Paper Towns — Chapter no 10

10.

I’d been asleep for just about thirty minutes when my alarm clock went off

at 6:32. But I did not personally notice that my alarm clock was going off

for seventeen minutes, not until I felt hands on my shoulders and heard the

distant voice of my mother saying, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

“Uhh,” I responded. I felt significantly more tired than I had back at

5:55, and I would have skipped school, except I had perfect attendance, and

while I realized that perfect attendance is not particularly impressive or

even necessarily admirable, I wanted to keep the streak alive. Plus, I wanted

to see how Margo would act around me.

When I walked into the kitchen, Dad was telling Mom something while

they ate at the breakfast counter. Dad paused when he saw me and said,

“How’d you sleep?”

“I slept fantastically,” I said, which was true. Briefly, but well.

He smiled. “I was just telling your mom that I have this recurring

anxiety dream,” he said. “So I’m in college. And I’m taking a Hebrew class,

except the professor doesn’t speak Hebrew, and the tests aren’t in Hebrew—

they’re in gibberish. But everyone is acting like this made-up language with

a made-up alphabet is Hebrew. And so I have this test, and I have to write in

a language I don’t know using an alphabet I can’t decipher.”

“Interesting,” I said, although in point of fact it wasn’t. Nothing is as

boring as other people’s dreams.

“It’s a metaphor for adolescence,” my mother piped up. “Writing in a

language—adulthood—you can’t comprehend, using an alphabet—mature

social interaction—you can’t recognize.” My mother worked with crazy

teenagers in juvenile detention centers and prisons. I think that’s why she

never really worried about me—as long as I wasn’t ritually decapitating

gerbils or urinating on my own face, she figured I was a success.

A normal mother might have said, “Hey, I notice you look like you’re

coming down off a meth binge and smell vaguely of algae. Were you

perchance dancing with a snakebit Margo Roth Spiegelman a couple hours

ago?” But no. They preferred dreams.

I showered, put on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. I was late, but then

again, I was always late.

“You’re late,” Mom said when I made it back to the kitchen. I tried to

shake the fog in my brain enough to remember how to tie my sneakers.

“I am aware,” I answered groggily.

Mom drove me to school. I sat in the seat that had been Margo’s. Mom

was mostly quiet on the drive, which was good, because I was entirely

asleep, the side of my head against the minivan window.

As Mom pulled up to school, I saw Margo’s usual spot empty in the senior

parking lot. Couldn’t blame her for being late, really. Her friends didn’t

gather as early as mine.

As I walked up toward the band kids, Ben shouted, “Jacobsen, was I

dreaming or did you—” I gave him the slightest shake of my head, and he

changed gears midsentence— “and me go on a wild adventure in French

Polynesia last night, traveling in a sailboat made of bananas?”

“That was one delicious sailboat,” I answered. Radar raised his eyes at

me and ambled into the shade of a tree. I followed him. “Asked Angela

about a date for Ben. No dice.” I glanced over at Ben, who was talking

animatedly, a coffee stirrer dancing in his mouth as he spoke.

“That sucks,” I said. “It’s all good, though. He and I will hang out and

have a marathon session of Resurrection or something.”

Ben came over then, and said, “Are you trying to be subtle? Because I

know you’re talking about the honeybunnyless prom tragedy that is my

life.” He turned around and headed inside. Radar and I followed him,

talking as we went past the band room, where freshmen and sophomores

were sitting and chatting amid a slew of instrument cases.

“Why do you even want to go?” I asked.

“Bro, it’s our senior prom. It’s my last best chance to be some

honeybunny’s fondest high school memory.” I rolled my eyes.

The first bell rang, meaning five minutes to class, and like Pavlov’s

dogs, people started rushing around, filling up the hallways. Ben and Radar

and I stood by Radar’s locker. “So why’d you call me at three in the

morning for Chuck Parson’s address?”

I was mulling over how to best answer that question when I saw Chuck

Parson walking toward us. I elbowed Ben’s side and cut my eyes toward

Chuck. Chuck, incidentally, had decided that the best strategy was to shave

off Lefty. “Holy shitstickers,” Ben said.

Soon enough, Chuck was in my face as I scrunched back against the

locker, his forehead deliciously hairless. “What are you assholes looking

at?”

“Nothing,” said Radar. “We’re certainly not looking at your eyebrows.”

Chuck flicked Radar off, slammed an open palm against the locker next to

me, and walked away.

“You did that?” Ben asked, incredulous.

“You can never tell anyone,” I said to both of them. And then quietly

added, “I was with Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

Ben’s voice rose with excitement. “You were with Margo Roth

Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.?” I nodded. “Alone?” I nodded.

“Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single

thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel

of Margo Roth Spiegelman’s breasts. Thirty pages, minimum!”

“I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing,” Radar said.

“A sculpture would also be acceptable,” Ben added.

Radar half raised his hand. I dutifully called on him. “Yes, I was

wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo

Roth Spiegelman’s breasts? Your six words are: pink, round, firmness,

succulent, supple, and pillowy.”

“Personally,” Ben said, “I think at least one of the words should be

buhbuhbuhbuh.”

“I don’t think I’m familiar with that word,” I said.

“It’s the sound my mouth makes when I’m giving a honey-bunny the

patented Ben Starling Speedboat.” At which point Ben mimicked what he

would do in the unlikely event that his face ever encountered cleavage.

“Right now,” I said, “although they have no idea why, thousands of girls

all across America are feeling a chill of fear and disgust run down their

spines. Anyway, I didn’t hook up with her, perv.”

“Typical,” Ben said. “I’m the only guy I know with the balls to give a

honeybunny what she wants, and the only one with no opportunities.”

“What an amazing coincidence,” I said. It was life as it had always been

—only more fatigued. I had hoped that last night would change my life, but

it hadn’t—at least not yet.

The second bell rang. We hustled off to class.

I became extremely tired during calc first period. I mean, I had been tired

since waking, but combining fatigue with calculus seemed unfair. To stay

awake, I was scribbling a note to Margo— nothing I’d ever send to her, just

a summary of my favorite moments from the night before—but even that

could not keep me awake. At some point, my pen just stopped moving, and

I found my field of vision shrinking and shrinking, and then I was trying to

remember if tunnel vision was a symptom of fatigue. I decided it must be,

because there was only one thing in front of me, and it was Mr. Jiminez at

the blackboard, and this was the only thing that my brain could process, and

so when Mr. Jiminez said, “Quentin?” I was extraordinarily confused,

because the one thing happening in my universe was Mr. Jiminez writing on

the blackboard, and I couldn’t fathom how he could be both an auditory and

a visual presence in my life.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Did you hear the question?”

“Yes?” I asked again.

“And you raised your hand to answer it?” I looked up, and sure enough

my hand was raised, but I did not know how it had come to be raised, and I

only sort of knew how to go about de-raising it. But then after considerable

struggle, my brain was able to tell my arm to lower itself, and my arm was

able to do so, and then finally I said, “I just needed to ask to go to the

bathroom?”

And he said, “Go ahead,” and then someone else raised a hand and

answered some question about some kind of differential equation.

I walked to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and then leaned

over the sink, close to the mirror, and appraised myself. I tried to rub the

bloodshotedness out of my eyes, but I couldn’t. And then I had a brilliant

idea. I went into a stall, put the seat down, sat down, leaned against the side,

and fell asleep. The sleep lasted for about sixteen milliseconds before the

second period bell rang. I got up and walked to Latin, and then to physics,

and then finally it was fourth period, and I found Ben in the cafeteria and

said, “I really need a nap or something.”

“Let’s have lunch with RHAPAW,” he answered.

RHAPAW was a fifteen-year-old Buick that had been driven with impunity

by all three of Ben’s older siblings and was, by the time it reached Ben,

composed primarily out of duct tape and spackle. Her full name was Rode

Hard And Put Away Wet, but we called her RHAPAW for short. RHAPAW

ran not on gasoline, but on the inexhaustible fuel of human hope. You

would sit on the blisteringly hot vinyl seat and hope she would start, and

then Ben would turn the key and the engine would turn over a couple times,

like a fish on land making its last, meager, dying flops. And then you would

hope harder, and the engine would turn over a couple more times. You

hoped some more, and it would finally catch.

Ben started RHAPAW and turned the AC on high. Three of the four

windows didn’t even open, but the air conditioner worked magnificently,

though for the first few minutes it was just hot air blasting out of the vents

and mixing with the hot stale air in the car. I reclined the passenger seat all

the way back, so that I was almost lying down, and I told him everything:

Margo at my window, the Wal-Mart, the revenge, the SunTrust Building,

entering the wrong house, SeaWorld, the I-will-miss-hanging-out-with-you.

He didn’t interrupt me once—Ben was a good friend in the not-

interrupting way—but when I finished, he immediately asked me the most

pressing question in his mind.

“Wait, so about Jase Worthington, how small are we talking?”

“Shrinkage may have played a role, since he was under significant

anxiety, but have you ever seen a pencil?” I asked him, and Ben nodded.

“Well, have you ever seen a pencil eraser?” He nodded again. “Well, have

you ever seen the little shavings of rubber left on the paper after you erase

something?” More nodding. “I’d say three shavings long and one shaving

wide,” I said. Ben had taken a lot of crap from guys like Jason Worthington

and Chuck Parson, so I figured he was entitled to enjoy it a little. But he

didn’t even laugh. He was just shaking his head slowly, awestruck.

“God, she is such a badass.”

“I know.”

“She’s the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like

Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever

Nobel Prize for Awesome.”

“Yeah,” I said. I rarely tired of talking about Margo Roth Spiegelman,

but I was rarely this tired. I leaned back against the cracked vinyl headrest

and fell immediately asleep. When I woke up, a Wendy’s hamburger was

sitting in my lap with a note. Had to go to class, bro. See you after band.

Later, after my last class, I translated Ovid while sitting up against the

cinder-block wall outside the band room, trying to ignore the groaning

cacophony coming from inside. I always hung around school for the extra

hour during band practice, because to leave before Ben and Radar meant

enduring the unbearable humiliation of being the lone senior on the bus.

After they got out, Ben dropped Radar off at his house right by the

Jefferson Park “village center,” near where Lacey lived. Then he took me

home. I noticed Margo’s car was not parked in her driveway, either. So she

hadn’t skipped school to sleep. She’d skipped school for another adventure

—a me-less adventure. She’d probably spent her day spreading hair-

removal cream on the pillows of other enemies or something. I felt a little

left out as I walked into the house, but of course she knew I would never

have joined her anyway—I cared too much about a day of school. And who

even knew if it would be just a day for Margo. Maybe she was off on

another three-day jaunt to Mississippi, or temporarily joining the circus. But

it wasn’t either of those, of course. It was something I couldn’t imagine,

that I would never imagine, because I couldn’t be Margo.

I wondered what stories she would come home with this time. And I

wondered if she would tell them to me, sitting across from me at lunch.

Maybe, I thought, this is what she meant by I will miss hanging out with

you. She knew she was heading somewhere for another of her brief respites

from Orlando’s paperness. But when she came back, who knew? She

couldn’t spend the last weeks of school with the friends she’d always had,

so maybe she would spend them with me after all.

She didn’t have to be gone long for the rumors to start. Ben called me that

night after dinner. “I hear she’s not answering her phone. Someone on

Facebook said she’d told them she might move into a secret storage room in

Tomorrowland at Disney.”

“That’s idiotic,” I said.

“I know. I mean, Tomorrowland is by far the crappiest of the Lands.

Someone else said she met a guy online.”

“Ridiculous,” I said.

“Okay, fine, but what?”

“She’s somewhere by herself having the kind of fun we can only

imagine,” I said.

Ben giggled. “Are you saying that she’s playing with herself?”

I groaned. “Come on, Ben. I mean she’s just doing Margo stuff. Making

stories. Rocking worlds.”

That night, I lay on my side, staring out the window into the invisible world

outside. I kept trying to fall asleep, but then my eyes would dart open, just

to check. I couldn’t help but hope that Margo Roth Spiegelman would

return to my window and drag my tired ass through one more night I’d

never forget.