Paper Towns

So it turned out that I did spend prom night with Margo, just not quite as I’d dreamed. Instead of busting into prom together, I sat against her rolled-up carpet with her ratty blanket draped over my knees, alternately reading travel guides by flashlight and sitting still in the dark as the cicadas hummed above and around me.



Maybe she had sat here in the cacophonous darkness and felt some kind of desperation take her over, and maybe she found it impossible to unthink the thought of death. I could imagine that, of course.



But I could also imagine this: Margo picking these books up at various garage sales, buying every travel guide she could get her hands on for a quarter or less. And then coming here—even before she disappeared—to read the books away from prying eyes. Reading them, trying to decide on destinations. Yes. She would stay on the road and in hiding, a balloon floating through the sky, eating up hundreds of miles a day with the help of a perpetual tailwind. And in this imagining, she was alive. Had she brought me here to give me the clues to piece together an itinerary? Maybe. Of course I was nowhere near an itinerary. Judging from the books, she could be in Jamaica or Namibia, Topeka or Beijing. But I had only just begun to look.



22.



In my dream, her head was on my shoulder as I lay on my back, only the corner of carpet between us and the concrete floor. Her arm was around my rib cage. We were just lying there, sleeping.



God help me. The only teenaged guy in America who dreams of sleeping with girls, and just sleeping with them. And then my phone rang. It took two more rings before my fumbling hands found the phone lying on the unrolled carpet. It was 3:18 A.M. Ben was calling.



“Good morning, Ben,” I said.



“YESSS!!!!!” he answered, screaming, and I could tell right away that now was not the time to try to explain to him all I had learned and imagined about Margo. I could damn near smell the booze on his breath. That one word, in the way it was shouted, contained more exclamation points than anything Ben had ever said to me in his entire life.



“I take it prom is going well?”



“YESSSS! Quentin Jacobsen! The Q! America’s greatest Quentin! Yes!” His voice got distant then but I could still hear him. “Everybody, hey, shut up, hold on, shut up—QUENTIN! JACOBSEN! IS INSIDE MY PHONE!” There was a cheer then, and Ben’s voice returned. “Yes, Quentin! Yes! Bro, you have got to come over here.”



“Where is here?” I asked.



“Becca’s! Do you know where it is?”



As it happened, I knew precisely where it was. I’d been in her basement. “I know where it is, but it’s the middle of the night, Ben. And I’m in—”



“YESSS!!! You have to come right now. Right now!”



“Ben, there are more important things going on,” I answered.



“DESIGNATED DRIVER!”



“What?”



“You’re my designated driver! Yes! You are so designated! I love that you answered! That’s so awesome! I have to be home by six! And I designate you to get me there! YESSSSSSS!”



“Can’t you just spend the night there?” I asked.



“NOOOO! Booooo. Booo on Quentin. Hey, everybody! Boooo Quentin!” And then I was booed. “Everybody’s drunk. Ben drunk. Lacey drunk. Radar drunk. Nobody drive. Home by six. Promised Mom. Boo, Sleepy Quentin! Yay, Designated Driver! YESSSS!”



I took a long breath. If Margo were going to show up, she would have showed up by three. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”



“YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YESSSSSS!!!! YES! YES!”



Ben was still making assertions of affirmation when I hung up the phone. I lay there for a moment, telling myself to get up, and then I did. Still half asleep, I crawled through Troll Holes past the library and into the office, then pulled open the back door and got into the minivan.



I turned in to Becca Arrington’s subdivision just before four. There were dozens of cars parked along both sides of Becca’s street, and I knew there would be more people inside, since many of them had been dropped off via limo. I found a spot a couple cars away from RHAPAW.



I had never seen Ben drunk. In tenth grade, I once drank a bottle of pink “wine” at a band party. It tasted as bad going down as it did coming up. It was Ben who sat with me in Cassie Hiney’s Winnie-the-Pooh–themed bathroom while I projectile-vomited pink liquid all over a painting of Eeyore. I think the experience soured both of us on alcoholic pursuits. Until tonight, anyway.



Now, I knew Ben was going to be drunk. I’d heard him on the phone. No sober person says “yes” that many times per minute. Nonetheless, when I pushed past some people smoking cigarettes on Becca’s front lawn and opened the door to her house, I did not expect to see Jase Worthington and two other baseball players holding a tuxedo-clad Ben upside down above a keg of beer. The spout of the beer keg was in Ben’s mouth, and the entire room was transfixed on him. They were all chanting in unison, “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty,” and for a moment, I thought Ben was getting—like—hazed or something. But no, as he sucked on that beer spout like it was mother’s milk, little trickles of beer spilled from the sides of his mouth, because he was smiling. “Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five,” the people shouted, and you could hear their enthusiasm. Apparently, something remarkable was taking place.



It all seemed so trivial, so embarrassing. It all seemed like paper kids having their paper fun. I made my way through the crowd toward Ben, and was surprised to happen across Radar and Angela.



“What the hell is this?” I asked.



Radar paused from counting and looked over at me. “Yes!” he said. “The Designated Driver cometh! Yes!”



“Why is everyone saying ‘yes’ so much tonight?”



“Good question,” Angela shouted to me. She puffed out her cheeks and sighed. She looked almost as annoyed as I felt.



“Hell yes, it’s a good question!” Radar said, holding a red plastic cup full of beer in each hand.



“They’re both his,” Angela explained to me calmly.



“Why aren’t you designated driver?” I asked.



“They wanted you,” she said. “Thought it would get you here.” I rolled my eyes. She rolled hers back, sympathetically.



“You must really like him,” I said, nodding toward Radar, who was holding both beers over his head, joining in the counting. Everybody seemed so proud of the fact that they could count.



“Even now he’s sort of adorable,” she answered.



“Gross,” I said.



Radar nudged me with one of the beer cups. “Look at our boy Ben! He’s some kind of autistic savant when it comes to keg stands. Apparently he’s like setting a world record right now or something.”



“What is a keg stand?” I asked.



Angela pointed at Ben. “That,” she said.



“Oh,” I said. “Well, it’s—I mean, how hard can it be to hang upside down?”



“Apparently, the longest keg stand in Winter Park history is sixty-two seconds,” she explained. “And it was set by Tony Yorrick,” who’s this gigantic guy who’d graduated when we were freshmen and now played for the University of Florida football team.



I was all for Ben setting records, but I couldn’t bring myself to join in as everyone shouted, “Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three!” And then Ben pulled the spout out of his mouth and screamed, “YESSS! I MUST BE THE GREATEST! I SHOOK UP THE WORLD!” Jase and some baseball players flipped him right-side-up and carried him around on their shoulders. And then Ben caught sight of me, pointed, and let out the loudest and most passionate “YESSSS!!!!!!” I’d ever heard. I mean, soccer players don’t get that excited about winning the World Cup.



Ben jumped off the baseball players’ shoulders, landing in an awkward crouch, and then swayed a bit on his way to standing. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “YES!” he said again. “Quentin is here! The Great Man! Let’s hear it for Quentin, the best friend of the fucking keg stand world record holder!” Jase rubbed the top of my head and said, “You’re the man, Q!” and then I heard Radar in my ear, “By the way, we are like folk heroes to these people. Angela and I left our afterparty to come here because Ben told me I’d be greeted as a king. I mean, they were chanting my name. Apparently they all think Ben is hilarious or something, and so they like us, too.”



To Radar, and also to everyone else, I said, “Wow.”



Ben turned away from us, and I watched him grab Cassie Hiney. His hands were on her shoulders, and she put her hands on his shoulders, and he said, “My prom date was almost prom queen,” and Cassie said, “I know. That’s great,” and Ben said, “I’ve wanted to kiss you every single day for the last three years,” and Cassie said, “I think you should,” and then Ben said, “YES! That’s awesome!” But he didn’t kiss Cassie. He just turned around to me and said, “Cassie wants to kiss me!” And I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “That’s so awesome.” And then he seemed to forget about Cassie and me both, as if the idea of kissing Cassie Hiney felt better than actually kissing her ever could.



Cassie said to me, “This party is so great, isn’t it?” and I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “This is like the opposite of band parties, huh?” And I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Ben is a spaz, but I love him.” And I said, “Yeah.” “Plus he’s got really green eyes,” she added, and I said, “Uh-huh,” and then she said, “Everyone says you’re cuter, but I like Ben,” and I said, “Okay,” and she said, “This party is so great, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yeah.” Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.



Chuck Parson walked up to me just as Cassie walked away. “Jacobsen,” he said, matter-of-factly.



“Parson,” I answered.



“You shaved my fucking eyebrow, didn’t you?”



“I didn’t shave it, actually,” I said. “I used a depilatory cream.”



He poked me quite hard in the middle of my chest. “You’re a douche,” he said, but he was laughing. “That took such big balls, bro. And now you’re all puppet master and shit. I mean, maybe I’m just drunk, but I’m feeling a little love for your douchey ass right now.”



“Thank you,” I said. I felt so detached from all this shit, all this high-school-is-ending-so-we-have-to-reveal-that-deep-down-we-all-love-everybody bullshit. And I imagined her at this party, or at thousands like this one. The life drawn out of her eyes. I imagined her listening to Chuck Parson babble at her and thinking about ways out, about the living ways out and the dead ways out. I could imagine the two paths with equal clarity.



“You want a beer, dicklicker?” Chuck asked. I might have forgotten he was even there, but the smell of booze on his breath made it hard to overlook his presence. I just shook my head, and he wandered off.



I wanted to go home, but I knew I couldn’t rush Ben. This was probably the single greatest day of his life. He was entitled to it.



So instead, I found a stairway and headed down to the basement. I’d been in the dark so long I was still craving it, and I just wanted to lie down somewhere halfway quiet and halfway dark and go back to imagining Margo. But as I walked past Becca’s bedroom, I heard some muffled noises—specifically, moanish noises—and so I paused outside her door, which was open just a crack.



I could see the top two-thirds of Jase, shirtless, on top of Becca, and she had her legs wrapped around him. Nobody was naked or anything, but they were headed in that direction. And maybe a better person would have turned away, but people like me don’t get a lot of chances to see people like Becca Arrington naked, so I stayed there in the doorway, peering into the room. And then they rolled around so Becca was on top of Jason, and she was sighing as she kissed him, and she was reaching down for her shirt. “Do you think I’m hot?” she said.



“God yeah, you are so hot, Margo,” Jase said.



“What!?” Becca said, furious, and it became quickly clear to me that I wasn’t going to see Becca naked. She started screaming; I backed away from the door; Jase spotted me and screamed, “What’s your problem?” And Becca shouted, “Screw him. Who gives a shit about him? What about me?! Why are you thinking about her and not me!”



That seemed like as good a time as any to take my leave of the situation, so I closed the door and went to the bathroom. I did need to pee, but mostly I just needed to be away from the human voice.



It always takes a few seconds for me to start peeing after all the equipment has been properly set up, and so I stood there for a second, waiting, and then I started peeing. I’d just gotten to the full-stream, shudder-of-relief part of peeing when a girl’s voice from the general area of the bathtub said, “Who’s there?”



And I said, “Uh, Lacey?”



“Quentin? What the hell are you doing here?” I wanted to stop peeing but couldn’t, of course. Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.



“Um, peeing,” I said.



“How’s it going?” she asked through the curtain.



“Um, fine?” I shook out the last of it, zipped my shorts, and flushed.



“You wanna hang out in the bathtub?” she asked. “That’s not a come-on.”



After a moment, I said, “Sure.” I pulled the shower curtain back. Lacey smiled up at me, and then pulled her knees up to her chest. I sat down across from her, my back against the cold sloping porcelain. Our feet were intertwined. She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and these cute little flip-flops. Her makeup was just a little smeared around her eyes. Her hair was half up, still styled for prom, and her legs were tan. It must be said that Lacey Pemberton was very beautiful. She was not the kind of girl who could make you forget about Margo Roth Spiegelman, but she was the kind of girl who could make you forget about a lot of things.