Paper Towns pdfdrive com

Hour Twenty-one
After more than 1,100 miles on interstates, it’s finally time to exit. It’s entirely
impossible to drive seventy-seven miles per hour on the two-lane state highway
that takes us farther north, up toward the Catskills. But we’ll be okay. Radar,
ever the brilliant tactician, has banked an extra thirty minutes without telling us.
It’s beautiful up here, the late-morning sunlight pouring down on old-growth
forest. Even the brick buildings in the ramshackle little downtowns we drive past
seem crisp in this light.
Lacey and I are telling Ben and Radar everything we can think of in hopes of
helping them find Margo. Reminding them of her. Reminding ourselves of her.
Her silver Honda Civic. Her chestnut hair, stick straight. Her fascination with
abandoned buildings.
“She has a black notebook with her,” I say.
Ben wheels around to me. “Okay, Q. If I see a girl who looks exactly like
Margo in Agloe, New York, I’m not going to do anything. Unless she has a

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notebook. That’ll be the giveaway.”
I shrug him off. I just want to remember her. One last time, I want to
remember her while still hoping to see her again.
Agloe
The speed limit drops from fifty-five to forty-five and then to thirty-five. We
cross some railroad tracks, and we’re in Roscoe. We drive slowly through a
sleepy downtown with a café, a clothing store, a dollar store, and a couple
boarded-up storefronts.
I lean forward and say, “I can imagine her in there.”
“Yeah,” Ben allows. “Man, I really don’t want to break into buildings. I don’t
think I would do well in New York prisons.”
The thought of exploring these buildings doesn’t strike me as particularly
scary, though, since the whole town seems deserted. Nothing’s open here. Past
downtown, a single road bisects the highway, and on that road sits Roscoe’s lone
neighborhood and an elementary school. Modest wood-frame houses are
dwarfed by the trees, which grow thick and tall here.
We turn onto a different highway, and the speed limit goes back up
incrementally, but Radar is driving slowly anyway. We haven’t gone a mile when
we see a dirt road on our left with no street sign to tell us its name.
“This may be it,” I say.
“That’s a driveway,” Ben answers, but Radar turns in anyway. But it does
seem to be a driveway, actually, cut into the hard-packed dirt. To our left, uncut
grass grows as high as the tires; I don’t see anything, although I worry that it’d
be easy for a person to hide anywhere in that field. We drive for a while and the
road dead-ends into a Victorian farmhouse. We turn around and head back up the
two-lane highway, farther north. The highway turns into Cat Hollow Road, and
we drive until we see a dirt road identical to the previous one, this time on the
right side of the street, leading to a crumbling barnlike structure with grayed
wood. Huge cylindrical bales of hay line the fields on either side of us, but the
grass has begun to grow up again. Radar drives no faster than five miles an hour.
We are looking for something unusual. Some crack in the perfectly idyllic
landscape.
“Do you think that could have been the Agloe General Store?” I ask.

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“That barn?”
“Yeah.”
“I dunno,” Radar says. “Did general stores look like barns?”
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

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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

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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.”
“You, too. I mean, without you, how would I have ever known how fat I
was?” Lacey gets up and stomps off, her footfalls vibrating through the
crumbling floor. Ben follows. I look over, and Radar has stood up, too.
“I never knew you until I got to know you through your clues,” he says. “I
like the clues more than I like you.”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Margo asks me. Radar doesn’t answer.
He just leaves.
I should, too, of course. They’re my friends—more than Margo, certainly.
But I have questions. As Margo stands and starts to walk back toward her
cubicle, I start with the obvious one. “Why are you acting like such a brat?”
She spins around and grabs a fistful of my shirt and shouts into my face,
“Where do you get off showing up here without any kind of warning?!”
“How could I have warned you when you completely dropped off the face of
the planet?!” I see a long blink and know she has no response for this, so I keep
going. I’m so pissed at her. For . . . for, I don’t know. Not being the Margo I had
expected her to be. Not being the Margo I thought I had finally imagined
correctly. “I thought for sure there was a good reason why you never got in touch
with anyone after that night. And . . . this is your good reason? So you can live
like a bum?”
She lets go of my shirt and pushes away from me. “Now who’s being a brat?
I left the only way you can leave. You pull your life off all at once—like a Band-
Aid. And then you get to be you and Lace gets to be Lace and everybody gets to
be everybody and I get to be me.”
“Except I didn’t get to be me, Margo, because I thought you were dead. For
the longest time. So I had to do all kinds of crap that I would never do.”
She screams at me now, pulling herself up by my shirt so she can get in my

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face. “Oh, bullshit. You didn’t come here to make sure I was okay. You came
here because you wanted to save poor little Margo from her troubled little self,
so that I would be oh-so-thankful to my knight in shining armor that I would
strip my clothes off and beg you to ravage my body.”
“Bullshit!” I shout, which it mostly is. “You were just playing with us,
weren’t you? You just wanted to make sure that even after you left to go have
your fun, you were still the axis we spun around.”
She’s screaming back, louder than I thought possible. “You’re not even
pissed at me, Q! You’re pissed at this idea of me you keep inside your brain from
when we were little!”
She tries to turn away from me, but I grab her shoulders and hold her in front
of me and say, “Did you ever even think about what your leaving meant? About
Ruthie? About me or Lacey or any of the other people who cared about you? No.
Of course you didn’t. Because if it doesn’t happen to you, it doesn’t happen at
all. Isn’t that it, Margo? Isn’t it?”
She doesn’t fight me now. She just slumps her shoulders, turns, and walks
back to her office. She kicks down both of the Plexiglas walls, and they clamor
against the desk and chair before sliding onto the ground. “SHUT UP SHUT UP
YOU ASSHOLE.”
“Okay,” I say. Something about Margo completely losing her temper allows
me to regain mine. I try to talk like my mom. “I’ll shut up. We’re both upset.
Lots of, uh, unresolved issues on my side.”
She sits down in the desk chair, her feet on what had been the wall of her
office. She’s looking into a corner of the barn. At least ten feet between us.
“How the hell did you even find me?”
“I thought you wanted us to,” I answer. My voice is so small I’m surprised
she even hears me, but she spins the chair to glare at me.
“I sure as shit did not.”
“‘Song of Myself,’” I say. “Guthrie took me to Whitman. Whitman took me
to the door. The door took me to the minimall. We figured out how to read the
painted-over graffiti. I didn’t understand ‘paper towns’; it can also mean
subdivisions that never got built, and so I thought you had gone to one and were
never coming back. I thought you were dead in one of these places, that you had
killed yourself and wanted me to find you for whatever reason. So I went to a
bunch of them, looking for you. But then I matched the map in the gift shop to
the thumbtack holes. I started reading the poem more closely, figured out you
weren’t running probably, just holed up, planning. Writing in that notebook. I

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found Agloe from the map, saw your comment on the talk page of Omnictionary,
skipped graduation, and drove here.”
She brushes her hair down, but it isn’t long enough to fall over her face
anymore. “I hate this haircut,” she says. “I wanted to look different, but—it
looks ridiculous.”
“I like it,” I say. “It frames your face nicely.”
“I’m sorry I was being so bitchy,” she says. “You just have to understand—I
mean, you guys walk in here out of nowhere and you scare the shit out of me—”
“You could have just said, like, ‘Guys, you are scaring the shit out of me,’” I
said.
She scoffs. “Yeah, right, ’cause that’s the Margo Roth Spiegelman everybody
knows and loves.” Margo is quiet for a moment, and then says, “I knew I
shouldn’t have said that on Omnictionary. I just thought it would be funny for
them to find it later. I thought the cops might trace it somehow, but not soon
enough. There’s like a billion pages on Omnictionary or whatever. I never
thought . . .”
“What?”
“I thought about you a lot, to answer your question. And Ruthie. And my
parents. Of course, okay? Maybe I am the most horribly self-centered person in
the history of the world. But God, do you think I would have done it if I didn’t
need to?” She shakes her head. Now, finally, she leans toward me, elbows on
knees, and we are talking. At a distance, but still. “I couldn’t figure out any other
way that I could leave without getting dragged back.”
“I’m happy you’re not dead,” I say to her.
“Yeah. Me, too,” she says. She smirks, and it’s the first time I’ve seen that
smile I have spent so much time missing. “That’s why I had to leave. As much as
life can suck, it always beats the alternative.”
My phone rings. It’s Ben. I answer it.
“Lacey wants to talk to Margo,” he tells me.
I walk over to Margo, hand her the phone, and linger there as she sits with
her shoulders hunched, listening. I can hear the noises coming through the
phone, and then I hear Margo cut her off and say, “Listen, I’m really sorry. I was
just so scared.” And then silence. Lacey starts talking again finally, and Margo
laughs, and says something. I feel like they should have some privacy, so I do
some exploring. Against the same wall as the office, but in the opposite corner of
the barn, Margo has set up a kind of bed—four forklift pallets beneath an orange
air mattress. Her small, neatly folded collection of clothes sits next to the bed on

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a pallet of its own. There’s a toothbrush and toothpaste, along with a large plastic
cup from Subway. Those items sit atop two books: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I can’t believe she’s been living like
this, this irreconcilable mix of tidy suburbanality and creepy decay. But then
again, I can’t believe how much time I wasted believing she was living any other
way.
“They’re staying at a motel in the park. Lace said to tell you they’re leaving
in the morning, with or without you,” Margo says from behind me. It is when
she says you and not us that I think for the first time of what comes after this.
“I’m mostly self-sufficient,” she says, standing next to me now. “There’s an
outhouse here, but it’s not in great shape, so I usually go to the bathroom at this
truck stop east of Roscoe. They have showers there, too, and the girls’ shower is
pretty clean because there aren’t a lot of female truckers. Plus, they have Internet
there. It’s like this is my house, and the truck stop is my beach house.” I laugh.
She walks past me and kneels down, looking inside the pallets beneath the
bed. She pulls out a flashlight and a square, thin piece of plastic. “These are the
only two things I’ve purchased in the whole month except gas and food. I’ve
only spent about three hundred dollars.” I take the square thing from her and
finally realize that it’s a battery-powered record player. “I brought a couple
albums,” she says. “I’m gonna get more in the City, though.”
“The City?”
“Yeah. I’m leaving for New York City today. Hence the Omnictionary thing.
I’m going to start really traveling. Originally, this was the day I was going to
leave Orlando—I was going to go to graduation and then do all of these
elaborate pranks on graduation night with you, and then I was going to leave the
next morning. But I just couldn’t take it anymore. I seriously could not take it for
one more hour. And when I heard about Jase—I was like, ‘I have it all planned;
I’m just changing the day.’ I’m sorry I scared you, though. I was trying not to
scare you, but that last part was so rushed. Not my best work.”
As dashed-together escape plans replete with clues go, I thought it was pretty
impressive. But mostly I was surprised that she’d wanted me involved in her
original plan, too. “Maybe you’ll fill me in,” I said, managing a smile. “I have,
you know, been wondering. What was planned and what wasn’t? What meant
what? Why the clues went to me, why you left, that kind of thing.”
“Um, okay. Okay. For that story, we have to start with a different story.” She
gets up and I follow her footsteps as she nimbly avoids the rotting patches of
floor. Returning to her office, she digs into the backpack and pulls out the black

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moleskin notebook. She sits down on the floor, her legs crossed, and pats a patch
of wood next to her. I sit. She taps the closed book. “So this,” she says, “this
goes back a long way. When I was in, like, fourth grade, I started writing a story
in this notebook. It was kind of a detective story.”
I think that if I grab this book from her, I can use it as blackmail. I can use it
to get her back to Orlando, and she can get a summer job and live in an
apartment till college starts, and at least we’ll have the summer. But I just listen.
“I mean, I don’t like to brag, but this is an unusually brilliant piece of
literature. Just kidding. It’s the retarded wish-fulfilling magical-thinking
ramblings of ten-year-old me. It stars this girl, named Margo Spiegelman, who is
just like ten-year-old me in every way except her parents are nice and rich and
buy her anything she wants. Margo has a crush on this boy named Quentin, who
is just like you in every way except all fearless and heroic and willing to die to
protect me and everything. Also, it stars Myrna Mountweazel, who is exactly
like Myrna Mountweazel except with magical powers. Like, for example, in the
story, anyone who pets Myrna Mountweazel finds it impossible to tell a lie for
ten minutes. Also, she can talk. Of course she can talk. Has a ten-year-old ever
written a book about a dog that can’t talk?”
I laugh, but I’m still thinking about ten-year-old Margo having a crush on
ten-year-old me.
“So, in the story,” she continues, “Quentin and Margo and Myrna
Mountweazel are investigating the death of Robert Joyner, whose death is
exactly like his real-life death except instead of having obviously shot himself in
the face, someone else shot him in the face. And the story is about us finding out
who did it.”
“Who did it?”
She laughs. “You want me to spoil the entire story for you?”
“Well,” I say, “I’d rather read it.” She pulls open the book and shows me a
page. The writing is indecipherable, not because Margo’s handwriting is bad, but
because on top of the horizontal lines of text, writing also goes vertically down
the page. “I write crosshatch,” she says. “Very hard for non-Margo readers to
decode. So, okay, I’m going to spoil the story for you, but first you have to
promise not to get mad.”
“Promise,” I say.
“It turns out that the crime was committed by Robert Joyner’s alcoholic ex-
wife’s sister’s brother, who was insane because he’d been possessed by the spirit
of an evil ancient Egyptian house cat. Like I said, really top-notch storytelling.

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But anyway, in the story, you and me and Myrna Mountweazel go and confront
the killer, and he tries to shoot me, but you jump in front of the bullet, and you
die very heroically in my arms.”
I laugh. “Great. This story was all promising with the beautiful girl who has a
crush on me and the mystery and the intrigue, and then I get whacked.”
“Well, yeah.” She smiles. “But I had to kill you, because the only other
possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn’t really emotionally ready to write
about at ten.”
“Fair enough,” I say. “But in the revision, I want to get some action.”
“After you get shot up by the bad guy, maybe. A kiss before dying.”
“How kind of you.” I could stand up and go to her and kiss her. I could. But
there is still too much to be ruined.
“So anyway, I finished this story in fifth grade. A few years later, I decide
I’m going to run away to Mississippi. And then I write all my plans for this epic
event into this notebook on top of the old story, and then I finally do it—take
Mom’s car and put a thousand miles on it and leave these clues in the soup. I
didn’t even like the road trip, really—it was incredibly lonely— but I love
having done it, right? So I start crosshatching more schemes—pranks and ideas
for matching up certain girls with certain guys and huge TPing campaigns and
more secret road trips and whatever else. The notebook is half full by the start of
junior year, and that’s when I decide that I’m going to do one more thing, one
big thing, and then leave.”
She’s about to start talking again, but I have to stop her. “I guess I’m
wondering if it was the place or the people. Like, what if the people around you
had been different?”
“How can you separate those things, though? The people are the place is the
people. And anyway, I didn’t think there was anybody else to be friends with. I
thought everyone was either scared, like you, or oblivious, like Lacey. And th—”
“I’m not as scared as you think,” I say. Which is true. I only realize it’s true
after saying it. But still.
“I’m getting to that,” she says, almost whiningly. “So when I’m a freshman,
Gus takes me to the Osprey—” I tilt my head, confused. “The minimall. And I
start going there by myself all the time, just hanging out and writing plans. And
by last year, all the plans started to be about this last escape. And I don’t know if
it’s because I was reading my old story as I went, but I put you into the plans
early on. The idea was that we were going to do all these things together—like
break into SeaWorld, that was in the original plan—and I was going to push you

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toward being a badass. This one night would, like, liberate you. And then I could
disappear and you’d always remember me for that.
“So this plan eventually gets like seventy pages long, and then it’s about to
happen, and the plan has come together really well.
But then I find out about Jase, and I just decide to leave. Immediately. I don’t
need to graduate. What’s the point of graduating? But first I have to tie up loose
ends. So all that day in school I have my notebook out, and I’m trying like crazy
to adapt the plan to Becca and Jase and Lacey and everyone who wasn’t a friend
to me like I thought they were, trying to come up with ideas for letting everyone
know just how pissed off I am before I ditch them forever.
“But I still wanted to do it with you; I still liked that idea of maybe being
able to create in you at least an echo of the kick-ass hero of my little-kid story.
“And then you surprise me,” she says. “You had been a paper boy to me all
these years—two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but
still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real. And it
ends up being so odd and fun and magical that I go back to my room in the
morning and I just miss you. I want to come over and hang out and talk, but I’ve
already decided to leave, so I have to leave. And then at the last second, I have
this idea to will you the Osprey. To leave it for you so that it can help you make
even further progress in the field of not-being-such-a-scaredy-cat.
“So, yeah. That’s it. I come up with something real quick. Tape the Woody
poster to the back of the blinds, circle the song on the record, highlight those two
lines from “Song of Myself” in a different color than I’d highlighted stuff when I
was actually reading it. Then after you leave for school, I climb in through your
window and put the scrap of newspaper in your door. Then I go to the Osprey
that morning, partly because I just don’t feel ready to leave yet, and partly
because I want to clean the place up for you. I mean, the thing is, I didn’t want
you to worry. That’s why I painted over the graffiti; I didn’t know you’d be able
to see through it. I ripped off the pages of the desk calendar I’d been using, and I
took down the map, too, which I’d had up there ever since I saw that it contained
Agloe. Then because I’m tired and don’t have anyplace to go, I sleep there. I end
up there for two nights, actually, just trying to get my courage up, I guess. And
also, I don’t know, I thought maybe you would find it really quickly somehow.
Then I go. Took two days to get here. I’ve been here since.”
She seemed finished, but I had one more question. “And why here of all
places?”
“A paper town for a paper girl,” she says. “I read about Agloe in this book of

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‘amazing facts’ when I was ten or eleven. And I never stopped thinking about it.
The truth is that whenever I went up to the top of the SunTrust Building—
including that last time with you—I didn’t really look down and think about how
everything was made of paper. I looked down and thought about how I was
made of paper. I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else. And here’s
the thing about it. People love the idea of a paper girl. They always have. And
the worst thing is that I loved it, too. I cultivated it, you know?
“Because it’s kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could
never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper
creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the
people who created the dot could ever have imagined. I thought maybe the paper
cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to
tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else:
‘You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back.’”
“That graffiti,” I said. “God, Margo, I walked through so many of those
abandoned subdivisions looking for your body. I really thought—I really thought
you were dead.”
She gets up and searches around her backpack for a moment, and then
reaches over and grabs The Bell Jar, and reads to me.
“‘But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and
defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that
skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else,
deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.’” She sits back down next
to me, close, facing me, the fabric of our jeans touching without our knees
actually touching. Margo says, “I know what she’s talking about. The something
deeper and more secret. It’s like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault
lines where things don’t meet up right.”
“I like that,” I say. “Or it’s like cracks in the hull of a ship.”
“Right, right.”
“Brings you down eventually.”
“Exactly,” she says. We’re talking back and forth so fast now.
“I can’t believe you didn’t want me to find you.”
“Sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I’m impressed. Also, it’s nice to have
you here. You’re a good traveling companion.”
“Is that a proposal?” I ask.
“Maybe.” She smiles.
My heart has been fluttering around my chest for so long now that this

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variety of intoxication almost seems sustainable—but only almost. “Margo, if
you just come home for the summer— my parents said you can live with us, or
you can get a job and an apartment for the summer, and then school will start,
and you’ll never have to live with your parents again.”
“It’s not just them. I’d get sucked right back in,” she says, “and I’d never get
out. It’s not just the gossip and the parties and all that crap, but the whole allure
of a life rightly lived—college and job and husband and babies and all that
bullshit.”
The thing is that I do believe in college, and jobs, and maybe even babies one
day. I believe in the future. Maybe it’s a character flaw, but for me it is a
congenital one. “But college expands your opportunities,” I say finally. “It
doesn’t limit them.”
She smirks. “Thank you, College Counselor Jacobsen,” she says, and then
changes the subject. “I kept thinking about you inside the Osprey. Whether you
would get used to it. Stop worrying about the rats.”
“I did,” I say. “I started to like it there. I spent prom night there, actually.”
She smiles. “Awesome. I imagined you would like it eventually.
It never got boring in the Osprey, but that was because I had to go home at
some point. When I got here, I did get bored. There’s nothing to do; I’ve read so
much since I got here. I got more and more nervous here, too, not knowing
anybody. And I kept waiting for that loneliness and nervousness to make me
want to go back. But it never did. It’s the one thing I can’t do, Q.”
I nod. I understand this. I imagine it is hard to go back once you’ve felt the
continents in your palm. But I still try one more time. “But what about after the
summer? What about college? What about the rest of your life?”
She shrugged. “What about it?”
“Aren’t you worried about, like, forever?”
“Forever is composed of nows,” she says. I have nothing to say to that; I am
just chewing through it when Margo says, “Emily Dickinson. Like I said, I’m
doing a lot of reading.”
I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily
Dickinson. Margo stands up, slings her backpack over one shoulder, and reaches
her hand down for me. “Let’s take a walk.” As we’re walking outside, Margo
asks for my phone. She punches in a number, and I start to walk away to let her
talk, but she grabs my forearm and keeps me with her. So I walk beside her out
into the field as she talks to her parents.
“Hey, it’s Margo. . . . I’m in Agloe, New York, with Quentin. . . . Uh. . . .

---

well, no, Mom, I’m just trying to think of a way to answer your question
honestly. . . . Mom, come on. . . . I don’t know, Mom . . . I decided to move to a
fictitious place. That’s what happened. . . . Yeah, well, I don’t think I’m headed
that way, regardless. . . . Can I talk to Ruthie? . . . Hey, buddy. . . . Yeah, well, I
loved you first. . . . Yeah, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I thought—I don’t know
what I thought, Ruthie, but anyway it was a mistake and I’ll call now. I may not
call Mom, but I’ll call you. . . . Wednesdays? . . . You’re busy on Wednesdays.
Hmm. Okay. What’s a good day for you? . . . Tuesday it is. . . . Yeah, every
Tuesday. . . . Yeah, including this Tuesday.” Margo closes her eyes tight, her
teeth clenched. “Okay, Ruthers, can you put Mom back on? . . . I love you,
Mom. I’ll be okay. I swear. . . . Yeah, okay, you, too. Bye.”
She stops walking and closes the phone but holds it a minute. I can see her
fingertips pinkening with the tightness of her grip, and then she drops it onto the
ground. Her scream is short but deafening, and in its wake I am aware for the
first time of Agloe’s abject silence. “It’s like she thinks my job is to please her,
and that should be my dearest wish, and when I don’t please her—I get shut out.
She changed the locks. That’s the first thing she said. Jesus.”
“Sorry,” I say, pushing aside some knee-high yellow-green grass to pick up
the phone. “Nice to talk to Ruthie, though?”
“Yeah, she’s pretty adorable. I kind of hate myself for—you know—not
talking to her.”
“Yeah,” I say. She shoves me playfully.
“You’re supposed to make me feel better, not worse!” she says. “That’s your
whole gig!”
“I didn’t realize my job was to please you, Mrs. Spiegelman.”
She laughs. “Ooh, the Mom comparison. What a burn. But fair enough. So
how have you been? If Ben is dating Lacey, surely you are having nightly orgies
with dozens of cheerleaders.”
We walk slowly through the uneven dirt of this field. It doesn’t look big, but
as we walk, I realize that we do not seem to be getting closer to the stand of trees
in the distance. I tell her about leaving graduation, about the miraculous spinning
of the Dreidel. I tell her about prom, Lacey’s fight with Becca, and my night in
the Osprey. “That was the night I really knew you’d definitely been there,” I tell
her. “That blanket still smelled like you.”
And when I say that her hand brushes up against mine, and I just grab hers
because it feels like there is less to ruin now. She looks at me. “I had to leave. I
didn’t have to scare you and that was stupid and I should have done a better job

---

leaving, but I did have to leave. Do you see that yet?”
“Yeah,” I say, “but I think you can come back now. I really do.”
“No, you don’t,” she answers, and she’s right. She can see it in my face—I
understand now that I can’t be her and she can’t be me. Maybe Whitman had a
gift I don’t have. But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt,
because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is
me.
I stomp down some grass and sit. She lies down next to me, her backpack a
pillow. I lay back, too. She digs a couple of books out of her backpack and hands
them to me so I can have a pillow, too. Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson and