Paper Towns — Chapter no 38

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

I never previously knew that it is possible to become tired of eating

GoFast nutrition bars. But it is possible. I’m only two bites into my fourth

of the day when my stomach turns. I pull open the center console and stick

it back inside. We refer to this part of the kitchen as the pantry.

“I wish we had some apples,” Radar said. “God, wouldn’t an apple taste

good right now?”

I sigh. Stupid fourth food group. Also, even though I stopped drinking

Bluefin a few hours ago, I still feel exceedingly twitchy.

“I still feel kinda twitchy,” I say.

“Yeah,” Radar says. “I can’t stop tapping my fingers.” I look down. He

is drumming his fingers silently against his knees. “I mean,” he says, “I

actually cannot stop.”

“Okay, yeah I’m not tired, so we’ll stay up till four and then we’ll get

them up and we’ll sleep till eight.”

“Okay,” he says. There is a pause. The road has emptied out now; there

is only me and the semitrucks, and I feel like my brain is processing

information at eleven thousand times its usual pace, and it occurs to me that

what I’m doing is very easy, that driving on the interstate is the easiest and

most pleasant thing in the world: all I have to do is stay in between the lines

and make sure that no one is too close to me and I am not too close to

anyone and keep leaving. Maybe it felt like this for her, too, but I could

never feel like this alone.

Radar breaks the silence. “Well, if we’re not going to sleep until four . .

.”

I finish his sentence. “Yeah, then we should probably just open another

bottle of Bluefin.”