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Leaves of Grass. “I had two copies,” she says, smiling.
“It’s a hell of a good poem,” I tell her. “You couldn’t have picked a better
one.”
“Really, it was an impulse decision that morning. I remembered the bit about
the doors and thought that was perfect. But then when I got here I reread it. I
hadn’t read it since sophomore English, and yeah, I liked it. I tried to read a
bunch of poetry. I was trying to figure out—like, what was it that surprised me
about you that night? And for a long time I thought it was when you quoted T. S.
Eliot.”
“But it wasn’t,” I say. “You were surprised by the size of my biceps and my
graceful window-exiting.”
She smirks. “Shut up and let me compliment you, dillhole. It wasn’t the
poetry or your biceps. What surprised me was that, in spite of your anxiety
attacks and everything, you were like the Quentin in my story. I mean, I’ve been
crosshatching over that story for years now, and whenever I write over it, I also
read that page, and I would always laugh, like—don’t get offended, but, like,
‘God I can’t believe I used to think Quentin Jacobsen was like a superhot,
superloyal defender of justice.’ But then—you know—you kind of were.”
I could turn on my side, and she might turn on her side, too. And then we
could kiss. But what’s the point of kissing her now, anyway? It won’t go
anywhere. We are both staring at the cloudless sky. “Nothing ever happens like
you imagine it will,” she says.
The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with
its illusion of depth, pulling me up. “Yeah, that’s true,” I say. But then after I
think about it for a second, I add, “But then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing

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ever happens at all.” Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside
someone else. I could never have imagined Margo’s anger at being found, or the
story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world
being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.
She turns over toward me and puts her head onto my shoulder, and we lie
there, as I long ago imagined lying on the grass at SeaWorld. It has taken us
thousands of miles and many days, but here we are: her head on my shoulder,
her breath on my neck, the fatigue thick inside both of us. We are now as I
wished we could be then.
When I wake up, the dying light of the day makes everything seem to matter,
from the yellowing sky to the stalks of grass above my head, waving in slow
motion like a beauty queen. I roll onto my side and see Margo Roth Spiegelman
on her hands and knees a few feet from me, the jeans tight against her legs. It
takes me a moment to realize that she is digging. I crawl over to her and start to
dig beside her, the dirt beneath the grass dry as dust in my fingers. She smiles at
me. My heart beats at the speed of sound.
“What are we digging to?” I ask her.
“That’s not the right question,” she says. “The question is, Who are we
digging for?”
“Okay, then. Who are we digging for?”
“We are digging graves for Little Margo and Little Quentin and puppy Myrna
Mountweazel and poor dead Robert Joyner,” she says.
“I can get behind those burials, I think,” I say. The dirt is clumpy and dry,
drilled through with the paths of 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

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—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

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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

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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.

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