Paper Towns — Chapter no 15

15.

After parking in my driveway, we walked across the strip of grass that

separated Margo’s house from mine, just as we had Saturday. Ruthie

answered the door and said her parents wouldn’t be home until six; Myrna

Mountweazel ran excited circles around us; we went upstairs. Ruthie

brought us a toolbox from the garage, and then we all stared at the door

leading to Margo’s bedroom for a while. We were not handy people.

“What the hell are you supposed to do?” asked Ben.

“Don’t curse in front of Ruthie,” I said.

“Ruthie, do you mind if I say hell?”

“We don’t believe in hell,” she said, by way of answering.

Radar interrupted. “People,” he said. “People. The door.” Radar dug out

a Phillips-head screwdriver from the mess of a toolbox and knelt down,

unscrewing the locking doorknob. I grabbed a bigger screwdriver and tried

to unscrew the hinges, but there didn’t seem to be any screws involved. I

looked at the door some more. Eventually, Ruthie got bored and went

downstairs to watch TV.

Radar got the doorknob loose, and we each, in turn, peered inside at the

unpainted, unfinished wood around the knob. No message. No note.

Nothing. Annoyed, I moved onto the hinges, wondering how to open them.

I swung the door open and shut, trying to understand its mechanics. “That

poem is so damned long,” I said. “You’d think old Walt could have taken a

line or two to tell us how to unscrew the door itself from its jamb.”

Only when he responded did I realize Radar was sitting at Margo’s

computer. “According to Omnictionary,” he said, “we’re looking at a butt

hinge. And you just use the screwdriver as a lever to pop out the pin.

Incidentally, some vandal has added that butt hinges function well because

they are powered by farts. Oh, Omnictionary. Wilt thou ever be accurate?”

Once Omnictionary had told us what to do, doing it proved surprisingly

easy. I got the pin off each of the three hinges and then Ben pulled the door

away. I examined the hinges, and the unfinished wood of the doorway.

Nothing.

“Nothing on the door,” Ben said. Ben and I placed the door back in

place, and Radar pounded in the pins with the screwdriver’s handle.

Radar and I went over to Ben’s house, which was architecturally identical to

mine, to play a game called Arctic Fury. We were playing this game-within-

a-game where you shoot each other with paintballs on a glacier. You

received extra points for shooting your opponents in the balls. It was very

sophisticated. “Bro, she’s definitely in New York City,” Ben said. I saw the

muzzle of his rifle around a corner, but before I could move, he shot me

between the legs. “Shit,” I mumbled.

Radar said, “In the past, it seems like her clues have pointed to a place.

She tells Jase; she leaves us clues involving two people who both lived in

New York City most of their lives. It does make sense.”

Ben said, “Dude, that’s what she wants.” Just as I was creeping up on

Ben, he paused the game. “She wants you to go to New York. What if she

arranged to make that the only way to find her? To actually go?”

“What? It’s a city of like twelve million people.”

“She could have a mole here,” Radar said. “Who will tell her if you go.”

“Lacey!” Ben said. “It’s totally Lacey. Yes! You gotta get on a plane and

go to New York City right now. And when Lacey finds out, Margo will pick

you up at the airport. Yes. Bro, I am going to take you to your house, and

you’re gonna pack, and then I’m driving your ass to the airport, and you’re

gonna put a plane ticket on your emergencies-only credit card, and then

when Margo finds out what a badass you are, the kind of badass Jase

Worthington only dreams about being, all three of us will be taking hotties

to prom.”

I didn’t doubt there was a flight to New York City leaving shortly. From

Orlando, there’s a flight to everywhere leaving shortly. But I doubted

everything else. “If you call Lacey . . . ” I said.

“She’s not going to confess!” Ben said. “Think of all the misdirection

they used—they probably only acted like they were fighting so you

wouldn’t suspect she was the mole.”

Radar said, “I don’t know, that doesn’t really add up.” He kept talking,

but I was only half listening. Staring at the paused screen, I thought it over.

If Margo and Lacey were fake-fighting, did Lacey fake-break-up with her

boyfriend? Had she faked her concern? Lacey had been fielding dozens of

emails—none with real information—from the flyers her cousin had put in

record stores in New York. She was no mole, and Ben’s plan was idiotic.

Still, the mere idea of a plan appealed to me. But there were only two and a

half weeks left of school, and I’d miss at least two days if I went to New

York—not to mention my parents would kill me for putting a plane ticket

on my credit card. The more I thought about it, the dumber it was. Still, if I

could see her tomorrow. . . . But no. “I can’t miss school,” I finally said. I

unpaused the game.

“I have a French quiz tomorrow.”

“You know,” Ben said, “your romanticism is a real inspiration.”

I played for a few more minutes and then walked across Jefferson Park

back home.

My mom told me once about this crazy kid she worked with. He was a

completely normal kid until he was nine, when his dad died. And even

though obviously a lot of nine-year-olds have had a lot of dead fathers and

most of the time the kids don’t go crazy, I guess this kid was an exception.

So what he did was he took a pencil and one of those steel compass

things, and he started drawing circles onto a piece of paper. All the circles

exactly two inches in diameter. And he would draw the circles until the

entire piece of paper was completely black, and then he would get another

piece of paper and draw more circles, and he did this every day, all day, and

didn’t pay attention in school and drew circles all over all of his tests and

shit, and my mom said that this kid’s problem was that he had created a

routine to cope with his loss, only the routine became destructive. So

anyway, then my mom made him cry about his dad or whatever and the kid

stopped drawing circles and presumably lived happily ever after. But I think

about the circles kid sometimes, because I can sort of understand him. I

always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I

doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo, but drawing circles

through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.

So I should have felt fine about not going to New York—it was a dumb

idea, anyway. But as I went about my routine that night and the next day at

school, it ate away at me, as if the routine itself was taking me farther from

reuniting with her.