Paper Towns — Chapter no 35

“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.”

Hour Six

For some reason, the stretch of I-95 just south of Florence, South Carolina,

is the place to drive a car on a Friday evening. We get bogged down in

traffic for several miles, and even though Radar is desperate to violate the

speed limit, he’s lucky when he can go thirty. Radar and I sit up front, and

we try to keep from worrying by playing a game we’ve just invented called

That Guy Is a Gigolo. In the game, you imagine the lives of people in the

cars around you.

We’re driving alongside a Hispanic woman in a beat-up old Toyota

Corolla. I watch her through the early darkness. “Left her family to move

here,” I say. “Illegal. Sends money back home on the third Tuesday of every

month. She’s got two little kids—her husband is a migrant. He’s in Ohio

right now—he only spends three or four months a year at home, but they

still get along really well.”

Radar leans in front of me and glances over at her for half a second.

“Christ, Q, it’s not so melodratragic as that. She’s a secretary at a law firm

—look how she’s dressed. It has taken her five years, but she’s now close to

getting a law degree of her own. And she doesn’t have kids, or a husband.

She’s got a boyfriend, though. He’s a little flighty. Scared of commitment.

White guy, a little nervous about the Jungle Fever angle of the whole

thing.”

“She’s wearing a wedding ring,” I point out. In Radar’s defense, I’ve

been able to stare at her. She is to my right, just below me. I can see through

her tinted windows, and I watch as she sings along to some song, her

unblinking eyes on the road. There are so many people. It is easy to forget

how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them

imaginable and consistently misimagined. I feel like this is an important

idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly, the

way pythons eat, but before I can get any further, Radar speaks.

“She’s just wearing that so pervs like you don’t come on to her,” Radar

explains.

“Maybe.” I smile, pick up the half-finished GoFast bar sitting on my lap,

and take a bite. It’s quiet again for a while, and I am thinking about the way

you can and cannot see people, about the tinted windows between me and

this woman who is still driving right beside us, both of us in cars with all

these windows and mirrors everywhere, as she crawls along with us on this

packed highway. When Radar starts talking again, I realize that he has been

thinking, too.

“The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo,” Radar says, “I mean, the thing

about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person

doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I was just thinking that.” And I can’t help but feel that

Whitman, for all his blustering beauty, might have been just a bit too

optimistic. We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving,