Paper Towns(28)

“Yeah, bu—”

“I’m not finished, kid. The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there, and every one of those damned balloons ends up on my desk one way or another, and after a while a man can get discouraged. Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother or a father, or God forbid both, and after a while, you can’t even see ’em individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon.” He paused then, and inhaled sharply, as if he was realizing something. “But then every now and again you talk to some big-eyed kid with too much hair for his head and you want to lie to him because he seems like a good kid. And you feel bad for this kid, because the only thing worse than the skyful of balloons you see is what he sees: a clear blue day interrupted by just the one balloon. But once that string gets cut, kid, you can’t uncut it. Do you get what I’m saying?”

I nodded, although I wasn’t sure I did understand. He stood up. “I do think she’ll be back soon, kid. If that helps.”

I liked the image of Margo as a balloon, but I figured that in his urge for the poetic, the detective had seen more worry in me than the pang I’d actually felt. I knew she’d be back. She’d deflate and float back to Jefferson Park. She always had.





I followed the detective back to the dining room, and then he said he wanted to go back over to the Spiegelmans’ house and pick through her room a little. Mrs. Spiegelman gave me a hug and said, “You’ve always been such a good boy; I’m sorry she ever got you caught up in this ridiculousness.” Mr. Spiegelman shook my hand, and they left. As soon as the door closed, my dad said, “Wow.”

“Wow,” agreed Mom.

My dad put his arm around me. “Those are some very troubling dynamics, eh, bud?”

“They’re kind of assholes,” I said. My parents always liked it when I cursed in front of them. I could see the pleasure of it in their faces. It signified that I trusted them, that I was myself in front of them. But even so, they seemed sad.

“Margo’s parents suffer a severe narcissistic injury whenever she acts out,” Dad said to me.

“It prevents them from parenting effectively,” my mom added.

“They’re assholes,” I repeated.

“Honestly,” my dad said, “they’re probably right. She probably is in need of attention. And God knows, I would need attention, too, if I had those two for parents.”

“When she comes back,” my mom said, “she’s going to be devastated. To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.”

“Maybe she could live here when she comes back,” I said, and in saying it I realized what a fantastically great idea it was. My mom’s eyes lit up, too, but then she saw something in my dad’s expression and answered me in her usual measured way.

“Well, she’d certainly be welcome, although that would come with its own challenges—being next door to the Spiegelmans. But when she returns to school, please do tell her that she’s welcome here, and that if she doesn’t want to stay with us, there are many resources available to her that we’re happy to discuss.”

Ben came out then, his bedhead seeming to challenge our basic understanding of the force gravity exerts upon matter. “Mr. and Mrs. Jacobsen—always a pleasure.”

“Good morning, Ben. I wasn’t aware you were staying the night.”

“Neither was I, actually,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

I told Ben about the detective and the Spiegelmans and Margo being technically a missing adult. And when I had finished, he nodded and said, “We should probably discuss this over a piping hot plate of Resurrection.” I smiled and followed him back to my room. Radar came over shortly thereafter, and as soon as he arrived, I was kicked off the team, because we were facing a difficult mission and despite being the only one of us who actually owned the game, I wasn’t very good at Resurrection. As I watched them tramp through a ghoul-infested space station, Ben said, “Goblin, Radar, goblin.”

“I see him.”

“Come here, you little bastard,” Ben said, the controller twisting in his hand. “Daddy’s gonna put you on a sailboat across the River Styx.”

“Did you just use Greek mythology to talk trash?” I asked.

Radar laughed. Ben started pummeling buttons, shouting, “Eat it, goblin! Eat it like Zeus ate Metis!”

“I would think that she’d be back by Monday,” I said. “You don’t want to miss too much school, even if you’re Margo Roth Spiegelman. Maybe she can stay here till graduation.”

Radar answered me in the disjointed way of someone playing Resurrection. “I don’t even get why she left, was it just imp six o’clock no dude use the ray gun like because of lost love? I would have figured her to be where is the crypt is it to the left immune to that kind of stuff.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that, I don’t think. Not just that, anyway. She kind of hates Orlando; she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy. I think she just wanted a vacation from that.”

I happened to glance out my window, and I saw immediately that someone—the detective, I guessed—had lowered the shade in Margo’s room. But I wasn’t seeing the shade. Instead, I was seeing a black-and-white poster, taped to the back of the shade. In the photograph, a man stands, his shoulders slightly slumped, staring ahead. A cigarette dangles out of his mouth. A guitar is slung over his shoulder, and the guitar is painted with the words THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.