Paper Towns

“Hey,” he answered. “I just threw up in the shower. Can I call you back?”

“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound angry. I just wanted someone to help me sort through the world according to Margo. But Radar wasn’t Ben; he called back just a couple minutes later.

“It was so disgusting that I puked while cleaning it up, and then while cleaning that up, I puked again. It’s like a perpetual motion machine. If you just kept feeding me, I could have just kept puking forever.”

“Can you come over? Or can I come over to your house?”

“Yeah, of course. What’s up?”

“Margo was alive and in the minimall for at least one night after her disappearance.”

“I’ll come to you. Four minutes.”

Radar showed up at my window precisely four minutes later.

“You should know I’m having a huge fight with Ben,” I said as he climbed in.

“I’m too hungover to mediate,” Radar answered quietly. He lay down on the bed, his eyes half closed, and rubbed his buzzed hair. “It’s like I got hit by lightning.” He sniffed. “Okay, bring me up-to-date.” I sat down in the desk chair and told Radar about my evening in Margo’s vacation house, trying hard not to leave out any possibly helpful details. I knew Radar was better at puzzles than I, and I was hoping he’d piece together this one.

He waited to talk until I’d said, “And then Ben called me and I left for that party.”

“Do you have that book, the one with the turned-down corners?” he asked. I got up and fished for it under the bed, finally pulling it out. Radar held it above his head, squinting through his headache, and flipped through the pages.

“Write this down,” he said. “Omaha, Nebraska. Sac City, Iowa. Alexandria, Indiana. Darwin, Minnesota. Hollywood, California. Alliance, Nebraska. Okay. Those are the locations of all the things she—well, or whoever read this book—found interesting.” He got up, motioned me out of the chair, and then swiveled to the computer. Radar had an amazing talent for carrying on conversations while typing. “There’s a map mash-up that allows you to enter multiple destinations and it will spit out a variety of itineraries. Not that she’d know about this program. But still, I want to see.”

“How do you know all this shit?” I asked.

“Um, reminder: I. Spend. My. Entire. Life. On. Omnictionary. In the hour between when I got home this morning and when I hurled in the shower, I completely rewrote the page for the Blue-spotted Anglerfish. I have a problem. Okay, look at this,” he said. I leaned in and saw several jagged routes drawn onto a map of the United States. All began in Orlando and ended in Hollywood, California.

“Maybe she’ll stay in LA?” Radar suggested.

“Maybe,” I said. “There’s no way to tell her route, though.”

“True. Also nothing else points to LA. What she said to Jase points to New York. The ‘go to the paper towns and never come back’ points to a nearby pseudovision, it seems. The nail polish also points to maybe her still being in the area? I’m just saying we can now add the location of the world’s largest ball of popcorn to our list of possible Margo locales.”

“The traveling would fit with one of the Whitman quotes: ‘I tramp a perpetual journey.’”

Radar stayed hunched over the computer. I went to sit down on the bed. “Hey, will you just print out a map of the U.S. so I can plot the points?” I asked.

“I can just do it online,” he said.

“Yeah, but I want to be able to look at it.” The printer fired up a few seconds later and I placed the U.S. map next to the one with the pseudovisions on the wall. I put a tack in for each of the six locations she (or someone) had marked in the book. I tried to look at them as a constellation, to see if they formed a shape or a letter—but I couldn’t see anything. It was a totally random distribution, like she’d blindfolded herself and thrown darts at the map.

I sighed. “You know what would be nice?” Radar asked. “If we could find some evidence that she was checking her email or anywhere on the Internet. I search for her name every day; I’ve got a bot that will alert me if she ever logs on to Omnictionary with that username. I track IP addresses of people who search for the phrase ‘paper towns.’ It’s incredibly frustrating.”

“I didn’t know you were doing all that stuff,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Only doing what I’d want someone else to do. I know I wasn’t friends with her, but she deserves to be found, you know?”

“Unless she doesn’t want to be,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess that’s possible. It’s all still possible.” I nodded. “Yeah, so—okay,” he said. “Can we brainstorm over video games?”

“I’m not really in the mood.”

“Can we call Ben then?”

“No. Ben’s an ass**le.”

Radar looked at me sideways. “Of course he is. You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it’s going with my girlfriend—but I don’t give a shit, man, because you’re you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that’s okay. They’re them. I’m too obsessed with a reference Web site to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That’s okay, too. That’s me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You’re funny, and you’re smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t complimenting you. Just saying: stop thinking Ben should be you, and he needs to stop thinking you should be him, and y’all just chill the hell out.”

“All right,” I said finally, and called Ben. The news that Radar was over and wanted to play video games led to a miraculous hangover recovery.

“So,” I said after hanging up. “How’s Angela?”

Radar laughed. “She’s good, man. She’s real good. Thanks for asking.”

“You still a virgin?” I asked.

“I don’t kiss and tell. Although, yes. Oh, and we had our first fight this morning. We had breakfast at Waffle House, and she was going on about how awesome the black Santas are, and how my parents are great people for collecting them because it’s important for us not to presume that everybody cool in our culture like God and Santa Claus is white, and how the black Santa empowers the whole African-American community.”

“I actually think I kind of agree with her,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it’s a fine idea, but it happens to be bullshit. They’re not trying to spread the black Santa gospel. If they were, they’d make black Santas. Instead, they’re trying to buy the entire world supply. There’s this old guy in Pittsburgh with the second-biggest collection, and they’re always trying to buy it off him.”

Ben spoke from the doorway. He’d been there a while, apparently. “Radar, your failure to bop that lovely honeybunny is the greatest humanitarian tragedy of our time.”

“What’s up, Ben?” I said.

“Thanks for the ride last night, bro.”

24.

Even though we only had a week before finals, I spent Monday afternoon reading “Song of Myself.” I’d wanted to go to the last two pseudovisions, but Ben needed his car. I was no longer looking for clues in the poem so much as I was looking for Margo herself. I’d made it about halfway through “Song of Myself” this time when I stumbled into another section that I found myself reading and rereading.

“I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,” Whitman writes. And then for two pages, he’s just hearing: hearing a steam whistle, hearing people’s voices, hearing an opera. He sits on the grass and lets the sound pour through him. And this is what I was trying to do, too, I guess: to listen to all the little sounds of her, because before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard. For so long, I hadn’t really heard Margo—I’d seen her screaming and thought her laughing—that now I figured it was my job. To try, even at this great remove, to hear the opera of her.