Paper Towns

“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 dobelieve 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 Dickinsonand 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 werelike 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 Jacobsenwas 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.