Paper Towns pdfdrive com

A message from Margo Roth Spiegelman: Your friendship with her—it sleeps
with the fishes
Margo hid the fish between folded pairs of shorts in Becca’s closet. I could
hear footsteps upstairs, and tapped Margo on the shoulder and looked at her, my
eyes bulging. She just smiled and leisurely pulled out the spray paint. I
scrambled out the window, and then turned back to watch as Margo leaned over
the desk and calmly shook the spray paint. In an elegant motion—the kind you
associate with calligraphy or Zorro—she spray-painted the letter M onto the wall
above the desk.
She reached her hands up to me, and I pulled her through the window. She
was just starting to stand when we heard a high-pitched voice shout,
“DWIGHT!” I grabbed the clothes and took off running, Margo behind me.
I heard, but did not see, the front door of Becca’s house swing open, but I
didn’t stop or turn around, not when a booming voice shouted “HALT!” and not
even when I heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being pumped.
I heard Margo mumble “gun” behind me—she didn’t sound upset about it
exactly; she was just making an observation—and then rather than walk around
Becca’s hedge, I dove over it headfirst. I’m not sure how I intended to land—
maybe an artful somersault or something—but at any rate, I spilled onto the
asphalt of the road, landing on my left shoulder. Fortunately, Jase’s bundle of
clothes hit the ground first, softening the blow.
I swore, and before I could even start to stand, I felt Margo’s hands pulling
me up, and then we were in the car and I was driving in reverse with the lights
off, which is how I nearly came to run over the mostly naked starting shortstop
of the Winter Park High School Wildcats baseball team. Jase was running very
fast, but he didn’t seem to be running anyplace in particular. I felt another stab of
regret as we backed up past him, so I rolled the window halfway down and threw

---

his polo in his general direction. Fortunately, I don’t think he saw either Margo
or me, and he had no reason to recognize the minivan since—and I don’t want to
sound bitter or anything by dwelling on this—I can’t drive it to school.
“Why the hell would you do that?” Margo asked as I turned on the lights and,
driving forward now, began to navigate the suburban labyrinth back toward the
interstate.
“I felt bad for him.”
“For him? Why? Because he’s been cheating on me for six weeks? Because
he’s probably given me god-only-knows-what disease? Because he’s a
disgusting idiot who will probably be rich and happy his whole life, thus proving
the absolute unfairness of the cosmos?”
“He just looked sort of desperate,” I said.
“Whatever. We’re going to Karin’s house. It’s on Pennsylvania, by the ABC
Liquors.”
“Don’t be pissed at me,” I said. “I just had a guy point a freaking shotgun at
me for helping you, so don’t be pissed at me.”
“I’M NOT PISSED AT YOU!” Margo shouted, and then punched the
dashboard.
“Well, you’re screaming.”
“I thought maybe—whatever. I thought maybe he wasn’t cheating.”
“Oh.”
“Karin told me at school. And I guess a lot of people have known for a long
time. And no one told me until Karin. I thought maybe she was just trying to stir
up drama or something.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Yeah. Yeah. I can’t believe I even care.”
“My heart is really pounding,” I said.
“That’s how you know you’re having fun,” Margo said.
But it didn’t feel like fun; it felt like a heart attack. I pulled over into a 7-
Eleven parking lot and held my finger to my jugular vein while watching the : in
the digital clock blink every second. When I turned to Margo, she was rolling
her eyes at me. “My pulse is dangerously high,” I explained.
“I don’t even remember the last time I got excited about something like that.
The adrenaline in the throat and the lungs expanding.”
“In through the nose out through the mouth,” I answered her.
“All your little anxieties. It’s just so . . .”
“Cute?”

---

“Is that what they’re calling childish these days?” She smiled.
Margo crawled into the backseat and came back with a purse. How much shit
did she put back there? I thought. She opened up the purse and pulled out a full
bottle of nail polish so darkly red it was almost black. “While you calm down,
I’m going to paint my nails,” she said, smiling up at me through her bangs. “You
just take your time.”
And so we sat there, she with her nail polish balanced on the dash, and me
with a shaky finger on the pulse of myself. It was a good color of nail polish, and
Margo had nice fingers, thinner and bonier than the rest of her, which was all
curves and soft edges. She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with
your own. I remembered them against my hip bone in Wal-Mart, which felt like
days ago. My heartbeat slowed. And I tried to tell myself: Margo’s right. There’s
nothing out here to be afraid of, not in this little city on this quiet night.

---