The John Green Collection (99 page)

“So, in the story,” she continues, “Quentin and Margo and Myrna Mountweazel are investigating the death of Robert Joyner, whose death is exactly like his real-life death except instead of having obviously shot himself in the face,
someone else
shot him in the face. And the story is about us finding out who did it.”

“Who did it?”

She laughs. “You want me to spoil the entire story for you?”

“Well,” I say, “I’d rather read it.” She pulls open the book and shows me a page. The writing is indecipherable, not because Margo’s handwriting is bad, but because on top of the horizontal lines of text, writing also goes vertically down the page. “I write crosshatch,” she says. “Very hard for non-Margo readers to decode. So, okay, I’m going to spoil the story for you, but first you have to promise not to get mad.”

“Promise,” I say.

“It turns out that the crime was committed by Robert Joyner’s alcoholic ex-wife’s sister’s brother, who was insane because he’d been possessed by the spirit of an evil ancient Egyptian house cat. Like I said, really top-notch storytelling. But anyway, in the story, you and me and Myrna Mountweazel go and confront the killer, and he tries to shoot me, but you jump in front of the bullet, and you die very heroically in my arms.”

I laugh. “Great. This story was all promising with the beautiful girl who has a crush on me and the mystery and the intrigue, and then I get whacked.”

“Well, yeah.” She smiles. “But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn’t really emotionally ready to write about at ten.”

“Fair enough,” I say. “But in the revision, I want to get some action.”

“After you get shot up by the bad guy, maybe. A kiss before dying.”

“How kind of you.” I could stand up and go to her and kiss her. I could. But there is still too much to be ruined.

“So anyway, I finished this story in fifth grade. A few years later, I decide I’m going to run away to Mississippi. And then I write all my plans for this epic event into this notebook on top of the old story, and then I finally do it—take Mom’s car and put a thousand miles on it and leave these clues in the soup. I didn’t even
like
the road trip, really—it was incredibly lonely—but I love having done it, right? So I start crosshatching more schemes—pranks and ideas for matching up certain girls with certain guys and huge TPing campaigns and more secret road trips and whatever else. The notebook is half full by the start of junior year, and that’s when I decide that I’m going to do one more thing, one big thing, and then leave.”

She’s about to start talking again, but I have to stop her. “I guess I’m wondering if it was the place or the people. Like, what if the people around you had been different?”

“How can you separate those things, though? The people are the place is the people. And anyway, I didn’t think there
was
anybody else to be friends with. I thought everyone was either scared, like you, or oblivious, like Lacey. And th—”

“I’m not as scared as you think,” I say. Which is true. I only realize it’s true after saying it. But still.

“I’m
getting
to that,” she says, almost whiningly. “So when I’m a freshman, Gus takes me to the Osprey—” I tilt my head, confused. “The minimall. And I start going there by myself all the time, just hanging out and writing plans. And by last year, all the plans started to be about this last escape. And I don’t know if it’s because I was reading my old story as I went, but I put you into the plans early on. The idea was that we were going to do all these things together—like break into SeaWorld, that was in the original plan—and I was going to push you toward being a badass. This one night would, like, liberate you. And then I could disappear and you’d always remember me for that.

“So this plan eventually gets like seventy pages long, and then it’s about to happen, and the plan has come together really well. But then I find out about Jase, and I just decide to leave. Immediately. I don’t need to graduate. What’s the point of graduating? But first I have to tie up loose ends. So all that day in school I have my notebook out, and I’m trying like crazy to adapt the plan to Becca and Jase and Lacey and everyone who wasn’t a friend to me like I thought they were, trying to come up with ideas for letting everyone know just how pissed off I am before I ditch them forever.

“But I still wanted to do it with you; I still liked that idea of maybe being able to create in you at least an echo of the kick-ass hero of my little-kid story.

“And then you surprise me,” she says. “You had been a paper boy to me all these years—two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real. And it ends up being so odd and fun and magical that I go back to my room in the morning and I just
miss
you. I want to come over and hang out and talk, but I’ve already decided to leave, so I have to leave. And then at the last second, I have this idea to will you the Osprey. To leave it for you so that it can help you make even further progress in the field of not-being-such-a-scaredy-cat.

“So, yeah. That’s it. I come up with something real quick. Tape the Woody poster to the back of the blinds, circle the song on the record, highlight those two lines from “Song of Myself” in a different color than I’d highlighted stuff when I was actually reading it. Then after you leave for school, I climb in through your window and put the scrap of newspaper in your door. Then I go to the Osprey that morning, partly because I just don’t feel ready to leave yet, and partly because I want to clean the place up for you. I mean, the thing is, I
didn’t
want you to worry. That’s why I painted over the graffiti; I didn’t know you’d be able to see through it. I ripped off the pages of the desk calendar I’d been using, and I took down the map, too, which I’d had up there ever since I saw that it contained Agloe. Then because I’m tired and don’t have anyplace to go, I sleep there. I end up there for two nights, actually, just trying to get my courage up, I guess. And also, I don’t know, I thought maybe you would find it really quickly somehow. Then I go. Took two days to get here. I’ve been here since.”

She seemed finished, but I had one more question. “And why here of all places?”

“A paper town for a paper girl,” she says. “I read about Agloe in this book of ‘amazing facts’ when I was ten or eleven. And I never stopped thinking about it. The truth is that whenever I went up to the top of the SunTrust Building—including that last time with you—I didn’t really look down and think about how everything was made of paper. I looked down and thought about how
I
was made of paper. I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else. And here’s the thing about it. People love the idea of a paper girl. They always have. And the worst thing is that
I
loved it, too. I cultivated it, you know?

“Because it’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who created the dot could ever have imagined. I thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else: ‘You are going to the paper towns. And you are
never
coming back.’ ”

“That graffiti,” I said. “God, Margo, I walked through so many of those abandoned subdivisions looking for your body. I really thought—I really thought you were dead.”

She gets up and searches around her backpack for a moment, and then reaches over and grabs
The Bell Jar
, and reads to me. “‘But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.’ ” She sits back down next to me, close, facing me, the fabric of our jeans touching without our knees actually touching. Margo says, “I know what she’s talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It’s like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don’t meet up right.”

“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
do
believe 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.”