Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

I could tell I was hurting him. I could see it in the way he kept blinking. I could see that he didn’t understand it, that he couldn’t. I didn’t blame him. It made no sense. I was a story riddled with plot holes.

“That sounds really scary,” he said. I just nodded. “Do you feel like you’re getting better?” Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

“Maybe,” I said. “Honestly, I feel really fragile. I feel like I’ve been taped back together.”

“I know that feeling.”

“How are you?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“How’s Noah?” I asked.

“Not good.”

“Um, unpack that for me,” I said.

“He just misses Dad. It’s like Noah’s two people, almost: There’s the miniature dudebro who drinks bad vodka and is the king of his little gang of eighth-grade pseudo-badasses. And then the kid who crawls into bed with me some nights and cries. It’s almost like Noah thinks if he screws up enough, Dad will be forced to come out of hiding.”

“He’s heartbroken,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Aren’t we all. It’s . . . I don’t really want to talk about my life, if that’s okay.” It occurred to me that Davis probably liked what infuriated Daisy—that I didn’t ask too many questions. Everyone else was so relentlessly curious about the life of the billionaire boy, but I’d always been too stuck inside myself to interrogate him.

Slowly, the conversation sputtered. We started talking to each other like people who used to be close—catching each other up on our lives rather than living them together. By the time he paid the bill, I knew that whatever we’d been, we weren’t anymore.

Still, once I was home and under the covers, I texted him. You around?

You can’t do it the other way, he replied. And I can’t do it this way.

Me: Why?

Him: It makes me feel like you only like me at a distance. I need to be liked close up.

I kept typing and deleting, typing and deleting. I never ended up replying.

—

The next day at school, I was walking across the cafeteria to our lunch table when I was intercepted by Daisy. “Holmesy, we have to talk privately.” She sat me down at a mostly empty lunch table, a few seats away from some freshmen.

“Did you break up with Mychal again?”

“No, of course not. The magic of being Just Friends is that you can’t break up. I feel like I’ve unlocked the secret of the universe with this Just Friends thing. But no, we’re going on an adventure.”

“We are?”

“Do you feel like you’ve recovered your wits enough that you could, for instance, sneak underneath the city of Indianapolis to attend a guerrilla art show?”

“A what?”

“Okay, so remember how I had that idea for Mychal to make those photographic montages of exonerated prisoners?”

“Well, it was mostly his i—”

“Let’s not get lost in the details, Holmesy. The point is he made it and submitted it to this supercool arts collective Known City, and they are putting it in this one-night-only gallery show they’re doing Friday night called Underground Art, where they turn part of the Pogue’s Run tunnel into an art gallery.” Pogue’s Run was the tunnel that emptied into the White River that Pickett’s company had been hired to expand, the work they’d never finished. Seemed an odd place for an art show.

“I don’t really want to spend Friday night at an illegal art gallery.”

“It’s not illegal. They have permission. It’s just super underground. Like, literally underground.” I scrunched up my face. “It’s like the coolest thing ever to happen in Indianapolis, and my Just Friend has art in the show. Obviously don’t feel obligated to be there, but . . . do be there.”

“I don’t want to be a third wheel.”

“I am going to be nervous and surrounded by people cooler than me and I’d really like my best friend to be there.”

I opened the Ziploc bag containing my peanut butter and honey sandwich and took a bite.

“You’re thinking about it,” she said, excitement in her voice.

“I’m thinking about it,” I allowed.

And then, after I swallowed, I said, “All right, let’s do it.”

“Yes! Yes! We will pick you up at six fifteen on Friday; it’s going to be amazing.”

The way she smiled at me made it impossible not to smile back. In a quiet voice, not even sure she could hear me, I said, “I love you, Daisy. I know you say that to me all the time and I never say it, but I do. I love you.”

“Ahh, fuck. Don’t go all soft on me, Holmesy.”

—

Mychal and Daisy showed up at my doorstep at six fifteen sharp. She was wearing a dress-and-tights combo dwarfed by her huge puffer coat, and Mychal was wearing a silver-gray suit that was slightly too big for him. I had on a long-sleeve T-shirt, jeans, and a coat. “I didn’t know I was supposed to dress up for the sewer,” I said sheepishly.

“The art sewer.” Daisy smiled. I wondered whether maybe I should change, but she just grabbed me and said, “Holmesy, you look radiant. You look like . . . like yourself.”

I sat in one of the backseats in Mychal’s minivan, and as he drove south on Michigan Road, Daisy started playing one of our favorite songs, “You’re the One.” Mychal was laughing as Daisy and I screamed the lyrics to each other. She sang lead, and I belted out the background voice that just repeated, “You’re everything everything everything,” and I felt like I was. You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.