Paper Towns — Chapter no 32

you’re wearing a dress?”

“No,” says Radar. “That’s just tragic.”

Lacey smiles. “You’ll learn to like dresses. You get to enjoy the breeze.”

“Oh, I know!” I say from the front. “You spy a twenty-four-hour road

trip in a minivan. Hip because road trips always are; tragic because the gas

we’re guzzling will destroy the planet.”

Radar says no, and they keep guessing. I am driving and going seventy-

two and praying not to get a ticket and playing Metaphysical I Spy. The

tragically hip thing turns out to be failing to turn in your rented graduation

robes on time. I blow past a cop parked on the grass median. I grip the

steering wheel hard with both hands, feeling sure he’ll race up to pull us

over. But he doesn’t. Maybe he knows I’m only speeding because I have to.

Hour Three

Ben is sitting shotgun again. I’m still driving. We’re all hungry. Lacey

distributes one piece of wintergreen gum to each of us, but it’s cold comfort.

She’s writing a gigantic list of everything we’re going to buy at the BP

when we stop for the first time. This had better be one extraordinarily well-

stocked BP station, because we are going to clear the bitch out.

Ben keeps bouncing his legs up and down.

“Will you stop that?”

“I’ve had to pee for three hours.”

“You’ve mentioned that.”

“I can feel the pee all the way up to my rib cage,” he says. “I am

honestly full of pee. Bro, right now, seventy percent of my body weight is

pee.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, barely cracking a smile. It’s funny and all, but I’m

tired.

“I feel like I might start crying, and that I’m going to cry pee.”

That gets me. I laugh a little.

The next time I glance over, a few minutes later, Ben has a hand tight

around his crotch, the fabric of the gown bunched up.

“What the hell?” I ask.

“Dude, I have to go. I’m pinching off the flow.” He turns around then.

“Radar, how long till we stop?”

“We have to go at least a hundred forty-three more miles in order to

keep it down to four stops, which means about one hour and fifty-eight-

point-five minutes if Q keeps pace.”

“I’m keeping up!” I shout. We are just north of Jacksonville, getting

close to Georgia.

“I can’t make it, Radar. Get me something to pee in.”

The chorus erupts: NO. Absolutely not. Just hold it like a man. Hold it

like a Victorian lady holds on to her maidenhead. Hold it with dignity and

grace, like the president of the United States is supposed to hold the fate of

the free world.

“GIVE ME SOMETHING OR I WILL PEE ON THIS SEAT. AND

HURRY!”

“Oh, Christ,” Radar says as he unbuckles his seat belt. He climbs into

the wayback, and then reaches down and opens the cooler. He returns to his

seat, leans forward, and hands Ben a beer.

“Thank God it’s a twist off,” Ben says, gathering a handful of robe and

then opening the bottle. Ben rolls down the window, and I watch out the

side-view mirror as the beer floats past the car and splashes onto the

interstate. Ben manages to get the bottle underneath his robe without

showing us the world’s purportedly largest balls, and then we all sit and

wait, too disgusted to look.

Lacey is just saying, “Can’t you just hold it,” when we all hear it. I have

never heard the sound before, but I recognize it anyway: it is the sound of

pee hitting the bottom of a beer bottle. It sounds almost like music.

Revolting music with a very fast beat. I glance over and I can see the relief

in Ben’s eyes. He is smiling, staring into the middle distance.

“The longer you wait, the better it feels,” he says. The sound soon

changes from the clinking of pee-on-bottle to the blopping of pee-on-pee.

And then, slowly, Ben’s smile fades.

“Bro, I think I need another bottle,” he says suddenly.

“Another bottle STAT,” I shout.

“Another bottle coming up!” In a flash, I can see Radar bent over the

backseat, his head in the cooler, digging a bottle out of the ice. He opens it

with his bare hand, cracks one of the back windows open, and pours the

beer out through the crack. Then he leaps to the front, his head between Ben

and me, and holds the bottle out for Ben, whose eyes are darting around in

panic.

“The, uh, exchange is going to be, uh, complicated,” Ben says. There’s a

lot of fumbling going on beneath that robe, and I’m trying not to imagine

what’s happening when out from underneath a robe comes a Miller Lite