by John Green
"Well," Daisy said after a while, "it all worked out in the end."
"How's that?"
"Our heroes got rich and nobody got hurt."
"Everyone got hurt," I pointed out.
"What I mean is that no one got injured."
"I lacerated my liver!"
"Oh, right. I forgot about that. At least no one died."
"Harold died! And possibly Pickett!"
"Holmesy, I am trying to have a happy ending here. Stop screwing it up for me."
"I'm so Ayala," I answered.
"So Ayala."
"The problem with happy endings," I said, "is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die."
Daisy laughed. "As always, Aza 'And Then Eventually You Die' Holmes is here to remind you of how the story really ends, with the extinction of our species."
I laughed. "Well, that is the only real ending, though."
"No, it's not, Holmesy. You pick your endings, and your beginnings. You get to pick the frame, you know? Maybe you don't choose what's in the picture, but you decide on the frame."
--
Davis never wrote me back, not even after I texted him a few days later. But he did update his blog.
"And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind."
--WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
I get that nothing lasts. But why do I have to miss everybody so much?
TWENTY-FOUR
A MONTH LATER, just after Christmas vacation ended, I got up early and poured a couple bowls of cereal for Mom and me. I was eating in front of the TV when she walked in, still wearing pajamas, flustered. "Late late late," she said. "Hit snooze too many times."
"I made you breakfast," I told her, and when she joined me on the couch, she said, "Cheerios aren't something you make." I laughed as she took a few bites, then ran off to get dressed. Always a flurry of movement, my mother.
When I turned back to the TV, a red breaking news band was scrolling across the bottom of the screen. I saw a reporter standing in front of the gates of the Pickett compound. I fumbled for the remote and unmuted the TV.
"Our sources indicate that while Pickett has not been positively identified, authorities believe the body found in an offshoot of the Pogue's Run tunnel is indeed that of billionaire construction magnate Russell Davis Pickett, Sr. One source close to the investigation told Eyewitness News that Pickett likely died of exposure within quote 'a few days' of his disappearance, and while we have no official confirmation, several sources tell us that Pickett's body was discovered by police after an anonymous tip."
I texted Davis immediately. Just saw the news. I'm so sorry, Davis. I know I've said that to you a lot, but I am. I'm just so sorry.
He didn't reply right away, so I added, I want you to know it wasn't Daisy or me who tipped off the cops. We never said anything to anyone.
Now I saw the . . . of his typing. I know. It was us. Noah and I decided together.
Mom came in, putting earrings in while slipping on her shoes. She must've overheard the last bit of the story, because she said, "Aza, you should reach out to Davis. This is going to be a very hard day for him."
"I was just texting him," I said. "They were the ones who told the cops where to look."
"Can you imagine, that whole estate is going to a lizard?" They could've waited seven years, at least, before Pickett was declared dead--seven more years of that house, seven more years of getting anything they wanted--but they'd decided to let it go to a tuatara.
"I guess they couldn't leave their dad down there," I said. "Maybe I shouldn't have told him about the jogger's mouth." This was, after all, my fault. An icy dread passed over me. I'd forced them to choose between abandoning their father and abandoning their lives.
"Be kind to yourself," Mom said. "Obviously knowing the truth mattered more to him than the house, and it's not like he'll be thrown out onto the streets, Aza."
I tried to listen to her, but the undeniable feeling had sprung up in me. For a moment I tried to resist, but only a moment. I slipped off the Band-Aid and dug my nail into the callus of my finger, opening up a cut where the previous one had finally healed.
As I washed and rebandaged it in the bathroom, I stared at myself. I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life.
I was thinking about Davis's journal, of that Frost quote, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life--it goes on."
And you go on, too, when the current is with you and when it isn't. Or at least that's what I whispered wordlessly to myself. Before I left the bathroom, I texted him again. Can we hang out sometime?
I saw the . . . appear, but he never replied.
"We should get going," Mom said. I opened the bathroom door, pulled a jacket and a knit hat from the coatrack, and entered our frigid garage. I shimmied my fingertips under the garage door, lifted it up, and sat down in the passenger seat while Mom finished making her morning coffee. I kept looking at my phone, waiting for his reply. I was cold but sweating, the sweat soaking into my ski hat. I thought of Davis, hearing his own name on the news again. You go on, I told myself, and tried through the ether to say it to him, too.
--
Over the next few months, I kept going. I got better without ever quite getting well. Daisy and I started a Mental Health Alliance and a Fan-Fiction Workshop so that we could list some proper extracurriculars on next year's college applications, even though we were the only two members of both clubs. We hung out most nights, at her apartment or at Applebee's or at my house, sometimes with Mychal but usually not--usually it was just the two of us, watching movies or doing homework or just talking. It was so easy to go out into the meadow with her.
I missed Davis, of course. The first few days, I kept checking my phone, waiting for him to reply, but slowly I understood that we were going to be part of each other's past. I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.
--
And then one night in April, Daisy and I were over at my house, watching the one-night-only reunion of our favorite band, who were performing at some third-tier music awards show. They'd just brilliantly lip-synced their way through "It's Gotta Be You," when someone knocked. It was almost eleven o'clock, too late for visitors, and I felt a shiver of nerves as I opened the door.
It was Davis, wearing a plaid button-down and skinny jeans. He was holding a huge box.
"Um, hi," I said.
"This is for you," he told me, and handed me the box, which wasn't as heavy as I expected. I carried it inside and placed it on our dining room table, and when I turned back, he was already walking away.
"Wait," I said. "Come here." I reached my hand out for his. He took it, and we walked together into my backyard. The river was swollen, and you could hear it churning down there in the darkness somewhere. The air felt warm on the skin of my forearms as I lay down on the ground beneath the big ash tree in our backyard. He lay down next to me, and I showed him what the sky looked like from my house, all split up by the branches that were just beginning to sprout leaves.
He told me that he and Noah were moving, to Colorado, where Noah had gotten into some boarding school for troubled kids. Davis would finish high school out there, at a public school. They'd rented a house. "It's smaller than our current place," he said. "But on the other hand, no tuatara."
He asked me how I was doing, and I told him that I felt okay much of the time. Four weeks between visits to Dr. Singh now.
"So when are you leaving?" I asked him.
"Tomorrow," he said, and that kil
led the conversation for a while.
"Okay, so," I said at last, "what am I looking at?"
He laughed a little. "Well, you've got Jupiter up there, of course. Very bright tonight. And there's Arcturus." He squirmed a bit to turn around and pointed toward another part of the sky. "And there's the Big Dipper, and if you follow the line of those two stars, right there, that's Polaris, the North Star."
"Why'd you tell the cops to look down there?" I asked.
"It was eating Noah up, not knowing. I realized . . . I guess I realized I had to be a big brother, you know? That's my full-time occupation now. That's who I am. And he needed to know why his father wasn't in touch with him more than he needed all the money, so that's what we did."
I reached down and squeezed his hand. "You're a good brother."
He nodded. I could see in the gray light that he was crying a little. "Thanks," he said. "I kind of just want to stay here in this particular instant for a really long time."
"Yeah," I said.
We settled into a silence, and I felt the sky's bigness above me, the unimaginable vastness of it all--looking at Polaris and realizing the light I was seeing was 425 years old, and then looking at Jupiter, less than a light-hour from us. In the moonless darkness, we were just witnesses to light, and I felt a sliver of what must have driven Davis to astronomy. There was a kind of relief in having your own smallness laid bare before you, and I realized something Davis must have already known: Spirals grow infinitely small the farther you follow them inward, but they also grow infinitely large the farther you follow them out.
And I knew I would remember that feeling, underneath the split-up sky, back before the machinery of fate ground us into one thing or another, back when we could still be everything.
I thought, lying there, that I might love him for the rest of my life. We did love each other--maybe we never said it, and maybe love was never something we were in, but it was something I felt. I loved him, and I thought, maybe I will never see him again, and I'll be stuck missing him, and isn't that so terrible.
--
But it turns out not to be terrible, because I know the secret that the me lying beneath that sky could not imagine: I know that girl would go on, that she would grow up, have children and love them, that despite loving them she would get too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then get sick again. I know a shrink would say, Write it down, how you got here.
So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.
--
But underneath those skies, your hand--no, my hand--no, our hand--in his, you don't know yet. You don't know that the spiral painting is in that box on your dining room table, with a Post-it note stuck to the back of the frame: Stole this from a lizard for you.--D. You can't know yet how that painting will follow you from one apartment to another and then eventually to a house, or how decades later, you'll be so proud that Daisy continues to be your best friend, that growing into different lives only makes you more fiercely loyal to each other. You don't know that you'd go to college, find a job, make a life, see it unbuilt and rebuilt.
I, a singular proper noun, would go on, if always in a conditional tense.
But you don't know any of that yet. We squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. You stare up at the same sky together, and after a while he says, I have to go, and you say, Good-bye, and he says, Good-bye, Aza, and no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I'd first like to thank Sarah Urist Green, who read many, many, many versions of this story with immense thoughtfulness and generosity. Thanks also to Chris and Marina Waters; my brother, Hank, and sister-in-law, Katherine; my parents, Sydney and Mike Green; my in-laws, Connie and Marshall Urist; and Henry and Alice Green.
Julie Strauss-Gabel has been my editor for more than fifteen years now, and I will never be able to adequately express my gratitude for the faith and wisdom she showed during the six years we spent working together on this book. Thanks also to Anne Heausler for kind and contentious copyediting, and to the entire team at Dutton, especially Anna Booth, Melissa Faulner, Rosanne Lauer, Steve Meltzer, and Natalie Vielkind.
I am profoundly indebted to Elyse Marshall, friend and publicist and confidante and fellow traveler, and to many people at Penguin Random House who've helped to make my books and share them with readers. I want to especially thank Jen Loja, Felicia Frazier, Jocelyn Schmidt, Adam Royce, Stephanie Sabol, Emily Romero, Erin Berger, Helen Boomer, Leigh Butler, Kimberly Ryan, Deborah Kaplan, and Lindsey Andrews. Thanks as well to Don Weisberg, and to the brilliant Rosianna Halse Rojas, whose insight and guidance informed every page of this book.
Ariel Bissett, Meredith Danko, Hayley Hoover, Zulaiha Razak, and Tara Covais Varsov read drafts of this manuscript with great care and thoughtfulness. Joanna Cardenas provided invaluable insight and feedback. And for all kinds of help, thanks to Ilene Cooper, Bill Ott, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Rainbow Rowell, Stan Muller, and Marlene Reeder.
Jodi Reamer and Kassie Evashevski, agents extraordinaire, are the best advocates an author could hope for--and also the most patient. Thanks to Phil Plait for astronomy help; E. K. Johnston for Star Wars expertise; Ed Yong for his book I Contain Multitudes; David Adam for his book The Man Who Couldn't Stop; Elaine Scarry for her book The Body in Pain; Stuart Hyatt for introducing me to Pogue's Run; and to James Bell, Michaela Irons, Tim Riffle, Lea Shaver, and Shannon James for their legal expertise. With all that noted, geography, the law, power converters, the night sky, and everything else in this novel are imagined and treated fictitiously, and any mistakes are entirely my own.
Lastly, Dr. Joellen Hosler and Dr. Sunil Patel have made my life immeasurably better by providing the kind of high-quality mental health care that unfortunately remains out of reach for too many. My family and I are grateful. If you need mental health services in the United States, please call the SAMHSA treatment referral helpline: 1-877- SAMHSA7. It can be a long and difficult road, but mental illness is treatable. There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't.
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