Paper Towns(18)

“Yes!” I shouted. “God, that was brilliant.”

“Did you see it? His face without the eyebrow? He looks permanently doubtful, you know? Like, ‘oh, really? You’re saying I only have one eyebrow? Likely story.’ And I love making that asshole choose: better to shave off Lefty, or paint on Righty? Oh, I just love it. And how he yelled for his mama, that sniveling little shit.”

“Wait, why do you hate him?”

“I didn’t say I hated him. I said he was a sniveling little shit.”

“But you were always kind of friends with him,” I said, or at least I thought she had been.

“Yeah, well, I was always kind of friends with a lot of people,” she said. Margo leaned across the minivan and put her head on my bony shoulder, her hair falling against my neck. “I’m tired,” she said.

“Caffeine,” I said. She reached into the back and grabbed us each a Mountain Dew, and I drank it in two long chugs.

“So we’re going to SeaWorld,” she told me. “Part Eleven.”

“What, are we going to Free Willy or something?”

“No,” she said. “We’re just going to go to SeaWorld, that’s all. It’s the only theme park I haven’t broken into yet.”

“We can’t break into SeaWorld,” I said, and then I pulled over into an empty furniture store parking lot and turned off the car.

“We’re in a bit of a time crunch,” she told me, and then reached over to start the car again.

I pushed her hand away. “We can’t break into SeaWorld,” I repeated.

“There you go with the breaking again.” Margo paused and opened another Mountain Dew. Light reflected off the can onto her face, and for a second I could see her smiling at the thing she was about to say. “We’re not going to break anything. Don’t think of it as breaking in to SeaWorld. Think of it as visiting SeaWorld in the middle of the night for free.”





8.



“Well, first off, we will get caught,” I said. I hadn’t started the minivan and was laying out the reasons I wouldn’t start it and wondering if she could see me in the dark.

“Of course we’ll get caught. So what?”

“It’s illegal.”

“Q, in the scheme of things, what kind of trouble can SeaWorld get you into? I mean, Jesus, after everything I’ve done for you tonight, you can’t do one thing for me? You can’t just shut up and calm down and stop being so goddamned terrified of every little adventure?” And then under her breath she said, “I mean, God. Grow some nuts.”

And now I was mad. I ducked underneath my shoulder belt so I could lean across the console toward her. “After everything YOU did for ME?” I almost shouted. She wanted confident? I was getting confident. “Did you call MY friend’s father who was screwing MY boyfriend so no one would know that I was calling? Did you chauffeur MY ass all around the world not because you are oh-so-important to me but because I needed a ride and you were close by? Is that the kind of shit you’ve done for me tonight?”

She wouldn’t look at me. She just stared straight ahead at the vinyl siding of the furniture store. “You think I needed you? You don’t think I could have given Myrna Mountweazel a Benadryl so she’d sleep through my stealing the safe from under my parents’ bed? Or snuck into your bedroom while you were sleeping and taken your car key? I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.” Now she looked at me. “And that’s like a promise. At least for tonight. In sickness and in health. In good times and in bad. For richer, for poorer. Till dawn do us part.”

I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot, but all her teamwork stuff aside, I still felt like I was getting badgered into something, and I wanted the last word. “Fine, but when SeaWorld, Incorporated or whatever sends a letter to Duke University saying that miscreant Quentin Jacobsen broke into their facility at four thirty in the morning with a wild-eyed lass at his side, Duke University will be mad. Also, my parents will be mad.”

“Q, you’re going to go to Duke. You’re going to be a very successful lawyer-or-something and get married and have babies and live your whole little life, and then you’re going to die, and in your last moments, when you’re choking on your own bile in the nursing home, you’ll say to yourself: ‘Well, I wasted my whole goddamned life, but at least I broke into SeaWorld with Margo Roth Spiegelman my senior year of high school. At least I carpe’d that one diem.’”

“Noctem,” I corrected.

“Okay, you are the Grammar King again. You’ve regained your throne. Now take me to SeaWorld.”



As we drove silently down I-4, I found myself thinking about the day that the guy in the gray suit showed up dead. Maybe that’s the reason she chose me, I thought. And that’s when, finally, I remembered what she said about the dead guy and the strings— and about herself and the strings.

“Margo,” I said, breaking our silence.

“Q,” she said.

“You said . . . When the guy died, you said maybe all the strings inside him broke, and then you just said that about yourself, that the last string broke.”

She half laughed. “You worry too much. I don’t want some kids to find me swarmed with flies on a Saturday morning in Jefferson Park.” She waited a beat before delivering the punch line. “I’m too vain for that fate.”