Paper Towns — Chapter no 12

12.

Every morning, I now looked up through my bedroom window to check

whether there was any sign of life in Margo’s room. She always kept her

rattan shades closed, but since she’d left, her mom or somebody had pulled

them up, so I could see a little snippet of blue wall and white ceiling. On

that Saturday morning, with her only forty-eight hours gone, I figured she

wouldn’t be home yet, but even so, I felt a flicker of disappointment when I

saw the shade still pulled up.

I brushed my teeth and then, after briefly kicking at Ben in an attempt to

wake him, walked out in shorts and a T-shirt. Five people were seated at the

dining room table. My mom and dad. Margo’s mom and dad. And a tall,

stout African-American man with oversize glasses wearing a gray suit,

holding a manila folder.

“Uh, hi,” I said.

“Quentin,” my mom asked, “did you see Margo on Wednesday night?”

I walked into the dining room and leaned against the wall, standing

opposite the stranger. I’d thought of my answer to this question already.

“Yeah,” I said. “She showed up at my window at like midnight and we

talked for a minute and then Mr. Spiegelman caught her and she went back

to her house.”

“And was that—? Did you see her after that?” Mr. Spiegelman asked.

He seemed quite calm.

“No, why?” I asked.

Margo’s mom answered, her voice shrill. “Well,” she said, “it seems that

Margo has run away. Again.” She sighed. “This would be—what is it, Josh,

the fourth time?”

“Oh, I’ve lost count,” her dad answered, annoyed.

The African-American man spoke up then. “Fifth time you’ve filed a

report.” The man nodded at me and said, “Detective Otis Warren.”

“Quentin Jacobsen,” I said.

Mom stood up and put her hands on Mrs. Spiegelman’s shoulders.

“Debbie,” she said, “I’m so sorry. It’s a very frustrating situation.” I knew

this trick. It was a psychology trick called empathic listening. You say what

the person is feeling so they feel understood. Mom does it to me all the

time.

“I’m not frustrated,” Mrs. Spiegelman answered. “I’m done.”

“That’s right,” Mr. Spiegelman said. “We’ve got a locksmith coming

this afternoon. We’re changing the locks. She’s eighteen. I mean, the

detective has just said there’s nothing we can do—”

“Well,” Detective Warren interrupted, “I didn’t quite say that. I said that

she’s not a missing minor, and so she has the right to leave home.”

Mr. Spiegelman continued talking to my mom. “We’re happy to pay for

her to go to college, but we can’t support this . . . this silliness. Connie,

she’s eighteen! And still so self-centered! She needs to see some

consequences.”

My mom removed her hands from Mrs. Spiegelman. “I would argue she

needs to see loving consequences,” my mom said.

“Well, she’s not your daughter, Connie. She hasn’t walked all over you

like a doormat for a decade. We’ve got another child to think about.”

“And ourselves,” Mr. Spiegelman added. He looked up at me then.

“Quentin, I’m sorry if she tried to drag you into her little game. You can

imagine how . . . just how embarrassing this is for us. You’re such a good

boy, and she . . . well.”

I pushed myself off the wall and stood up straight. I knew Margo’s

parents a little, but I’d never seen them act so bitchy. No wonder she was

annoyed with them Wednesday night. I glanced over at the detective. He

was flipping through pages in the folder. “She’s been known to leave a bit

of a bread crumb trail; is that right?”

“Clues,” Mr. Spiegelman said, standing up now. The detective had

placed the folder on the table, and Margo’s dad leaned forward to look at it

with him. “Clues everywhere. The day she ran away to Mississippi, she ate

alphabet soup and left exactly four letters in her soup bowl: An M, an I, an

S, and a P. She was disappointed when we didn’t piece it together, although

as I told her when she finally returned: ‘How can we find you when all we

know is Mississippi? It’s a big state, Margo!’”

The detective cleared his throat. “And she left Minnie Mouse on her bed

when she spent a night inside Disney World.”

“Yes,” her mom said. “The clues. The stupid clues. But you can never

follow them anywhere, trust me.”

The detective looked up from his notebook. “We’ll get the word out, of

course, but she can’t be compelled to come home; you shouldn’t necessarily

expect her back under your roof in the near future.”

“I don’t want her under our roof.” Mrs. Spiegelman raised a tissue to her

eyes, although I heard no crying in her voice. “I know that’s terrible, but it’s

true.”

“Deb,” my mom said in her therapist voice.

Mrs. Spiegelman just shook her head—the smallest shake. “What can

we do? We told the detective. We filed a report. She’s an adult, Connie.”

“She’s your adult,” my mom said, still calm.

“Oh, come on, Connie. Look, is it sick that it’s a blessing to have her out

of the house? Of course it’s sick. But she was a sickness in this family! How

do you look for someone who announces she won’t be found, who always

leaves clues that lead nowhere, who runs away constantly? You can’t!”

My mom and dad shared a glance, and then the detective spoke to me.

“Son, I’m wondering if we can chat privately?” I nodded. We ended up in

my parents’ bedroom, he in an easy chair and me sitting on the corner of

their bed.

“Kid,” he said once he’d settled into the chair, “let me give you some

advice: never work for the government. Because when you work for the

government, you work for the people. And when you work for the people,

you have to interact with the people, even the Spiegelmans.” I laughed a

little.

“Let me be frank with you, kid. Those people know how to parent like I

know how to diet. I’ve worked with them before, and I don’t like them. I

don’t care if you tell her parents where she is, but I’d appreciate it if you

told me.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”

“Kid, I’ve been thinking about this girl. This stuff she does— she breaks

into Disney World, for instance, right? She goes to Mississippi and leaves

alphabet soup clues. She organizes a huge campaign to toilet paper houses.”

“How do you know about that?” Two years before, Margo had led the

TP-ing of two hundred houses in a single night. Needless to say, I wasn’t

invited on that adventure.

“I worked this case before. So, kid, here’s where I need your help: who

plans this stuff? These crazy schemes? She’s the mouthpiece for it all, the

one crazy enough to do everything. But who plans it? Who’s sitting around

with notebooks full of diagrams figuring out how much toilet paper you

need to toilet paper a ton of houses?”

“It’s all her, I assume.”

“But she might have a partner, somebody helpin’ her do all these big

and brilliant things, and maybe the person who’s in on her secret isn’t the

obvious person, isn’t her best friend or her boyfriend. Maybe it’s somebody

you wouldn’t think of right off,” he said. He took a breath and was about to

say something more when I cut him off.

“I don’t know where she is,” I said. “I swear to God.”

“Just checking, kid. Anyway, you know something, don’t you? So let’s

start there.” I told him everything. I trusted the guy. He took a few notes

while I talked, but nothing very detailed. And something about telling him,

and his scribbling in the notebook, and her parents being so lame—

something about all of it made the possibility of her being lastingly missing

well up in me for the first time. I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath

when I finished talking. The detective didn’t say anything for a while. He

just leaned forward in the chair and stared past me until he’d seen whatever

he was waiting to see, and then he started talking.

“Listen, kid. This is what happens: somebody—girl usually— got a free

spirit, doesn’t get on too good with her parents. These kids, they’re like

tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against

it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float

away. And maybe you never see the balloon again. It lands in Canada or

somethin’, gets work at a restaurant, and before the balloon even notices,

it’s been pouring coffee in that same diner to the same sad bastards for

thirty years. Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days

from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it

needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid,

that string gets cut all the time.”

“Yeah, bu—”

“I’m not finished, kid. The thing about these balloons is that there are so

goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up

against one another as they float to here or from there, and every one of

those damned balloons ends up on my desk one way or another, and after a

while a man can get discouraged. Everywhere the balloons, and each of

them with a mother or a father, or God forbid both, and after a while, you

can’t even see ’em individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky

and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon.” He

paused then, and inhaled sharply, as if he was realizing something. “But

then every now and again you talk to some big-eyed kid with too much hair

for his head and you want to lie to him because he seems like a good kid.

And you feel bad for this kid, because the only thing worse than the skyful

of balloons you see is what he sees: a clear blue day interrupted by just the

one balloon. But once that string gets cut, kid, you can’t uncut it. Do you

get what I’m saying?”

I nodded, although I wasn’t sure I did understand. He stood up. “I do

think she’ll be back soon, kid. If that helps.”

I liked the image of Margo as a balloon, but I figured that in his urge for

the poetic, the detective had seen more worry in me than the pang I’d

actually felt. I knew she’d be back. She’d deflate and float back to Jefferson

Park. She always had.

I followed the detective back to the dining room, and then he said he

wanted to go back over to the Spiegelmans’ house and pick through her

room a little. Mrs. Spiegelman gave me a hug and said, “You’ve always

been such a good boy; I’m sorry she ever got you caught up in this

ridiculousness.” Mr. Spiegelman shook my hand, and they left. As soon as

the door closed, my dad said, “Wow.”

“Wow,” agreed Mom.

My dad put his arm around me. “Those are some very troubling

dynamics, eh, bud?”

“They’re kind of assholes,” I said. My parents always liked it when I

cursed in front of them. I could see the pleasure of it in their faces. It

signified that I trusted them, that I was myself in front of them. But even so,

they seemed sad.

“Margo’s parents suffer a severe narcissistic injury whenever she acts

out,” Dad said to me.

“It prevents them from parenting effectively,” my mom added.

“They’re assholes,” I repeated.

“Honestly,” my dad said, “they’re probably right. She probably is in

need of attention. And God knows, I would need attention, too, if I had

those two for parents.”

“When she comes back,” my mom said, “she’s going to be devastated.

To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.”

“Maybe she could live here when she comes back,” I said, and in saying

it I realized what a fantastically great idea it was. My mom’s eyes lit up,

too, but then she saw something in my dad’s expression and answered me in

her usual measured way.

“Well, she’d certainly be welcome, although that would come with its

own challenges—being next door to the Spiegelmans. But when she returns

to school, please do tell her that she’s welcome here, and that if she doesn’t

want to stay with us, there are many resources available to her that we’re

happy to discuss.”

Ben came out then, his bedhead seeming to challenge our basic

understanding of the force gravity exerts upon matter. “Mr. and Mrs.

Jacobsen—always a pleasure.”

“Good morning, Ben. I wasn’t aware you were staying the night.”

“Neither was I, actually,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

I told Ben about the detective and the Spiegelmans and Margo being

technically a missing adult. And when I had finished, he nodded and said,

“We should probably discuss this over a piping hot plate of Resurrection.” I

smiled and followed him back to my room. Radar came over shortly

thereafter, and as soon as he arrived, I was kicked off the team, because we

were facing a difficult mission and despite being the only one of us who

actually owned the game, I wasn’t very good at Resurrection. As I watched

them tramp through a ghoul-infested space station, Ben said, “Goblin,

Radar, goblin.”

“I see him.”

“Come here, you little bastard,” Ben said, the controller twisting in his

hand. “Daddy’s gonna put you on a sailboat across the River Styx.”

“Did you just use Greek mythology to talk trash?” I asked.

Radar laughed. Ben started pummeling buttons, shouting, “Eat it,

goblin! Eat it like Zeus ate Metis!”

“I would think that she’d be back by Monday,” I said. “You don’t want

to miss too much school, even if you’re Margo Roth Spiegelman. Maybe

she can stay here till graduation.”

Radar answered me in the disjointed way of someone playing

Resurrection. “I don’t even get why she left, was it just imp six o’clock no

dude use the ray gun like because of lost love? I would have figured her to

be where is the crypt is it to the left immune to that kind of stuff.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that, I don’t think. Not just that, anyway. She

kind of hates Orlando; she called it a paper town. Like, you know,

everything so fake and flimsy. I think she just wanted a vacation from that.”

I happened to glance out my window, and I saw immediately that

someone—the detective, I guessed—had lowered the shade in Margo’s

room. But I wasn’t seeing the shade. Instead, I was seeing a black-and-

white poster, taped to the back of the shade. In the photograph, a man

stands, his shoulders slightly slumped, staring ahead. A cigarette dangles

out of his mouth. A guitar is slung over his shoulder, and the guitar is

painted with the words THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.

“There’s something in Margo’s window.” The game music stopped, and

Radar and Ben knelt down on either side of me. “That’s new?” asked Radar.

“I’ve seen the back of that shade a million times,” I answered, “but I’ve

never seen that poster before.”

“Weird,” Ben said.

“Margo’s parents just said this morning that she sometimes leaves

clues,” I said. “But never anything, like, concrete enough to find her before

she comes home.”

Radar already had his handheld out; he was searching Omnictionary for

the phrase. “The picture’s of Woody Guthrie,” he said. “A folksinger, 1912

to 1967. Sang about the working class. ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ Bit of a

Communist. Um, inspired Bob Dylan.” Radar played a snippet of one of his

songs—a high-pitched scratchy voice sang about unions.

“I’ll email the guy who wrote most of this page and see if there are any

obvious connections between Woody Guthrie and Margo,” Radar said.

“I can’t imagine she likes his songs,” I said.

“Seriously,” Ben said. “This guy sounds like an alcoholic Kermit the

Frog with throat cancer.”

Radar opened the window and stuck his head out, swiveling it around.

“It sure seems she left this for you, though, Q. I mean, does she know

anyone else who could see this window?” I shook my head no.

After a moment, Ben added, “The way he’s staring at us—it’s like, ‘pay

attention to me.’ And his head like that, you know? It’s not like he’s

standing on a stage; it’s like he’s standing in a doorway or something.”

“I think he wants us to come inside,” I said.