Paper Towns

I said, “Getting you a date to prom is so hard that a thousand monkeys typing at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years would never once type ‘ I will go to prom with Ben.’”

Ben could not resist tearing himself apart. “My prom prospects are so poor that Q’s grandma turned me down. She said she was waiting for Radar to ask her.”

Radar nodded his head slowly. “It’s true, Q. Your grandma loves the brothers.”

It was so pathetically easy to forget about Chuck, to talk about prom even though I didn’t give a shit about prom. Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.

I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks above various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clock. I’d had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

But as much as it felt like third-period physics would never end, it did, and then I was in the cafeteria with Ben. Radar had fifth-period lunch with most of our other friends, so Ben and I generally sat together alone, a couple seats between us and a group of drama kids we knew. Today, we were both eating mini pepperoni pizzas.

“Pizza’s good,” I said. He nodded distractedly. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nuffing,” he said through a mouthful of pizza. He swallowed. “I know you think it’s dumb, but I want to go to prom.”

“1. I do think it’s dumb; 2. If you want to go, just go; 3. If I’m not mistaken, you haven’t even asked anyone.”

“I asked Cassie Hiney during math. I wrote her a note.” I raised my eyebrows questioningly. Ben reached into his shorts and slid a heavily folded piece of paper to me. I flattened it out:

Ben,

I’d love to go to prom with you, but I’m already going with Frank. Sorry!

—C

I refolded it and slid it back across the table. I could remember playing paper football on these tables. “That sucks,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever.” The walls of sound felt like they were closing in on us, and we were silent for a while, and then Ben looked at me very seriously and said, “I’m going to get so much play in college. I’m going to be in the Guinness Book of World Recordsunder the category ‘Most Honeybunnies Ever Pleased.’”

I laughed. I was thinking about how Radar’s parents actually werein the Guinness Bookwhen I noticed a pretty African-American girl with spiky little dreads standing above us. It took me a moment to realize that the girl was Angela, Radar’s I-guess-girlfriend.

“Hi,” she said to me.

“Hey,” I said. I’d had classes with Angela and knew her a little, but we didn’t say hello in the hallway or anything. I motioned for her to sit. She scooted a chair to the head of the table.

“I figure that you guys probably know Marcus better than anyone,” she said, using Radar’s real name. She leaned toward us, her elbows on the table.

“It’s a shitty job, but someone’s got to do it,” Ben answered, smiling.

“Do you think he’s, like, embarrassed of me?”

Ben laughed. “What? No,” he said.

“Technically,” I added, “ youshould be embarrassed of him.”

She rolled her eyes, smiling. A girl accustomed to compliments. “But he’s never, like, invited me to hang out with you, though.”

“Ohhhh,” I said, getting it finally. “That’s because he’s embarrassed of us.”

She laughed. “You seem pretty normal.”

“You’ve never seen Ben snort Sprite up his nose and then spit it out of his mouth,” I said.

“I look like a demented carbonated fountain,” he deadpanned.

“But really, you wouldn’t worry? I mean, we’ve been dating for five weeks, and he’s never even taken me to his house.” Ben and I exchanged a knowing glance, and I scrunched up my face to suppress laughter. “What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Honestly, Angela. If he was forcing you to hang out with us and taking you to his house all the time—”

“Then it would definitely mean he didn’tlike you,” Ben finished.

“Are his parents weird?”

I struggled with how to answer that question honestly. “Uh, no. They’re cool. They’re just kinda overprotective, I guess.”

“Yeah, overprotective,” Ben agreed a little too quickly.

She smiled and then got up, saying she had to go say hi to someone before lunch was over. Ben waited until she was gone to say anything. “That girl is awesome,” Ben said.

“I know,” I answered. “I wonder if we can replace Radar with her.”

“She’s probably not that good with computers, though. We need someone who’s good at computers. Plus I bet she sucks at Resurrection,” which was our favorite video game. “By the way,” Ben added, “nice call saying that Radar’s folks are overprotective.”

“Well, it’s not my place to tell her,” I said.

“I wonder how long till she gets to see the Team Radar Residence and Museum.” Ben smiled.

The period was almost over, so Ben and I got up and put our trays onto the conveyer belt. The very same one that Chuck Parson had thrown me onto freshman year, sending me into the terrifying netherworld of Winter Park’s dishwashing corps. We walked over to Radar’s locker and were standing there when he raced up just after the first bell.

“I decided during government that I would actually, literally suck donkey balls if it meant I could skip that class for the rest of the semester,” he said.

“You can learn a lot about government from donkey balls,” I said. “Hey, speaking of reasons you wish you had fourth-period lunch, we just dined with Angela.”

Ben smirked at Radar and said, “Yeah, she wants to know why she’s never been over to your house.”

Radar exhaled a long breath as he spun the combination to open his locker. He breathed for so long I thought he might pass out. “Crap,” he said finally.

“Are you embarrassed about something?” I asked, smiling.

“Shut up,” he answered, poking his elbow into my gut.

“You live in a lovely home,” I said.

“Seriously, bro,” added Ben. “She’s a really nice girl. I don’t see why you can’t introduce her to your parents and show her Casa Radar.”

Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. The din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, “IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD’S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.”

I’d heard Radar say “the world’s largest collection of black Santas” perhaps a thousand times in my life, and it never became any less funny to me. But he wasn’t kidding. I remembered the first time I visited. I was maybe thirteen. It was spring, many months past Christmas, and yet black Santas lined the windowsills. Paper cutouts of black Santas hung from the stairway banister. Black Santa candles adorned the dining room table. A black Santa oil painting hung above the mantel, which was itself lined with black Santa figurines. They had a black Santa Pez dispenser purchased from Namibia. The light-up plastic black Santa that stood in their postage-stamp front yard from Thanksgiving to New Year’s spent the rest of the year proudly keeping watch in the corner of the guest bathroom, a bathroom with homemade black Santa wallpaper created with paint and a Santa-shaped sponge.

In every room, save Radar’s, their home was awash in black Santadom — plaster and plastic and marble and clay and wood and resin and cloth. In total, Radar’s parents owned more than twelve hundred black Santas of various sorts. As a plaque beside their front door proclaimed, Radar’s house was an officially registered Santa Landmark according to the Society for Christmas.