Paper Towns — Chapter no 37

Hour Eight

Just after we pass into South Carolina, I catch Radar yawning and insist

upon a driver switch. I like driving, anyway—this vehicle may be a

minivan, but it’s my minivan. Radar scoots out of his seat and into the first

bedroom, while I grab the steering wheel and hold it steady, quickly

stepping over the kitchen and into the driver’s seat.

Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For

instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a

mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South

Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour—but in fact I am that kind of

person. Also, I never previously knew that if you mix a lot of pee with a

little Bluefin energy drink, the result is this amazing incandescent turquoise

color. It looks so pretty that I want to put the cap on the bottle and leave it

in the cup holder so Lacey and Ben can see it when they wake up.

But Radar feels differently. “If you don’t throw that shit out the window

right now, I’m ending our eleven-year friendship,” he says.

“It’s not shit,” I say. “It’s pee.”

“Out,” he says. And so I litter. In the side-view mirror, I can see the

bottle hit the asphalt and burst open like a water balloon. Radar sees it, too.

“Oh, my God,” Radar says. “I hope that’s like one of those traumatic

events that is so damaging to my psyche that I just forget it ever happened.”

Hour Nine