Everything, Everything

Madeline dreams of being in a colorful field of poppies with figures dressed in black who look like Olly and are wearing gas masks coming toward her, crushing the poppies underfoot. She sketches a hypothetical map of her heart, with features like “Mountains of Misery” and “Depression Foothills.” She reads several books and plays that cause her to conclude that “everything is nothing” (250). She deletes all of Olly’s emails, the most recent of which she left unread. Madeline regains her health within a month of coming home from Hawaii but is numb and disillusioned with the ideas of happiness, meaning, and love in life. She goes through the motions in her relationship with her mom and deletes Olly’s emails—which eventually stop coming—without reading them. Pauline decides to rehire Carla, feeling that Madeline has learned her lesson about the dangers of the outside world.

Carla returns to care for Madeline and lets her cry about Olly and hurting her mom for an hour. Madeline is afraid that Pauline hates her for what she did in running away to Hawaii, but Carla says that mothers can never hate their daughters.

A moving van comes to Olly’s house, and he, Kara, and their mom furtively move out without his dad’s knowledge.