Paper Towns — Chapter no 17

17.

Mom came into my room the next morning and said, “You didn’t even

close the door last night, sleepyhead,” and I opened my eyes and said, “I

think I have a stomach bug.” And then I motioned toward the trash can,

which contained puke.

“Quentin! Oh, goodness. When did this happen?”

“About six,” I said, which was true.

“Why didn’t you come get us?”

“Too tired,” I said, which was also true.

“You just woke up feeling ill?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, which was untrue. I woke up because my alarm went off

at six, and then I snuck into the kitchen and ate a granola bar and some

orange juice. Ten minutes later, I stuck two fingers down my throat. I didn’t

want to do it the night before because I didn’t want it stinking the room up

all night. The puking sucked, but it was over quickly.

Mom took the bucket, and I could hear her cleaning it out in the kitchen.

She returned with a fresh bucket, her lips pouting with worry. “Well, I feel

like I should take the day—” she started, but I cut her off.

“I’m honestly fine,” I said. “Just queasy. Something I ate.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll call if it gets worse,” I said. She kissed my forehead. I could feel

her sticky lipstick on my skin. I wasn’t really sick, but still, somehow she’d

made me feel better.

“Do you want me to close the door?” she asked, one hand on it. The

door clung to its hinges, but only barely.

“No no no,” I said, perhaps too nervously.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll call school on my way to work. You let me know

if you need anything. Anything. Or if you want me to come home. And you

can always call Dad. And I’ll check up on you this afternoon, okay?”

I nodded, and then pulled the covers back up to my chin. Even though

the bucket had been cleaned, I could smell the puke underneath the

detergent, and the smell of it reminded me of the act of puking, which for

some reason made me want to puke again, but I just took slow, even mouth

breaths until I heard the Chrysler backing down the driveway. It was 7:32.

For once, I thought, I would be on time. Not to school, admittedly. But still.

I showered and brushed my teeth and put on dark jeans and a plain black

T-shirt. I put Margo’s scrap of newspaper in my pocket. I hammered the

pins back into their hinges, and then packed. I didn’t really know what to

throw into my backpack, but I included the doorjamb-opening screwdriver,

a printout of the satellite map, directions, a bottle of water, and in case she

was there, the Whitman. I wanted to ask her about it.

Ben and Radar showed up at eight on the dot. I got in the backseat. They

were shouting along to a song by the Mountain Goats.

Ben turned around and offered me his fist. I punched it softly, even

though I hated that greeting. “Q!” he shouted over the music. “How good

does this feel?”

And I knew exactly what Ben meant: he meant listening to the Mountain

Goats with your friends in a car that runs on a Wednesday morning in May

on the way to Margo and whatever Margotastic prize came with finding her.

“It beats calculus,” I answered. The music was too loud for us to talk. Once

we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked

so the world would know we had good taste in music.

We drove all the way out Colonial Drive, past the movie theaters and the

bookstores that I had been driving to and past my whole life. But this drive

was different and better because it occurred during calculus, because it

occurred with Ben and Radar, because it occurred on our way to where I

believed I would find her. And finally, after twenty miles, Orlando gave

way to the last remaining orange tree groves and undeveloped ranches—the

endlessly flat land grown over thick with brush, the Spanish moss hanging

off the branches of oak trees, still in the windless heat. This was the Florida

where I used to spend mosquito-bitten, armadillo-chasing nights as a Boy

Scout. The road was dominated now by pickup trucks, and every mile or so

you could see a subdivision off the highway—little streets winding for no

reason around houses that rose up out of nothing like a volcano of vinyl

siding.

Farther out we passed a rotting wooden sign that said GROVE-POINT

ACRES. A cracked blacktop road lasted only a couple hundred feet before

dead-ending into an expanse of gray dirt, signaling that Grovepoint Acres

was what my mom called a pseudovision—a subdivision abandoned before

it could be completed. Pseudovisions had been pointed out to me a couple

times before on drives with my parents, but I’d never seen one so desolate.

We were about five miles past Grovepoint Acres when Radar turned down

the music and said, “Should be in about a mile.”

I took a long breath. The excitement of being somewhere other than

school had started to wane. This didn’t seem like a place where Margo

would hide, or even visit. It was a far cry from New York City. This was the

Florida you fly over, wondering why people ever thought to inhabit this

peninsula. I stared at the empty asphalt, the heat distorting my vision.

Ahead, I saw a strip mall wavering in the bright distance.

“Is that it?” I asked, leaning forward and pointing.

“Must be,” Radar said.

Ben pushed the power button on the stereo, and we all got very quiet as

Ben pulled into a parking lot long since reclaimed by the gray sandy dirt.

There had once been a sign for these four storefronts. A rusted pole stood

about eight feet high by the side of the road. But the sign was long gone,

snapped off by a hurricane or an accumulation of decay. The stores

themselves had fared little better: it was a single-story building with a flat

roof, and bare cinder block was visible in places. Strips of cracked paint

wrinkled away from the walls, like insects clinging to a nest. Water stains

formed brown abstract paintings between the store windows. The windows

were boarded up with warped sheets of particleboard. I was struck by an

awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the

open air of consciousness: it seemed to me that this was not a place you go

to live. It was a place you go to die.

As soon as the car stopped, my nose and mouth were flooded with the

rancid smell of death. I had to swallow back a rush of puke that rose up into

the raw soreness in the back of my throat. Only now, after all this lost time,

did I realize how terribly I had misunderstood both her game and the prize

for winning it.

I get out of the car and Ben is standing next to me, and Radar next to him.

And I know all at once that this isn’t funny, that this hasn’t been prove-to-

me-you’re-good-enough-to-hang-out-with-me. I can hear Margo that night

as we drove around Orlando. I can hear her saying to me, “I don’t want

some kids to find me swarmed with flies on a Saturday morning in Jefferson

Park.” Not wanting to be found by some kids in Jefferson Park isn’t the

same thing as not wanting to die.

There is no evidence that anyone has been here in a long time except for

the smell, that sickly sour stench designed to keep the living from the dead.

I tell myself she can’t smell like that, but of course she can. We all can. I

hold my forearm up to my nose so I can smell sweat and skin and anything

but death.

“MARGO?” Radar calls. A mockingbird perched on the rusted gutter of

the building spits out two syllables in response. “MARGO!” he shouts

again. Nothing. He digs a parabola into the sand with his foot and sighs.

“Shit.”

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it

is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important

to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust

of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun

pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by

breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before.

This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us

before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed.

This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the

fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

The smell leaves me seized by desperate panic—panic not like my lungs

are out of air, but like the atmosphere itself is out of air. I think maybe the

reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to

prepare myself, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am

not prepared.

“Bro, we should leave,” Ben says. “We should call the cops or

something.” We have not looked at each other yet. We are all still looking at

this building, this long-abandoned building that cannot possibly hold

anything but corpses.

“No,” Radar says. “No no no no no. We call if there’s something to call

about. She left the address for Q. Not for the cops. We have to find a way in

there.”

“In there?” Ben says dubiously.

I clap Ben on the back, and for the first time all day, the three of us are

looking not forward but at one another. That makes it bearable. Something

about seeing them makes me feel as if she is not dead until we find her.

“Yeah, in there,” I say.

I don’t know who she is anymore, or who she was, but I need to find

her.