Paper Towns pdfdrive com

but that’s the whole point of you; the point of you is that you don’t look like a
boy. “You should not lose any weight.”
She laughed, waved her hand at me, and said, “You just love my big ass.” I
turned from the road for a second and glanced over, and I shouldn’t have,
because she could read my face and my face said: Well, first off I wouldn’t say

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it’s big exactly and second off, it is kind of spectacular. But it was more than
that. You can’t divorce Margo the person from Margo the body. You can’t see
one without seeing the other. You looked at Margo’s eyes and you saw both their
blueness and their Margo-ness. In the end, you could not say that Margo Roth
Spiegelman was fat, or that she was skinny, any more than you can say that the
Eiffel Tower is or is not lonely. Margo’s beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of
perfection—uncracked and uncrackable.
“But she would always make these little comments,” Margo continued. “‘I’d
loan you these shorts but I don’t think they’d fit right on you.’ Or, ‘You’re so
spunky. I love how you just make guys fall in love with your personality.’
Constantly undermining me. I don’t think she ever said anything that wasn’t an
attempt at undermination.”
“Undermining.”
“Thank you, Annoying McMasterGrammician.”
“Grammarian,” I said.
“Oh my God I’m going to kill you!” But she was laughing.
I drove around the perimeter of Jefferson Park so we could avoid driving past
our houses, just in case our parents had woken up and discovered us missing. We
drove in along the lake (Lake Jefferson), and then turned onto Jefferson Court
and drove into Jefferson Park’s little faux downtown, which felt eerily deserted
and quiet. We found Lacey’s black SUV parked in front of the sushi restaurant.
We stopped a block away in the first parking spot we could find not beneath a
streetlight.
“Would you please hand me the last fish?” Margo asked me. I was glad to get
rid of the fish because it was already starting to smell. And then Margo wrote on
the paper wrapper in her lettering: your Friendship with ms Sleeps with The
fishes We wove our way around the circular glow of the streetlights, walking as
casually as two people can when one of them (Margo) is holding a sizable fish
wrapped in paper and the other one (me) is holding a can of blue spray paint. A
dog barked, and we both froze, but then it was quiet again, and soon we were at
Lacey’s car.
“Well, that makes it harder,” Margo said, seeing it was locked. She reached
into her pocket and pulled out a length of wire that had once been a coat hanger.
It took her less than a minute to jimmy the lock open. I was duly awed.
Once she had the driver’s-side door open, she reached over and opened my
side. “Hey, help me get the seat up,” she whispered. Together we pulled the
backseat up. Margo slipped the fish underneath it, and then she counted to three,

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and in one motion we slammed the seat down on the fish. I heard the disgusting
sound of catfish guts exploding. I let myself imagine the way Lacey’s SUV
would smell after just one day of roasting in the sun, and I’ll admit that a kind of
serenity washed over me. And then Margo said, “Put an M on the roof for me.”
I didn’t even have to think about it for a full second before I nodded,
scrambled up onto the back bumper, and then leaned over, quickly spraying a
gigantic M all across the roof. Generally, I am opposed to vandalism. But I am
also generally opposed to Lacey Pemberton—and in the end, that proved to be
the more deeply held conviction. I jumped off the car. I ran through the darkness
—my breath coming fast and short—for the block back to the minivan. As I put
my hand on the steering wheel, I noticed my pointer finger was blue. I held it up
for Margo to see. She smiled, and held out her own blue finger, and then they
touched, and her blue finger was pushing against mine softly and my pulse failed
to slow. And then after a long time, she said, “Part Nine— downtown.”
It was 2:49 in the morning. I had never, in my entire life, felt less tired.

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