John Green - Paper Towns

“Need any help?” I asked. Radar nodded toward the living room, where the tables on either side of the couch held three sets of unnested black Santa nesting dolls. As I renested them, I couldn’t help but notice that they were really very beautiful— hand-painted and extraordinarily detailed. I didn’t say this to Radar, though, for fear that he would beat me to death with the black Santa lamp in the living room.

I carried the matryoshka dolls into the guest bedroom, where Radar was carefully stashing Santas into a dresser. “You know, when you see them all together, it really does make you question the way we imagine our myths.”

Radar rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I always find myself questioning the way I imagine my myths when I’m eating my Lucky Charms every morning with a goddamned black Santa spoon.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder spinning me around. It was Ben, his feet fidgeting in fast-motion like he needed to pee or something. “We kissed. Like, she kissed me. About ten minutes ago. On Radar’s parents’ bed.”

“That’s disgusting,” Radar said. “Don’t make out in my parents’ bed.”

“Wow, I figured you’d already gotten past that,” I said. “What with you being such a pimp and everything.”

“Shut up, bro. I’m freaked out,” he said, looking at me, his eyes almost crossed. “I don’t think I’m very good.”

“At what?”

“At kissing. And, I mean, she’s done a lot more kissing than me over the years. I don’t want to suck so bad she dumps me. Girls dig you,” he said to me, which was at best true only if you defined the word girls as “girls in the marching band.” “Bro, I’m asking for advice.”

I was tempted to bring up all Ben’s endless blather about the various ways in which he would rock various bodies, but I just said, “As far as I can tell, there are two basic rules: 1. Don’t bite anything without permission, and 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it’s very powerful, and should be used sparingly.”

Ben’s eyes suddenly grew bright with panic. I winced, and said, “She’s standing behind me, isn’t she?”

“‘The human tongue is like wasabi,’” Lacey mimicked in a deep, goofy voice that I hoped didn’t really resemble mine.

I wheeled around. “I actually think Ben’s tongue is like sunscreen,” she said. “It’s good for your health and should be applied liberally.”

“I just threw up in my mouth,” Radar said.

“Lacey, you just kind of took away my will to go on,” I added.

“I wish I could stop imagining that,” Radar said.

I said, “The very idea is so offensive that it’s actually illegal to say the words ‘Ben Starling’s tongue’ on television.”

“The penalty for violating that law is either ten years in prison or one Ben Starling tongue bath,” Radar said.

“Everyone,” I said.

“Chooses,” Radar said, smiling.

“Prison,” we finished together.

And then Lacey kissed Ben in front of us. “Oh God,” Radar said, waving his arms in front of his face. “Oh, God. I’m blind. I’m blind.”

“Please stop,” I said. “You’re upsetting the black Santas.”

The party ended up in the formal living room on the second floor of Radar’s house, all twenty of us. I leaned against a wall, my head inches from a black Santa portrait painted on velvet. Radar had one of those sectional couches, and everyone was crowded onto it. There was beer in a cooler by the TV, but no one was drinking. Instead, they were telling stories about one another. I’d heard most of them before — band camp stories and Ben Starling stories and first kiss stories — but Lacey hadn’t heard any of them, and anyway, they were still entertaining.

I stayed mostly out of it until Ben said, “Q, how are we going to graduate?”

I smirked. “Naked but for our robes,” I said.

“Yes!” Ben sipped a Dr Pepper.

“I’m not even bringing clothes, so I don’t wuss out,” Radar said.

“Me neither! Q, swear not to bring clothes.”

I smiled. “Duly sworn,” I said.

“I’m in!” said our friend Frank. And then more and more of the guys got behind the idea. The girls, for some reason, were resistant.

Radar said to Angela, “Your refusal to do this makes me question the whole foundation of our love.”

“You don’t get it,” Lacey said. “It’s not that we’re afraid . It’s just that we already have our dresses picked out.”

Angela pointed at Lacey. “ Exactly .” Angela added, “Y’all better hope it’s not windy.”

“I hope it is windy,” Ben said. “The world’s largest balls benefit from fresh air.”

Lacey put a hand to her face, ashamed. “You’re a challenging boyfriend,” she said. “Rewarding, but challenging.” We laughed.

This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened — the stories on my mind weren’t that funny.

I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them — it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

I left just before midnight. Some people were staying later, but it was my curfew, and plus I didn’t feel like staying. Mom was half asleep on the couch, but she perked up when she saw me. “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was pretty chill.”

“Just like you,” she said, smiling. This sentiment struck me as hilarious, but I didn’t say anything. She stood up and pulled me into her, kissing me on the cheek. “I really like being your mom,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

I went to bed with the Whitman, flipping to the part I’d liked before, where he spends all the time hearing the opera and the people.

After all that hearing, he writes, “I am exposed. . cut by bitter and poisoned hail.” That was perfect, I thought: you listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you’re trying to listen to.

Walking through pseudovisions and trying to listen to her does not crack the Margo Roth Spiegelman case so much as it cracks me. Pages later — hearing and exposed — Whitman starts to write about all the travel he can do by imagining, and lists all the places he can visit while loafing on the grass. “My palms cover continents,” he writes.

I kept thinking about maps, like the way sometimes when I was a kid I would look at atlases, and just the looking was kind of like being somewhere else. This is what I had to do. I had to hear and imagine my way into her map.

But hadn’t I been trying to do that? I looked up at the maps above my computer. I had tried to plot her possible travels, but just as the grass stood for too much, so Margo stood for too much. It seemed impossible to pin her down with maps. She was too small and the space covered by the maps too big. They were more than a waste of time — they were the physical representation of the total fruitlessness of all of it, my absolute inability to develop the kinds of palms that cover continents, to have the kind of mind that correctly imagines.

I got up and walked over to the maps and tore them off the wall, the pins and tacks flying out with the paper and falling to the ground. I balled up the maps and threw them in the garbage can. On my way back to bed I stepped on a tack, like an idiot, and even though I was annoyed and exhausted and out of pseudovisions and ideas, I had to pick up all the thumbtacks scattered around the carpet so I didn’t step on them later. I just wanted to punch the wall, but I had to pick up those stupid goddamned thumbtacks. When I finished, I got back into bed and socked my pillow, my teeth clenched.