Paper Towns

insects like an abandoned ant farm. We dig our bare hands into the ground over and over again, each fistful of earth accompanied by a little cloud of dust. We dig the hole wide and deep. This grave must be proper. Soon I’m reaching in as deep as my elbows. The sleeve of my shirt gets dusty when I wipe the sweat from my cheek. Margo’s cheeks are reddening. I can smell her, and she smells like that night right before we jumped into the moat at SeaWorld.

“I never really thought of him as a real person,” she says.

When she speaks, I take the opportunity to take a break, and sit back on my haunches. “Who, Robert Joyner?”

She keeps digging. “Yeah. I mean, he was something that happened to me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life, he was — you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life.”

I have never really thought of him as a person, either. A guy who played in the dirt like me. A guy who fell in love like me. A guy whose strings were broken, who didn’t feel the root of his leaf of grass connected to the field, a guy who was cracked. Like me. “Yeah,” I say after a while as I return to digging. “He was always just a body to me.”

“I wish we could have done something,” she says. “I wish we could have proven how heroic we were.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It would have been nice to tell him that, whatever it was, that it didn’t have to be the end of the world.”

“Yeah, although in the end something kills you.”

I shrug. “Yeah, I know. I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.” I dig my hand in again, the dirt here so much blacker than back home. I toss a handful into the pile behind us, and sit back. I feel on the edge of an idea, and I try to talk my way into it. I have never spoken this many words in a row to Margo in our long and storied relationship, but here it is, my last play for her.

“When I’ve thought about him dying — which admittedly isn’t that much — I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass — our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?”

She nods.

“I like the strings. I always have. Because that’s how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We’re not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we’re not different sprouts from the same plant. I can’t be you. You can’t be me. You can imagine another well — but never quite perfectly, you know?

“Maybe it’s more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen — these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it’s only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”

She raises her fingers to her lips, as if concentrating, or as if hiding her mouth from me, or as if to feel the words she speaks. “You’re pretty something,” she says finally. She stares at me, my eyes and her eyes and nothing between them. I have nothing to gain from kissing her. But I am no longer looking to gain anything. “There’s something I have to do,” I say, and she nods very slightly, as if she knows the something, and I kiss her.

It ends quite a while later when she says, “You can come to New York. It will be fun. It will be like kissing.”

And I say, “Kissing is pretty something.”

And she says, “You’re saying no.”

And I say, “Margo, I have a whole life there, and I’m not you, and I—” But I can’t say anything because she kisses me again, and it’s in the moment that she kisses me that I know without question that we’re headed in different directions. She stands up and walks over to where we were sleeping, to her backpack. She pulls out the moleskin notebook, walks back to the grave, and places it in the ground.

“I’ll miss you,” she whispers, and I don’t know if she’s talking to me or to the notebook. Nor do I know to whom I’m talking when I say, “As will I.”

“Godspeed, Robert Joyner,” I say, and drop a handful of dirt onto the notebook.

“Godspeed, young and heroic Quentin Jacobsen,” she says, tossing in dirt of her own.

Another handful as I say, “Godspeed, fearless Orlandoan Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

And another as she says, “Godspeed, magical puppy Myrna Mountweazel.” We shove the dirt over the book, tamping down the disturbed soil. The grass will grow back soon enough. It will be for us the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

We hold hands rough with dirt as we walk back to the Agloe General Store. I help Margo carry her belongings — an armful of clothes, her toiletries, and the desk chair — to her car. The preciousness of the moment, which should make it easier to talk, makes it harder.

We’re standing outside in the parking lot of a single-story motel when the good-byes become unavoidable. “I’m gonna get a cell, and I’ll call you,” she says. “And email. And post mysterious statements on Omnictionary’s Paper Towns talk page.”

I smile. “I’ll email you when we get home,” I say, “and I expect a response.”

“You have my word. And I’ll see you. We’re not done seeing each other.”

“At the end of the summer, maybe, I can meet you somewhere before school,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” I smile and nod. She turns away, and I am wondering if she means any of it when I see her shoulders collapse. She is crying.

“I’ll see you then. And I’ll write in the meantime,” I say.

“Yes,” she says without turning around, her voice thick. “I’ll write you, too.”

It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.

I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I keep thinking she will get into the car, but she doesn’t, and she finally turns around to me and I see her soaked eyes. The physical space between us evaporates. We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time.

I feel her hands on my back. And it is dark as I kiss her, but I have my eyes open and so does Margo. She is close enough to me that I can see her, because even now there is the outward sign of the invisible light, even at night in this parking lot on the outskirts of Agloe. After we kiss, our foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I learned about paper towns by coming across one during a road trip my junior year of college. My traveling companion and I kept driving up and down the same desolate stretch of highway in South Dakota, searching for this