Paper Towns(76)

I blow a long breath from between pursed lips. “Dunno.”

“Is that—shit, that’s her car!” Lacey shouts next to me. “Yes yes yes yes yes her car her car!”

Radar stops the minivan as I follow Lacey’s finger back across the field, behind the building. A glint of silver. Leaning down so my face is next to hers, I can see the arc of the car’s roof. God knows how it got there, since no road leads in that direction.

Radar pulls over, and I jump out and run back toward her car. Empty. Unlocked. I pop the trunk. Empty, too, except for an open and empty suitcase. I look around, and take off toward what I now believe to be the remnants of Agloe’s General Store. Ben and Radar pass me as I run through the mown field. We enter the barn not through a door but through one of several gaping holes where the wooden wall has simply fallen away.

Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things: the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds, like her. An old claw-footed bathtub in a corner. So many holes everywhere that this place is simultaneously inside and outside.

I feel someone pull hard on my shirt. I spin my head and see Ben, his eyes shooting back and forth between me and a corner of the room. I have to look past a wide beam of bright white light shining down from the ceiling, but I can see into that corner. Two long panes of chest-high, dirty, gray-tinted Plexiglas lean against each other at an acute angle, held up on the other side by the wooden wall. It’s a triangular cubicle, if such a thing is possible.

And here’s the thing about tinted windows: the light still gets through. So I can see the jarring scene, albeit in gray scale: Margo Roth Spiegelman sits in a black leather office chair, hunched over a school desk, writing. Her hair is much shorter— she has choppy bangs above her eyebrows and everything is mussed-up, as if to emphasize the asymmetry—but it is her. She is alive. She has relocated her offices from an abandoned minimall in Florida to an abandoned barn in New York, and I have found her.

We walk toward Margo, all four of us, but she doesn’t seem to see us. She just keeps writing. Finally, someone—Radar, maybe—says, “Margo. Margo?”

She stands up on her tiptoes, her hands resting atop the makeshift cubicle’s walls. If she is surprised to see us, her eyes do not give it away. Here is Margo Roth Spiegelman, five feet away from me, her lips chapped to cracking, makeup-less, dirt in her fingernails, her eyes silent. I’ve never seen her eyes dead like that, but then again, maybe I’ve never seen her eyes before. She stares at me. I feel certain she is staring at me and not at Lacey or Ben or Radar. I haven’t felt so stared at since Robert Joyner’s dead eyes watched me in Jefferson Park.

She stands there in silence for a long time, and I am too scared of her eyes to keep walking forward. “I and this mystery here we stand,” Whitman wrote.

Finally, she says, “Give me like five minutes,” and then sits back down and resumes her writing.

I watch her write. Except for being a little grimy, she looks like she has always looked. I don’t know why, but I always thought she would look different. Older. That I would barely recognize her when I finally saw her again. But there she is, and I am watching her through the Plexiglas, and she looks like Margo Roth Spiegelman, this girl I have known since I was two—this girl who was an idea that I loved.

And it is only now, when she closes her notebook and places it inside a backpack next to her and then stands up and walks toward us, that I realize that the idea is not only wrong but dangerous. What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.

“Hey,” she says to Lacey, smiling. She hugs Lacey first, then shakes Ben’s hand, then Radar’s. She raises her eyebrows and says, “Hi, Q,” and then hugs me, quickly and not hard. I want to hold on. I want an event. I want to feel her heaving sobs against my chest, tears running down her dusty cheeks onto my shirt. But she just hugs me quickly and sits down on the floor. I sit down across from her, with Ben and Radar and Lacey following in a line, so that we are all facing Margo.

“It’s good to see you,” I say after a while, feeling like I’m breaking a silent prayer.

She pushes her bangs to the side. She seems to be deciding exactly what to say before she says it. “I, uh. Uh. I’m rarely at a loss for words, huh? Not much talking to people lately. Um. I guess maybe we should start with, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Margo,” Lacey says. “Christ, we were so worried.”

“No need to worry,” Margo answers cheerfully. “I’m good.” She gives us two thumbs-up. “I am A-OK.”

“You could have called us and let us know that,” Ben says, his voice tinged with frustration. “Saved us a hell of a drive.”

“In my experience, Bloody Ben, when you leave a place, it’s best to leave. Why are you wearing a dress, by the way?”

Ben blushes. “Don’t call him that,” Lacey snaps.

Margo cuts a look at Lacey. “Oh, my God, are you hooking up with him?” Lacey says nothing. “You’re not actually hooking up with him,” Margo says.

“Actually, yes,” Lacey says. “And actually he’s great. And actually you’re a bitch. And actually, I’m leaving. It’s nice to see you again, Margo. Thanks for terrifying me and making me feel like shit for the entire last month of my senior year, and then being a bitch when we track you down to make sure you’re okay. It’s been a real pleasure knowing you.”