Paper Towns

Paper Towns Page 29

“Who is hurt?!” Lacey shouts. She’s unbuckled herself from her sleeping position and she’s leaning into the wayback. When I turn around, I can see that the back door has popped open, and for a moment I think that Radar has been thrown from the car, but then he sits up. He is running his hands over his face, and he says, “I’m okay. I’m okay. Is everyone okay?”

Lacey doesn’t even respond; she just jumps forward, between Ben and me. She is leaning over the apartment’s kitchen, and she looks at Ben. She says, “Sweetie, where are you hurt?” Her eyes are overfull of water like a swimming pool on a rainy day. And Ben says, “I’mfineI’mfineQisbleeding.”

She turns to me, and I shouldn’t cry but I do, not because it hurts, but because I am scared, and I raised my hands, and Ben saved us, and now there is this girl looking at me, and she looks at me kind of the way a mom does, and that shouldn’t crack me open, but it does. I know the cut on my cheek isn’t bad, and I’m trying to say so, but I keep crying. Lacey is pressing against the cut with her fingers, thin and soft, and shouting at Ben for something to use as a bandage, and then I’ve got a small swath of the Confederate flag pressed against my cheek just to the right of my nose. She says, “Just hold it there tight; you’re fine does anything else hurt?” and I say no. That’s when I realize that the car is still running, and still in gear, stopped only because I’m still standing on the brakes. I put it into park and turn it off. When I turn it off, I can hear liquid leaking—not dripping so much as pouring.

“We should probably get out,” Radar says. I hold the Confederate flag to my face. The sound of liquid pouring out of the car continues.

“It’s gas! It’s gonna blow!” Ben shouts. He throws open the passenger door and takes off, running in a panic. He hurdles a split-rail fence and tears across a hay field. I get out as well, but not in quite the same hurry. Radar is outside, too, and as Ben hauls ass, Radar is laughing. “It’s the beer,” he says.

“What?”

“The beers all broke,” he says again, and nods toward the split-open cooler, gallons of foamy liquid pouring out from inside it.

We try to call Ben but he can’t hear us because he’s too busy screaming, “IT’S GONNA BLOW!” as he races across the field. His graduation robe flies up in the gray dawn, his bony bare ass exposed.

I turn and look out at the highway as I hear a car coming. The white beast and her spotted friend have successfully ambled to the safety of the opposite shoulder, still impassive. Turning back, I realize the minivan is against the fence.

I’m assessing damage when Ben finally schleps back to the car. As we spun, we must have grazed the fence, because there is a deep gouge on the sliding door, deep enough that if you look closely, you can just see inside the van. But other than that, it looks immaculate. No other dents. No windows broken. No flat tires. I walk around to close the back door and appraise the 210 broken bottles of beer, still bubbling. Lacey finds me and puts an arm around me. We are both staring at the rivulet of foaming beer flowing into the drainage ditch beneath us. “What happened?” she asks.

I tell her: we were dead, and then Ben managed to spin the car in just the right way, like some kind of brilliant vehicular ballerina.

Ben and Radar have crawled underneath the minivan. Neither of them knows shit about cars, but I suppose it makes them feel better. The hem of Ben’s robe and his naked calves peek out.

“Dude,” Radar shouts. “It looks, like, fine.”

“Radar,” I say, “the car spun around like eight times. Surely it’s not fine.”

“Well it seems fine,” Radar says.

“Hey,” I say, grabbing at Ben’s New Balances. “Hey, come out here.” He scoots his way out, and I offer him my hand and help him up. His hands are black with car gunk. I grab him and hug him. If I had not ceded control of the wheel, and if he had not assumed control of the vessel so deftly, I’m sure I’d be dead. “Thank you,” I say, pounding his back probably too hard. “That was the best damned passenger-seat driving I’ve ever seen in my life.”

He pats my uninjured cheek with a greasy hand. “I did it to save myself, not you,” he says. “Believe me when I say that you did not once cross my mind.”

I laugh. “Nor you mine,” I say.

Ben looks at me, his mouth on the edge of smiling, and then says, “I mean, that was a big damned cow. It wasn’t even a cow so much as it was a land whale.” I laugh.

Radar scoots out then. “Dude, I really think it’s fine. I mean, we’ve only lost like five minutes. We don’t even have to push up the cruising speed.”

Lacey is looking at the gouge in the minivan, her lips pursed. “What do you think?” I ask her.

“Go,” she says.

“Go,” Radar votes.

Ben puffs out his cheeks and exhales. “Mostly because I’m prone to peer pressure: go.”

“Go,” I say. “But I’m sure as hell not driving anymore.”

Ben takes the keys from me. We get into the minivan. Radar guides us up a slow-sloping embankment and back onto the interstate. We’re 542 miles from Agloe.

Hour Thirteen

Every couple minutes, Radar says, “Do you guys remember that time when we were all definitely going to die and then Ben grabbed the steering wheel and dodged a ginormous freaking cow and spun the car like the teacups at Disney World and we didn’t die?”

Lacey leans across the kitchen, her hand on Ben’s knee, and says, “I mean, you are a hero, do you realize that? They give out medals for this stuff.”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I wasn’t thinking about none of y’all. I. Wanted. To. Save. My. Ass.”

“You liar. You heroic, adorable liar,” she says, and then plants a kiss on his cheek.

Radar says, “Hey guys, do you remember that time I was double-seat-belted in the wayback and the door flew open and the beer fell out but I survived completely uninjured? How is that even possible?”

“Let’s play metaphysical I Spy,” Lacey says. “I Spy with my little eye a hero’s heart, a heart that beats not for itself but for all humanity.”

“I’M NOT BEING MODEST. I JUST DIDN’T WANT TO DIE,” Ben exclaims.

“Do you guys remember that one time, in the minivan, twenty minutes ago, that we somehow didn’t die?”

Hour Fourteen

Once the initial shock passes, we clean. We try to shepherd as much glass from the broken Bluefin bottles as possible onto pieces of paper and then gather them into a single bag for later disposal. The minivan’s carpet is soaked with sticky Mountain Dew and Bluefin and Diet Coke, and we try to sop it up with the few napkins we’ve collected. But this will require a serious car wash, at the very least, and there’s no time for that before Agloe. Radar has looked up the side panel replacement I’ll need: $300 plus paint. The cost of this trip keeps going up, but I’ll make it back this summer working in my dad’s office, and anyway, it’s a small ransom to pay for Margo.

The sun is rising to our right. My cheek is still bleeding. The Confederate flag is stuck to the wound now, so I no longer need to hold it there.

Hour Fifteen

A thin stand of oak trees obscures the cornfields that stretch out to the horizon. The landscape changes, but nothing else. Big interstates like this one make the country into a single place: McDonald’s, BP, Wendy’s. I know I should probably hate that about interstates and yearn for the halcyon days of yore, back when you could be drenched in local color at every turn— but whatever. I like this. I like the consistency. I like that I can drive fifteen hours from home without the world changing too much. Lacey double-belts me down in the wayback. “You need the rest,” she says. “You’ve been through a lot.” It’s amazing that no one has yet blamed me for not being more proactive in the battle against the cow.

As I trail off, I hear them making one another laugh—not the words exactly, but the cadence, the rising and falling pitches of banter. I like just listening, just loafing on the grass. And I decide that if we get there on time but don’t find her, that’s what we’ll do: we’ll drive around the Catskills and find a place to sit around and hang out, loafing on the grass, talking, telling jokes. Maybe the sure knowledge that she is alive makes all of that possible again—even if I never see proof of it. I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.

Hour Sixteen

I sleep.

Hour Seventeen

I sleep.

Hour Eighteen

I sleep.

Hour Nineteen

When I wake up, Radar and Ben are loudly debating the name of the car. Ben would like to name it Muhammad Ali, because, just like Muhammad Ali, the minivan takes a punch and keeps going. Radar says you can’t name a car after a historical figure. He thinks the car ought to be called Lurlene, because it sounds right.

“You want to name it Lurlene?” Ben asks, his voice rising with the horror of it all. “Hasn’t this poor vehicle been through enough?!”

I unbuckle one seat belt and sit up. Lacey turns around to me. “Good morning,” she says. “Welcome to the great state of New York.”

“What time is it?”

“Nine forty-two.” Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, but the shorter strands have strayed. “How’s it going?” she asks.

I tell her. “I’m scared.”

Lacey smiles at me and nods. “Yeah, me, too. It’s like there’s too many things that could happen to prepare for all of them.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“I hope you and me stay friends this summer,” she says. And that helps, for some reason. You can never tell what is going to help.

Radar is now saying that the car should be called the Gray Goose. I lean forward a little so everyone can hear me and say, “The Dreidel. The harder you spin it, the better it performs.”

Ben nods. Radar turns around. “I think you should be the official stuff-namer.”

Hour Twenty

I’m sitting in the first bedroom with Lacey. Ben drives. Radar’s navigating. I was asleep when they last stopped, but they picked up a map of New York. Agloe isn’t marked, but there are only five or six intersections north of Roscoe. I always thought of New York as being a sprawling and endless metropolis, but here it is just lush rolling hills that the minivan heroically strains its way up. When there’s a lull in the conversation and Ben reaches for the radio knob, I say, “Metaphysical I Spy!”

Ben starts. “I Spy with my little eye something I really like.”

“Oh, I know,” Radar says. “It’s the taste of balls.”

“No.”

“Is it the taste of penises?” I guess.

“No, dumbass,” Ben says.

“Hmm,” says Radar. “Is it the smell of balls?”

“The texture of balls?” I guess.

“Come on, asshats, it has nothing to do with genitalia. Lace?”

“Um, is it the feeling of knowing you just saved three lives?”

“No. And I think you guys are out of guesses.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Lacey,” he says, and I can see him looking at her through the rearview.

“Dumbass,” I say, “it’s supposed to be metaphysical I Spy. It has to be things that can’t be seen.”

“And it is,” he says. “That’s what I really like—Lacey but not the visible Lacey.”

“Oh, hurl,” Radar says, but Lacey unbuckles her seat belt and leans forward over the kitchen to whisper something in his ear. Ben blushes in response.

“Okay, I promise not to be a cheese ball,” Radar says. “I Spy with my little eye something we’re all feeling.”

I guess, “Extraordinary fatigue?”

“No, although excellent guess.”

Lacey says, “Is it that weird feeling you get from so much caffeine that, like, your heart isn’t beating so much as your whole body is beating?”

“No. Ben?”

“Um, are we feeling the need to pee, or is that just me?”

“That is, as usual, just you. More guesses?” We are silent. “The correct answer is that we are all feeling like we will be happier after an a cappella rendition of ‘Blister in the Sun.’”

And so it is. Tone deaf as I may be, I sing as loud as anybody. And when we finish, I say, “I Spy with my little eye a great story.”

No one says anything for a while. There’s just the sound of the Dreidel devouring the blacktop as she speeds downhill. And then after a while Ben says, “It’s this, isn’t it?”

I nod.

“Yeah,” Radar says. “As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”

It will help if we can find her, I think, but I don’t say anything. Ben turns on the radio finally and finds a rock station with ballads we can sing along to.

Hour Twenty-one

After more than 1,100 miles on interstates, it’s finally time to exit. It’s entirely impossible to drive seventy-seven miles per hour on the two-lane state highway that takes us farther north, up toward the Catskills. But we’ll be okay. Radar, ever the brilliant tactician, has banked an extra thirty minutes without telling us. It’s beautiful up here, the late-morning sunlight pouring down on old-growth forest. Even the brick buildings in the ramshackle little downtowns we drive past seem crisp in this light.

Lacey and I are telling Ben and Radar everything we can think of in hopes of helping them find Margo. Reminding them of her. Reminding ourselves of her. Her silver Honda Civic. Her chestnut hair, stick straight. Her fascination with abandoned buildings.