Paper Towns — Chapter no 20

20.

The next morning at school, I found Ben standing beside the band door

talking to Lacey, Radar, and Angela in the shade of a tree with low-hanging

branches. It was hard for me to listen as they talked about prom, and about

how Lacey was feuding with Becca or whatever. I was waiting for a chance

to tell them what I’d seen, but then when I had the chance, when I finally

said, “I took a pretty long look at the two pseudovisions but didn’t find

much,” I realized that there was nothing new to say, really.

No one even seemed that concerned, except Lacey. She shook her head

as I talked about the pseudovisions, and then said, “I was reading online last

night that people who are suicidal end relationships with people they’re

angry with. And they give away their stuff. Margo gave me like five pairs

of jeans last week because she said I could wear them better, which isn’t

even true because she’s so much more, like, curvy.” I liked Lacey, but I saw

Margo’s point about the undermining.

Something about telling us that story made her start to cry, and Ben put

an arm around her, and she tucked her head into his shoulder, which was

hard to do, because in her heels she was actually taller than him.

“Lacey, we just have to find a location. I mean, talk to your friends. Did

she ever mention paper towns? Did she ever talk about a specific place?

Was there some subdivision somewhere that meant something to her?” She

shrugged into Ben’s shoulder.

“Bro, don’t push her,” Ben said. I sighed, but shut up.

“I’m on the online stuff,” Radar said, “but her username hasn’t logged

on to Omnictionary since she left.”

And then all at once they were back on the topic of prom. Lacey

emerged from Ben’s shoulder still looking sad and distracted, but she tried

to smile as Radar and Ben swapped tales of corsage purchasing.

The day passed as it always did—in slow motion, with a thousand plaintive

glances at the clock. But now it was even more unbearable, because every

minute I wasted in school was another minute in which I failed to find her.

My only vaguely interesting class that day was English, when Dr.

Holden completely ruined Moby Dick for me by incorrectly assuming we’d

all read it and talking about Captain Ahab and his obsession with finding

and killing this white whale. But it was fun to watch her get more and more

excited as she talked. “Ahab’s a madman railing against fate. You never see

Ahab wanting anything else in this whole novel, do you? He has a singular

obsession. And because he is the captain of his ship, no one can stop him.

You can argue—indeed, you may argue, if you choose to write about him

for your final reaction papers—that Ahab is a fool for being obsessed. But

you could also argue that there is something tragically heroic about fighting

this battle he is doomed to lose. Is Ahab’s hope a kind of insanity, or is it

the very definition of humanness?” I wrote down as much as I could of

what she said, realizing that I could probably pull off my final reaction

paper without actually reading the book. As she talked, it occurred to me

that Dr. Holden was unusually good at reading stuff. And she’d said she

liked Whitman. So when the bell rang, I took Leaves of Grass from my bag

and then zipped it back up slowly while everyone raced off either to home

or to extracurriculars. I waited behind someone asking for an extension on

an already late paper, and then he left.

“It’s my favorite Whitman reader,” she said.

I forced a smile. “Do you know Margo Roth Spiegelman?” I asked.

She sat down behind her desk and motioned for me to sit. “I never had

her in class,” Dr. Holden said, “but I’ve certainly heard of her. I know that

she ran away.”

“She sort of left me this book of poems before she, uh, disappeared.” I

handed the book over, and Dr. Holden began paging through it slowly. As

she did, I told her, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the highlighted parts. If

you go to the end of ‘Song of Myself,’ she highlights this stuff about dying.

Like, ‘If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.’”

“She left this for you,” Dr. Holden said quietly.

“Yeah,” I said.

She flipped back and tapped at the green highlighted quote with her

fingernail. “What is this about the doorjambs? That’s a great moment in the

poem, where Whitman—I mean, you can feel him shouting at you: ‘Open

the doors! In fact, remove the doors!’”

“She actually left me something else inside my doorjamb.”

Dr. Holden laughed. “Wow. Clever. But it’s such a great poem—I hate to

see it reduced to such a literal reading. And she seems to have responded

very darkly to what is finally a very optimistic poem. The poem is about our

connectedness—each of us sharing the same root system like leaves of

grass.”

“But, I mean, from what she highlighted, it seems kinda like a suicide

note,” I said. Dr. Holden read the last stanzas again and then looked up at

me.

“What a mistake it is to distill this poem into something hopeless. I hope

that’s not the case, Quentin. If you read the whole poem, I don’t see how

you can come to any conclusion except that life is sacred and valuable. But

—who knows. Maybe she skimmed it for what she was looking for. We

often read poems that way. But if so, she completely misunderstood what

Whitman was asking of her.”

“And what’s that?”

She closed the book and looked right at me in a way that made it

impossible for me to hold her gaze. “What do you think of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, staring at a stack of graded papers on her desk.

“I’ve tried to read it straight through a bunch of times, but I haven’t gotten

very far. Mostly I just read the parts she highlighted. I’m reading it to try to

understand Margo, not to try to understand Whitman.”

She picked up a pencil and wrote something on the back of an envelope.

“Hold on. I’m writing that down.”

“What?”

“What you just said,” she explained.

“Why?”

“Because I think that is precisely what Whitman would have wanted.

For you to see ‘Song of Myself’ not just as a poem but as a way into

understanding another. But I wonder if maybe you have to read it as a

poem, instead of just reading these fragments for quotes and clues. I do

think there are some interesting connections between the poet in ‘Song of

Myself’ and Margo Spiegelman—all that wild charisma and wanderlust.

But a poem can’t do its work if you only read snippets of it.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. I took the book and stood up. I didn’t feel much

better.

I got a ride home with Ben that afternoon and stayed at his house until he

left to go pick up Radar for some pre-prom party being thrown by our friend

Jake, whose parents were out of town. Ben asked me to go, but I didn’t feel

like it.

I walked back to my house, across the park where Margo and I had

found the dead guy. I remembered that morning, and I felt something twist

at my gut in the remembering of it—not because of the dead guy, but

because I remembered that she had found him first. Even in my own

neighborhood’s playground, I’d been unable to find a body on my own—

how the hell would I do it now?

I tried to read “Song of Myself” again when I got home that night, but

despite Dr. Holden’s advice, it still turned into a jumble of nonsensical

words.

I woke up early the next morning, just after eight, and went to the computer.

Ben was online, so I IM’ed him.

QTHERESURRECTION: How was the party?

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Lame, of course. Every party I go

to is lame.

QTHERESURRECTION: Sorry I missed it. You’re up early. Want

to come over, play Resurrection?

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Are you kidding?

QTHERESURRECTION: uh . . . no?

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Do you know what day it is?

QTHERESURRECTION: Saturday May 15?

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Bro, prom starts in eleven hours

and fourteen minutes. I have to pick Lacey up in less than nine

hours. I haven’t even washed and waxed RHAPAW yet, which by

the way you did a nice job of dirtying up. Then after that I have to

shower and shave and trim nasal hairs and wash and wax myself.

God, don’t even get me started. I have a lot to do. Listen, I’ll call you

later if I have a chance.

Radar was on, too, so I IM’ed him.

QTHERESURRECTION: What is Ben’s problem?

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Whoa there, cowboy.

QTHERESURRECTION: Sorry, I’m just pissed that he thinks

prom is oh-so important.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: You’re going to be pretty pissed when

you hear that the only reason I’m up this early is that I really need to

go because I have to pick up my tux, aren’t you?

QTHERESURRECTION: Jesus Christ. Seriously?

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Q, tomorrow and the next day and the

day after that and all the days for the rest of my life, I am happy to

participate in your investigation. But I have a girlfriend. She wants

to have a nice prom. I want to have a nice prom. It’s not my fault that

Margo Roth Spiegelman didn’t want us to have a nice prom.

I didn’t know what to say. He was right, maybe. Maybe she deserved to be

forgotten. But at any rate, I couldn’t forget her.

My mom and dad were still in bed, watching an old movie on TV. “Can

I take the minivan?” I asked.

“Sure, why?”

“Decided to go to prom,” I answered hurriedly. The lie occurred to me

as I told it. “Gotta pick out a tux and then get over to Ben’s. We’re both

going stag.” My mom sat up, smiling.

“Well, I think that’s great, hon. It’ll be great for you. Will you come

back so we can take pictures?”

“Mom, do you really need pictures of me going to prom stag? I mean,

hasn’t my life been humiliating enough?”

She laughed.

“Call before curfew,” my dad said, which was midnight.

“Sure thing,” I said. It was so easy to lie to them that I found myself

wondering why I’d never much done it before that night with Margo.

I took I-4 west toward Kissimmee and the theme parks, and then passed I-

Drive where Margo and I had broken into SeaWorld, and then took

Highway 27 down toward Haines City. There are a lot of lakes down there,

and wherever there are lakes in Florida, there are rich people to congregate

around them, so it seemed an unlikely place for a pseudovision. But the

Website I’d found had been very specific about there being this huge parcel

of oft-foreclosed land that no one had ever managed to develop. I

recognized the place immediately, because every other subdivision on the

access road was walled in, whereas Quail Hollow was just a plastic sign

hammered into the ground. As I turned in, little plastic posters read FOR

SALE, PRIME LOCATION, and GREAT DEVELOPMENT

OPPORTUNITIE$!

Unlike the previous pseudovisions, someone was keeping up Quail

Hollow. No houses had been built, but the lots were marked with surveying

stakes, and the grass was freshly mown. All the streets were paved and

named with road signs. In the subdivision’s center, a perfectly circular lake

had been dug and then, for some reason, drained. As I drove up in the

minivan, I could see it was about ten feet deep and several hundred feet in

diameter. A hose snaked across the bottom of the crater to the middle,

where a steel-and-aluminum fountain rose from the bottom to eye level. I

found myself feeling thankful the lake was empty, so I wouldn’t have to

stare into the water and wonder if she was in the bottom somewhere,

expecting me to put on scuba gear to find her.

I felt certain Margo could not be in Quail Hollow. It abutted too many

subdivisions for it to be a good place to hide, whether you were a person or

a body. But I looked anyway, and as I idled down the streets in the minivan,

I felt so hopeless. I wanted to be happy that it wasn’t here. But if it wasn’t

Quail Hollow, it would be the next place, or the one after that, or the one

after that. Or maybe I’d never find her. Was that the better fate?

I finished my rounds, finding nothing, and headed back toward the highway.

I got lunch at a drive-thru and then ate as I drove out west toward the

minimall.