In their counseling session, Mr. Embry asks Finch if he’s been thinking about hurting himself; he says he saw the Bartlett Dirt piece. Finch says he hasn’t, and doesn’t say much of anything about how he’s feeling, knowing that it’s better to say nothing than to turn people’s radars on. He does tell Mr. Embryo about Violet (using a different name), thinking that he will be happy for him; to his annoyance, Mr. Embryo tells him to be careful. Finch really hates that response, because it gets him thinking about a possible ending to his happiness. For the rest of the day, Finch walks Violet to all of her classes; she acts like she’s annoyed, but he can tell she likes it.
Finch shows up to Violet’s house at two in the morning. She tells him to go away, but makes herself look more presentable nonetheless and meets him outside. They drive to Bookmarks, the bookstore where Finch’s mother works a second job, and Finch uses his key to go inside. He gets them sodas and muffins, lights a candle, and they read through children’s books, reading out the words from Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and then getting up on their feet and singing the words.
They leave the bookstore and drive to Purina Tower, climbing the long ladder to the top. Finch spreads out a blanket, and they huddle together, looking out at all the lights and trees and earth before them. Violet says it’s lovely, and Finch says lovely is a word that should be used more often. She thinks to herself that he always says the right thing, and that he should be the writer, not her. She confides in him that she likes writing, and it might be what she’s good at, but she worries that also maybe that part of her life is over. Finch tells her she has time to figure it out, and then they sing the Dr. Seuss words together into the night. When he drives her home, she hopes that he’ll kiss her, but he doesn’t; he only announces, to her and to anyone else who might be awake in the neighborhood, that he’s pretty sure she doesn’t suck at writing.
At the weekly dinner at their father’s house, Mr. Finch is in a bad mood, watching television in the basement and ignoring everyone. Finch tells him his original family is here for dinner, and his dad becomes violent, throwing Finch into the wall. When Finch goes out later that night, after they’ve gone back to their mom’s house, he sits in Little Bastard with the gas running in the closed garage, contemplating the statistics of car-exhaust suicide and thinking about how easy it would be to close his eyes and stay there. When he opens the door and whizzes onto the road, a negative, cruel voice in his head says that he’s a coward.
Finch drives two and a half hours to Mudlavia, a healing spring he heard about when he drank the water from another spring a few months prior. The resort is abandoned, and nature is growing over it. Finch notes that it doesn’t look like a place for healing, but then he finds a clearing in the trees, the bankside of a rushing river. He wades into the cold water and drinks a cupful from his hands, then another, then fills his water bottle. He lies down in stream and lets the water engulf him. When he runs into Kate back at home, she asks him if he was out with Violet. Finch says no, and Kate, echoing Mr. Embry’s words, tells him to be careful with his heart.
Finch checks on Decca, as Kate said she’s worried about her, pointing out that it’s probably strange for her that their stepbrother, Josh Raymond, is her age. Kate asks Finch if he’s ever thought that Josh Raymond is actually their father’s child. Decca is cutting words out of books when Finch goes to her room. She gives Finch a pair of scissors and says to cut out the mean parts and bad words. He asks why they’re doing this, and Decca says the mean words shouldn’t be mixed in with the good ones, that they trick people. When they finish, Finch hunts through the chopped books until he finds the words to spell out “make it lovely,” which he leaves on Decca’s bed.
Violet flips through the notebook where she has been recording her and Finch’s wanderings, adding Bookmarks and Purina Tower even though they aren’t official. She writes in the moment where he says the word lovely should be used more often, and then she pulls everything off her bulletin board and writes “lovely” on a post-it note, sticking it up. She brainstorms ideas for a new web magazine, tacking up more words, and sends a photo to Finch telling him to look what he got her doing. He doesn’t answer all night; the bad feeling has been coming on, so he spends the night tacking good words from Decca’s books onto his walls, wrapped tightly in his comforter to hold onto the light.
Finch’s room is feeling off, so decides to cover the red walls with blue paint, until his room is the “bright blue of a swimming pool” (172). He writes to Violet that she is “all the colors in one, at full brightness" (172), and then doesn’t go to school for a week. Violet is worried about him, but Charlie and Brenda tell her it’s normal, he just disappears sometimes. When he finally returns to school, he looks different, and he doesn’t seem to notice Violet in the hallway until he tells her to meet her in the student parking during a fire alarm. They go down to the river, where Finch points out a hooded crane, the only one in Indiana. Violet says he’s lost, but Finch corrects her: he’s wandering.
Finch swims while Violet writes on the riverbank, but their peace is interrupted with the arrival of Ryan, Roamer, and another boy, who ask Violet patronizing questions like whether she’s okay. Finch and Roamer get into a fight; Finch’s face is bloodied by Roamer’s punches, but then Finch holds Roamer’s head under the water. Only when Violet tells him in a stern voice to let him go does he stop. After the fight, she goes to his house to check on him, but he doesn’t let her inside his room. Finch isn’t feeling well; he considers calling Mr. Embry, but doesn’t; he considers telling his mom, but he knows she’ll just tell him to take some Advil, because the only illness she understands is a physical one.
Analysis:
Again, Finch is concealing things: he’s not telling Mr. Embry how he really feels, not telling Violet why he missed school for a week, not telling anyone he’s feeling low after the fight with Roamer. Whereas everyone else in his life seems to breezily accept Finch’s diversions as an unproblematic fact of life, Violet is not as quick to do so. It makes sense that she shows up for him, given that he is the only person showing up for her. However, while Finch is able to get through to Violet, pushing through the barriers she’s put up, she can’t seem to do the same with him; even for her, there are parts of him that are entirely walled off.
As we’ve seen with other texts included in the novel, Finch and Violet glean a lot of meaning through the written word. The moment when they read from Dr. Seuss is an emotional high-point where they both feel like they could be optimistic about their lives. Similarly, their latching onto the word “lovely” signifies an important thread, as made evident by its repeated usage—Finch says it should be used more, and then from that moment on, it is: Violet writes it in the notebook, Violet writes it on her wall, Finch places it on Decca’s pillow. Through words—those written by authors, as well as those given importance by Finch and Violet—they are able to make some sense of life’s possibilities.
The image of them on top of Purina Tower, looking out over Indiana, is again evocative of that first scene on the bell tower, and now we’re in a kind of progression: this tower is even higher than Hoosier Hill. There is power in height, in the omniscience the vantage point affords them. Both Violet and Finch are plagued by questions of the unknown, but that physical position—standing above everything—represents a break of emotional or mental clarity. It makes sense, then, that Violet allows herself to be vulnerable in this moment (one of the first times, notably, where she volunteers private information to Finch, rather than conceding to his questions), telling him about her confusion and fear with her writing. Additionally, it marks an emotional turning point in her romantic feelings for Finch: she wants him to kiss her, and she doesn’t try to explain it away.
By now, we can see that water is a consistent motif throughout the book. Interestingly, its symbolism is two-fold: it evokes both dying (by drowning) and healing. Finch is desperate for some solace when he makes the long drive to Mudlavia, gulping down the water with alleged healing properties. He submerges himself in the stream in a scene that evokes an immersion baptism, a story seen many times in the bible, going all the way back to when God submerges Adam. Conversely, the scene also conjures the image of Ophelia, the unfulfilled tragic heroine of Hamlet who is driven to madness, and dies by drowning in a river. In paintings of the scene, like the famous “Ophelia” by John Everett Millais, her body is often shown floating atop the water, much like Finch’s.
The dual symbolism persists: in an emotional low, Finch paints over his red walls with what he calls a swimming pool blue. (While this is a positive moment, because he prefers the color, it also demonstrates a deeper, creeping unhappiness he’s experiencing. It takes several days for the blue paint to cover up the red paint, but the fact stands: it is there, underneath. This seems to mirror Finch’s own emotional state—whatever layers he piles on, however many miles he runs, however many times he renovates his room, he can’t escape the depression and pain that lives beneath it all.) Back at school, the next river scene represents an emotional high. Finch sees himself in the crane, has the courage to say it’s not lonely but wandering. And Violet, while still not fully let in, sees a more vulnerable Finch without the layers, underscored by him taking his clothes off in front of her for the first time.
