John Green: Paper Towns

“Uh-huh,” I answered dubiously, although in point of fact I’d always figured it was Margo who had stopped Chuck Parson and his ilk from screwing with us.

She blinked. She’d even painted her eyelids. “Q,” she said, “we have to go.”

And so I went. I slid out the window, and we ran along the side of my house, heads down, until we opened the doors of the minivan. Margo whispered not to close the doors — too much noise — so with the doors open, I put it in neutral, pushed off the cement with my foot, and then let the minivan roll down the driveway. We rolled slowly past a couple houses before I turned on the engine and the headlights. We closed the doors, and then I drove through the serpentine streets of Jefferson Park’s endlessness, the houses all still new-looking and plastic, like a toy village housing tens of thousands of real people.

Margo started talking. “The thing is they don’t even really care ; they just feel like my exploits make them look bad. Just now, do you know what he said? He said, ‘I don’t care if you screw up your life, but don’t embarrass us in front of the Jacobsens — they’re our friends .’ Ridiculous. And you have no idea how hard they’ve made it to get out of that goddamned house. You know how in prison-escape movies they put bundled-up clothes under the blankets to make it look like there’s a person in there?” I nodded. “Yeah, well, Mom put a goddamned baby monitor in my room so she could hear my sleep-breathing all night. So I just had to pay Ruthie five bucks to sleep in my room, and then I put bundled-up clothes in her room.” Ruthie is Margo’s little sister. “It’s Mission: Impossible shit now. Used to be I could just sneak out like a regular goddamned American — just climb out the window and jump off the roof. But God, these days, it’s like living in a fascist dictatorship.”

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

“Well, first we’re going to Publix. Because for reasons I’ll explain later, I need you to go grocery shopping for me. And then to Wal-Mart.”

“What, we’re just gonna go on a grand tour of every commercial establishment in Central Florida?” I asked.

“Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.” I pulled into the Publix then, the parking lot almost entirely empty, and parked.

“Listen,” she said, “how much money do you have on you right now?”

“Zero dollars and zero cents,” I answered. I turned off the ignition and looked over at her. She wriggled a hand into a pocket of her tight, dark jeans and pulled out several hundred-dollar bills. “Fortunately, the good Lord has provided,” she said.

“What the hell?” I asked.

“Bat mitzvah money, bitch. I’m not allowed to access the account, but I know my parents’ password because they use ‘myrnamountw3az3l’ for everything. So I made a withdrawal.” I tried to blink away the awe, but she saw the way I was looking at her and smirked at me. “Basically,” she said, “this is going to be the best night of your life.”

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.

And so in the parking lot of Publix she said, “So, right. I made you a list. If you have any questions, just call my cell. Listen, that reminds me, I took the liberty of putting some supplies in the back of the van earlier.”

“What, like, before I agreed to all this?”

“Well, yes. Technically yes. Anyway, just call me if you have any questions, but with the Vaseline, you want the one that’s bigger than your fist. There’s like a Baby Vaseline, and then there’s a Mommy Vaseline, and then there’s a big fat Daddy of a Vaseline, and that’s the one you want. If they don’t have that, then get, like, three of the Mommies.” She handed me the list and a hundred-dollar bill and said, “That should cover it.”

Margo’s list:

3 whole Catfish, Wrapped separately

Veet (It’s for Shaving your legs Only you don’t Need A razor

It’s with all the Girly cosmetic stuff)

Vaseline

six-pack, Mountain Dew

One dozen Tulips

one Bottle Of water

Tissues

one Can of blue Spray paint

“Interesting capitalization,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m a big believer in random capitalization. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle.”

Now, I’m not sure what you’re supposed to say to the checkout woman at twelve-thirty in the morning when you put thirteen pounds of catfish, Veet, the fat-daddy-size tub of Vaseline, a six-pack of Mountain Dew, a can of blue spray paint, and a dozen tulips on the conveyor belt. But here’s what I said: “This isn’t as weird as it looks.”

The woman cleared her throat but didn’t look up. “Still weird,” she muttered.

“I really don’t want to get in any trouble,” I told Margo back in the minivan as she used the bottled water to wipe the black paint off her face with the tissues. She’d only needed the makeup, apparently, to get out of the house. “In my admission letter from Duke it actually explicitly says that they won’t take me if I get arrested.”

“You’re a very anxious person, Q.”

“Let’s just please not get in trouble,” I said. “I mean, I want to have fun and everything, but not at the expense of, like, my future.”

She looked up at me, her face mostly revealed now, and she smiled just the littlest bit. “It amazes me that you can find all that shit even remotely interesting.”

“Huh?”

“College: getting in or not getting in. Trouble: getting in or not getting in. School: getting A’s or getting D’s. Career: having or not having. House: big or small, owning or renting. Money: having or not having. It’s all so boring.”

I started to say something, to say that she obviously cared a little, because she had good grades and was going to the University of Florida’s honors program next year, but she just said, “Wal-Mart.”

We entered Wal-Mart together and picked up that thing from infomercials called The Club, which locks a car’s steering wheel into place. As we walked through the Juniors department, I asked Margo, “Why do we need The Club?”

Margo managed to speak in her usual manic soliloquy without answering my question. “Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement. There was no planning for a career. There was no planning . No time for planning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future, and so they spent more time thinking about it. About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future — you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”