Paper Towns — Chapter no 19

19.

Ben and Radar dropped me off at my house—even though they’d skipped

school, they couldn’t afford to skip band practice. I sat alone with “Song of

Myself” for a long time, and for about the tenth time I tried to read the

entire poem starting at the beginning, but the problem was that it’s like

eighty pages long and weird and repetitive, and although I could understand

each word of it, I couldn’t understand anything about it as a whole. Even

though I knew the highlighted parts were probably the only important parts,

I wanted to know whether it was a suicide-note kind of poem. But I couldn’t

make sense of it.

I was ten confusing pages into the poem when I got so freaked out that I

decided to call the detective. I dug his business card out of a pair of shorts

in the laundry hamper. He answered on the second ring.

“Warren.”

“Hi, um, it’s Quentin Jacobsen. I’m a friend of Margo Roth

Spiegelman?”

“Sure, kid, I remember you. What’s up?”

I told him about the clues and the minimall and about paper towns,

about how she had called Orlando a paper town from the top of the

SunTrust Building, but she hadn’t used it in the plural, about her telling me

that she wouldn’t want to be found, about finding her underneath our

bootsoles. He didn’t even tell me not to break into abandoned buildings, or

ask why I was at an abandoned building at 10 A.M. on a school day. He just

waited until I stopped talking and said, “Jesus, kid, you’re almost a

detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what’s

your theory?”

“I’m worried that she might have, um, I guess killed herself.”

“It never crossed my mind this girl did anything but run off, kid. I can

see your case, but you gotta remember she’s done this before. The clues, I

mean. Adds drama to the whole enterprise. Honestly, kid, if she wanted you

to find her—dead or alive—you already would have.”

“But don’t you—”

“Kid, the unfortunate thing is that she’s a legal adult with free will, you

know? Let me give you some advice: let her come home. I mean, at some

point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look

back down and see that you floated away, too.”

I hung up with a bad taste in my mouth—I realized it wasn’t Warren’s

poetry that would take me to Margo. I kept thinking about those lines at the

end Margo had underlined: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the

grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” That

grass, Whitman writes in the first few pages, is “the beautiful uncut hair of

graves.” But where were the graves? Where were the paper towns?

I logged onto Omnictionary to see if it knew anything more about the

phrase “paper towns” than I did. They had an extremely thoughtful and

helpful entry created by a user named skunkbutt: “A Paper Town is a town

that’s got a paper mill in it.” This was the shortcoming of Omnictionary: the

stuff written by Radar was thorough and extremely helpful; the unedited

work of skunk-butt left something to be desired. But when I searched the

whole Web, I found something interesting buried forty entries down on a

forum about real estate in Kansas.

Looks like Madison Estates isn’t going to get built; my husband and

I bought property there, but someone called this week to say they’re

refunding us our deposit because they didn’t presell enough houses

to finance the project. Another paper town for KS! —Marge in

Cawker, KS

A pseudovision! You will go to the pseudovisions and you will never

come back. I took a deep breath and stared at the screen for a while.

The conclusion seemed inescapable. Even with everything broken and

decided inside her, she couldn’t quite allow herself to disappear for good.

And she had decided to leave her body—to leave it for me—in a shadow

version of our subdivision, where her first strings had broken. She had said

she didn’t want her body found by random kids—and it made sense that out

of everyone she knew, she would pick me to find her. She wouldn’t be

hurting me in a new way. I’d done it before. I had experience in the field.

I saw that Radar was online and was clicking over to talk to him when

an IM from him popped up on my screen.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Hey.

QTHERESURRECTION: Paper towns = pseudovisions.

I think she wants me to find her body. Because she thinks I can

handle it. Because we found that dead guy when we were kids.

I sent him the link.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Slow down. Let me look at the link.

QTHERESURRECTION: K.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Okay, don’t be so morbid. You don’t

know anything for sure. I think she’s probably fine.

QTHERESURRECTION: No you don’t.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Okay, I don’t. But if anybody’s alive in

the face of this evidence . . .

QTHERESURRECTION: Yeah, I guess. I’m gonna go lie down.

My parents get home soon.

But I couldn’t calm down, so I called Ben from bed and told him my

theory.

“Pretty morbid shit, bro. But she’s fine. It’s all part of some game she’s

playing.”

“You’re being kind of cavalier about it.”

He sighed. “Whatever, it’s a little lame of her to, like, hijack the last

three weeks of high school, you know? She’s got you all worried, and she’s

got Lacey all worried, and prom is in like three days, you know? Can’t we

just have a fun prom?”

“Are you serious? She could be dead, Ben.”

“She’s not dead. She’s a drama queen. Wants attention. I mean, I know

her parents are assholes, but they know her better than we do, don’t they?

And they think so, too.”

“You can be such a tool,” I said.

“Whatever, bro. We both had a long day. Too much drama. I’ll TTYS.” I

wanted to ridicule him for using chatspeak IRL, but I found myself lacking

the energy.

After I hung up with Ben, I went back online, looking for a list of

pseudovisions in Florida. I couldn’t find a list anywhere, but after searching

“abandoned subdivisions” and “Grovepoint Acres” and the like for a while,

I managed to compile a list of five places within three hours of Jefferson

Park. I printed out a map of Central Florida, tacked the map to the wall

above my computer, and then added a tack for each of the five locations.

Looking at the map, I could detect no pattern among them. They were

randomly distributed among the far-flung suburbs, and it would take me at

least a week to get to all of them. Why hadn’t she left me a specific place?

All these scary-as-hell clues. All this intimation of tragedy. But no place.

Nothing to hold on to. Like trying to climb a mountain of gravel.

Ben gave me permission to borrow RHAPAW the next day, since he was

going to be driving around, prom shopping with Lacey in her SUV. So for

once I didn’t have to sit outside the band room—the seventh-period bell

rang and I raced out to his car. I lacked Ben’s talent for getting RHAPAW to

start, so I was one of the first people to arrive at the senior parking lot and

one of the last to leave, but finally the engine caught, and I was off to

Grovepoint Acres.

I drove out of town on Colonial, driving slowly, watching for any other

pseudovisions I might have missed online. A long line of cars trailed behind

me, and I felt anxious about holding them up; I marveled at how I could still

have room to worry about such petty, ridiculous crap as whether the guy in

the SUV behind me thought I was an excessively cautious driver. I wanted

Margo’s disappearance to change me; but it hadn’t, not really.

As the line of cars snaked behind me like some kind of unwilling funeral

procession, I found myself talking out loud to her. I will play out the string.

I will not betray your trust. I will find you.

Talking like this to her kept me calm, strangely. It kept me from imagining

the possibilities. I came again to the sagging wooden sign for Grovepoint

Acres. I could almost hear the sighs of relief from the bottleneck behind me

as I turned left onto the dead-end asphalt road. It looked like a driveway

without a house. I left RHAPAW running and got out. From close up, I

could see that Grovepoint Acres was more finished than it initially

appeared. Two dirt roads ending in cul-de-sacs had been cut into the dusty

ground, although the roads had eroded so much I could barely see their

outlines. As I walked up and down both streets, I could feel the heat in my

nose with each breath. The scalding sun made it hard to move, but I knew

the beautiful, if morbid, truth: heat made death reek, and Grovepoint Acres

smelled like nothing except cooked air and car exhaust—our cumulative

exhalations held close to the surface by the humidity.

I looked for evidence she had been there: footprints or something

written in the dirt or some memento. But I seemed to be the first person to

walk on these unnamed dirt streets in years. The ground was flat, and not

much brush had grown back yet, so I could see for a ways in every

direction. No tents. No campfires. No Margo.

I got back in RHAPAW and drove to I-4 and then went northeast of town,

up to a place called Holly Meadows. I drove past Holly Meadows three

times before I finally found it—everything in the area was oak trees and

ranch land, and Holly Meadows—lacking a sign at its entrance—didn’t

stand out much. But once I drove a few feet down a dirt road through the

initial roadside stand of oak and pine trees, it was every bit as desolate as

Grovepoint Acres. The main dirt road just slowly evaporated into a field of

dirt. There were no other roads that I could make out, but as I walked

around, I did find a few spray-painted wooden stakes lying on the ground; I

guessed that they had once been lot line markers. I couldn’t smell or see

anything suspicious, but even so I felt a fear standing on my chest, and at

first I couldn’t understand why, but then I saw it: when they’d clear-cut the

area to build, they’d left a solitary live oak tree near the back of the field.

And the gnarled tree with its thick-barked branches looked so much like the

one where we’d found Robert Joyner in Jefferson Park that I felt sure she

was there, on the other side of the tree.

And for the first time, I had to picture it: Margo Roth Spiegelman,

slumped against the tree, her eyes silent, the black blood pouring out of her

mouth, everything bloated and distorted because I had taken so long to find

her. She had trusted me to find her sooner. She had trusted me with her last

night. And I had failed her. And even though the air tasted like nothing but

it-might-rain-later, I was sure I’d found her.

But no. It was only a tree, alone in the empty silver dirt. I sat down

against the tree and let my breath come back. I hated doing this alone. I

hated it. If she thought Robert Joyner had prepared me for this, she was

wrong. I didn’t know Robert Joyner. I didn’t love Robert Joyner.

I hit at the dirt with the heels of my fists, and then pounded it again and

again, the sand scattering around my hands until I was hitting the bare roots

of the tree, and I kept it up, the pain shooting up through my palms and

wrists. I had not cried for Margo until then, but now finally I did, pounding

against the ground and shouting because there was no one to hear: I missed

her I missed her I missed her I miss her.

I stayed there even after my arms got tired and my eyes dried up, sitting

there and thinking about her until the light got gray.