Paper Towns — Chapter no 34

There’s only one moment of pause, and it’s after the woman behind the

counter swipes Lacey’s BP card. I glance at my watch. We’re supposed to

leave in twenty seconds. Finally, I hear the receipt printing. The woman

tears it out of the machine, Lacey scribbles her name, and then Ben and I

grab the bags and dash for the car. Radar revs the engine as if to say hustle,

and we are running through the parking lot, Ben’s robe flowing in the wind

so that he looks vaguely like a dark wizard, except that his pale skinny legs

are visible, and his arms hug plastic bags. I can see the back of Lacey’s legs

beneath her dress, her calves tight in midstride. I don’t know how I look,

but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite. I watch as Lacey and Ben

pile in through the open sliding door. I follow, landing on plastic bags and

Lacey’s torso. Radar guns the car as I slam the sliding door shut, and then

he peels out of the parking lot, marking the first time in the long and storied

history of the minivan that anyone anywhere has ever used one to burn

rubber. Radar turns left onto the highway at a somewhat unsafe speed, and

then merges back onto the interstate. We’re four seconds ahead of schedule.

And just like with the NASCAR pit stops, we share high-fives and

backslaps. We are well supplied. Ben has plenty of containers into which he

can urinate. I have adequate beef jerky rations. Lacey has her Mentos.

Radar and Ben have T-shirts to wear over their robes. The minivan has

become a biosphere—give us gas, and we can keep going forever.

Hour Five

Okay, maybe we are not that well provisioned after all. In the rush of the

moment, it turns out that Ben and I made some moderate (although not

fatal) mistakes. With Radar alone up front, Ben and I sit in the first bench,

unpacking each bag and handing the items to Lacey in the wayback. Lacey,

in turn, is sorting items into piles based on an organizational schema only

she understands.

“Why is the NyQuil not in the same pile as the NoDoz?” I ask.

“Shouldn’t all the medicines be together?”

“Q. Sweetie. You’re a boy. You don’t know how to do these things. The

NoDoz is with the chocolate and the Mountain Dew, because those things

all contain caffeine and help you stay up. The NyQuil is with the beef jerky

because eating meat makes you feel tired.”

“Fascinating,” I say. After I’ve handed Lacey the last of the food from

my bags, Lacey asks, “Q, where is the food that is— you know—good?”

“Huh?”

Lacey produces a copy of the grocery list she wrote for me and reads

from it. “Bananas. Apples. Dried cranberries. Raisins.”

“Oh.” I say. “Oh, right. The fourth food group wasn’t crackers.”

“Q!” she says, furious. “I can’t eat any of this!”

Ben puts a hand on her elbow. “Well, but you can eat Grandma’s

cookies. They’re not bad for you. They were made by Grandma. Grandma

wouldn’t hurt you.”

Lacey blows a strand of hair out of her face. She seems genuinely

annoyed. “Plus,” I tell her, “there are GoFast bars. They’re fortified with

vitamins!”

“Yeah, vitamins and like thirty grams of fat,” she says.

From the front Radar announces, “Don’t you go talking bad about

GoFast bars. Do you want me to stop this car?”

“Whenever I eat a GoFast bar,” Ben says, “I’m always like, ‘So this is

what blood tastes like to mosquitoes.’”

I half unwrap a fudge brownie GoFast bar and hold it in front of Lacey’s

mouth. “Just smell it,” I say. “Smell the vitaminy deliciousness.”

“You’re going to make me fat.”

“Also zitty,” Ben said. “Don’t forget zitty.”

Lacey takes the bar from me and reluctantly bites into it. She has to

close her eyes to hide the orgasmic pleasure inherent in GoFast-tasting.

“Oh. My. God. That tastes like hope feels.”

Finally, we unpack the last bag. It contains two large T-shirts, which Radar

and Ben are very excited about, because it means they can be guys-wearing-

gigantic-shirts-over-silly-robes instead of just guys-wearing-silly-robes.

But when Ben unfurls the T-shirts, there are two small problems. First, it

turns out that a large T-shirt in a Georgia gas station is not the same size as a

large T-shirt at, say, Old Navy. The gas station shirt is gigantic—more

garbage bag than shirt. It is smaller than the graduation robes, but not by

much. But this problem rather pales in comparison to the other problem,

which is that both T-shirts are embossed with huge Confederate flags.

Printed over the flag are the words HERITAGE NOT HATE.

“Oh no you didn’t,” Radar says when I show him why we’re laughing.

“Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist

shirt.”