Paper Towns

If I couldn’t hear Margo, I could at least listen to what she once heard, so I downloaded the album of Woody Guthrie covers. I sat at the computer, my eyes closed, elbows against the desk, and listened to a voice singing in a minor key. I tried to hear, inside a song I’d never heard before, the voice I had trouble remembering after twelve days.

I was still listening—but now to another of her favorites, Bob Dylan—when my mom got home. “Dad’s gonna be late,” she said through the closed door. “I thought I might make turkey burgers?”

“Sounds good,” I answered, and then closed my eyes again and listened to the music. I didn’t sit up again until Dad called me for dinner an album and a half later.

At dinner, Mom and Dad were talking about politics in the Middle East. Even though they completely agreed with each other, they still managed to yell about it, saying that so-and-so was a liar, and so-and-so was a liar and a thief, and that the lot of them should resign. I focused on the turkey burger, which was excellent, dripping with ketchup and smothered with grilled onions.

“Okay, enough,” my mom said after a while. “Quentin, how was your day?”

“Fine,” I said. “Getting ready for finals, I guess.”

“I can’t believe this is your last week of classes,” Dad said. “It really does just seem like yesterday . . .”

“It does,” Mom said. A voice in my head was like: WARNING NOSTALGIA ALERT WARNING WARNING WARNING. Great people, my parents, but prone to bouts of crippling sentimentality.

“We’re just very proud of you,” she said. “But, God, we’ll miss you next fall.”

“Yeah, well, don’t speak too soon. I could still fail English.”

My mom laughed, and then said, “Oh, guess who I saw at the YMCA yesterday? Betty Parson. She said Chuck was going to the University of Georgia next fall. I was pleased for him; he’s always struggled.”

“He’s an ass**le,” I said.

“Well,” my dad said, “he was a bully. And his behavior was deplorable.” This was typical of my parents: in their minds, no one was just an ass**le. There was always something wrong with people other than just sucking: they had socialization disorders, or borderline personality syndrome, or whatever.

My mom picked up the thread. “But Chuck has learning difficulties. He has all kinds of problems—just like anyone. I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them—the bad kids and the good kids and all kids—as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self-actualized. But you know, I always liked Betty, and I always had hopes for Chuck. So it’s good that he’s going to college, don’t you think?”

“Honestly, Mom, I don’t really care about him one way or another.” But I did think, if everyone is such a person, how come Mom and Dad still hated all the politicians in Israel and Palestine? They didn’t talk about them like they were people.

My dad finished chewing something and then put his fork down and looked at me. “The longer I do my job,” he said, “the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”

“That is really lovely,” my mom said. I liked that they liked each other. “But isn’t it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”

“True. Consciousness makes for poor windows, too. I don’t think I’d ever thought about it quite that way.”

I was sitting back. I was listening. And I was hearing something about her and about windows and mirrors. Chuck Parson was a person. Like me. Margo Roth Spiegelman was a person, too. And I had never quite thought of her that way, not really; it was a failure of all my previous imaginings. All along—not only since she left, but for a decade before—I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who—because no one thought she was a person—had no one to really talk to.

And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

25.

The clock was always punishing, but feeling like I was closer to unraveling the knots made time seem to stop entirely on Tuesday. We’d all decided to go to the minimall right after school, and the waiting was unbearable. When the bell finally rang for the end of English, I raced downstairs and was almost out the door when I realized we couldn’t leave until Ben and Radar finished band practice. I sat down outside the band room and took a personal pizza wrapped in napkins from my backpack, where I’d had it since lunch. I was through the first quarter when Lacey Pemberton sat down next to me. I offered her a piece. She declined.

We talked about Margo, of course. The hole we had in common. “What I need to figure out,” I said, rubbing pizza grease onto my jeans, “is a place. But I don’t even know if I’m close with the pseudovisions. Sometimes I think we’re just entirely off track.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Honestly, everything else aside, I like finding stuff out about her. I mean, that I didn’t know before. I had no idea who she really was. I honestly never thought of her as anything but my crazy beautiful friend who does all the crazy beautiful things.”

“Right, but she didn’t come up with these things on the fly,” I said. “I mean, all of her adventures had a certain . . . I don’t know.”

“Elegance,” Lacey said. “She is the only person I know who’s not, like, grown up who has total elegance.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s hard to imagine her in some gross unlit dusty room.”

“Yeah,” I said. “With rats.”

Lacey pulled her knees to her chest and assumed the fetal position. “Ick. That’s so not Margo.”

Somehow Lacey got shotgun, although she was the shortest of us. Ben was driving. I sighed quite loudly as Radar, seated next to me, pulled out his handheld and started working on Omnictionary.

“Just deleting vandalism on the Chuck Norris page,” he said. “For instance, while I do think Chuck Norris specializes in the roundhouse kick, I don’t think it’s accurate to say, ‘Chuck Norris’s tears can cure cancer, but unfortunately he has never cried.’ Anyway, vandalism-deletion only takes like four percent of my brain.”

I understood Radar was trying to make me laugh, but I only wanted to talk about one thing. “I’m not convinced she’s in a pseudovision. Maybe that’s not even what she meant by ‘paper towns,’ you know? There are so many place hints, but nothing specific.”

Radar looked up for a second and then back down at the screen. “Personally, I think she’s far away, doing some ridiculous roadside attraction tour that she wrongly thinks she left enough clues to explain. So I think she’s currently in, like, Omaha, Nebraska, visiting the world’s largest ball of stamps, or in Minnesota checking out the world’s largest ball of twine.”

With a glance into the rearview mirror, Ben said, “So you think that Margo is on a national tour in search of various World’s Largest Balls?” Radar nodded.

“Well,” Ben went on, “someone should just tell her to come on home, because she can find the world’s largest balls right here in Orlando, Florida. They’re located in a special display case known as ‘my scrotum.’”