Paper Towns(72)

“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.”