Paper Towns — Chapter no 41

We hit the construction. The highway narrows to one lane, and we’re

stuck behind a tractor-trailer driving the precise roadwork speed limit of

thirty-five mph. Lacey is the right driver for the situation; I’d be pounding

the steering wheel, but she’s just amiably chatting with Ben until she turns

half around and says, “Q, I really need to go to the bathroom, and we’re

losing time behind this truck anyway.”

I just nod. I can’t blame her. I would have forced us to stop long ago had

it been impossible for me to pee in a bottle. It was heroic of her to make it

as long as she did.

She pulls into an all-night gas station, and I get out to stretch my

rubbery legs. When Lacey comes racing back to the minivan, I’m sitting in

the driver’s seat. I don’t even really know how I came to be sitting in the

driver’s seat, why I end up there and not Lacey. She comes around to the

front door, and she sees me there, and the window is open, and I say to her,

“I can drive.” It’s my car, after all, and my mission. And she says, “Really,

you’re sure?” and I say, “Yeah, yeah, I’m good to go,” and she just throws

open the sliding door and lies down in the first row.

Hour Twelve

It is 2:40 in the morning. Lacey is sleeping. Radar is sleeping. I drive. The

road is deserted. Even most of the truck drivers have gone to bed. We go

minutes without seeing headlights coming in the opposite direction. Ben

keeps me awake, chattering next to me. We are talking about Margo.

“Have you given any thought to how we will actually, like, find Agloe?”

he asks me.

“Uh, I have an approximate idea of the intersection,” I say.

“And it’s nothing but an intersection.”

“And she’s just gonna be sitting at the corner on the trunk of her car,

chin in her hands, waiting for you?”

“That would certainly be helpful,” I answered.

“Bro, I gotta say I’m a little worried that you might, like—if it doesn’t

go as you’re planning it—you might be really disappointed.”

“I just want to find her,” I say, because I do. I want her to be safe, alive,

found. The string played out. The rest is secondary.

“Yeah, but— I don’t know,” Ben says. I can feel him looking over at me,

being Serious Ben. “Just— Just remember that sometimes, the way you

think about a person isn’t the way they actually are. Like, I always thought

Lacey was so hot and so awesome and so cool, but now when it actually

comes to being with her . . . it’s not the exact same. People are different

when you can smell them and see them up close, you know?”

“I know that,” I say. I know how long, and how badly, I wrongly

imagined her.

“I’m just saying that it was easy for me to like Lacey before. It’s easy to

like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing

unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl

with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who’s kinda

bossy—then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.”

I can feel my cheeks warming. “You’re saying I don’t really like Margo?

After all this—I’m twelve hours inside this car already and you don’t think I

care about her because I don’t— ” I cut myself off. “You think that since

you have a girlfriend you can stand atop the lofty mountain and lecture me?

You can be such a—”

I stop talking because I see in the outer reaches of the headlights the thing

that will shortly kill me.

Two cows stand oblivious in the highway. They come into view all at

once, a spotted cow in the left lane, and in our lane an immense creature,

the entire width of our car, standing stock-still, her head turned back as she

appraises us with blank eyes. The cow is flawlessly white, a great white

wall of cow that cannot be climbed or ducked or dodged. It can only be hit.

I know that Ben sees it, too, because I hear his breath stop.

They say that your life flashes before your eyes, but for me that is not

the case. Nothing flashes before my eyes except this impossibly vast

expanse of snowy fur, now only a second from us. I don’t know what to do.

No, that’s not the problem. The problem is that there is nothing to do,

except to hit this white wall and kill it and us, both. I slam on the brakes,

but out of habit not expectation: there is absolutely no avoiding this. I raise

my hands off the steering wheel. I do not know why I am doing this, but I

raise my hands up, as if I am surrendering. I’m thinking the most banal

thing in the world: I am thinking that I don’t want this to happen. I don’t

want to die. I don’t want my friends to die. And to be honest, as the time

slows down and my hands are in the air, I am afforded the chance to think

one more thought, and I think about her. I blame her for this ridiculous, fatal

chase—for putting us at risk, for making me into the kind of jackass who

would stay up all night and drive too fast. I would not be dying were it not

for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I

would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always

wanted to do, which is to grow up.

Having surrendered control of the vessel, I am surprised to see a hand

on the steering wheel. We are turning before I realize why we are turning,

and then I realize that Ben is pulling the wheel toward him, turning us in a

hopeless attempt to miss the cow, and then we are on the shoulder and then

on the grass. I can hear the tires spinning as Ben turns the wheel hard and

fast in the opposite direction. I stop watching. I don’t know if my eyes close

or if they just cease to see. My stomach and my lungs meet in the middle

and crush each other. Something sharp hits my cheek. We stop.

I don’t know why, but I touch my face. I pull my hand back and there is

a streak of blood. I touch my arms with my hands, hugging my arms to

myself, but I am only checking to make sure that they are there, and they

are. I look at my legs. They are there. There is some glass. I look around.

Bottles are broken. Ben is looking at me. Ben is touching his face. He looks

okay. He holds himself as I held myself. His body still works. He is just

looking at me. In the rearview mirror, I can see the cow. And now,

belatedly, Ben screams. He is staring at me and screaming, his mouth all the

way open, the scream low and guttural and terrified. He stops screaming.

Something is wrong with me. I feel faint. My chest is burning. And then I

gulp air. I had forgotten to breathe. I had been holding my breath the whole

time. I feel much better when I start up again. In through the nose, out

through the mouth.

“Who is hurt?!” Lacey shouts. She’s unbuckled herself from her

sleeping position and she’s leaning into the wayback. When I turn around, I

can see that the back door has popped open, and for a moment I think that

Radar has been thrown from the car, but then he sits up. He is running his

hands over his face, and he says, “I’m okay. I’m okay. Is everyone okay?”

Lacey doesn’t even respond; she just jumps forward, between Ben and

me. She is leaning over the apartment’s kitchen, and she looks at Ben. She

says, “Sweetie, where are you hurt?” Her eyes are overfull of water like a

swimming pool on a rainy day. And Ben says,

“I’mfineI’mfineQisbleeding.”

She turns to me, and I shouldn’t cry but I do, not because it hurts, but

because I am scared, and I raised my hands, and Ben saved us, and now

there is this girl looking at me, and she looks at me kind of the way a mom

does, and that shouldn’t crack me open, but it does. I know the cut on my

cheek isn’t bad, and I’m trying to say so, but I keep crying. Lacey is

pressing against the cut with her fingers, thin and soft, and shouting at Ben

for something to use as a bandage, and then I’ve got a small swath of the

Confederate flag pressed against my cheek just to the right of my nose. She

says, “Just hold it there tight; you’re fine does anything else hurt?” and I

say no. That’s when I realize that the car is still running, and still in gear,

stopped only because I’m still standing on the brakes. I put it into park and

turn it off. When I turn it off, I can hear liquid leaking—not dripping so

much as pouring.

“We should probably get out,” Radar says. I hold the Confederate flag to

my face. The sound of liquid pouring out of the car continues.

“It’s gas! It’s gonna blow!” Ben shouts. He throws open the passenger

door and takes off, running in a panic. He hurdles a split-rail fence and tears

across a hay field. I get out as well, but not in quite the same hurry. Radar is

outside, too, and as Ben hauls ass, Radar is laughing. “It’s the beer,” he

says.

“What?”

“The beers all broke,” he says again, and nods toward the split-open

cooler, gallons of foamy liquid pouring out from inside it.

We try to call Ben but he can’t hear us because he’s too busy screaming,

“IT’S GONNA BLOW!” as he races across the field. His graduation robe

flies up in the gray dawn, his bony bare ass exposed.

I turn and look out at the highway as I hear a car coming. The white

beast and her spotted friend have successfully ambled to the safety of the

opposite shoulder, still impassive. Turning back, I realize the minivan is

against the fence.

I’m assessing damage when Ben finally schleps back to the car. As we

spun, we must have grazed the fence, because there is a deep gouge on the

sliding door, deep enough that if you look closely, you can just see inside

the van. But other than that, it looks immaculate. No other dents. No

windows broken. No flat tires. I walk around to close the back door and

appraise the 210 broken bottles of beer, still bubbling. Lacey finds me and

puts an arm around me. We are both staring at the rivulet of foaming beer

flowing into the drainage ditch beneath us. “What happened?” she asks.

I tell her: we were dead, and then Ben managed to spin the car in just the

right way, like some kind of brilliant vehicular ballerina.

Ben and Radar have crawled underneath the minivan. Neither of them

knows shit about cars, but I suppose it makes them feel better. The hem of

Ben’s robe and his naked calves peek out.

“Dude,” Radar shouts. “It looks, like, fine.”

“Radar,” I say, “the car spun around like eight times. Surely it’s not

fine.”

“Well it seems fine,” Radar says.

“Hey,” I say, grabbing at Ben’s New Balances. “Hey, come out here.”

He scoots his way out, and I offer him my hand and help him up. His hands

are black with car gunk. I grab him and hug him. If I had not ceded control

of the wheel, and if he had not assumed control of the vessel so deftly, I’m

sure I’d be dead. “Thank you,” I say, pounding his back probably too hard.

“That was the best damned passenger-seat driving I’ve ever seen in my

life.”

He pats my uninjured cheek with a greasy hand. “I did it to save myself,

not you,” he says. “Believe me when I say that you did not once cross my

mind.”

I laugh. “Nor you mine,” I say.

Ben looks at me, his mouth on the edge of smiling, and then says, “I

mean, that was a big damned cow. It wasn’t even a cow so much as it was a

land whale.” I laugh.

Radar scoots out then. “Dude, I really think it’s fine. I mean, we’ve only

lost like five minutes. We don’t even have to push up the cruising speed.”

Lacey is looking at the gouge in the minivan, her lips pursed. “What do

you think?” I ask her.

“Go,” she says.