Paper Towns(22)

“You don’t have to,” I answered aloud. I tried to hide my disappointment. “If you don’t like them anymore,” I said, “just hang out with me. My friends are actually, like, nice.”

Her lips were so close to me that I could feel her smile. “I’m afraid it’s not possible,” she whispered. She let go then, but kept looking at me, taking step after step backward. She raised her eyebrows finally, and smiled, and I believed the smile. I watched her climb up a tree and then lift herself onto the roof outside of her second-floor bedroom window. She jimmied her window open and crawled inside.

I walked through my unlocked front door, tiptoed through the kitchen to my bedroom, peeled off my jeans, threw them into a corner of the closet back near the window screen, downloaded the picture of Jase, and got into bed, my mind booming with the things I would say to her at school.





PART TWO

The Grass





10.



I’d been asleep for just about thirty minutes when my alarm clock went off at 6:32. But I did not personally notice that my alarm clock was going off for seventeen minutes, not until I felt hands on my shoulders and heard the distant voice of my mother saying, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

“Uhh,” I responded. I felt significantly more tired than I had back at 5:55, and I would have skipped school, except I had perfect attendance, and while I realized that perfect attendance is not particularly impressive or even necessarily admirable, I wanted to keep the streak alive. Plus, I wanted to see how Margo would act around me.



When I walked into the kitchen, Dad was telling Mom something while they ate at the breakfast counter. Dad paused when he saw me and said, “How’d you sleep?”

“I slept fantastically,” I said, which was true. Briefly, but well.

He smiled. “I was just telling your mom that I have this recurring anxiety dream,” he said. “So I’m in college. And I’m taking a Hebrew class, except the professor doesn’t speak Hebrew, and the tests aren’t in Hebrew—they’re in gibberish. But everyone is acting like this made-up language with a made-up alphabet is Hebrew. And so I have this test, and I have to write in a language I don’t know using an alphabet I can’t decipher.”

“Interesting,” I said, although in point of fact it wasn’t. Nothing is as boring as other people’s dreams.

“It’s a metaphor for adolescence,” my mother piped up. “Writing in a language—adulthood—you can’t comprehend, using an alphabet—mature social interaction—you can’t recognize.” My mother worked with crazy teenagers in juvenile detention centers and prisons. I think that’s why she never really worried about me—as long as I wasn’t ritually decapitating gerbils or urinating on my own face, she figured I was a success.

A normal mother might have said, “Hey, I notice you look like you’re coming down off a meth binge and smell vaguely of algae. Were you perchance dancing with a snakebit Margo Roth Spiegelman a couple hours ago?” But no. They preferred dreams.

I showered, put on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. I was late, but then again, I was always late.

“You’re late,” Mom said when I made it back to the kitchen. I tried to shake the fog in my brain enough to remember how to tie my sneakers.

“I am aware,” I answered groggily.

Mom drove me to school. I sat in the seat that had been Margo’s. Mom was mostly quiet on the drive, which was good, because I was entirely asleep, the side of my head against the minivan window.



As Mom pulled up to school, I saw Margo’s usual spot empty in the senior parking lot. Couldn’t blame her for being late, really. Her friends didn’t gather as early as mine.

As I walked up toward the band kids, Ben shouted, “Jacobsen, was I dreaming or did you—” I gave him the slightest shake of my head, and he changed gears midsentence— “and me go on a wild adventure in French Polynesia last night, traveling in a sailboat made of bananas?”

“That was one delicious sailboat,” I answered. Radar raised his eyes at me and ambled into the shade of a tree. I followed him. “Asked Angela about a date for Ben. No dice.” I glanced over at Ben, who was talking animatedly, a coffee stirrer dancing in his mouth as he spoke.

“That sucks,” I said. “It’s all good, though. He and I will hang out and have a marathon session of Resurrection or something.”

Ben came over then, and said, “Are you trying to be subtle? Because I know you’re talking about the honeybunnyless prom tragedy that is my life.” He turned around and headed inside. Radar and I followed him, talking as we went past the band room, where freshmen and sophomores were sitting and chatting amid a slew of instrument cases.

“Why do you even want to go?” I asked.

“Bro, it’s our senior prom. It’s my last best chance to be some honeybunny’s fondest high school memory.” I rolled my eyes.

The first bell rang, meaning five minutes to class, and like Pavlov’s dogs, people started rushing around, filling up the hallways. Ben and Radar and I stood by Radar’s locker. “So why’d you call me at three in the morning for Chuck Parson’s address?”

I was mulling over how to best answer that question when I saw Chuck Parson walking toward us. I elbowed Ben’s side and cut my eyes toward Chuck. Chuck, incidentally, had decided that the best strategy was to shave off Lefty. “Holy shitstickers,” Ben said.