Paper Towns pdfdrive com

There’s nothing funny about this shit is the closest Ben can come to the terror
I feel, maybe. And it is close enough for me. I fast-walk toward the Troll Hole. I
can feel the walls closing in on us.

---

19.
Ben and Radar dropped me off at my house—even though they’d skipped
school, they couldn’t afford to skip band practice. I sat alone with “Song of
Myself” for a long time, and for about the tenth time I tried to read the entire
poem starting at the beginning, but the problem was that it’s like eighty pages
long and weird and repetitive, and although I could understand each word of it, I
couldn’t understand anything about it as a whole. Even though I knew the
highlighted parts were probably the only important parts, I wanted to know
whether it was a suicide-note kind of poem. But I couldn’t make sense of it.
I was ten confusing pages into the poem when I got so freaked out that I
decided to call the detective. I dug his business card out of a pair of shorts in the
laundry hamper. He answered on the second ring.
“Warren.”
“Hi, um, it’s Quentin Jacobsen. I’m a friend of Margo Roth Spiegelman?”
“Sure, kid, I remember you. What’s up?”
I told him about the clues and the minimall and about paper towns, about
how she had called Orlando a paper town from the top of the SunTrust Building,
but she hadn’t used it in the plural, about her telling me that she wouldn’t want
to be found, about finding her underneath our bootsoles. He didn’t even tell me
not to break into abandoned buildings, or ask why I was at an abandoned
building at 10 A.M. on a school day. He just waited until I stopped talking and
said, “Jesus, kid, you’re almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and
three ex-wives. So what’s your theory?”
“I’m worried that she might have, um, I guess killed herself.”
“It never crossed my mind this girl did anything but run off, kid. I can see
your case, but you gotta remember she’s done this before. The clues, I mean.
Adds drama to the whole enterprise. Honestly, kid, if she wanted you to find her
—dead or alive—you already would have.”
“But don’t you—”
“Kid, the unfortunate thing is that she’s a legal adult with free will, you
know? Let me give you some advice: let her come home. I mean, at some point,
you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down
and see that you floated away, too.”

---

I hung up with a bad taste in my mouth—I realized it wasn’t Warren’s poetry
that would take me to Margo. I kept thinking about those lines at the end Margo
had underlined: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If
you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” That grass, Whitman
writes in the first few pages, is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” But where
were the graves? Where were the paper towns?
I logged onto Omnictionary to see if it knew anything more about the phrase
“paper towns” than I did. They had an extremely thoughtful and helpful entry
created by a user named skunkbutt: “A Paper Town is a town that’s got a paper
mill in it.” This was the shortcoming of Omnictionary: the stuff written by Radar
was thorough and extremely helpful; the unedited work of skunkbutt left
something to be desired. But when I searched the whole Web, I found something
interesting buried forty entries down on a forum about real estate in Kansas.
Looks like Madison Estates isn’t going to get built; my husband and I
bought property there, but someone called this week to say they’re
refunding us our deposit because they didn’t presell enough houses to
finance the project. Another paper town for KS! —Marge in Cawker, KS
A pseudovision! You will go to the pseudovisions and you will never come
back. I took a deep breath and stared at the screen for a while.
The conclusion seemed inescapable. Even with everything broken and
decided inside her, she couldn’t quite allow herself to disappear for good. And
she had decided to leave her body—to leave it for me—in a shadow version of
our subdivision, where her first strings had broken. She had said she didn’t want
her body found by random kids—and it made sense that out of everyone she
knew, she would pick me to find her. She wouldn’t be hurting me in a new way.
I’d done it before. I had experience in the field.
I saw that Radar was online and was clicking over to talk to him when an IM
from him popped up on my screen.