All the Bright Places: Part Two

In honor of the Dirt’s demise, Jordan Gripenwaldt is passing out celebration candy.

It splashes in the water and then pecks around the opposite bank, strutting like a man.

He stands, the first real-live naked boy I’ve ever seen, and doesn’t seem one bit self-conscious.

Roamer’s legs are thrashing, and Ryan has Finch by the collar of his black sweater, and then by the arm, and is pulling on him.

Mom lingers in the doorway and says, “Can you trust this boy, V?”

Instead of aspiring to immortality, they aspired to living a healthy, full life.

As he stands, hands on hips, nodding at the Blue Flash, I think about impending weightless doom.

I’ll need to ruminate on it, understand—give it some good, hard thought—but we may need to choose a kind of backup place, just in case.

But if it did, it would be a three-minute ride that involves a climb nearly a third of a mile long, up to 1,600 feet, followed by a sheer drop and seven loops.

That final descent and series of loops takes sixty seconds, but the 10 G centrifugal force that results from the 223-mile-per-hour loops is what kills you.

Julijonas Urbonas, the man who thought up the Euthanasia Coaster, claims it’s engineered to “humanely—with elegance and euphoria—take the life of a human being.”

He holds out his glove and the ball falls right into it. Roamer yells about fifteen hundred expletives as Charlie sends it flying right back.

“Not so fast, Romero,” I hear Kappy bark, and the sound of Roamer groveling almost makes the pain worth it.

Before Amanda and I stopped being peripheral semi-friends, I remember sleeping over at her house and talking to her older brothers.

Once the roads are clear, Violet and I creep very, very carefully down them to see the Painted Rainbow Bridge, the Periodic Table Display, the Seven Pillars, and the lynching and burial site of the Reno brothers, America’s first train robbers.

Bottomless blue holes exist all over the world, and each one has these kinds of myths associated with it.

In and out, we are swept;. . . we cannot step outside its sinuous, its hesitating, its abrupt, its perfectly encircling walls.

Ryan Cross is a kleptomaniac. He steals stuff for fun.

This was a rare alignment that meant the combined gravitational force of those two planets would exert a stronger tidal pull, which would temporarily counteract gravity here on earth and make people weigh less.

I can’t see anything because once again I’m being smothered, and eventually I hear Finch drive away.

If you’re weighed down by something heavy, you’re apt to get pulled to the bottom faster.

This goes back to the stay-perfectly-still-so-you-don’t-sink adage.

Bren throws back her head and laughs, kind of diabolically.

I wash my hands, wash my face, rummage through the cabinets.

I go into what must be the largest room for a seven-year-old on the planet. The thing is so cavernous, I wonder if he needs a map, and it’s filled with every toy you can imagine, most requiring batteries.

But then I look at this kid, at the thin face and the thin neck and the scrawny shoulders, and he’s seven and small for his age, and I remember what that was like.

It’s hard to describe, but I imagine the way I am at this moment is a lot like getting sucked into a vortex.

Everything dark and churning, but slow churning instead of fast, and this great weight pulling you down, like it’s attached to your feet even if you can’t see it.

I want to bawl, but I tell myself: Disguise the pain.

I rein myself in. “Sorry. Bad taste. But I'm fine. Really.”

Some people call it manic depression. It’s a brain disorder that causes extreme shifts in mood and energy.

we are all alone, trapped in these bodies and our own minds, and whatever company we have in this life is only fleeting and superficial

I lay my hand on my chest, over my heart, and I can feel the flesh and bone and the hard, erratic beating of the organ that is keeping me alive.

Life Is Life meets on the grounds of the arboretum in a nearby Ohio town, which shall remain nameless.

This isn’t a nature class, but a support group for teens who are thinking about, or have attempted, or have survived, suicide.

Before I take my seat, one of the girls sidles up to me and says, “You are really tall.”

I want to get away from the stigma they all clearly feel just because they have an illness of the mind as opposed to, say, an illness of the lungs or blood.

The Slow Club is playing, a band I like, all plucky and bittersweet and kind of offbeat.

It’s not like anyone has firsthand experience, and scientists can’t decide if you would spend weeks floating past the event horizon before being torn apart or soar into a kind of maelstrom of particles and be burned alive.

I spend the day with my parents, obsessively checking Facebook for a new message when I’m not pretending to focus on homework