Paper Towns

A message from Margo Roth Spiegelman: Your friendship with her—it sleeps with the fishes



Margo hid the fish between folded pairs of shorts in Becca’s closet. I could hear footsteps upstairs, and tapped Margo on the shoulder and looked at her, my eyes bulging. She just smiled and leisurely pulled out the spray paint. I scrambled out the window, and then turned back to watch as Margo leaned over the desk and calmly shook the spray paint. In an elegant motion—the kind you associate with calligraphy or Zorro—she spray-painted the letter M onto the wall above the desk.



She reached her hands up to me, and I pulled her through the window. She was just starting to stand when we heard a high-pitched voice shout, “DWIGHT!” I grabbed the clothes and took off running, Margo behind me.



I heard, but did not see, the front door of Becca’s house swing open, but I didn’t stop or turn around, not when a booming voice shouted “HALT!” and not even when I heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being pumped.



I heard Margo mumble “gun” behind me—she didn’t sound upset about it exactly; she was just making an observation—and then rather than walk around Becca’s hedge, I dove over it headfirst. I’m not sure how I intended to land—maybe an artful somersault or something—but at any rate, I spilled onto the asphalt of the road, landing on my left shoulder. Fortunately, Jase’s bundle of clothes hit the ground first, softening the blow.



I swore, and before I could even start to stand, I felt Margo’s hands pulling me up, and then we were in the car and I was driving in reverse with the lights off, which is how I nearly came to run over the mostly naked starting shortstop of the Winter Park High School Wildcats baseball team. Jase was running very fast, but he didn’t seem to be running anyplace in particular. I felt another stab of regret as we backed up past him, so I rolled the window halfway down and threw his polo in his general direction. Fortunately, I don’t think he saw either Margo or me, and he had no reason to recognize the minivan since—and I don’t want to sound bitter or anything by dwelling on this—I can’t drive it to school.



“Why the hell would you do that?” Margo asked as I turned on the lights and, driving forward now, began to navigate the suburban labyrinth back toward the interstate.



“I felt bad for him.”



“For him? Why? Because he’s been cheating on me for six weeks? Because he’s probably given me god-only-knows-what disease? Because he’s a disgusting idiot who will probably be rich and happy his whole life, thus proving the absolute unfairness of the cosmos?”



“He just looked sort of desperate,” I said.



“Whatever. We’re going to Karin’s house. It’s on Pennsylvania, by the ABC Liquors.”



“Don’t be pissed at me,” I said. “I just had a guy point a freaking shotgun at me for helping you, so don’t be pissed at me.”



“I’M NOT PISSED AT YOU!” Margo shouted, and then punched the dashboard.



“Well, you’re screaming.”



“I thought maybe—whatever. I thought maybe he wasn’t cheating.”



“Oh.”



“Karin told me at school. And I guess a lot of people have known for a long time. And no one told me until Karin. I thought maybe she was just trying to stir up drama or something.”



“I’m sorry,” I said.



“Yeah. Yeah. I can’t believe I even care.”



“My heart is really pounding,” I said.



“That’s how you know you’re having fun,” Margo said.



But it didn’t feel like fun; it felt like a heart attack. I pulled over into a 7-Eleven parking lot and held my finger to my jugular vein while watching the : in the digital clock blink every second. When I turned to Margo, she was rolling her eyes at me. “My pulse is dangerously high,” I explained.



“I don’t even remember the last time I got excited about something like that. The adrenaline in the throat and the lungs expanding.”



“In through the nose out through the mouth,” I answered her.



“All your little anxieties. It’s just so . . .”



“Cute?”



“Is that what they’re calling childish these days?” She smiled.



Margo crawled into the backseat and came back with a purse. How much shit did she put back there? I thought. She opened up the purse and pulled out a full bottle of nail polish so darkly red it was almost black. “While you calm down, I’m going to paint my nails,” she said, smiling up at me through her bangs. “You just take your time.”



And so we sat there, she with her nail polish balanced on the dash, and me with a shaky finger on the pulse of myself. It was a good color of nail polish, and Margo had nice fingers, thinner and bonier than the rest of her, which was all curves and soft edges. She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own. I remembered them against my hip bone in Wal-Mart, which felt like days ago. My heartbeat slowed. And I tried to tell myself: Margo’s right. There’s nothing out here to be afraid of, not in this little city on this quiet night.



5.



“Part Six,” Margo said once we were driving again. She was waving her fingernails through the air, almost like she was playing piano. “Leave flowers on Karin’s doorstep with apologetic note.”



“What’d you do to her?”



“Well, when she told me about Jase, I sort of shot the messenger.”



“How so?” I asked. We were pulled up to a stoplight, and some kids in a sports car next to us were revving their engine—as if I was going to race the Chrysler. When you floored it, it whimpered.



“Well, I don’t remember exactly what I called her, but it was something along the lines of ‘sniveling, repulsive, idiotic, backne-ridden, snaggletoothed, fat-assed bitch with the worst hair in Central Florida—and that’s saying something.’”



“Her hair is ridiculous,” I said.



I know. That was the only thing I said about her that was “true. When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can’t really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes.”



As I drove up to Karin’s house, Margo disappeared into the way-back and returned with the bouquet of tulips. Taped to one of the flowers’ stems was a note Margo’d folded to look like an envelope. She handed me the bouquet once I stopped, and I sprinted down a sidewalk, placed the flowers on Karin’s doorstep, and sprinted back.



“Part Seven,” she said as soon as I was back in the minivan. “Leave a fish for the lovely Mr. Worthington.”



“I suspect he won’t be home yet,” I said, just the slightest hint of pity in my voice.



“I hope the cops find him barefoot, frenzied, and naked in some roadside ditch a week from now,” Margo answered dispassionately.



“Remind me never to cross Margo Roth Spiegelman,” I mumbled, and Margo laughed.



“Seriously,” she said. “We bring the fucking rain down on our enemies.”



“Your enemies,” I corrected.



“We’ll see,” she answered quickly, and then perked up and said, “Oh, hey, I’ll handle this one. The thing about Jason’s house is they have this crazy good security system. And we can’t have another panic attack.”



“Um,” I said.



Jason lived just down the road from Karin, in this uber-rich subdivision called Casavilla. All the houses in Casavilla are Spanish-style with the red-tile roofs and everything, only they weren’t built by the Spanish. They were built by Jason’s dad, who is one of the richest land developers in Florida. “Big, ugly homes for big, ugly people,” I told Margo as we pulled into Casavilla.



“No shit. If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me.”



We pulled up in front of Jase’s house, an architectural monstrosity that looked generally like an oversize Spanish hacienda except for three thick Doric columns going up to the roof. Margo grabbed the second catfish from the backseat, uncapped a pen with her teeth, and scrawled in handwriting that didn’t look much like hers:



MS’s love For you: it Sleeps With the Fishes “Listen, keep the car on,” she said. She put Jase’s WPHS baseball hat on backward.



“Okay,” I said.



“Keep it in drive,” she said.



“Okay,” I said, and felt my pulse rising. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Catfish and spray paint in hand, Margo threw the door open, jogged across the Worthingtons’ expansive front lawn, and then hid behind an oak tree. She waved at me through the darkness, and I waved back, and then she took a dramatically deep breath, puffed her cheeks out, turned, and ran.



She’d only taken one stride when the house lit up like a municipal Christmas tree, and a siren started blaring. I briefly contemplated abandoning Margo to her fate, but just kept breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth as she ran toward the house. She heaved the fish through a window, but the sirens were so loud I could barely even hear the glass breaking. And then, just because she’s Margo Roth Spiegelman, she took a moment to carefully spray-paint a lovely M on the part of the window that wasn’t shattered. Then she was running all out toward the car, and I had a foot on the accelerator and a foot on the brake, and the Chrysler felt at that moment like a Thoroughbred racehorse. Margo ran so fast her hat blew off behind her, and then she jumped into the car, and we were gone before she even got the door closed.



I stopped at the stop sign at the end of the street, and Margo said, “What the hell? Go go go go go,” and I said, “Oh, right,” because I had forgotten that I was throwing caution to the wind and everything. I rolled through the three other stop signs in Casavilla, and we were a mile down Pennsylvania Avenue before we saw a cop car roar past us with its lights on.



“That was pretty hardcore,” Margo said. “I mean, even for me. To put it Q-style, my pulse is a little elevated.”



“Jesus,” I said. “I mean, you couldn’t have just left it in his car? Or at least at the doorstep?”



“We bring the fucking rain, Q. Not the scattered showers.”



“Tell me Part Eight is less terrifying.”



“Don’t worry. Part Eight is child’s play. We’re going back to Jefferson Park. Lacey’s house. You know where she lives, right?” I did, although God knows Lacey Pemberton would never deign to have me over. She lived on the opposite side of Jefferson Park, a mile away from me, in a nice condo on top of a stationery store— the same block the dead guy had lived on, actually. I’d been to the building before, because friends of my parents lived on the third floor. There were two locked doors before you even got to the condos. I figured even Margo Roth Spiegelman couldn’t break into that place.



“So has Lacey been naughty or nice?” I asked.



“Lacey has been distinctly naughty,” Margo answered. She was looking out the passenger window again, talking away from me, so I could barely hear her. “I mean, we have been friends since kindergarten.”



“And?”



“And she didn’t tell me about Jase. But not just that. When I look back on it, she’s just a terrible friend. I mean, for instance, do you think I’m fat?”



“Jesus, no,” I said. “You’re—” And I stopped myself from saying not skinny, but that’s the whole point of you; the point of you is that you don’t look like a boy. “You should not lose any weight.”



She laughed, waved her hand at me, and said, “You just love my big ass.” I turned from the road for a second and glanced over, and I shouldn’t have, because she could read my face and my face said: Well, first off I wouldn’t say it’s big exactly and second off, it is kind of spectacular. But it was more than that. You can’t divorce Margo the person from Margo the body. You can’t see one without seeing the other. You looked at Margo’s eyes and you saw both their blueness and their Margo-ness. In the end, you could not say that Margo Roth Spiegelman was fat, or that she was skinny, any more than you can say that the Eiffel Tower is or is not lonely. Margo’s beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection—uncracked and uncrackable.



“But she would always make these little comments,” Margo continued. “‘I’d loan you these shorts but I don’t think they’d fit right on you.’ Or, ‘You’re so spunky. I love how you just make guys fall in love with your personality.’ Constantly undermining me. I don’t think she ever said anything that wasn’t an attempt at undermination.”



“Undermining.”



“Thank you, Annoying McMasterGrammician.”



“Grammarian,” I said.



“Oh my God I’m going to kill you!” But she was laughing.



I drove around the perimeter of Jefferson Park so we could avoid driving past our houses, just in case our parents had woken up and discovered us missing. We drove in along the lake (Lake Jefferson), and then turned onto Jefferson Court and drove into Jefferson Park’s little faux downtown, which felt eerily deserted and quiet. We found Lacey’s black SUV parked in front of the sushi restaurant. We stopped a block away in the first parking spot we could find not beneath a streetlight.



“Would you please hand me the last fish?” Margo asked me. I was glad to get rid of the fish because it was already starting to smell. And then Margo wrote on the paper wrapper in her lettering: your Friendship with ms Sleeps with The fishes We wove our way around the circular glow of the streetlights, walking as casually as two people can when one of them (Margo) is holding a sizable fish wrapped in paper and the other one (me) is holding a can of blue spray paint. A dog barked, and we both froze, but then it was quiet again, and soon we were at Lacey’s car.