Paper Towns — Chapter no 7

7.

Sitting in the minivan with the keys in the ignition but the engine not yet

started, she asked, “What time do your parents get up, by the way?”

“I don’t know, like, six-fifteen?” It was 3:51. “I mean, we have two-plus

hours and we’re through with nine parts.”

“I know, but I saved the most laborious one for last. Anyway, we’ll get it

all done. Part Ten—Q’s turn to pick a victim.”

“What?”

“I already picked a punishment. Now you just pick who we’re going to

rain our mighty wrath down on.”

“Upon whom we are going to rain our mighty wrath,” I corrected her,

and she shook her head in disgust. “And I don’t really have anyone upon

whom I want to rain down my wrath,” I said, because in truth I didn’t. I

always felt like you had to be important to have enemies. Example:

Historically, Germany has had more enemies than Luxembourg. Margo

Roth Spiegelman was Germany. And Great Britain. And the United States.

And czarist Russia. Me, I’m Luxembourg. Just sitting around, tending

sheep, and yodeling.

“What about Chuck?” she asked.

“Hmm,” I said. Chuck Parson was pretty horrible in all those years

before he’d been reined in. Aside from the cafeteria conveyor belt debacle,

he once grabbed me outside school while I waited for the bus and twisted

my arm and kept saying, “Call yourself a faggot.” That was his all-purpose,

I-have-a-vocabulary-of-twelve-words-so-don’t-expect-a-wide-variety-of-

insults insult. And even though it was ridiculously childish, in the end I had

to call myself a faggot, which really annoyed me, because 1. I don’t think

that word should ever be used by anyone, let alone me, and 2. As it

happens, I am not gay, and furthermore, 3. Chuck Parson made it out like

calling yourself a faggot was the ultimate humiliation, even though there’s

nothing at all embarrassing about being gay, which I was trying to say while

he twisted my arm farther and farther toward my shoulder blade, but he just

kept saying, “If you’re so proud of being a faggot, why don’t you admit that

you’re a faggot, faggot?”

Clearly, Chuck Parson was no Aristotle when it came to logic. But he

was six three, and 270 pounds, which counts for something.

“You could make a case for Chuck,” I acknowledged. And then I turned

on the car and started to make my way back toward the interstate. I didn’t

know where we were going, but we sure as hell weren’t staying downtown.

“Remember at the Crown School of Dance?” she asked. “I was just

thinking about that tonight.”

“Ugh. Yeah.”

“I’m sorry about that, by the way. I have no idea why I went along with

him.”

“Yeah. It’s all good,” I said, but remembering the godforsaken Crown

School of Dance pissed me off, and I said, “Yeah. Chuck Parson. You know

where he lives?”

“I knew I could bring out your vengeful side. He’s in College Park. Get

off at Princeton.” I turned onto the interstate entrance ramp and floored it.

“Whoa there,” Margo said. “Don’t break the Chrysler.”

In sixth grade, a bunch of kids including Margo and Chuck and me were

forced by our parents to take ballroom dancing lessons at the Crown School

of Humiliation, Degradation, and Dance. And how it worked was the boys

would stand on one side and the girls would stand on the other and then

when the teacher told us to, the boys would walk over to the girls and the

boy would say, “May I have this dance?” and the girl would say, “You

may.” Girls were not allowed to say no. But then one day—we were doing

the fox-trot—Chuck Parson convinced every single girl to say no to me.

Not anyone else. Just me. So I walked across to Mary Beth Shortz and I

said, “May I have this dance?” and she said no. And then I asked another

girl, and then another, and then Margo, who also said no, and then another,

and then I started to cry.

The only thing worse than getting rejected at dance school is crying

about getting rejected at dance school, and the only thing worse than that is

going to the dance teacher and saying through your tears, “The girls are

saying no to me and they’re not supposedtuh.” So of course I went weeping

to the teacher, and I spent the majority of middle school trying to live down

that one embarrassing event. So, long story short, Chuck Parson kept me

from ever dancing the fox-trot, which doesn’t seem like a particularly

horrible thing to do to a sixth-grader. And I wasn’t really pissed about it

anymore, or about everything else he’d done to me over the years. But I

certainly wasn’t going to lament his suffering.

“Wait, he won’t know it’s me, will he?”

“Nope. Why?”

“I don’t want him to think I give enough of a shit about him to hurt

him.” I put a hand down on the center console and Margo patted it. “Don’t

worry,” she said. “He’ll never know what depilatated him.”

“I think you just misused a word, but I don’t know what it means.”

“I know a word you don’t know,” Margo chanted. “I’M THE NEW

QUEEN OF VOCABULARY! I’VE USURPED YOU!”

“Spell usurped,” I told her.

“No,” she answered, laughing. “I’m not giving up my crown over

usurped. You’ll have to do better.”

“Fine.” I smiled.

We drove through College Park, a neighborhood that passes for Orlando’s

historic district on account of how the houses were mostly built thirty whole

years ago. Margo couldn’t remember Chuck’s exact address, or what his

house looked like, or even for sure what street it was on (“I’m almost like

ninety-five percent positive it’s on Vassar.”). Finally, after the Chrysler had

prowled three blocks of Vassar Street, Margo pointed to her left and said,

“That one.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I’m like ninety-seven-point-two percent sure. I mean, I’m pretty sure

his bedroom is right there,” she said, pointing. “One time he had a party,

and when the cops came I shimmied out his window. I’m pretty sure it’s the

same window.”

“This seems like we could get in trouble.”

“But if the window is open, there’s no breaking involved. Only entering.

And we just did entering at the SunTrust, and it wasn’t that big of a deal,

right?”

I laughed. “It’s like you’re turning me into a badass.”

“That’s the idea. Okay, supplies: get the Veet, the spray paint, and the

Vaseline.”

“Okay.” I grabbed them.

“Now don’t freak out on me, Q. The good news is that Chuck sleeps like

a hibernating bear—I know because I had English with him last year and he

wouldn’t wake up even when Ms. Johnston swatted him with Jane Eyre. So

we’re going to go up to his bedroom window, we’re gonna open it, we’re

gonna take off our shoes, and then very quietly go inside, and I’m going to

screw with Chuck. Then you and I are going to fan out to opposite sides of

the house, and we’re going to cover every door handle in Vaseline, so even

if someone wakes up, they’ll have a hella hard time getting out of the house

in time to catch us. Then we’ll screw with Chuck some more, paint his

house a little, and we’re out of there. And no talking.”

I put my hand to my jugular, but I was smiling.

We were walking away from the car together when Margo reached down for

my hand, laced her fingers in mine, and squeezed. I squeezed back and then

glanced at her. She nodded her head solemnly, and I nodded back, and then

she let go of my hand. We scampered up to the window. I gently pushed the

wooden casing up. It squeaked ever so quietly but opened in one motion. I

looked in. It was dark, but I could see a body in a bed.

The window was a little high for Margo, so I put my hands together and

she stepped a socked foot onto my hand and I boosted her up. Her silent

entrance into the house would have made a ninja jealous. I proceeded to

jump up, get my head and shoulders into the window, and then attempt, via

a complicated torso undulation, to dance the caterpillar into the house. That

might have worked fine except I racked my balls against the windowsill,

which hurt so bad that I groaned, which was a pretty sizable mistake.

A bedside light came on. And there, lying in bed, was some old guy—

decidedly not Chuck Parson. His eyes were wide with terror; he didn’t say a

thing.

“Um,” said Margo. I thought about shoving off and running back to the

car, but for Margo’s sake I stayed there, the top half of me in the house,

parallel to the floor. “Um, I think we have the wrong house.” She turned

around then and looked at me urgently, and only then did I realize I was

blocking Margo’s exit. So I pushed myself back out the window, grabbed

my shoes, and took off.

We drove to the other side of College Park to regroup.

“I think we share the blame on that one,” Margo said.

“Um, you picked the wrong house,” I said.

“Right, but you were the one who made noise.” It was quiet for a

minute, and we were just driving in circles, and then finally I said, “We

could probably get his address off the Internet. Radar has a log-in to the

school directory.”

“Brilliant,” Margo said.

So I called Radar, but his phone went straight to voice mail. I

contemplated calling his house, but his parents were friends with my

parents, so that wouldn’t work. Finally, it occurred to me to call Ben. He

wasn’t Radar, but he did know all of Radar’s passwords. I called. It went to

voice mail, but only after ringing. So I called again. Voice mail. I called

again. Voice mail. Margo said, “He’s obviously not answering,” and as I

dialed again, I said, “Oh, he’ll answer.” And after just four more calls, he

did.

“You’d better be calling me to say that there are eleven naked

honeybunnies in your house, and that they’re asking for the Special Feeling

that only Big Daddy Ben can provide.”

“I need you to use Radar’s login to the student directory and look up an

address. Chuck Parson.”

“No.”

“Please,” I said.

“No.”

“You’ll be glad you did this, Ben. I promise.”

“Yeah, yeah, I just did it. I was doing it while saying no—can’t help but

help. Four-two-two Amherst. Hey, why do you want Chuck Parson’s

address at four-twelve in the morning?”

“Get some sleep, Benners.”

“I’m going to assume this is a dream,” Ben answered, and hung up.

Amherst was only a couple blocks down. We parked on the street in front of

418 Amherst, got our supplies together, and jogged across Chuck’s lawn,

the morning dew shaking off the grass and onto my calves.

At his window, which was fortunately lower than that of Random Old

Guy, I climbed in quietly and then pulled Margo up and in. Chuck Parson

was asleep on his back. Margo walked over to him, tiptoeing, and I stood

behind her, my heart pounding. He’d kill us both if he woke up. She pulled

out the Veet, sprayed a dob of what looked like shaving cream onto her

palm, and then softly and carefully spread it across Chuck’s right eyebrow.

He didn’t so much as twitch.

Then she opened the Vaseline—the lid made what seemed like a

deafeningly loud clorp, but again Chuck showed no sign of waking. She

scooped a huge gob of it into my hand, and then we headed off to opposite

sides of the house. I went to the entryway first and slathered Vaseline on the

front door’s doorknob, and then to the open door of a bedroom, where I

Vaselined the inner knob and then quietly, with only the slightest creak, shut

the door to the room.

Finally I returned to Chuck’s room—Margo was already there—and

together we closed his door and then Vaselined the hell out of Chuck’s

doorknob. We slathered every surface of his bedroom window with the rest

of the Vaseline, hoping it would make it hard to open the window after we

closed it shut on our way out.

Margo glanced at her watch and held up two fingers. We waited. And

for those two minutes we just stared at each other, and I watched the blue in

her eyes. It was nice—in the dark and the quiet, with no possibility of me

saying anything to screw it up, and her eyes looking back, like there was

something in me worth seeing.

Margo nodded then, and I walked over to Chuck. I wrapped my hand in

my T-shirt, as she’d told me to do, leaned forward, and—as softly as I could

—pressed my finger against his forehead and then quickly wiped away the

Veet. With it came every last hair that had been Chuck Parson’s right

eyebrow. I was standing above Chuck with his right eyebrow on my T-shirt

when his eyes shot open. Lightning fast, Margo grabbed his comforter and

threw it over him, and when I looked up, the little ninja was already out the

window. I followed as quickly as I could, as Chuck screamed, “MAMA!

DAD! ROBBERY ROBBERY!”

I wanted to say, The only thing we stole was your eyebrow, but I kept

mum as I swung myself feetfirst out the window. I damn near landed on

Margo, who was spray-painting an M onto the vinyl siding of Chuck’s

house, and then we both grabbed our shoes and hauled ass to the minivan.

When I looked back at the house, lights were on but no one was outside yet,

a testament to the brilliant simplicity of the well-Vaselined doorknob. By

the time Mr. (or possibly Mrs., I couldn’t really see) Parson pulled open the

living room curtains and looked outside, we were driving in reverse back

toward Princeton Street and the interstate.

“Yes!” I shouted. “God, that was brilliant.”

“Did you see it? His face without the eyebrow? He looks permanently

doubtful, you know? Like, ‘oh, really? You’re saying I only have one

eyebrow? Likely story.’ And I love making that asshole choose: better to

shave off Lefty, or paint on Righty? Oh, I just love it. And how he yelled for

his mama, that sniveling little shit.”

“Wait, why do you hate him?”

“I didn’t say I hated him. I said he was a sniveling little shit.”

“But you were always kind of friends with him,” I said, or at least I

thought she had been.

“Yeah, well, I was always kind of friends with a lot of people,” she said.

Margo leaned across the minivan and put her head on my bony shoulder,

her hair falling against my neck. “I’m tired,” she said.

“Caffeine,” I said. She reached into the back and grabbed us each a

Mountain Dew, and I drank it in two long chugs.

“So we’re going to SeaWorld,” she told me. “Part Eleven.”

“What, are we going to Free Willy or something?”

“No,” she said. “We’re just going to go to SeaWorld, that’s all. It’s the

only theme park I haven’t broken into yet.”

“We can’t break into SeaWorld,” I said, and then I pulled over into an

empty furniture store parking lot and turned off the car.

“We’re in a bit of a time crunch,” she told me, and then reached over to

start the car again.

I pushed her hand away. “We can’t break into SeaWorld,” I repeated.

“There you go with the breaking again.” Margo paused and opened

another Mountain Dew. Light reflected off the can onto her face, and for a

second I could see her smiling at the thing she was about to say. “We’re not

going to break anything. Don’t think of it as breaking in to SeaWorld. Think

of it as visiting SeaWorld in the middle of the night for free.”