Violet’s parents are disappointed in her for skipping the rest of the day at school. When they try to reprimand her for using Eleanor’s death as an excuse for acting out, she fights back, saying that’s not at all what she was doing, but that this wandering project is the only she thing she has going on because the rest of her life has continued on without her. Her mother comes to her room later and asks about the new website. Violet opens up, telling her about her ideas, and her mother poses her questions that lead to several hours of brainstorming and outlining. She has decided to call it Germ Magazine. Before she goes to bed, she sends Finch a message to check in, and she realizes it’s the first day she hasn’t crossed off her calendar. She doesn’t; instead, she goes to Eleanor’s room and puts her glasses she’d been wearing back on her dresser.
Finch shows up at Violet’s the next morning and explains that the situation at school wasn’t her fault, and that he will be on his best behavior with her from now on. The Markeys appreciate that he’s been getting Violet out of the house, so they accept with some ground-rules. When they ask if his father is the former hockey player, Finch says yes but that he hasn’t seen him years, that he left when Finch was ten. Later, Violet asks him why he lied about this, it upsets her to think he could lie so easily to her, too. Finch says that “‘it’s not a lie if it’s how you feel’” (195).
They drive to the home of a man called John Ivers, who has built two roller coasters in his backyard. They both love it, and take several turns riding. Violet writes for a while in the car, and then tells Finch that she likes that he’s interesting and different, and that she can talk to him. Finch says he likes everything about her, and they exchange a look; the energy has shifted, their chemistry is visceral. Finch pulls off the highway to a random parking lot, saying he thought he could wait but he can’t. He kisses her outside of the car, and she kisses him back. They go to the backseat, but Violet hesitates when he wants to have sex with her; she tells him that she is a virgin, so Finch stops, and says "someday." That night, Finch doesn’t have any suicide methods to record in his writing—for the first time, he doesn’t want to be anyone else but himself.
Roamer goes after Finch in the locker room, but Finch resists the urge to fight back, thinking of Violet’s reaction during their altercation at the river. The gym teacher catches Roamer and he gets in trouble. Ryan tells Violet that he asked her friend Suze out, and she says that’s great. He also tells her about Roamer and Finch, which worries Violet, but Ryan says that Finch didn’t even try to defend himself. At lunch, Violet skips past her normal table and sits with Brenda and some other girls.
She and Finch continue driving around and making out. When she’s not with him, she finds herself thinking about being with him, and even though she doesn’t think she’s ready to have sex, she feels a surprising physical draw to him. Finch mails a package to her house. It’s goggles, and he tells her they’ll use them soon, on the first warm day of the winter. When it finally arrives, they go to Blue Hole, a three-acre lake on private property. Finch tells her that people claim it’s bottomless, that it leads you to another world, that there’s a whirlpool at the bottom.
They jump into the water together and swim down. Violet is impressed by how long Finch can hold his breath. They play Marco Polo, they float and talk, and then Finch says he’s going to look for the bottom again. He stays underwater for a long time, and starts thinking about drowning, about how nice the heaviness of the water is, until he thinks of Violet waiting for him, and he bursts back up to the surface. Violet is crying on the bank and calls him an asshole, and tells him how scared she was. Finch worries that he crossed a line and has lost her, but he encourages her to keep yelling, to release all of her pent up anger, until eventually they are both screaming and throwing rocks. She asks him what’s going on between them and he kisses her intensely, like he’s seen in the movies, and he says he can’t promise her all the good days of someone like Ryan Cross. Violet says she doesn’t want that; Finch says he thinks he loves her.
They go back to Finch’s house after the Blue Hole, and Violet sees his newly painted room and the reorganizing he’s done. After they both take showers, Finch says that she never asked him what he was doing on the bell tower ledge. He says that he was also imagining jumping, that he also wanted to leave everything behind, but that he didn’t like what that looked like. And then he saw her. They have sex for the first time, and then on the drive to drop Violet back home, Finch takes a detour to Purina Tower. They hold each other wrapped in a blanket and he tells her that he feels like Pluto and Jupiter are aligned with the earth and he’s floating.
Analysis:
Writing takes on another layer of meaning as Violet starts to re-forge a relationship with her mother, bonding over Germ. Finch seems to have been right all along: Violet is at her best, and truest, when she’s writing. Symbolically, there is power in Violet’s reclaiming of the website—a new website, importantly, which looks away from the past and toward the future. And that step forward, or letting go, is underscored by her returning Eleanor’s glasses. It seems like she is beginning to understand how Eleanor can and will always be a part of her life in ways that don’t hold Violet in the past.
The section introduces a new theme about the complexity of truth. Violet is upset that Finch so easily lied to her parents, and she doesn’t understand why he did so. But to Finch, the literal truth hardly matters. For him, the worst part isn’t that his parents divorced, it’s that his father is a cruel abuser who emotionally abandoned the family long before the divorce ever happened. Finch isn’t going to get into the weeds of his psychological distress, but saying that his father left them ten years ago is actually closer to the reality of what he feels, and therefore feels more honest, even if less truthful.
The roller coaster takes on a literal translation of the emotional ride Finch and Violet have been on together. It forces them to let go, to give in, and to truly be in the moment—all things that have been difficult for them individually, but that they have increasingly been able to do together. The moment indicates a catharsis, or a release of repressed emotions—they’re screaming, after all, and being turned upside down—and the mood is visibly shifted in the wake of the scene. Even while the tension is mounting between them with the acceleration of their romance, the mood in the car is calm, open, and safe. That their first kiss happens then, and is spurred by them saying what they like about each other, is significant: the catharsis allowed them to reach each other, and the action of the kiss mirrors their experience at John Ivers’ house—letting go, giving in, being in the moment.
The kiss is an inflection point for both characters, a physical marker of the emotional change that has overcome them. Finch resists the urge to fight Roamer, Violet sits with kinder people at lunch. Finch isn’t thinking about suicide methods, he’s thinking about Violet, and how he can be the boy she loves. Violet isn’t rushing through days until graduation, she’s rushing to the moments when she can see Finch, and savoring them. If they were both in a kind of fog at the beginning of the novel, they have brought things into focus for each other, and have brought a sense of meaning to what used to feel meaningless.
The scene at the Blue Hole engages the water imagery, the jumping imagery, and the idea of togetherness. Again, Finch finds himself on a border between feeling good and feeling bad; in an instant, he can fall back into that low feeling, as evidenced by the intoxicating heaviness of the deep water. But it is the thought of Violet waiting for him on shore that pulls him up, and to his amazement she hasn’t given up on him; he hasn’t pushed her too far. There is another catharsis, this one even more self-aware, as they scream and throw rocks to get rid of all the pain their pent up anger and sorrow; it seems to fall into a pattern with the earlier scene: catharsis paves the way for newfound vulnerability, leading to emotional, and therefore physical, intimacy. Sure enough, after all their talk about having sex “someday,” it happens that day.
