Paper Towns — PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be

struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small

nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or

spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together,

at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it

rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a

whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at

sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the

houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door

to Margo Roth Spiegelman.

Our subdivision, Jefferson Park, used to be a navy base. But then the navy

didn’t need it anymore, so it returned the land to the citizens of Orlando,

Florida, who decided to build a massive subdivision, because that’s what

Florida does with land. My parents and Margo’s parents ended up moving

next door to one another just after the first houses were built. Margo and I

were two.

Before Jefferson Park was a Pleasantville, and before it was a navy base,

it belonged to an actual Jefferson, this guy Dr. Jefferson Jefferson. Dr.

Jefferson Jefferson has a school named after him in Orlando and also a large

charitable foundation, but the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing

about Dr. Jefferson Jefferson is that he was not a doctor of any kind. He was

just an orange juice salesman named Jefferson Jefferson. When he became

rich and powerful, he went to court, made “Jefferson” his middle name, and

then changed his first name to “Dr.” Capital D. Lowercase r. Period.

So Margo and I were nine. Our parents were friends, so we would

sometimes play together, biking past the cul-de-sacced streets to Jefferson

Park itself, the hub of our subdivision’s wheel.

I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Margo was about to

show up, on account of how she was the most fantastically gorgeous

creature that God had ever created. On the morning in question, she wore

white shorts and a pink T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing a fire

of orange glitter. It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt

at the time.

Margo, as always, biked standing up, her arms locked as she leaned

above the handlebars, her purple sneakers a circuitous blur. It was a steam-

hot day in March. The sky was clear, but the air tasted acidic, like it might

storm later.

At the time, I fancied myself an inventor, and after we locked up our

bikes and began the short walk across the park to the playground, I told

Margo about an idea I had for an invention called the Ringolator. The

Ringolator was a gigantic cannon that would shoot big, colored rocks into a

very low orbit, giving Earth the same sort of rings that Saturn has. (I still

think this would be a fine idea, but it turns out that building a cannon that

can shoot boulders into a low orbit is fairly complicated.)

I’d been in this park so many times before that it was mapped in my

mind, so we were only a few steps inside when I began to sense that the

world was out of order, even though I couldn’t immediately figure out what

was different.

“Quentin,” Margo said quietly, calmly.

She was pointing. And then I realized what was different.

There was a live oak a few feet ahead of us. Thick and gnarled and

ancient-looking. That was not new. The playground on our right. Not new,

either. But now, a guy wearing a gray suit, slumped against the trunk of the

oak tree. Not moving. This was new. He was encircled by blood; a half-

dried fountain of it poured out of his mouth. The mouth open in a way that

mouths generally shouldn’t be. Flies at rest on his pale forehead.

“He’s dead,” Margo said, as if I couldn’t tell.

I took two small steps backward. I remember thinking that if I made any

sudden movements, he might wake up and attack me. Maybe he was a

zombie. I knew zombies weren’t real, but he sure looked like a potential

zombie.

As I took those two steps back, Margo took two equally small and quiet

steps forward. “His eyes are open,” she said.

“Wegottagohome,” I said.

“I thought you closed your eyes when you died,” she said.

“Margowegottagohomeandtell.”

She took another step. She was close enough now to reach out and touch

his foot. “What do you think happened to him?” she asked. “Maybe it was

drugs or something.”

I didn’t want to leave Margo alone with the dead guy who might be an

attack zombie, but I also didn’t care to stand around and chat about the

circumstances of his demise. I gathered my courage and stepped forward to

take her hand. “Margowegotta-gorightnow!”

“Okay, yeah,” she said. We ran to our bikes, my stomach churning with

something that felt exactly like excitement, but wasn’t. We got on our bikes

and I let her go in front of me because I was crying and didn’t want her to

see. I could see blood on the soles of her purple sneakers. His blood. The

dead guy blood.

And then we were back home in our separate houses. My parents called

911, and I heard the sirens in the distance and asked to see the fire trucks,

but my mom said no. Then I took a nap.

Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really

goddamned well adjusted. So when I woke up, I had a long conversation

with my mom about the cycle of life, and how death is part of life, but not a

part of life I needed to be particularly concerned about at the age of nine,

and I felt better. Honestly, I never worried about it much. Which is saying

something, because I can do some worrying.

Here’s the thing: I found a dead guy. Little, adorable nine-year-old me

and my even littler and more adorable playdate found a guy with blood

pouring out of his mouth, and that blood was on her little, adorable sneakers

as we biked home. It’s all very dramatic and everything, but so what? I

didn’t know the guy. People I don’t know die all the damned time. If I had a

nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I’d

be crazier than a shithouse rat.

That night, I went into my room at nine o’clock to go to bed, because nine

o’clock was my bedtime. My mom tucked me in, told me she loved me, and

I said, “See you tomorrow,” and she said, “See you tomorrow,” and then she

turned out the lights and closed the door almost-all-the-way.

As I turned on my side, I saw Margo Roth Spiegelman standing outside

my window, her face almost pressed against the screen. I got up and opened

the window, but the screen stayed between us, pixelating her.

“I did an investigation,” she said quite seriously. Even up close the

screen broke her face apart, but I could tell that she was holding a little

notebook and a pencil with teeth marks around the eraser. She glanced

down at her notes. “Mrs. Feldman from over on Jefferson Court said his

name was Robert Joyner. She told me he lived on Jefferson Road in one of

those condos on top of the grocery store, so I went over there and there

were a bunch of policemen, and one of them asked if I worked at the school

paper, and I said our school didn’t have a paper, and he said as long as I

wasn’t a journalist he would answer my questions. He said Robert Joyner

was thirty-six years old. A lawyer. They wouldn’t let me in the apartment,

but a lady named Juanita Alvarez lives next door to him, and I got into her

apartment by asking if I could borrow a cup of sugar, and then she said that

Robert Joyner had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and

then she told me that he was getting a divorce and was sad about it.”

She stopped then, and I just looked at her, her face gray and moonlit and

split into a thousand little pieces by the weave of the window screen. Her

wide, round eyes flitted back and forth from her notebook to me. “Lots of

people get divorces and don’t kill themselves,” I said.

“I know,” she said, excitement in her voice. “That’s what I told Juanita

Alvarez. And then she said . . .” Margo flipped the notebook page. “She

said that Mr. Joyner was troubled. And then I asked what that meant, and

then she told me that we should just pray for him and that I needed to take

the sugar to my mom, and I said forget the sugar and left.”

I said nothing again. I just wanted her to keep talking—that small voice

tense with the excitement of almost knowing things, making me feel like

something important was happening to me.

“I think I maybe know why,” she finally said.

“Why?”

“Maybe all the strings inside him broke,” she said.

While I tried to think of something to say in answer to that, I reached

forward and pressed the lock on the screen between us, dislodging it from

the window. I placed the screen on the floor, but she didn’t give me a

chance to speak. Before I could sit back down, she just raised her face up

toward me and whispered, “Shut the window.” So I did. I thought she would

leave, but she just stood there, watching me. I waved at her and smiled, but

her eyes seemed fixed on something behind me, something monstrous that

had already drained the blood from her face, and I felt too afraid to turn

around to see. But there was nothing behind me, of course—except maybe

the dead guy.

I stopped waving. My head was level with hers as we stared at each

other from opposite sides of the glass. I don’t remember how it ended—if I

went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn’t end. We just stay there,

looking at each other, forever.

Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I

could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she

became one.