Paper Towns - Hour Five

Okay, maybe we are not that well provisioned after all. In the rush of the moment, it turns out that Ben
and I made some moderate (although not fatal) mistakes. With Radar alone up front, Ben and I sit in
the first bench, unpacking each bag and handing the items to Lacey in the wayback. Lacey, in turn, is
sorting items into piles based on an organizational schema only she understands.
“Why is the NyQuil not in the same pile as the NoDoz?” I ask. “Shouldn’t all the medicines be together?”
“Q. Sweetie. You’re a boy. You don’t know how to do these things. The NoDoz is with the chocolate
and the Mountain Dew, because those things all contain caffeine and help you stay up. The NyQuil is
with the beef jerky because eating meat makes you feel tired.”
“Fascinating,” I say. After I’ve handed Lacey the last of the food from my bags, Lacey asks, “Q,
where is the food that is— you know—good?”
“Huh?”
Lacey produces a copy of the grocery list she wrote for me and reads from it. “Bananas. Apples.
Dried cranberries. Raisins.”
“Oh.” I say. “Oh, right. The fourth food group wasn’t crackers.”
“Q!” she says, furious. “I can’t eat any of this!”
Ben puts a hand on her elbow. “Well, but you can eat Grandma’s cookies. They’re not bad for you.
They were made by Grandma. Grandma wouldn’t hurt you.”
Lacey blows a strand of hair out of her face. She seems genuinely annoyed. “Plus,” I tell her, “there
are GoFast bars. They’re fortified with vitamins!”
“Yeah, vitamins and like thirty grams of fat,” she says.
From the front Radar announces, “Don’t you go talking bad about GoFast bars. Do you want me to
stop this car?”
“Whenever I eat a GoFast bar,” Ben says, “I’m always like, ‘So this is what blood tastes like to mosquitoes.’”
I half unwrap a fudge brownie GoFast bar and hold it in front of Lacey’s mouth. “Just smell it,” I
say. “Smell the vitaminy deliciousness.”
“You’re going to make me fat.”
“Also zitty,” Ben said. “Don’t forget zitty.”
Lacey takes the bar from me and reluctantly bites into it. She has to close her eyes to hide the orgasmic
pleasure inherent in GoFast-tasting. “Oh. My. God. That tastes like hope feels.”
Finally, we unpack the last bag. It contains two large T-shirts, which Radar and Ben are very excited
about, because it means they can be guys-wearing-gigantic-shirts-over-silly-robes instead of just guyswearing-
silly-robes.
But when Ben unfurls the T-shirts, there are two small problems. First, it turns out that a large T-shirt
in a Georgia gas station is not the same size as a large T-shirt at, say, Old Navy. The gas station shirt is
gigantic—more garbage bag than shirt. It is smaller than the graduation robes, but not by much. But this
problem rather pales in comparison to the other problem, which is that both T-shirts are embossed with
huge Confederate flags. Printed over the flag are the words HERITAGE NOT HATE.
“Oh no you didn’t,” Radar says when I show him why we’re laughing. “Ben Starling, you better not
have bought your token black friend a racist shirt.”
“I just grabbed the first shirts I saw, bro.”
“Don’t bro me right now,” Radar says, but he’s shaking his head and laughing. I hand him his shirt
and he wiggles into it while driving with his knees. “I hope I get pulled over,” he says. “I’d like to see
how the cop responds to a black man wearing a Confederate T-shirt over a black dress.”

Categories: Paper Towns

Paper Towns - Hour Four

For the first time, Lacey asks, “Are we there yet?” We laugh.
We are, however, in Georgia, a state I love and adore for this reason and this reason only: the speed
limit here is seventy, which means I can up my speed to seventy-seven. Aside from that, Georgia reminds
me of Florida.
We spend the hour preparing for our first stop. This is an important stop, because I am very, very,
very, very hungry and dehydrated. For some reason, talking about the food we’ll buy at the BP eases the
pangs. Lacey prepares a grocery list for each of us, written in small letters on the backs of receipts she
found in her purse. She makes Ben lean out the passenger-side window to see which side the gas cap is
on. She forces us to memorize our grocery lists and then quizzes us. We talk through our visit to the gas
station several times; it needs to be as well-executed as a stock car pit stop.
“One more time,” Lacey says.
“I’m the gas man,” Radar says. “After I start the fill-up, I run inside while the pump is pumping even
though I’m supposed to stay near the pump at all times, and I give you the card. Then I return to the
gas.”
“I take the card to the guy behind the counter,” Lacey says.
“Or girl,” I add.
“Not relevant,” Lacey answers.
“I’m just saying—don’t be so sexist.”
“Oh whatever, Q. I take the card to the person behind the counter. I tell her or him to ring up
everything we bring. Then I pee.”
I add, “Meanwhile, I’m getting everything on my list and bringing it up to the front.”
Ben says, “And I’m peeing. Then when I finish peeing, I’ll get the stuff on my list.”
“Most importantly shirts,” Radar says. “People keep looking at me funny.”
Lacey says, “I sign the receipt when I get out of the bathroom.”
“And then the moment the tank is full, I’m going to get in the minivan and drive away, so y’all had
better be in there. I will seriously leave your asses. You have six minutes,” Radar says.
“Six minutes,” I say, nodding my head. And Lacey and Ben repeat it also. “Six minutes.” “Six
minutes.” At 5:35 P.M., with nine hundred miles to go, Radar informs us that, according to his handheld,
the next exit will have a BP.
As I pull into the gas station, Lacey and Radar are crouched behind the sliding door in the back. Ben,
seat belt unbuckled, has one hand on the passenger-door handle and the other on the dashboard. I maintain
as much speed as I can for as long as I can, and then slam on the brakes right in front of the gas
tank. The minivan jolts to a halt, and we fly out the doors. Radar and I cross in front of the car; I toss
him the keys and then run all out to the food mart. Lacey and Ben have beaten me to the doors, but
only just barely. While Ben bolts for the bathroom, Lacey explains to the gray-haired woman (it is a
woman!) that we’re going to be buying a lot of stuff, and that we’re in a huge hurry, and that she should
just ring items up as we deliver them and that it will all go on her BP card, and the woman seems a little
bewildered but agrees. Radar runs in, his robe aflutter, and hands Lacey the card.
Meanwhile, I’m running through the aisles getting everything on my list. Lacey’s on liquids; Ben’s
on nonperishable supplies; I’m on food. I sweep through the place like I’m a cheetah and the tortilla
chips are injured gazelles. I run an armful of chips and beef jerky and peanuts to the front counter, then
jog to the candy aisle. A handful of Mentos, a handful of Snickers, and— Oh, it’s not on the list, but
screw it, I love Nerds, so I add three packages of Nerds. I run back and then head over to the “deli”
counter, which consists of ancient turkey sandwiches wherein the turkey strongly resembles ham. I grab
two of those. On my way back to the cash register, I stop for a couple Starbursts, a package of Twinkies,
and an indeterminate number of GoFast nutrition bars. I run back. Ben’s standing there in his graduation
gown, handing the woman T-shirts and four-dollar sunglasses. Lacey runs up with gallons of soda, energy
drinks, and bottles of water. Big bottles, the kind of bottles that even Ben’s pee can’t fill.
“ONE MINUTE!” Lacey shouts, and I panic. I’m turning in circles, my eyes darting around the store,
trying to remember what I’m forgetting. I glance down at my list. I seem to have everything, but I feel
like there’s something important I’ve forgotten. Something. Come on, Jacobsen. Chips, candy, turkeythat-
looks-like-ham, pbj, and—what? What are the other food groups? Meat, chips, candy, and, and,
and, and cheese! “CRACKERS!” I say, much too loud, and then I dart to the crackers, grabbing cheese
crackers and peanut butter crackers and some of Grandma’s peanut butter cookies for good measure,
and then I run back and toss them across the counter. The woman has already bagged up four plastic
bags of groceries. Almost a hundred dollars total, not even counting gas; I’ll be paying back Lacey’s
parents all summer.
There’s only one moment of pause, and it’s after the woman behind the counter swipes Lacey’s BP
card. I glance at my watch. We’re supposed to leave in twenty seconds. Finally, I hear the receipt printing.
The woman tears it out of the machine, Lacey scribbles her name, and then Ben and I grab the bags
and dash for the car. Radar revs the engine as if to say hustle, and we are running through the parking
lot, Ben’s robe flowing in the wind so that he looks vaguely like a dark wizard, except that his pale
skinny legs are visible, and his arms hug plastic bags. I can see the back of Lacey’s legs beneath her
dress, her calves tight in midstride. I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.
I watch as Lacey and Ben pile in through the open sliding door. I follow, landing on plastic bags
and Lacey’s torso. Radar guns the car as I slam the sliding door shut, and then he peels out of the parking
lot, marking the first time in the long and storied history of the minivan that anyone anywhere has
ever used one to burn rubber. Radar turns left onto the highway at a somewhat unsafe speed, and then
merges back onto the interstate. We’re four seconds ahead of schedule. And just like with the NASCAR
pit stops, we share high-fives and backslaps. We are well supplied. Ben has plenty of containers into
which he can urinate. I have adequate beef jerky rations. Lacey has her Mentos. Radar and Ben have
T-shirts to wear over their robes. The minivan has become a biosphere—give us gas, and we can keep
going forever.

Categories: Paper Towns

Paper Towns - Hour Three

Ben is sitting shotgun again. I’m still driving. We’re all hungry. Lacey distributes one piece of wintergreen

gum to each of us, but it’s cold comfort. She’s writing a gigantic list of everything we’re going

to buy at the BP when we stop for the first time. This had better be one extraordinarily well-stocked BP

station, because we are going to clear the bitch out.

Ben keeps bouncing his legs up and down.

“Will you stop that?”

“I’ve had to pee for three hours.”

“You’ve mentioned that.”

“I can feel the pee all the way up to my rib cage,” he says. “I am honestly full of pee. Bro, right now,

seventy percent of my body weight is pee.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, barely cracking a smile. It’s funny and all, but I’m tired.

“I feel like I might start crying, and that I’m going to cry pee.”

That gets me. I laugh a little.

The next time I glance over, a few minutes later, Ben has a hand tight around his crotch, the fabric

of the gown bunched up.

“What the hell?” I ask.

“Dude, I have to go. I’m pinching off the flow.” He turns around then. “Radar, how long till we

stop?”

“We have to go at least a hundred forty-three more miles in order to keep it down to four stops,

which means about one hour and fifty-eight-point-five minutes if Q keeps pace.”

“I’m keeping up!” I shout. We are just north of Jacksonville, getting close to Georgia.

“I can’t make it, Radar. Get me something to pee in.”

The chorus erupts: NO. Absolutely not. Just hold it like a man. Hold it like a Victorian lady holds on

to her maidenhead. Hold it with dignity and grace, like the president of the United States is supposed to

hold the fate of the free world.

“GIVE ME SOMETHING OR I WILL PEE ON THIS SEAT. AND HURRY!”

“Oh, Christ,” Radar says as he unbuckles his seat belt. He climbs into the wayback, and then reaches

down and opens the cooler. He returns to his seat, leans forward, and hands Ben a beer.

“Thank God it’s a twist off,” Ben says, gathering a handful of robe and then opening the bottle. Ben

rolls down the window, and I watch out the side-view mirror as the beer floats past the car and splashes

onto the interstate. Ben manages to get the bottle underneath his robe without showing us the world’s

purportedly largest balls, and then we all sit and wait, too disgusted to look.

Lacey is just saying, “Can’t you just hold it,” when we all hear it. I have never heard the sound before,

but I recognize it anyway: it is the sound of pee hitting the bottom of a beer bottle. It sounds almost

like music. Revolting music with a very fast beat. I glance over and I can see the relief in Ben’s eyes.

He is smiling, staring into the middle distance.

“The longer you wait, the better it feels,” he says. The sound soon changes from the clinking of peeon-

bottle to the blopping of pee-on-pee. And then, slowly, Ben’s smile fades.

“Bro, I think I need another bottle,” he says suddenly.

“Another bottle STAT,” I shout.

“Another bottle coming up!” In a flash, I can see Radar bent over the backseat, his head in the cooler,

digging a bottle out of the ice. He opens it with his bare hand, cracks one of the back windows open,

and pours the beer out through the crack. Then he leaps to the front, his head between Ben and me, and

holds the bottle out for Ben, whose eyes are darting around in panic.

“The, uh, exchange is going to be, uh, complicated,” Ben says. There’s a lot of fumbling going on

beneath that robe, and I’m trying not to imagine what’s happening when out from underneath a robe

comes a Miller Lite bottle filled with pee (which looks astoundingly similar to Miller Lite). Ben deposits

the full bottle in the cup holder, grabs the new one from Radar, and then sighs with relief.

The rest of us, meanwhile, are left to contemplate the pee in the cup holder. The road is not particularly

bumpy, but the shocks on the minivan leave something to be desired, so the pee swishes back and

forth at the top of the bottle.

“Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off.”

Still peeing, Ben looks over at me, smirking. “You’re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.” And

then finally I hear the stream slow. He’s soon finished, and then in one swift motion he throws the new

bottle out the window. The full one follows.

Lacey is fake-gagging—or maybe really gagging. Radar says, “God, did you wake up this morning

and drink eighteen gallons of water?”

But Ben is beaming. He is holding his fists in the air, triumphant, and he is shouting, “Not a drop on

the seat! I’m Ben Starling. First clarinet, WPHS Marching Band. Keg Stand Record Holder. Pee-in-thecar

champion. I shook up the world! I must be the greatest!”

Thirty-five minutes later, as our third hour comes to a close, he asks in a small voice, “When are we

stopping again?”

“One hour and three minutes, if Q keeps pace,” Radar answers.

“Okay,” Ben says. “Okay. Good. Because I have to pee.”

Categories: Paper Towns

Paper Towns - Hour Two

I’m still driving. We turn north, onto I-95, snaking our way up Florida, near the coast but not quite on

it. It is all pine trees here, too skinny for their height, built like I am. But there is mostly just the road,

passing cars and occasionally being passed by them, always having to remember who is in front of you

and who behind, who is approaching and who is drifting away.

Lacey and Ben are sitting together on the bench seat now, and Radar is in the wayback, and they’re

all playing a retarded version of I Spy in which they are only allowed to spy things that cannot physically

be seen.

“I Spy with my little eye something tragically hip,” Radar says.

“Is it the way Ben smiles mostly with the right side of his mouth?” asks Lacey.

“No,” says Radar. “Also don’t be so gooey about Ben. It’s gross.”

“Is it the idea of wearing nothing under your graduation gown and then having to drive to New York

while all the people in passing cars assume you’re wearing a dress?”

“No,” says Radar. “That’s just tragic.”

Lacey smiles. “You’ll learn to like dresses. You get to enjoy the breeze.”

“Oh, I know!” I say from the front. “You spy a twenty-four-hour road trip in a minivan. Hip because

road trips always are; tragic because the gas we’re guzzling will destroy the planet.”

Radar says no, and they keep guessing. I am driving and going seventy-two and praying not to get

a ticket and playing Metaphysical I Spy. The tragically hip thing turns out to be failing to turn in your

rented graduation robes on time. I blow past a cop parked on the grass median. I grip the steering wheel

hard with both hands, feeling sure he’ll race up to pull us over. But he doesn’t. Maybe he knows I’m

only speeding because I have to.

Categories: Paper Towns

Paper Towns - First Hour

It takes a little while for everyone to explain to their parents that 1. We’re all going to miss graduation,
and 2. We’re driving to New York, to 3. See a town that may or may not technically exist, and hopefully
4. Intercept the Omnictionary poster, who according to the Randomly capitalized Evidence is 5. Margo
Roth Spiegelman.
Radar is the last to get off the phone, and when he finally does, he says, “I’d like to make an announcement.
My parents are very annoyed that I’m missing graduation. My girlfriend is also annoyed, because
we were scheduled to do something very special in about eight hours. I don’t want to get into details about
it, but this had better be one fun road trip.”
“Your ability to not lose your virginity is an inspiration to us all,” Ben says next to me.
I glance at Radar through the rearview mirror. “WOOHOO ROAD TRIP!” I tell him. In spite of himself,
a smile creeps across his face. The pleasure of leaving.
By now we are on I-4, and traffic is fairly light, which in and of itself is borderline miraculous. I’m in
the far left lane driving eight miles an hour over the fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit, because I heard
once that you don’t get pulled over until you’re going nine miles an hour over the speed limit.
Very quickly, we all settle into our roles.
In the wayback, Lacey is the provisioner. She lists aloud everything we currently have for the trip: the
half of a Snickers that Ben was eating when I called about Margo; the 212 beers in the back; the directions
I printed out; and the following items from her purse: eight sticks of wintergreen gum, a pencil, some tissue,
three tampons, one pair of sunglasses, some ChapStick, her house keys, a YMCA membership card,
a library card, some receipts, thirty-five dollars, and a BP card.
From the back, Lacey says, “This is exciting! We’re like under-provisioned pioneers! I wish we had
more money, though.”
“At least we have the BP card,” I say. “We can get gas and food.”
I look up into the rearview mirror and see Radar, wearing his graduation gown, looking over into
Lacey’s purse. The graduation gown has a bit of a low-cut neck, so I can see some curled chest hairs.
“You got any boxers in there?” he asks.
“Seriously, we better be stopping at the Gap,” Ben adds.
Radar’s job, which he begins with the calculator on his handheld, is Research and Calculations. He’s
alone in the row of seats behind me, with the directions and the minivan’s owner’s manual spread out next
to him. He’s figuring out how fast we need to travel in order to make it by noon tomorrow, how many
times we’ll need to stop in order to keep the car from running out of gas, the locations of BP stations on
our route and how long each stop will be, and how much time we’ll lose in the process of slowing down
to exit.
“We gotta stop four times for gas. The stops will have to be very very short. Six minutes at the most
off-highway. We’re looking at three long areas of construction, plus traffic in Jacksonville, Washington,
D.C., and Philadelphia, although it will help that we’re driving through D.C. around three in the morning.
According to my calculations, our average cruising speed should be around seventy-two. How fast
are you going?”
“Sixty-three,” I say. “The speed limit is fifty-five.”
“Go seventy-two,” he says.
“I can’t; it’s dangerous, and I’ll get a ticket.”
“Go seventy-two,” he says again. I press my foot down hard on the gas. The difficulty is partly that
I am hesitant to go seventy-two and partly that the minivan itself is hesitant to go seventy-two. It begins
to shake in a way that implies it might fall apart. I stay in the far left lane, even though I’m still not the
fastest car on the road, and I feel bad that people are passing me on the right, but I need clear road ahead,
because unlike everyone else on this road, I can’t slow down. And this is my role: my role is to drive,
and to be nervous. It occurs to me that I have played this role before.
And Ben? Ben’s role is to need to pee. At first it seems like his main role is going to be complaining
about how we don’t have any CDs and that all the radio stations in Orlando suck except for the college
radio station, which is already out of range. But soon enough, he abandons that role for his true and
faithful calling: needing to pee.
“I need to pee,” he says at 3:06. We’ve been on the road for forty-three minutes. We have approximately
a day left in our drive.
“Well,” says Radar, “the good news is that we will be stopping. The bad news is that it won’t be for
another four hours and thirty minutes.”
“I think I can hold it,” Ben says. At 3:10, he announces, “Actually, I really need to pee. Really.”
The chorus responds, “Hold it.” He says, “But I—” And the chorus responds again, “Hold it!” It is
fun, for now, Ben needing to pee and us needing him to hold it. He is laughing, and complaining that
laughing makes him need to pee more. Lacey jumps forward and leans in behind him and starts tickling
at his sides. He laughs and whines and I laugh, too, keeping the speedometer on seventy-two. I wonder
if she created this journey for us on purpose or by accident—regardless, it’s the most fun I’ve had since
the last time I spent hours behind the wheel of a minivan.

Categories: Paper Towns

Paper Towns - Chapter 29

All night Wednesday, and all day Thursday, I tried to use my new understanding of her to figure out
some meaning to the clues I had—some relationship between the map and the travel books, or else some
link between the Whitman and the map that would allow me to understand her travelogue. But increasingly
I felt like maybe she had become too enthralled with the pleasure of leaving to construct a proper
bread crumb trail. And if that were the case, the map she had never intended for us to see might be our
best chance to find her. But no site on the map was adequately specific. Even the Catskill Park dot, which
interested me because it was the only location not in or near a big city, was far too big and populous to
find a single person. “Song of Myself” made references to places in New York City, but there were too
many locations to track them all down. How do you pinpoint a spot on the map when the spot seems to
be moving from metropolis to metropolis?
I was already up and paging through travel guides when my parents came into my room on Friday morning.
They rarely both entered the room at the same time, and I felt a ripple of nausea—maybe they had
bad news about Margo—before I remembered it was my graduation day.
“Ready, bud?”
“Yeah. I mean, it’s not that big of a deal, but it’ll be fun.”
“You only graduate from high school once,” Mom said.
“Yeah,” I said. They sat down on the bed across from me. I noticed them share a glance and giggle.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, we want to give you your graduation present,” Mom said. “We’re really proud of you, Quentin.
You’re the greatest accomplishment of our lives, and this is just such a great day for you, and we’re—
You’re just a great young man.”
I smiled and looked down. And then my dad produced a very small gift wrapped in blue wrapping
paper.
“No,” I said, snatching it from him.
“Go ahead and open it.”
“No way,” I said, staring at it. It was the size of a key. It was the weight of a key. When I shook the
box, it rattled like a key.
“Just open it, sweetie,” my mom urged.
I tore off the wrapping paper. A KEY! I examined it closely. A Ford key! Neither of our cars was a
Ford. “You got me a car?!”
“We did,” my dad said. “It’s not brand-new—but only two years old and just twenty thousand miles
on it.” I jumped up and hugged both of them.
“It’s mine?”
“Yeah!” my mom almost shouted. I had a car! A car! Of my own!
I disentangled myself from my parents and shouted “thank you thank you thank you thank you thank
you thank you” as I raced through the living room, and yanked open the front door wearing only an old
T-shirt and boxer shorts. There, parked in the driveway with a huge blue bow on it, was a Ford minivan.
They’d given me a minivan. They could have picked any car, and they picked a minivan. A minivan.
O God of Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You
mark of Cain! You wretched beast of high ceilings and few horsepower!
I put on a brave face when I turned around. “Thank you thank you thank you!” I said, although surely
I didn’t sound quite as effusive now that I was completely faking it.
“Well, we just knew how much you loved driving mine,” Mom said. She and Dad were beaming—
clearly convinced they’d landed me the transportation of my dreams. “It’s great for getting around
with your friends!” added my dad. And to think: these people specialize in the analysis and understanding
of the human psyche.
“Listen,” Dad said, “we should get going pretty soon if we want to get good seats.”
I hadn’t showered or dressed or anything. Well, not that I would technically be dressing, but still. “I
don’t have to be there until twelve-thirty,” I said. “I need to, like, get ready.”
Dad frowned. “Well, I really want to have a good sight line so I can take some pic— ”
I interrupted him. “I can just take MY CAR,” I said. “I can drive MYSELF in MY CAR.” I smiled
broadly.
“I know!” my mom said excitedly. And what the hell—a car’s a car, after all. Driving my own
minivan was surely a step up from driving someone else’s.
I went back to my computer then and informed Radar and Lacey (Ben wasn’t online) about the minivan.
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Actually that’s really good news. Can I stop by and put a cooler in
your trunk? I gotta drive my parents to graduation and don’t want them to see.
QTHERESURRECTION: Sure, it’s unlocked. Cooler for what?
OMNICTIONARIAN96: Well, since no one drank at my party, there were 212 beers left over,
and we’re taking them over to Lacey’s for her party tonight.
QTHERESURRECTION: 212 beers?
OMNICTIONARIAN96: It’s a big cooler.
Ben came online then, SHOUTING about how he was already showered and naked and just needed
to put on the cap and gown. We were all talking back and forth about our naked graduation. After everyone
logged off to get ready, I got in the shower and stood up straight so that the water shot directly at
my face, and I started thinking as the water pounded away at me. New York or California? Chicago or
D.C.? I could go now, too, I thought. I had a car just as much as she did. I could go to the five spots on
the map, and even if I didn’t find her, it would be more fun than another boiling summer in Orlando. But
no. It’s like breaking into SeaWorld. It takes an immaculate plan, and then you execute it brilliantly, and
then—nothing. And then it’s just Sea-World, except darker. She’d told me: the pleasure isn’t in doing
the thing; the pleasure is in planning it.
And that’s what I thought about as I stood beneath the showerhead: the planning. She sits in the minimall
with her notebook, planning. Maybe she’s planning a road trip, using the map to imagine routes.
She reads the Whitman and highlights “I tramp a perpetual journey,” because that’s the kind of thing
she likes to imagine herself doing, the kind of thing she likes to plan.
But is it the kind of thing she likes to actually do? No. Because Margo knows the secret of leaving,
the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something
important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your
life has grown roots.
And so when she left, she left for good. But I could not believe she had left for a perpetual journey.
She had, I felt sure, left for a place—a place where she could stay long enough for it to matter, long
enough for the next leaving to feel as good as the last one had. There is a corner of the world somewhere
far away from here where no one knows what “Margo Roth Spiegelman” means. And Margo is sitting
in that corner, scrawling in her black notebook.
The water began to get cold. I hadn’t so much as touched a bar of soap, but I got out, wrapped a
towel around my waist, and sat down at the computer.
I dug up Radar’s email about his Omnictionary program and downloaded the plug-in. It really was
pretty cool. First, I entered a zip code in downtown Chicago, clicked “location,” and asked for a radius
of twenty miles. It spit back a hundred responses, from Navy Pier to Deerfield. The first sentence of
each entry came up on my screen, and I read through them in about five minutes. Nothing stood out.
Then I tried a zip code near the Catskill Park in New York. Fewer responses this time, eighty-two, organized
by the date on which the Omnictionary page had been created. I started to read.
Woodstock, New York, is a town in Ulster County, New York, perhaps best known for the
eponymous Woodstock concert [see Woodstock Concert] in 1969, a three-day event featuring
acts from Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin, which actually occurred in a nearby town.
Lake Katrine is a small lake in Ulster County, New York, often visited by Henry David Thoreau.
The Catskill Park comprises 700,000 acres of land in the Catskill Mountains owned jointly by
state and local governments, including a 5 percent share held by New York City, which gets much
of its water from reservoirs partly inside the park.
Roscoe, New York, is a hamlet in New York State, which according to a recent census contains
261 households.
Agloe, New York, is a fictitious village created by the Esso company in the early 1930s and inserted
into tourist maps as a copyright trap, or paper town.
I clicked on the link and it took me to the full article, which continued:
Located at the intersection of two dirt roads just north of Roscoe, NY, Agloe was the creation of
mapmakers Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers, who invented the town name by anagramming
their initials. Copyright traps have featured in mapmaking for centuries. Cartographers create fictional
landmarks, streets, and municipalities and place them obscurely into their maps. If the fictional
entry is found on another cartographer’s map, it becomes clear a map has been plagiarized.
Copyright traps are also sometimes known as key traps, paper streets, and paper towns [see also
fictitious entries]. Although few cartographic corporations acknowledge their existence, copyright
traps remain a common feature even in contemporary maps.
In the 1940s, Agloe, New York, began appearing on maps created by other companies. Esso
suspected copyright infringement and prepared several lawsuits, but in fact, an unknown resident
had built “The Agloe General Store” at the intersection that appeared on the Esso map.
The building, which still stands [needs citation], is the only structure in Agloe, which continues
to appear on many maps and is traditionally recorded as having a population of zero.
Every Omnictionary entry contains subpages where you can view all the edits ever made to the page
and any discussion by Omnictionary members about it. The Agloe page hadn’t been edited by anyone
in almost a year, but there was one recent comment on the talk page by an anonymous user:
fyi, whoever Edits this—the Population of agloe Will actually be One until may 29th at Noon.
I recognized the capitalization immediately. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the
middle of a sentence. My throat tightened, but I forced myself to calm down. The comment had been
left fifteen days ago. It had been sitting there all that time, waiting for me. I looked at the clock on the
computer. I had just under twenty-four hours.
For the first time in weeks, she seemed completely and undeniably alive to me. She was alive. For
one more day at least, she was alive. I had focused on her whereabouts for so long in an attempt to keep
me from obsessively wondering whether she was alive that I had no idea how terrified I’d been until
now, but oh, my God. She was alive.
I jumped up, let the towel drop, and called Radar. I cradled the phone in the crook of my neck while
pulling on boxers and then shorts. “I know what paper towns means! Do you have your handheld?”
“Yeah. You should really be here, dude. They’re about to make us line up.”
I heard Ben shout into the phone, “Tell him he better be naked!”
“Radar,” I said, trying to convey the importance of it. “Look up the page for Agloe, New York. Got
it?”
“Yes. Reading. Hold on. Wow. Wow. This could be the Catskills spot on the map?”
“Yes, I think so. It’s pretty close. Go to the discussion page.”
“. . .”
“Radar?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I know, I know!” I shouted. I didn’t hear his response because I was pulling my shirt on, but when
the phone got back to my ear, I could hear him talking to Ben. I just hung up.
Online, I searched for driving directions from Orlando to Agloe, but the map system had never heard
of Agloe, so instead I searched for Roscoe. Averaging sixty-five miles per hour, the computer said it
would be a nineteen-hour-and-four-minute trip. It was two fifteen. I had twenty-one hours and forty-five
minutes to get there. I printed the directions, grabbed the keys to the minivan, and locked the front door
behind me.
“It’s nineteen hours and four minutes away,” I said into the cell phone. It was Radar’s cell phone, but
Ben had answered it.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked. “Are you flying there?”
“No, I don’t have enough money, and anyway it’s like eight hours away from New York City. So
I’m driving.”
Suddenly Radar had the phone back. “How long is the trip?”
“Nineteen hours and four minutes.”
“According to who?”
“Google maps.”
“Crap,” Radar said. “None of those map programs calculate for traffic. I’ll call you back. And hurry.
We’ve got to line up like right now!”
“I’m not going. Can’t risk the time,” I said, but I was talking to dead air. Radar called back a minute
later. “If you average sixty-five miles per hour, don’t stop, and account for average traffic patterns, it’s
going to take you twenty-three hours and nine minutes. Which puts you there just after one P.M., so
you’re going to have to make up time when you can.”
“What? But the—”
Radar said, “I don’t want to criticize, but maybe on this particular topic, the person who is chronically
late needs to listen to the person who is always punctual. But you gotta come here at least for a
second because otherwise your parents will freak out when you don’t show when your name is called,
and also, not that it is the most important consideration or anything, but I’m just saying—you have all
our beer in there.”
“I obviously don’t have time,” I answered.
Ben leaned into the phone. “Don’t be an asshat. It’ll cost you five minutes.”
“Okay, fine.” I hooked a right on red and gunned the minivan— it had better pickup than Mom’s but
only just barely— toward school. I made it to the gym parking lot in three minutes. I did not park the
minivan so much as I stopped it in the middle of the parking lot and jumped out. As I sprinted toward
the gym I saw three robed individuals running toward me. I could see Radar’s spindly dark legs as his
robe blew up around him, and next to him Ben, wearing sneakers without socks. Lacey was just behind
them.
“You get the beer,” I said as I ran past them. “I gotta talk to my parents.”
The families of graduates were spread out across the bleachers, and I ran back and forth across the
basketball court a couple times before I spotted Mom and Dad about halfway up. They were waving at
me. I ran up the stairs two at a time, and so was a little out of breath when I knelt down next to them
and said, “Okay, so I’m not going [breath] to walk, because I [breath] think I found Margo and [breath]
I just have to go, and I’ll have my cell phone on [breath] and please don’t be pissed at me and thank you
again for the car.”
And my mom wrapped her hand around my wrist and said, “What? Quentin, what are you talking
about? Slow down.”
I said, “I’m going to Agloe, New York, and I have to go right now. That’s the whole story. Okay, I
gotta go. I’m crunched for time here. I have my cell. Okay, love you.”
I had to pull free from her light grasp. Before they could say anything, I bounded down the stairs and
took off, sprinting back toward the minivan. I was inside and had the thing in gear and was starting to
move when I looked over and saw Ben sitting in the passenger’s seat.
“Get the beer and get out of the car!” I shouted.
“We’re coming with,” he said. “You’d fall asleep if you tried to drive for that long anyway.”
I turned back, and Lacey and Radar were both holding cell phones to their ears. “Gotta tell my parents,”
Lacey explained, tapping the phone. “C’mon, Q. Go go go go go go.”

Categories: Paper Towns

Paper Towns - Chapter 28

After three long hours alone with eight hundred words from Ovid on Monday morning, I walked
through the halls feeling as if my brain might drip out of my ears. But I’d done okay. We had an hour and
a half for lunch, to give our minds time to firm back up before the second exam period of the day. Radar
was waiting for me at my locker.
“I just bombed me some Spanish,” Radar said.
“I’m sure you did okay.” He was going to Dartmouth on a huge scholarship. He was plenty smart.
“Dude, I don’t know. I kept falling asleep during the oral part. But listen, I was up half the night building
this program. It’s so awesome. What it does is it allows you to enter a category—it can be a geographical
area or like a family in the animal kingdom— and then you can read the first sentences of up
to a hundred Omnictionary articles about your topic on a single page. So, like, say you are trying to find
a particular kind of rabbit but can’t remember its name. You can read an introduction to all twenty-one
species of rabbits on the same page in, like, three minutes.”
“You did this the night before finals?” I asked.
“Yeah, I know, right? Anyway I’ll email it to you. It’s nerd-tastic.”
Ben showed up then. “I swear to God, Q, Lacey and I were up on IM until two o’clock in the morning
playing on that site, the-longwayround? And having now plotted every single possible trip that Margo
could have taken between Orlando and those five points, I realize I was wrong all this time. She’s not in
Orlando. Radar’s right. She’s coming back here for graduation day.”
“Why?”
“The timing is perfect. To drive from Orlando to New York to the mountains to Chicago to Los
Angeles back to Orlando is like exactly a twenty-three-day trip. Plus, it’s a totally retarded joke, but it’s
a Margo joke. You make everyone think you offed yourself. Surround yourself with an air of mystery so
that everyone pays attention. And then right as all the attention starts to go away, you show up at graduation.”
“No,” I said. “No way.” I knew Margo better than that by now. She did want attention. I believed that.
But Margo didn’t play life for laughs. She didn’t get off on mere trickery.
“I’m telling you, bro. Look for her at graduation. She’s gonna be there.” I just shook my head. Since
everyone had the same lunch period, the cafeteria was beyond packed, so we exercised our rights as seniors
and drove to Wendy’s. I tried to stay focused on my coming calc exam, but I was starting to feel like
maybe there was more string to the story. If Ben was right about the twenty-three-day trip, that was very
interesting, indeed. Maybe that’s what she’d been planning in her black notebook, a long and lonesome
road trip. It didn’t explain everything, but it did fit with Margo as a planner. Not that this brought me
closer to her. As hard as it is to pinpoint a dot inside a ripped segment of a map, it only becomes harder
when the dot is moving.
After a long day of finals, returning to the comfortable impenetrability of “Song of Myself” was almost
a relief. I had reached a weird part of the poem—after all this time listening and hearing people, and
then traveling alongside them, Whitman stops hearing and he stops visiting, and he starts to become other
people. Like, actually inhabit them. He tells the story of a ship’s captain who saved everyone on his
boat except himself. The poet can tell the story, he argues, because he has become the captain. As he
writes, “I am the man . . . . I suffered . . . . I was there.” A few lines later, it becomes even more clear
that Whitman no longer needs to listen to become another: “I do not ask the wounded person how he
feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person.”
I put the book down and lay on my side, staring out the window that had always been between us.
It is not enough just to see her or hear her. To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo
Roth Spiegelman.
And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom
coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested
haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become
the wounded person.
I limped through my physics and government finals the next day and then stayed up till 2 A.M. on Tuesday
finishing my final reaction paper for English about Moby Dick. Ahab was a hero, I decided. I had no
particular reason for having decided this—particularly given that I hadn’t read the book—but I decided
it and reacted thusly.
The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day
long, it was hard not to walk around thinking about the lastness of it all: The last time I stand in a circle
outside the band room in the shade of this oak tree that has protected generations of band geeks. The
last time I eat pizza in the cafeteria with Ben. The last time I sit in this school scrawling an essay with a
cramped hand into a blue book. The last time I glance up at the clock. The last time I see Chuck Parson
prowling the halls, his smile half a sneer. God. I was becoming nostalgic for Chuck Parson. Something
sick was happening inside of me.
It must have been like this for Margo, too. With all the planning she’d done, she must have known
she was leaving, and even she couldn’t have been totally immune to the feeling. She’d had good days
here. And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she
had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d
done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me. These
whitewashed cinder-block walls. My white walls. Margo’s white walls. We’d been captive in them for
so long, stuck in their belly like Jonah.
Throughout the day, I found myself thinking that maybe this feeling was why she’d planned
everything so intricately and precisely: even if you want to leave, it is so hard. It took preparation,
and maybe sitting in that minimall scrawling her plans was both intellectual and emotional practice—
Margo’s way of imagining herself into her fate.
Ben and Radar both had a marathon band practice to make sure they would rock “Pomp and Circumstance”
at graduation. Lacey offered me a ride, but I decided to clean out my locker, because I didn’t
really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.
My locker was an unadulterated crap hole—half trash can, half book storage. Her locker had been
neatly stacked with textbooks when Lacey opened it, I remembered, as if she intended to come to school
the next day. I pulled a garbage can over to the bank of lockers and opened mine up. I began by pulling
off a picture of Radar and Ben and me goofing off. I put it inside my backpack and then started the
disgusting process of picking through a year’s worth of accumulated filth—gum wrapped in scraps of
notebook paper, pens out of ink, greasy napkins—and scraping it all into the garbage. All along, I kept
thinking, I will never do this again, I will never be here again, this will never be my locker again, Radar
and I will never write notes in calculus again, I will never see Margo across the hall again. This was
the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.
And finally it was too much. I could not talk myself down from the feeling, and the feeling became
unbearable. I reached in deep to the recesses of my locker. I pushed everything—photographs and notes
and books—into the trash can. I left the locker open and walked away. As I walked past the band room, I
could hear through the walls the muffled sounds of “Pomp and Circumstance.” I kept walking. It was hot
outside, but not as hot as usual. It was bearable. There are sidewalks most of the way home, I thought.
So I kept walking.
And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure.
The most distilled possible form of liberation. Everything that mattered except one lousy picture was in
the trash, but it felt so great. I started jogging, wanting to put even more distance between myself and
school.
It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.
As I ran, I felt myself for the first time becoming Margo. I knew: she is not in Orlando. She is not in
Florida. Leaving feels too good, once you leave. If I’d been in a car, and not on foot, I might have kept
going, too. She was gone and not coming back for graduation or anything else. I felt sure of that now.
I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep
leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?
Ben and Radar drove past me a quarter mile from Jefferson Park, and Ben brought RHAPAW to a
screeching halt right on Lakemont in spite of traffic everywhere, and I ran up to the car and got in. They
wanted to play Resurrection at my house, but I had to tell them no, because I was closer than I’d ever
been before.

Categories: Paper Towns