Paper Towns

on all those doors: they opened in. I walked up to the door to the mortgage company office and pushed. It opened with no resistance whatsoever. God, we were such idiots. Surely, whoever cared for the building knew about the unlocked door, which made the painters’ tape seem even more out of place.

I wiggled out of the backpack I’d packed that morning and pulled out my dad’s high-powered Maglite and flashed it around the room. Something sizable in the rafters scurried. I shivered. Little lizards jump-ran through the path of the light.

A single shaft of light from a hole in the ceiling shone in the front corner of the room, and sunlight peeked out from behind the particleboard, but I mostly relied on the flashlight. I walked up and down the rows of desks, looking at the items we’d found in the drawers, which we’d left. It was profoundly creepy to see desktop after desktop with the same unmarked calendar: February 1986. February 1986. February 1986. June 1986. February 1986. I spun around and shone the light on a desk in the very center of the room. The calendar had been changed to June. I leaned in close and looked at the paper of the calendar, hoping to see a jagged edge where previous months had been torn off, or some marks on the page where a pen had pushed through the paper, but there was nothing different from the other calendars, save the date.

With the flashlight crooked between my neck and shoulder, I started to look through desk drawers again, paying special attention to the June desk: some napkins, some still-sharp pencils, memos about mortgages addressed to one Dennis McMahon, an empty pack of Marlboro Lights, and an almost-full bottle of red nail polish.

I took the flashlight in one hand and the nail polish in the other and stared at it closely. So red it was almost black. I’d seen this color before. It had been on the minivan’s dash that night. Suddenly, the scurrying in the rafters and the creaking in the building became irrelevant — I felt a perverted euphoria. I couldn’t know if it was the same bottle, of course, but it was certainly the same color.

I rotated the bottle around and saw, unambiguously, a tiny smear of blue spray paint on the outside of the bottle. From her spray-painted fingers. I could be sure now. She’d been here after we parted ways that morning. Maybe she was still staying here. Maybe she only showed up late at night. Maybe she had taped up the particleboard to keep her privacy.

I resolved right then to stay until morning. If Margo had slept here, I could, too. And thus commenced a brief conversation with myself.

Me: But the rats.

Me: Yeah, but they seem to stay in the ceiling.

Me: But the lizards.

Me: Oh, come on. You used to pull their tails off when you were little. You’re not scared of lizards.

Me: But the rats.

Me: Rats can’t really hurt you anyway. They’re more scared of you than you are of them.

Me: Okay, but what about the rats?

Me: Shut up.

In the end, the rats didn’t matter, not really, because I was in a place where Margo had been alive. I was in a place that saw her after I did, and the warmth of that made the minimall almost comfortable. I mean, I didn’t feel like an infant being held by Mommy or anything, but my breath had stopped catching each time I heard a noise. And in becoming comfortable, I found it easier to explore. I knew there was more to find, and now, I felt ready to find it.

I left the office, ducking through a Troll Hole into the room with the labyrinthine shelves. I walked up and down the aisles for a while. At the end of the room I crawled through the next Troll Hole into the empty room. I sat down on the carpet rolled against the far wall. The cracked white paint crunched against my back. I stayed there for a while, long enough that the jagged beam of light coming through a hole in the ceiling crept an inch along the floor as I let myself become accustomed to the sounds.

After a while, I got bored and crawled through the last Troll Hole into the souvenir shop. I rifled through the T-shirts. I pulled the box of tourist brochures out from under the display case and looked through them, looking for some hand-scrawled message from Margo, but I found nothing.

I returned to the room I now found myself calling the library. I thumbed through the Reader’s Digests and found a stack of National Geographics from the 1960s, but the box was covered in so much dust that I knew Margo had never been inside it.

I began to find evidence of human habitation only when I got back to the empty room. On the wall with the rolled-up carpet, I discovered nine thumbtack holes in the cracked and paint-peeled wall. Four of the holes made an approximate square, and then there were five holes inside the square. I thought perhaps Margo had stayed here long enough to hang up some posters, although there were none obviously missing from her room when we searched it.

I unrolled the carpet partway and immediately found something else: a flattened, empty box that had once contained twenty-four nutrition bars. I found myself able to imagine Margo here, leaning against the wall with musty rolled-up carpet for a seat, eating a nutrition bar. She is all alone, with only this to eat. Maybe she drives once a day to a convenience store to buy a sandwich and some Mountain Dew, but most of every day is spent here, on or near this carpet. This image seemed too sad to be true — it all struck me as so lonely and so very unMargo. But all the evidence of the past ten days accumulated toward a surprising conclusion: Margo herself was — at least part of the time — very unMargo.

I rolled out the carpet farther and found a blue knit blanket, almost newspaper thin. I grabbed it and held it to my face and there, God, yes. Her smell. The lilac shampoo and the almond in her skin lotion and beneath all of that the faint sweetness of the skin itself.

And I could picture her again: she unravels the carpet halfway each night so her hip isn’t against bare concrete as she lies on her side. She crawls beneath the blanket, uses the rest of the carpet as a pillow, and sleeps. But why here? How is this better than home? And if it’s so great, why leave? These are the things I cannot imagine, and I realize that I cannot imagine them because I didn’t know Margo. I knew how she smelled, and I knew how she acted in front of me, and I knew how she acted in front of others, and I knew that she liked Mountain Dew and adventure and dramatic gestures, and I knew that she was funny and smart and just generally more than the rest of us. But I didn’t know what brought her here, or what kept her here, or what made her leave. I didn’t know why she owned thousands of records but never told anyone she even liked music. I didn’t know what she did at night, with the shades down, with the door locked, in the sealed privacy of her room.

And maybe this was what I needed to do above all. I needed to discover what Margo was like when she wasn’t being Margo.

I lay there with the her-scented blanket for a while, staring up at the ceiling. I could see a sliver of late- afternoon sky through a crack in the roof, like a jagged canvas painted a bright blue. This would be the perfect place to sleep: one could see stars at night without getting rained on.

I called my parents to check in. My dad answered, and I said we were in the car on the way to meet Radar and Angela, and that I was staying with Ben overnight. He told me not to drink, and I told him I wouldn’t, and he said he was proud of me for going to prom, and I wondered if he would be proud of me for doing what I was actually doing.

This place was boring. I mean, once you got past the rodents and the mysterious the-building-is-falling-apart groans in the walls, there wasn’t anything to do. No Internet, no TV, no music. I was bored, so it again confused me that she would pick this place, since Margo always struck me as a person with a very limited tolerance for boredom. Maybe she liked the idea of slumming it? Unlikely. Margo wore designer jeans to break into SeaWorld.

It was the lack of alternative stimuli that led me back to “Song of Myself,” the only certain gift I had from her. I moved to a water-stained patch of concrete floor directly beneath the hole in the ceiling, sat down cross- legged, and angled my body so the light shone upon the book. And for some reason, finally, I could read it.

The thing is that the poem starts out really slowly — it’s just sort of a long introduction, but around the ninetieth line, Whitman finally starts to tell a bit of a story, and that’s where it picked up for me. So Whitman is sitting around (which he calls loafing) on the grass, and then: