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ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.
she was the most fantastically gorgeous creature that God had ever created.
Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.
I’d tried telling Ben that “honeybunny” sounded more sexist and lame than retro-cool, but he refused to abandon the practice.
IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD’S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.”
me about their days dealing with people who had been raised less brilliantly.
The thing about Margo Roth Spiegelman is that really all I could ever do was let her talk, and then when she stopped talking encourage her to go on, due to the facts that 1. I was incontestably in love with her, and 2. She was absolutely unprecedented in every way, and 3. She never really asked me any questions, so the only way to avoid silence was to keep her talking.
Yeah. I’m a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle.”
She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own.
Everything’s uglier close up,” she said. “Not you,” I answered before thinking better of it.
Clues everywhere. The day she ran away to Mississippi, she ate alphabet soup and left exactly four letters in her soup bowl: An M, an I, an S, and a P. She was disappointed when we didn’t piece it together, although as I told her when she finally returned: ‘How can we find you when all we know is Mississippi? It’s a big state, Margo!’”
No,” I said. “It wasn’t that, I don’t think. Not just that, anyway. She kind of hates Orlando; she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy. I think she just wanted a vacation from that.”
But on the back, Woody Guthrie was staring at me, a cigarette hanging out of his lips, holding a guitar that said THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.
I’d looked right past the slim volume on the bottom shelf, wedged between two yearbooks. Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. I pulled out the book. There was a photograph of Whitman on the cover, his light eyes staring back at me.
I guess she told Jase like two days before she left that New York was the only place in America where a person could actually live a halfway livable life. Maybe she was just saying it. I don’t know.”
It’s not poetry. It’s not metaphor. It’s instructions. We are supposed to go to Margo’s room and unscrew the lock from the door and unscrew the door itself from its jamb.”
as I swung it, I saw a tiny piece of paper—about the size of my thumbnail—flutter down from the door’s top hinge. Typical Margo. Why
YOU WILL GO TO THE PAPER TOWNS AND YOU WILL NEVER COME BACK
Paper towns=pseudovisions. I think she wants me to find her body. Because she thinks I can handle it.
The only teenaged guy in America who dreams of sleeping with girls, and just sleeping with them.
I’ve wanted to kiss you every single day for the last three years,”
Hey, I thought of something last night. The little holes in that wall in the strip mall—maybe a map that plotted points with thumbtacks?
The town was paper, but the memories were not.
It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.
Leaving feels too good, once you leave.
There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.
What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person.
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
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Maybe I am the most horribly self-centered person in the history of the world.
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.
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.
