Paper Towns(7)

When I let my sight unfocus, she became nothing but eyes, floating in the ether. And then I locked back on her, and I could see the outline of her face, the paint still wet against her skin. Her cheekbones triangulating into her chin, her pitch-black lips barely turned to a smile. “Any felonies?” I asked.

“Hmm,” said Margo. “Remind me if breaking and entering is a felony.”

“No,” I answered firmly.

“No it’s not a felony or no you won’t help?”

“No I won’t help. Can’t you enlist some of your underlings to drive you around?” Lacey and/or Becca were always doing her bidding.

“They’re part of the problem, actually,” Margo said.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“There are eleven problems,” she said somewhat impatiently.

“No felonies,” I said.

“I swear to God that you will not be asked to commit a felony.”

And right then, the floodlights came on all around Margo’s house. In one swift motion, she somersaulted through my window, into my room, and then rolled beneath my bed. Within seconds, her dad was standing on the patio outside. “Margo!” he shouted. “I saw you!”

From beneath my bed, I heard a muffled, “Oh, Christ.” Margo scooted out from under the bed, stood up, walked to the window, and said, “Come on, Dad. I’m just trying to have a chat with Quentin. You’re always telling me what a fantastic influence he could be on me and everything.”

“Just chatting with Quentin?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you wearing black face paint?”

Margo faltered for only the briefest moment. “Dad, to answer that question would take hours of backstory, and I know that you’re probably very tired, so just go back t—”

“In the house,” he thundered. “This minute!”

Margo grabbed hold of my shirt, whispered, “Back in a minute,” in my ear, and then climbed out the window.



As soon as she left, I grabbed my car keys from my desk. The keys are mine; the car, tragically, is not. On my sixteenth birthday, my parents gave me a very small gift, and I knew the moment they handed it to me that it was a car key, and I about peed myself, because they’d said over and over again that they couldn’t afford to give me a car. But when they handed me the tiny wrapped box, I knew they’d been tricking me, that I was getting a car after all. I tore off the wrapping paper and popped open the little box. Indeed, it contained a key.

Upon close inspection, it contained a Chrysler key. A key for a Chrysler minivan. The one and the same Chrysler minivan owned by my mother.

“My present is a key to your car?” I asked my mom.

“Tom,” she said to my dad, “I told you he would get his hopes up.”

“Oh, don’t blame me,” my dad said. “You’re just sublimating your own frustration with my income.”

“Isn’t that snap analysis a tad passive-aggressive?” my mother asked.

“Aren’t rhetorical accusations of passive aggression inherently passive-aggressive?” my dad responded, and they went on like that for a while.

The long and short of it was this: I had access to the vehicular awesomeness that is a late-model Chrysler minivan, except for when my mom was driving it. And since she drove to work every morning, I could only use the car on weekends. Well, weekends and the middle of the goddamned night.

It took Margo more than the promised minute to return to my window, but not much more. But in the time she was gone, I’d started to waffle again. “I’ve got school tomorrow,” I told her.

“Yeah, I know,” Margo answered. “There’s school tomorrow and the day after that, and thinking about that too long could make a girl bonkers. So, yeah. It’s a school night. That’s why we’ve got to get going, because we’ve got to be back by morning.”

“I don’t know.”

“Q,” she said. “Q. Darling. How long have we been dear friends?”

“We’re not friends. We’re neighbors.”

“Oh, Christ, Q. Am I not nice to you? Do I not order my various and sundry minions to be kind to you at school?”

“Uh-huh,” I answered dubiously, although in point of fact I’d always figured it was Margo who had stopped Chuck Parson and his ilk from screwing with us.

She blinked. She’d even painted her eyelids. “Q,” she said, “we have to go.”





And so I went. I slid out the window, and we ran along the side of my house, heads down, until we opened the doors of the minivan. Margo whispered not to close the doors—too much noise—so with the doors open, I put it in neutral, pushed off the cement with my foot, and then let the minivan roll down the driveway. We rolled slowly past a couple houses before I turned on the engine and the headlights. We closed the doors, and then I drove through the serpentine streets of Jefferson Park’s endlessness, the houses all still new-looking and plastic, like a toy village housing tens of thousands of real people.

Margo started talking. “The thing is they don’t even really care; they just feel like my exploits make them look bad. Just now, do you know what he said? He said, ‘I don’t care if you screw up your life, but don’t embarrass us in front of the Jacobsens—they’re our friends.’ Ridiculous. And you have no idea how hard they’ve made it to get out of that goddamned house. You know how in prison-escape movies they put bundled-up clothes under the blankets to make it look like there’s a person in there?” I nodded. “Yeah, well, Mom put a goddamned baby monitor in my room so she could hear my sleep-breathing all night. So I just had to pay Ruthie five bucks to sleep in my room, and then I put bundled-up clothes in her room.” Ruthie is Margo’s little sister. “It’s Mission: Impossible shit now. Used to be I could just sneak out like a regular goddamned American—just climb out the window and jump off the roof. But God, these days, it’s like living in a fascist dictatorship.”