All the Bright Places

The words are written in The Waves: “If that blue could stay for
ever;
if that hole could remain for ever; if this moment could stay for ever.… I
feel myself shining in the dark.… I am arrayed. I am prepared. This is
the momentary pause; the dark moment. The fiddlers have lifted their
bows.… This is my calling. This is my world. All is decided and ready.
… I am rooted, but I flow.… ‘Come,’ I say, ‘come.’ ”
I write the only thing I can think of: 
“Stay,” I say, “stay.”
I check every five minutes, but he doesn’t reply. I call him again, but the
voicemail is still full. I hang up and call Brenda. She answers on the first ring.
“Hey, I was getting ready to call you. I got this weird email from Finch this
morning.”
Brenda’s was sent at 9:41 and said simply, 
Some guy will definitely love
you for who you are. Don’t settle.
The one to Charlie was sent at 9:45 and read, 
Peace, you todger.
Something is wrong.
I tell myself it’s only the heartbreak at being left, the fact that he
disappeared without saying good-bye.
I pick up the phone to call Kate and realize I don’t have her number, so I
tell my mom I’ll be back, and I drive to Finch’s house.
Kate, Decca, and Mrs. Finch are there. When she sees me, Mrs. Finch starts
to cry, and then before I can stop her, she’s hugging me too hard and saying,
“Violet, we’re so glad you’re here. Maybe you can figure this out. I told Kate
maybe Violet will know where he is.”
Through Mrs. Finch’s hair, I look at Kate: 
Please help me
.
She says, “Mom,” and touches her once, on the shoulder. Mrs. Finch moves
away from me, dabbing at her eyes and apologizing for being so emotional.
I ask Kate if I can speak with her alone. She leads me through sliding glass
doors, outside to the patio, where she lights a cigarette. I wonder if this is the
same patio where Finch found the cardinal.
She frowns at me. “What’s going on?”
“He just wrote me. Today. Minutes after the email he sent you. He also sent
emails to Brenda Shank-Kravitz and Charlie Donahue.” I don’t want to share
his message with her, but I know I have to. I pull out my phone, and we stand
in the shade of a tree as I show her the lines he wrote.
“I didn’t even know he was on Facebook,” she says, and then goes quiet as
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she reads. When she’s finished, she looks at me, lost. “Okay, what does all
that mean?”
“It’s a book we discovered. By Virginia Woolf. We’ve been quoting the
lines to each other off and on.”
“Do you have a copy of the book? Maybe there’s a clue in the part that
comes before or after this.”
“I brought it with me.” I pull it out of my bag. I’ve already marked the
words, and now I show her where he got them. He’s taken them out of
sequence, picking and choosing certain lines over a series of pages and
putting them together in his own way. Just like his Post-it songs.
Kate has forgotten about her cigarette, and the ash dangles, as long as a
fingernail. “I can’t figure out what the hell these people are doing”—she
gestures at the book—“much less see how it might relate to where he is.” She
suddenly remembers her cigarette and takes a long drag. As she exhales, she
says, “He’s supposed to go to NYU, you know.”
“Who?”
“Theo.” She drops the cigarette onto the patio and crushes it with her shoe.
“He got early acceptance.”
NYU. Of course. What are the odds we were both supposed to be there, but
now neither one of us is going?
“I didn’t—he never told me about college.”
“He didn’t tell me or Mom either. The only reason we found out is that
someone from NYU tried to contact him during the fall and I got to the
message first.” She forces a smile. “For all I know, he’s in New York right
now.”
“Do you know if your mom ever got the messages? The ones from my
mom and the psychiatrist?”
“Decca mentioned the doctor, but Mom almost never checks the home
phone. I would have picked up the messages if there were any.”
“But there weren’t.”
“No.”
Because he erased them
.
We go back inside, and Mrs. Finch is lying on the couch, eyes closed, while
Decca sits nearby arranging pieces of paper across the floor. I can’t help but
watch her, because it’s so much like Finch and his Post-its. Kate notices and
says, “Don’t ask me what she’s doing. Another one of her art projects.”
“Do you mind if I take a look at his room while I’m here?”
“Go for it. We’ve left everything the way it was—you know, for when he
comes back.”
If he comes back
.
Upstairs, I shut the door to his bedroom and stand there a moment. The
room still smells like him—a mix of soap and cigarettes and the heady,
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woodsy quality that is distinctly Theodore Finch. I open the windows to let
some air in because it’s too dead and stale, and then I close them again, afraid
the scent of soap and cigarettes and Finch will escape. I wonder if his sisters
or mom have even set foot in this room since he’s been gone. It looks so
untouched, the drawers still open from when I was here last.
I search through the dresser and desk again, and then the bathroom, but
there’s nothing that can tell me anything. My phone buzzes, and I jump. It’s
Ryan, and I ignore it. I walk into the closet, where the black light has been
replaced by a regular old bulb. I go through the shelves and the remaining
clothes, the ones he didn’t take with him. I pull his black T-shirt off a hanger
and breathe him in, and then I slip it into my purse. I close the door behind
me, sit down, and say out loud, “Okay, Finch. Help me out here. You must
have left something behind.”
I let myself feel the smallness and closeness of the closet pressing in on me,
and I think about Sir Patrick Moore’s black hole trick, when he just vanished
into thin air. It occurs to me that this is exactly what Finch’s closet is—a black
hole. He went inside and disappeared.
Then I examine the ceiling. I study the night sky he created, but it looks
like a night sky and nothing more. I look at our wall of Post-its, reading every
single one until I see there’s nothing new or added. The short wall, the one
opposite the door, holds an empty shoe rack, which he used to hang his guitar
from. I sit up and scoot back and check the wall I was leaning against. There
are Post-its here too, and for some reason I didn’t notice them the last time.
Just two lines across, each word on a separate piece of paper. The first
reads: