Paper Towns — Chapter no 51

I shrug him off. I just want to remember her. One last time, I want to

remember her while still hoping to see her again.

Agloe

The speed limit drops from fifty-five to forty-five and then to thirty-five.

We cross some railroad tracks, and we’re in Roscoe. We drive slowly

through a sleepy downtown with a café, a clothing store, a dollar store, and

a couple boarded-up storefronts.

I lean forward and say, “I can imagine her in there.”

“Yeah,” Ben allows. “Man, I really don’t want to break into buildings. I

don’t think I would do well in New York prisons.”

The thought of exploring these buildings doesn’t strike me as

particularly scary, though, since the whole town seems deserted. Nothing’s

open here. Past downtown, a single road bisects the highway, and on that

road sits Roscoe’s lone neighborhood and an elementary school. Modest

wood-frame houses are dwarfed by the trees, which grow thick and tall

here.

We turn onto a different highway, and the speed limit goes back up

incrementally, but Radar is driving slowly anyway. We haven’t gone a mile

when we see a dirt road on our left with no street sign to tell us its name.

“This may be it,” I say.

“That’s a driveway,” Ben answers, but Radar turns in anyway. But it

does seem to be a driveway, actually, cut into the hard-packed dirt. To our

left, uncut grass grows as high as the tires; I don’t see anything, although I

worry that it’d be easy for a person to hide anywhere in that field. We drive

for a while and the road dead-ends into a Victorian farmhouse. We turn

around and head back up the two-lane highway, farther north. The highway

turns into Cat Hollow Road, and we drive until we see a dirt road identical

to the previous one, this time on the right side of the street, leading to a

crumbling barnlike structure with grayed wood. Huge cylindrical bales of

hay line the fields on either side of us, but the grass has begun to grow up

again. Radar drives no faster than five miles an hour. We are looking for

something unusual. Some crack in the perfectly idyllic landscape.

“Do you think that could have been the Agloe General Store?” I ask.

“That barn?”

“Yeah.”

“I dunno,” Radar says. “Did general stores look like barns?”

I blow a long breath from between pursed lips. “Dunno.”

“Is that—shit, that’s her car!” Lacey shouts next to me. “Yes yes yes yes

yes her car her car!”

Radar stops the minivan as I follow Lacey’s finger back across the field,

behind the building. A glint of silver. Leaning down so my face is next to

hers, I can see the arc of the car’s roof. God knows how it got there, since

no road leads in that direction.

Radar pulls over, and I jump out and run back toward her car. Empty.

Unlocked. I pop the trunk. Empty, too, except for an open and empty

suitcase. I look around, and take off toward what I now believe to be the

remnants of Agloe’s General Store. Ben and Radar pass me as I run through

the mown field. We enter the barn not through a door but through one of

several gaping holes where the wooden wall has simply fallen away.

Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden

floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things:

the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds, like her. An old claw-footed

bathtub in a corner. So many holes everywhere that this place is

simultaneously inside and outside.

I feel someone pull hard on my shirt. I spin my head and see Ben, his

eyes shooting back and forth between me and a corner of the room. I have

to look past a wide beam of bright white light shining down from the

ceiling, but I can see into that corner. Two long panes of chest-high, dirty,

gray-tinted Plexiglas lean against each other at an acute angle, held up on

the other side by the wooden wall. It’s a triangular cubicle, if such a thing is

possible.

And here’s the thing about tinted windows: the light still gets through.

So I can see the jarring scene, albeit in gray scale: Margo Roth Spiegelman

sits in a black leather office chair, hunched over a school desk, writing. Her

hair is much shorter— she has choppy bangs above her eyebrows and

everything is mussed-up, as if to emphasize the asymmetry—but it is her.

She is alive. She has relocated her offices from an abandoned mini-mall in

Florida to an abandoned barn in New York, and I have found her.

We walk toward Margo, all four of us, but she doesn’t seem to see us.

She just keeps writing. Finally, someone—Radar, maybe—says, “Margo.

Margo?”

She stands up on her tiptoes, her hands resting atop the makeshift

cubicle’s walls. If she is surprised to see us, her eyes do not give it away.

Here is Margo Roth Spiegelman, five feet away from me, her lips chapped

to cracking, makeup-less, dirt in her fingernails, her eyes silent. I’ve never

seen her eyes dead like that, but then again, maybe I’ve never seen her eyes

before. She stares at me. I feel certain she is staring at me and not at Lacey

or Ben or Radar. I haven’t felt so stared at since Robert Joyner’s dead eyes

watched me in Jefferson Park.

She stands there in silence for a long time, and I am too scared of her

eyes to keep walking forward. “I and this mystery here we stand,” Whitman

wrote.

Finally, she says, “Give me like five minutes,” and then sits back down

and resumes her writing.

I watch her write. Except for being a little grimy, she looks like she has

always looked. I don’t know why, but I always thought she would look

different. Older. That I would barely recognize her when I finally saw her

again. But there she is, and I am watching her through the Plexiglas, and

she looks like Margo Roth Spiegelman, this girl I have known since I was

two—this girl who was an idea that I loved.

And it is only now, when she closes her notebook and places it inside a

backpack next to her and then stands up and walks toward us, that I realize

that the idea is not only wrong but dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is

to believe that a person is more than a person.

“Hey,” she says to Lacey, smiling. She hugs Lacey first, then shakes

Ben’s hand, then Radar’s. She raises her eyebrows and says, “Hi, Q,” and

then hugs me, quickly and not hard. I want to hold on. I want an event. I

want to feel her heaving sobs against my chest, tears running down her

dusty cheeks onto my shirt. But she just hugs me quickly and sits down on

the floor. I sit down across from her, with Ben and Radar and Lacey

following in a line, so that we are all facing Margo.

“It’s good to see you,” I say after a while, feeling like I’m breaking a

silent prayer.

She pushes her bangs to the side. She seems to be deciding exactly what

to say before she says it. “I, uh. Uh. I’m rarely at a loss for words, huh? Not

much talking to people lately. Um. I guess maybe we should start with,

what the hell are you doing here?”

“Margo,” Lacey says. “Christ, we were so worried.”

“No need to worry,” Margo answers cheerfully. “I’m good.” She gives

us two thumbs-up. “I am A-OK.”

“You could have called us and let us know that,” Ben says, his voice

tinged with frustration. “Saved us a hell of a drive.”

“In my experience, Bloody Ben, when you leave a place, it’s best to

leave. Why are you wearing a dress, by the way?”

Ben blushes. “Don’t call him that,” Lacey snaps.

Margo cuts a look at Lacey. “Oh, my God, are you hooking up with

him?” Lacey says nothing. “You’re not actually hooking up with him,”

Margo says.

“Actually, yes,” Lacey says. “And actually he’s great. And actually

you’re a bitch. And actually, I’m leaving. It’s nice to see you again, Margo.

Thanks for terrifying me and making me feel like shit for the entire last

month of my senior year, and then being a bitch when we track you down to

make sure you’re okay. It’s been a real pleasure knowing you.”

“You, too. I mean, without you, how would I have ever known how fat I

was?” Lacey gets up and stomps off, her footfalls vibrating through the

crumbling floor. Ben follows. I look over, and Radar has stood up, too.

“I never knew you until I got to know you through your clues,” he says.

“I like the clues more than I like you.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Margo asks me. Radar doesn’t

answer. He just leaves.

I should, too, of course. They’re my friends—more than Margo,

certainly. But I have questions. As Margo stands and starts to walk back

toward her cubicle, I start with the obvious one. “Why are you acting like

such a brat?”

She spins around and grabs a fistful of my shirt and shouts into my face,

“Where do you get off showing up here without any kind of warning?!”

“How could I have warned you when you completely dropped off the

face of the planet?!” I see a long blink and know she has no response for

this, so I keep going. I’m so pissed at her. For . . . for, I don’t know. Not

being the Margo I had expected her to be. Not being the Margo I thought I

had finally imagined correctly. “I thought for sure there was a good reason

why you never got in touch with anyone after that night. And . . . this is

your good reason? So you can live like a bum?”

She lets go of my shirt and pushes away from me. “Now who’s being a

brat? I left the only way you can leave. You pull your life off all at once—

like a Band-Aid. And then you get to be you and Lace gets to be Lace and

everybody gets to be everybody and I get to be me.”

“Except I didn’t get to be me, Margo, because I thought you were dead.

For the longest time. So I had to do all kinds of crap that I would never do.”

She screams at me now, pulling herself up by my shirt so she can get in

my face. “Oh, bullshit. You didn’t come here to make sure I was okay. You

came here because you wanted to save poor little Margo from her troubled

little self, so that I would be oh-so-thankful to my knight in shining armor

that I would strip my clothes off and beg you to ravage my body.”

“Bullshit!” I shout, which it mostly is. “You were just playing with us,

weren’t you? You just wanted to make sure that even after you left to go

have your fun, you were still the axis we spun around.”

She’s screaming back, louder than I thought possible. “You’re not even

pissed at me, Q! You’re pissed at this idea of me you keep inside your brain

from when we were little!”

She tries to turn away from me, but I grab her shoulders and hold her in

front of me and say, “Did you ever even think about what your leaving

meant? About Ruthie? About me or Lacey or any of the other people who

cared about you? No. Of course you didn’t. Because if it doesn’t happen to

you, it doesn’t happen at all. Isn’t that it, Margo? Isn’t it?”

She doesn’t fight me now. She just slumps her shoulders, turns, and

walks back to her office. She kicks down both of the Plexiglas walls, and

they clamor against the desk and chair before sliding onto the ground.

“SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU ASSHOLE.”

“Okay,” I say. Something about Margo completely losing her temper

allows me to regain mine. I try to talk like my mom. “I’ll shut up. We’re

both upset. Lots of, uh, unresolved issues on my side.”

She sits down in the desk chair, her feet on what had been the wall of

her office. She’s looking into a corner of the barn. At least ten feet between

us. “How the hell did you even find me?”

“I thought you wanted us to,” I answer. My voice is so small I’m

surprised she even hears me, but she spins the chair to glare at me.

“I sure as shit did not.”

“‘Song of Myself,’” I say. “Guthrie took me to Whitman. Whitman took

me to the door. The door took me to the mini-mall. We figured out how to

read the painted-over graffiti. I didn’t understand ‘paper towns’; it can also

mean subdivisions that never got built, and so I thought you had gone to

one and were never coming back. I thought you were dead in one of these

places, that you had killed yourself and wanted me to find you for whatever

reason. So I went to a bunch of them, looking for you. But then I matched

the map in the gift shop to the thumbtack holes. I started reading the poem

more closely, figured out you weren’t running probably, just holed up,

planning. Writing in that notebook. I found Agloe from the map, saw your

comment on the talk page of Omnictionary, skipped graduation, and drove

here.”

She brushes her hair down, but it isn’t long enough to fall over her face

anymore. “I hate this haircut,” she says. “I wanted to look different, but—it

looks ridiculous.”

“I like it,” I say. “It frames your face nicely.”

“I’m sorry I was being so bitchy,” she says. “You just have to

understand—I mean, you guys walk in here out of nowhere and you scare

the shit out of me—”

“You could have just said, like, ‘Guys, you are scaring the shit out of

me,’” I said.

She scoffs. “Yeah, right, ’cause that’s the Margo Roth Spiegelman

everybody knows and loves.” Margo is quiet for a moment, and then says,

“I knew I shouldn’t have said that on Omnictionary. I just thought it would

be funny for them to find it later. I thought the cops might trace it somehow,

but not soon enough. There’s like a billion pages on Omnictionary or

whatever. I never thought . . .”

“What?”

“I thought about you a lot, to answer your question. And Ruthie. And

my parents. Of course, okay? Maybe I am the most horribly self-centered

person in the history of the world. But God, do you think I would have done

it if I didn’t need to?” She shakes her head. Now, finally, she leans toward

me, elbows on knees, and we are talking. At a distance, but still. “I couldn’t

figure out any other way that I could leave without getting dragged back.”

“I’m happy you’re not dead,” I say to her.

“Yeah. Me, too,” she says. She smirks, and it’s the first time I’ve seen

that smile I have spent so much time missing. “That’s why I had to leave.

As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.”

My phone rings. It’s Ben. I answer it.

“Lacey wants to talk to Margo,” he tells me.

I walk over to Margo, hand her the phone, and linger there as she sits

with her shoulders hunched, listening. I can hear the noises coming through

the phone, and then I hear Margo cut her off and say, “Listen, I’m really

sorry. I was just so scared.” And then silence. Lacey starts talking again

finally, and Margo laughs, and says something. I feel like they should have

some privacy, so I do some exploring. Against the same wall as the office,

but in the opposite corner of the barn, Margo has set up a kind of bed—four

forklift pallets beneath an orange air mattress. Her small, neatly folded

collection of clothes sits next to the bed on a pallet of its own. There’s a

toothbrush and toothpaste, along with a large plastic cup from Subway.

Those items sit atop two books: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I can’t believe she’s been living

like this, this irreconcilable mix of tidy suburbanality and creepy decay. But

then again, I can’t believe how much time I wasted believing she was living

any other way.

“They’re staying at a motel in the park. Lace said to tell you they’re

leaving in the morning, with or without you,” Margo says from behind me.

It is when she says you and not us that I think for the first time of what

comes after this.

“I’m mostly self-sufficient,” she says, standing next to me now. “There’s

an outhouse here, but it’s not in great shape, so I usually go to the bathroom

at this truck stop east of Roscoe. They have showers there, too, and the

girls’ shower is pretty clean because there aren’t a lot of female truckers.

Plus, they have Internet there. It’s like this is my house, and the truck stop is

my beach house.” I laugh.

She walks past me and kneels down, looking inside the pallets beneath

the bed. She pulls out a flashlight and a square, thin piece of plastic. “These

are the only two things I’ve purchased in the whole month except gas and

food. I’ve only spent about three hundred dollars.” I take the square thing

from her and finally realize that it’s a battery-powered record player. “I

brought a couple albums,” she says. “I’m gonna get more in the City,

though.”

“The City?”

“Yeah. I’m leaving for New York City today. Hence the Omnictionary

thing. I’m going to start really traveling. Originally, this was the day I was

going to leave Orlando—I was going to go to graduation and then do all of

these elaborate pranks on graduation night with you, and then I was going

to leave the next morning. But I just couldn’t take it anymore. I seriously

could not take it for one more hour. And when I heard about Jase—I was

like, ‘I have it all planned; I’m just changing the day.’ I’m sorry I scared

you, though. I was trying not to scare you, but that last part was so rushed.

Not my best work.”

As dashed-together escape plans replete with clues go, I thought it was

pretty impressive. But mostly I was surprised that she’d wanted me

involved in her original plan, too. “Maybe you’ll fill me in,” I said,

managing a smile. “I have, you know, been wondering. What was planned

and what wasn’t? What meant what? Why the clues went to me, why you

left, that kind of thing.”

“Um, okay. Okay. For that story, we have to start with a different story.”

She gets up and I follow her footsteps as she nimbly avoids the rotting

patches of floor. Returning to her office, she digs into the backpack and

pulls out the black moleskin notebook. She sits down on the floor, her legs

crossed, and pats a patch of wood next to her. I sit. She taps the closed

book. “So this,” she says, “this goes back a long way. When I was in, like,

fourth grade, I started writing a story in this notebook. It was kind of a

detective story.”

I think that if I grab this book from her, I can use it as blackmail. I can

use it to get her back to Orlando, and she can get a summer job and live in

an apartment till college starts, and at least we’ll have the summer. But I

just listen.

“I mean, I don’t like to brag, but this is an unusually brilliant piece of

literature. Just kidding. It’s the retarded wish-fulfilling magical-thinking

ramblings of ten-year-old me. It stars this girl, named Margo Spiegelman,

who is just like ten-year-old me in every way except her parents are nice

and rich and buy her anything she wants. Margo has a crush on this boy

named Quentin, who is just like you in every way except all fearless and

heroic and willing to die to protect me and everything. Also, it stars Myrna

Mountweazel, who is exactly like Myrna Mountweazel except with magical

powers. Like, for example, in the story, anyone who pets Myrna

Mountweazel finds it impossible to tell a lie for ten minutes. Also, she can

talk. Of course she can talk. Has a ten-year-old ever written a book about a

dog that can’t talk?”

I laugh, but I’m still thinking about ten-year-old Margo having a crush

on ten-year-old me.

“So, in the story,” she continues, “Quentin and Margo and Myrna

Mountweazel are investigating the death of Robert Joyner, whose death is

exactly like his real-life death except instead of having obviously shot

himself in the face, someone else shot him in the face. And the story is

about us finding out who did it.”

“Who did it?”

She laughs. “You want me to spoil the entire story for you?”

“Well,” I say, “I’d rather read it.” She pulls open the book and shows me

a page. The writing is indecipherable, not because Margo’s handwriting is

bad, but because on top of the horizontal lines of text, writing also goes

vertically down the page. “I write crosshatch,” she says. “Very hard for non-

Margo readers to decode. So, okay, I’m going to spoil the story for you, but

first you have to promise not to get mad.”

“Promise,” I say.

“It turns out that the crime was committed by Robert Joyner’s alcoholic

ex-wife’s sister’s brother, who was insane because he’d been possessed by

the spirit of an evil ancient Egyptian house cat. Like I said, really top-notch

storytelling. But anyway, in the story, you and me and Myrna Mountweazel

go and confront the killer, and he tries to shoot me, but you jump in front of

the bullet, and you die very heroically in my arms.”

I laugh. “Great. This story was all promising with the beautiful girl who

has a crush on me and the mystery and the intrigue, and then I get

whacked.”

“Well, yeah.” She smiles. “But I had to kill you, because the only other

possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn’t really emotionally ready to

write about at ten.”

“Fair enough,” I say. “But in the revision, I want to get some action.”

“After you get shot up by the bad guy, maybe. A kiss before dying.”

“How kind of you.” I could stand up and go to her and kiss her. I could.

But there is still too much to be ruined.

“So anyway, I finished this story in fifth grade. A few years later, I

decide I’m going to run away to Mississippi. And then I write all my plans

for this epic event into this notebook on top of the old story, and then I

finally do it—take Mom’s car and put a thousand miles on it and leave these

clues in the soup. I didn’t even like the road trip, really—it was incredibly

lonely— but I love having done it, right? So I start crosshatching more

schemes—pranks and ideas for matching up certain girls with certain guys

and huge TPing campaigns and more secret road trips and whatever else.

The notebook is half full by the start of junior year, and that’s when I decide

that I’m going to do one more thing, one big thing, and then leave.”

She’s about to start talking again, but I have to stop her. “I guess I’m

wondering if it was the place or the people. Like, what if the people around

you had been different?”

“How can you separate those things, though? The people are the place is

the people. And anyway, I didn’t think there was anybody else to be friends

with. I thought everyone was either scared, like you, or oblivious, like

Lacey. And th—”

“I’m not as scared as you think,” I say. Which is true. I only realize it’s

true after saying it. But still.

“I’m getting to that,” she says, almost whiningly. “So when I’m a

freshman, Gus takes me to the Osprey—” I tilt my head, confused. “The

minimall. And I start going there by myself all the time, just hanging out

and writing plans. And by last year, all the plans started to be about this last

escape. And I don’t know if it’s because I was reading my old story as I

went, but I put you into the plans early on. The idea was that we were going

to do all these things together—like break into SeaWorld, that was in the

original plan—and I was going to push you toward being a badass. This one

night would, like, liberate you. And then I could disappear and you’d

always remember me for that.

“So this plan eventually gets like seventy pages long, and then it’s about

to happen, and the plan has come together really well.

But then I find out about Jase, and I just decide to leave. Immediately. I

don’t need to graduate. What’s the point of graduating? But first I have to

tie up loose ends. So all that day in school I have my notebook out, and I’m

trying like crazy to adapt the plan to Becca and Jase and Lacey and

everyone who wasn’t a friend to me like I thought they were, trying to come

up with ideas for letting everyone know just how pissed off I am before I

ditch them forever.

“But I still wanted to do it with you; I still liked that idea of maybe

being able to create in you at least an echo of the kick-ass hero of my little-

kid story.

“And then you surprise me,” she says. “You had been a paper boy to me

all these years—two dimensions as a character on the page and two

different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out

to be real. And it ends up being so odd and fun and magical that I go back

to my room in the morning and I just miss you. I want to come over and

hang out and talk, but I’ve already decided to leave, so I have to leave. And

then at the last second, I have this idea to will you the Osprey. To leave it

for you so that it can help you make even further progress in the field of

not-being-such-a-scaredy-cat.

“So, yeah. That’s it. I come up with something real quick. Tape the

Woody poster to the back of the blinds, circle the song on the record,

highlight those two lines from “Song of Myself” in a different color than I’d

highlighted stuff when I was actually reading it. Then after you leave for

school, I climb in through your window and put the scrap of newspaper in

your door. Then I go to the Osprey that morning, partly because I just don’t

feel ready to leave yet, and partly because I want to clean the place up for

you. I mean, the thing is, I didn’t want you to worry. That’s why I painted

over the graffiti; I didn’t know you’d be able to see through it. I ripped off

the pages of the desk calendar I’d been using, and I took down the map, too,

which I’d had up there ever since I saw that it contained Agloe. Then

because I’m tired and don’t have anyplace to go, I sleep there. I end up

there for two nights, actually, just trying to get my courage up, I guess. And

also, I don’t know, I thought maybe you would find it really quickly

somehow. Then I go. Took two days to get here. I’ve been here since.”

She seemed finished, but I had one more question. “And why here of all

places?”

“A paper town for a paper girl,” she says. “I read about Agloe in this

book of ‘amazing facts’ when I was ten or eleven. And I never stopped

thinking about it. The truth is that whenever I went up to the top of the

SunTrust Building—including that last time with you—I didn’t really look

down and think about how everything was made of paper. I looked down

and thought about how I was made of paper. I was the flimsy-foldable

person, not everyone else. And here’s the thing about it. People love the

idea of a paper girl. They always have. And the worst thing is that I loved it,

too. I cultivated it, you know?

“Because it’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I

could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place

where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place,

more real than the people who created the dot could ever have imagined. I

thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also.

And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity

and clothes and everything else: ‘You are going to the paper towns. And

you are never coming back.’”

“That graffiti,” I said. “God, Margo, I walked through so many of those

abandoned subdivisions looking for your body. I really thought—I really

thought you were dead.”

She gets up and searches around her backpack for a moment, and then

reaches over and grabs The Bell Jar, and reads to me.

“‘But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so

white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill

wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but

somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.’” She

sits back down next to me, close, facing me, the fabric of our jeans touching

without our knees actually touching. Margo says, “I know what she’s

talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It’s like cracks inside

of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don’t meet up right.”

“I like that,” I say. “Or it’s like cracks in the hull of a ship.”

“Right, right.”

“Brings you down eventually.”

“Exactly,” she says. We’re talking back and forth so fast now.

“I can’t believe you didn’t want me to find you.”

“Sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I’m impressed. Also, it’s nice to

have you here. You’re a good traveling companion.”

“Is that a proposal?” I ask.

“Maybe.” She smiles.

My heart has been fluttering around my chest for so long now that this

variety of intoxication almost seems sustainable—but only almost. “Margo,

if you just come home for the summer— my parents said you can live with

us, or you can get a job and an apartment for the summer, and then school

will start, and you’ll never have to live with your parents again.”

“It’s not just them. I’d get sucked right back in,” she says, “and I’d

never get out. It’s not just the gossip and the parties and all that crap, but the

whole allure of a life rightly lived—college and job and husband and babies

and all that bullshit.”

The thing is that I do believe in college, and jobs, and maybe even

babies one day. I believe in the future. Maybe it’s a character flaw, but for

me it is a congenital one. “But college expands your opportunities,” I say

finally. “It doesn’t limit them.”

She smirks. “Thank you, College Counselor Jacobsen,” she says, and

then changes the subject. “I kept thinking about you inside the Osprey.

Whether you would get used to it. Stop worrying about the rats.”

“I did,” I say. “I started to like it there. I spent prom night there,

actually.”

She smiles. “Awesome. I imagined you would like it eventually.

It never got boring in the Osprey, but that was because I had to go home

at some point. When I got here, I did get bored. There’s nothing to do; I’ve

read so much since I got here. I got more and more nervous here, too, not

knowing anybody. And I kept waiting for that loneliness and nervousness to

make me want to go back. But it never did. It’s the one thing I can’t do, Q.”

I nod. I understand this. I imagine it is hard to go back once you’ve felt

the continents in your palm. But I still try one more time. “But what about

after the summer? What about college? What about the rest of your life?”

She shrugged. “What about it?”

“Aren’t you worried about, like, forever?”

“Forever is composed of nows,” she says. I have nothing to say to that; I

am just chewing through it when Margo says, “Emily Dickinson. Like I

said, I’m doing a lot of reading.”

I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily

Dickinson. Margo stands up, slings her backpack over one shoulder, and

reaches her hand down for me. “Let’s take a walk.” As we’re walking

outside, Margo asks for my phone. She punches in a number, and I start to

walk away to let her talk, but she grabs my forearm and keeps me with her.

So I walk beside her out into the field as she talks to her parents.

“Hey, it’s Margo. . . . I’m in Agloe, New York, with Quentin. . . . Uh. . .

. well, no, Mom, I’m just trying to think of a way to answer your question

honestly. . . . Mom, come on. . . . I don’t know, Mom . . . I decided to move

to a fictitious place. That’s what happened. . . . Yeah, well, I don’t think I’m

headed that way, regardless. . . . Can I talk to Ruthie? . . . Hey, buddy. . . .

Yeah, well, I loved you first. . . . Yeah, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I thought

—I don’t know what I thought, Ruthie, but anyway it was a mistake and I’ll

call now. I may not call Mom, but I’ll call you. . . . Wednesdays? . . . You’re

busy on Wednesdays. Hmm. Okay. What’s a good day for you? . . . Tuesday

it is. . . . Yeah, every Tuesday. . . . Yeah, including this Tuesday.” Margo

closes her eyes tight, her teeth clenched. “Okay, Ruthers, can you put Mom

back on? . . . I love you, Mom. I’ll be okay. I swear. . . . Yeah, okay, you,

too. Bye.”

She stops walking and closes the phone but holds it a minute. I can see

her fingertips pinkening with the tightness of her grip, and then she drops it

onto the ground. Her scream is short but deafening, and in its wake I am

aware for the first time of Agloe’s abject silence. “It’s like she thinks my

job is to please her, and that should be my dearest wish, and when I don’t

please her—I get shut out. She changed the locks. That’s the first thing she

said. Jesus.”

“Sorry,” I say, pushing aside some knee-high yellow-green grass to pick

up the phone. “Nice to talk to Ruthie, though?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty adorable. I kind of hate myself for—you know—not

talking to her.”

“Yeah,” I say. She shoves me playfully.

“You’re supposed to make me feel better, not worse!” she says. “That’s

your whole gig!”

“I didn’t realize my job was to please you, Mrs. Spiegelman.”

She laughs. “Ooh, the Mom comparison. What a burn. But fair enough.

So how have you been? If Ben is dating Lacey, surely you are having

nightly orgies with dozens of cheerleaders.”

We walk slowly through the uneven dirt of this field. It doesn’t look big,

but as we walk, I realize that we do not seem to be getting closer to the

stand of trees in the distance. I tell her about leaving graduation, about the

miraculous spinning of the Dreidel. I tell her about prom, Lacey’s fight with

Becca, and my night in the Osprey. “That was the night I really knew you’d

definitely been there,” I tell her. “That blanket still smelled like you.”

And when I say that her hand brushes up against mine, and I just grab

hers because it feels like there is less to ruin now. She looks at me. “I had to

leave. I didn’t have to scare you and that was stupid and I should have done

a better job leaving, but I did have to leave. Do you see that yet?”

“Yeah,” I say, “but I think you can come back now. I really do.”

“No, you don’t,” she answers, and she’s right. She can see it in my face

—I understand now that I can’t be her and she can’t be me. Maybe

Whitman had a gift I don’t have. But as for me: I must ask the wounded

man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only

wounded man I can be is me.

I stomp down some grass and sit. She lies down next to me, her backpack a

pillow. I lay back, too. She digs a couple of books out of her backpack and

hands them to me so I can have a pillow, too. Selected Poems of Emily

Dickinson and Leaves of Grass. “I had two copies,” she says, smiling.

“It’s a hell of a good poem,” I tell her. “You couldn’t have picked a

better one.”

“Really, it was an impulse decision that morning. I remembered the bit

about the doors and thought that was perfect. But then when I got here I

reread it. I hadn’t read it since sophomore English, and yeah, I liked it. I

tried to read a bunch of poetry. I was trying to figure out—like, what was it

that surprised me about you that night? And for a long time I thought it was

when you quoted T. S. Eliot.”

“But it wasn’t,” I say. “You were surprised by the size of my biceps and

my graceful window-exiting.”

She smirks. “Shut up and let me compliment you, dillhole. It wasn’t the

poetry or your biceps. What surprised me was that, in spite of your anxiety

attacks and everything, you were like the Quentin in my story. I mean, I’ve

been crosshatching over that story for years now, and whenever I write over

it, I also read that page, and I would always laugh, like—don’t get offended,

but, like, ‘God I can’t believe I used to think Quentin Jacobsen was like a

superhot, superloyal defender of justice.’ But then—you know—you kind

of were.”

I could turn on my side, and she might turn on her side, too. And then

we could kiss. But what’s the point of kissing her now, anyway? It won’t go

anywhere. We are both staring at the cloudless sky. “Nothing ever happens

like you imagine it will,” she says.

The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in

with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. “Yeah, that’s true,” I say. But then

after I think about it for a second, I add, “But then again, if you don’t

imagine, nothing ever happens at all.” Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get

all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo’s anger

at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being

someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the

machine that kills fascists.

She turns over toward me and puts her head onto my shoulder, and we

lie there, as I long ago imagined lying on the grass at SeaWorld. It has taken

us thousands of miles and many days, but here we are: her head on my

shoulder, her breath on my neck, the fatigue thick inside both of us. We are

now as I wished we could be then.

When I wake up, the dying light of the day makes everything seem to

matter, from the yellowing sky to the stalks of grass above my head, waving

in slow motion like a beauty queen. I roll onto my side and see Margo Roth

Spiegelman on her hands and knees a few feet from me, the jeans tight

against her legs. It takes me a moment to realize that she is digging. I crawl

over to her and start to dig beside her, the dirt beneath the grass dry as dust

in my fingers. She smiles at me. My heart beats at the speed of sound.

“What are we digging to?” I ask her.

“That’s not the right question,” she says. “The question is, Who are we

digging for?”

“Okay, then. Who are we digging for?”

“We are digging graves for Little Margo and Little Quentin and puppy

Myrna Mountweazel and poor dead Robert Joyner,” she says.

“I can get behind those burials, I think,” I say. The dirt is clumpy and

dry, drilled through with the paths of insects like an abandoned ant farm.

We dig our bare hands into the ground over and over again, each fistful of

earth accompanied by a little cloud of dust. We dig the hole wide and deep.

This grave must be proper. Soon I’m reaching in as deep as my elbows. The

sleeve of my shirt gets dusty when I wipe the sweat from my cheek.

Margo’s cheeks are reddening. I can smell her, and she smells like that night

right before we jumped into the moat at SeaWorld.

“I never really thought of him as a real person,” she says.

When she speaks, I take the opportunity to take a break, and sit back on

my haunches. “Who, Robert Joyner?”

She keeps digging. “Yeah. I mean, he was something that happened to

me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life,

he was—you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life.”

I have never really thought of him as a person, either. A guy who played

in the dirt like me. A guy who fell in love like me. A guy whose strings

were broken, who didn’t feel the root of his leaf of grass connected to the

field, a guy who was cracked. Like me. “Yeah,” I say after a while as I

return to digging. “He was always just a body to me.”

“I wish we could have done something,” she says. “I wish we could

have proven how heroic we were.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It would have been nice to tell him that, whatever it was,

that it didn’t have to be the end of the world.”

“Yeah, although in the end something kills you.”

I shrug. “Yeah, I know. I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just

that everything except the last thing is.” I dig my hand in again, the dirt here

so much blacker than back home. I toss a handful into the pile behind us,

and sit back. I feel on the edge of an idea, and I try to talk my way into it. I

have never spoken this many words in a row to Margo in our long and

storied relationship, but here it is, my last play for her.

“When I’ve thought about him dying—which admittedly isn’t that much

—I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke.

But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or

maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent

that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don’t suffer from a

shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which

metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then

you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If

you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected,

that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to

become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I

mean?”

She nods.

“I like the strings. I always have. Because that’s how it feels. But the

strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We’re not as frail as the

strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me

to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we’re not

different sprouts from the same plant. I can’t be you. You can’t be me. You

can imagine another well—but never quite perfectly, you know?

“Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open.

Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen—

these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get

them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to

crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the

end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never

be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to

open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we

can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and

into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not

until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just

looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never

seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can

get out.”

She raises her fingers to her lips, as if concentrating, or as if hiding her

mouth from me, or as if to feel the words she speaks. “You’re pretty

something,” she says finally. She stares at me, my eyes and her eyes and

nothing between them. I have nothing to gain from kissing her. But I am no

longer looking to gain anything. “There’s something I have to do,” I say,

and she nods very slightly, as if she knows the something, and I kiss her.

It ends quite a while later when she says, “You can come to New York.

It will be fun. It will be like kissing.”

And I say, “Kissing is pretty something.”

And she says, “You’re saying no.”

And I say, “Margo, I have a whole life there, and I’m not you, and I—”

But I can’t say anything because she kisses me again, and it’s in the moment

that she kisses me that I know without question that we’re headed in

different directions. She stands up and walks over to where we were

sleeping, to her backpack. She pulls out the moleskin notebook, walks back

to the grave, and places it in the ground.

“I’ll miss you,” she whispers, and I don’t know if she’s talking to me or

to the notebook. Nor do I know to whom I’m talking when I say, “As will

I.”

“Godspeed, Robert Joyner,” I say, and drop a handful of dirt onto the

notebook.

“Godspeed, young and heroic Quentin Jacobsen,” she says, tossing in

dirt of her own.

Another handful as I say, “Godspeed, fearless Orlandoan Margo Roth

Spiegelman.”

And another as she says, “Godspeed, magical puppy Myrna

Mountweazel.” We shove the dirt over the book, tamping down the

disturbed soil. The grass will grow back soon enough. It will be for us the

beautiful uncut hair of graves.

We hold hands rough with dirt as we walk back to the Agloe General

Store. I help Margo carry her belongings—an armful of clothes, her

toiletries, and the desk chair—to her car. The preciousness of the moment,

which should make it easier to talk, makes it harder.

We’re standing outside in the parking lot of a single-story motel when

the good-byes become unavoidable. “I’m gonna get a cell, and I’ll call

you,” she says. “And email. And post mysterious statements on

Omnictionary’s Paper Towns talk page.”

I smile. “I’ll email you when we get home,” I say, “and I expect a

response.”

“You have my word. And I’ll see you. We’re not done seeing each

other.”

“At the end of the summer, maybe, I can meet you somewhere before

school,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” I smile and nod. She turns

away, and I am wondering if she means any of it when I see her shoulders

collapse. She is crying.

“I’ll see you then. And I’ll write in the meantime,” I say.

“Yes,” she says without turning around, her voice thick. “I’ll write you,

too.”

It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by

imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either

way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.

I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home,

and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand,

because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I keep thinking she will get into the car, but she doesn’t, and she finally

turns around to me and I see her soaked eyes. The physical space between

us evaporates. We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time.

I feel her hands on my back. And it is dark as I kiss her, but I have my

eyes open and so does Margo. She is close enough to me that I can see her,

because even now there is the outward sign of the invisible light, even at

night in this parking lot on the outskirts of Agloe. After we kiss, our

foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly

in this cracked darkness.