The John Green Collection (80 page)

I assume he means his shoulder as I race toward him, but then he stands up, and I’m looking at a Ben-high crack in the particleboard. I start kicking at it, and the crack spreads horizontally, and then Radar and I get our fingers inside the crack and start tugging. I squint to keep the sweat from burning my eyes, and pull with all my force back and forth until the crack starts to make a jagged opening. Radar and I urge it on with silent work, until eventually he has to take a break and Ben replaces him. Finally we are able to punch a big chunk of the board into the minimall. I climb in feetfirst, landing blindly onto what feels like a stack of papers.

The hole we’ve carved into this building gives a little light, but I can’t even make out the dimensions of the room, or whether there is a ceiling. The air in here is so stale and hot that inhaling and exhaling feel identical.

I turn around and my chin hits Ben’s forehead. I find myself whispering, even though there’s no reason to. “Do you have a—”

“No,” he whispers back before I can finish. “Radar, did you bring a flashlight?”

I hear Radar coming through the hole. “I have one on my key chain. It’s not much, though.”

The light comes on, and I still can’t see very well, but I can tell we’ve stepped into a big room filled with a labyrinth of metal shelves. The papers on the floor are pages from an old day-by-day calendar, the days scattered through the room, all of them yellowing and mouse-bit. I wonder if this might once have been a little bookstore, although it’s been decades since these shelves held anything but dust.

We fall into line behind Radar. I hear something creak above us, and we all stop moving. I try to swallow the panic. I can hear each of Radar’s and Ben’s breaths, their shuffling footsteps. I want out of here, but that could be Margo creaking for all I know. It could also be crack addicts.

“Just the building settling,” Radar whispers, but he seems less sure than usual. I stand there unable to move. After a moment, I hear Ben’s voice. “The last time I was this scared, I peed myself.”

“The last time I was this scared,” Radar says, “I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards.”

I made a feeble attempt. “The last time I was this scared I had to sleep in Mommy’s room.”

Ben chuckles. “Q, if I were you, I would get that scared Every. Single. Night.”

I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, and so we begin to explore. We walk through each row of shelves, finding nothing but a few copies of
Reader’s Digest
from the 1970s lying on the floor. After a while, I find my eyes adjusting to the darkness, and in the gray light we start walking in different directions at different speeds.

“No one leaves the room until everyone leaves the room,” I whisper, and they whisper
okay’s
back. I get to a side wall of the room and find the first evidence that someone has been here since everyone left. A jagged semicircular, waist-high tunnel has been cut out of the wall. The words TROLL HOLE have been spray-painted in orange above the hole, with a helpful arrow pointing down to the hole. “Guys,” Radar says, so loud that the spell breaks for just a moment. I follow his voice and find him standing by the opposite wall, his flashlight illuminating another Troll Hole. The graffiti doesn’t look particularly like Margo’s, but it’s hard to tell for sure. I’ve only seen her spray-paint a single letter.

Radar shines the light through the hole as I duck down and lead the way through. This room is entirely empty except for a rolled carpet in one corner. As the flashlight scans the floor, I can see glue stains on the concrete from where the carpet had once been. Across the room, I can just make out another hole cut into the wall, this time without the graffiti.

I crawl through that Troll Hole into a room lined with clothing racks, the stainless-steel poles still bolted into walls wine-stained with water damage. This room is better lit, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s because there are several holes in the roof—tar paper hangs down, and I can see places where the roof sags against exposed steel girders.

“Souvenir store,” Ben whispers in front of me, and I know immediately he is right.

In the middle of the room five display cases form a pentagon. The glass that once kept the tourists from their tourist crap has mostly been shattered and lies in shards around the cases. The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay.

Strangely, though, there’s still some merchandise: there’s a Mickey Mouse phone I recognize from some way back part of childhood. Moth-bit but still-folded SUNNY ORLANDO T-shirts are on display, splattered with broken glass. Beneath the glass cases, Radar finds a box filled with maps and old tourist brochures advertising Gator World and Crystal Gardens and fun houses that no longer exist. Ben waves me over and silently points out the green glass alligator tchotchke lying alone in the case, almost buried in the dust. This is the value of our souvenirs, I think: you can’t give this shit away.

We make our way back through the empty room and the shelved room and crawl through the last Troll Hole. This room looks like an office only without computers, and it appears to have been abandoned in a great hurry, like its employees were beamed up to space or something. Twenty desks sit in four rows. There are still pens on some of the desks, and they all feature oversize paper calendars lying flat against the desks. On each calendar, it is perpetually February of 1986. Ben pushes a cloth desk chair and it spins, creaking rhythmically. Thousands of Post-it notes advertising The Martin-Gale Mortgage Corp. are piled beside one desk in a rickety pyramid. Open boxes contain stacks of paper from old dot matrix printers, detailing the expenses and income of the Martin-Gale Mortgage Corp. On one of the desks, someone has stacked brochures for subdivisions into a single-story house of cards. I spread the brochures out, thinking that they may hold a clue, but no.

Radar fingers through the papers, whispering, “Nothing after 1986.” I start to go through the desk drawers. I find Q-tips and stickpins. Pens and pencils packed a dozen each in flimsy cardboard packaging with retro fonts and design. Napkins. A pair of golf gloves.

“Do you guys see anything,” I ask, “that gives any hint that anyone has been here in the last, say, twenty years?”

“Nothing but the Troll Holes,” Ben answers. It’s a tomb, everything wrapped in dust.

“So why did she lead us here?” asks Radar. We are speaking now.

“Dunno,” I say. She is clearly not here.

“There are some spots,” Radar says, “with less dust. There’s a dustless rectangle in the empty room, like something was moved. But I don’t know.”

“And there’s that painted part,” Ben says. Ben points and Radar’s flashlight shows me that a piece of the far wall in this office has been brushed over with white primer, like someone got the idea to remodel the place but abandoned the project after half an hour. I walk over to the wall, and up close, I can see that there’s some red graffiti behind the white paint. But I can only see occasional hints of the red paint bleeding through—not nearly enough to make anything out. There’s a can of primer up against the wall, open. I kneel down and push my finger into the paint. There’s a hard surface, but it breaks easily, and my finger comes up drenched in white. As the paint drips off my finger, I don’t say anything, because we’ve all come to the same conclusion, that someone has been here recently after all, and then the building creaks again and Radar drops the flashlight and curses.

“This is freaky,” he says.

“Guys,” Ben says. The flashlight is still on the ground, and I take a step back, to pick it up, but then I see Ben pointing. He is pointing at the wall. A trick of the indirect light has made the graffiti letters float up through the coat of primer, a ghost-gray print I recognize immediately as Margo’s.

 
I pick up the flashlight and shine it on the paint directly, and the message disappears. But when I shine it against a different part of the wall, I can read it again. “Shit,” Radar says under his breath.

And now Ben says, “Bro, can we go now? Because the last time I was this scared . . . screw it. I’m freaked out. There’s nothing funny about this shit.”

There’s nothing funny about this shit
is the closest Ben can come to the terror I feel, maybe. And it is close enough for me. I fast-walk toward the Troll Hole. I can feel the walls closing in on us.

Ben and Radar
dropped me off at my house—even though they’d skipped school, they couldn’t afford to skip band practice. I sat alone with “Song of Myself” for a long time, and for about the tenth time I tried to read the entire poem starting at the beginning, but the problem was that it’s like eighty pages long and weird and repetitive, and although I could understand each word of it, I couldn’t understand anything about it as a whole. Even though I knew the highlighted parts were probably the only important parts, I wanted to know whether it was a suicide-note kind of poem. But I couldn’t make sense of it.

I was ten confusing pages into the poem when I got so freaked out that I decided to call the detective. I dug his business card out of a pair of shorts in the laundry hamper. He answered on the second ring.

“Warren.”

“Hi, um, it’s Quentin Jacobsen. I’m a friend of Margo Roth Spiegelman?”

“Sure, kid, I remember you. What’s up?”

I told him about the clues and the minimall and about paper towns, about how she had called Orlando a paper town from the top of the SunTrust Building, but she hadn’t used it in the plural, about her telling me that she wouldn’t want to be found, about finding her underneath our bootsoles. He didn’t even tell me not to break into abandoned buildings, or ask why I was at an abandoned building at 10 A.M. on a school day. He just waited until I stopped talking and said, “Jesus, kid, you’re almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what’s your theory?”

“I’m worried that she might have, um, I guess killed herself.”

“It never crossed my mind this girl did anything but run off, kid. I can see your case, but you gotta remember she’s done this before. The clues, I mean. Adds drama to the whole enterprise. Honestly, kid, if she wanted you to find her—dead or alive—you already would have.”

“But don’t you—”

“Kid, the unfortunate thing is that she’s a legal adult with free will, you know? Let me give you some advice: let her come home. I mean, at some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”

 
I hung up with a bad taste in my mouth—I realized it wasn’t Warren’s poetry that would take me to Margo. I kept thinking about those lines at the end Margo had underlined: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” That grass, Whitman writes in the first few pages, is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” But where were the graves? Where were the paper towns?

I logged onto Omnictionary to see if it knew anything more about the phrase “paper towns” than I did. They had an extremely thoughtful and helpful entry created by a user named skunkbutt: “A Paper Town is a town that’s got a paper mill in it.” This was the shortcoming of Omnictionary: the stuff written by Radar was thorough and extremely helpful; the unedited work of skunkbutt left something to be desired. But when I searched the whole Web, I found something interesting buried forty entries down on a forum about real estate in Kansas.

 
A pseudovision! You will go to the pseudovisions and you will never come back. I took a deep breath and stared at the screen for a while.

The conclusion seemed inescapable. Even with everything broken and decided inside her, she couldn’t quite allow herself to disappear for good. And she had decided to leave her body—to leave it for me—in a shadow version of
our
subdivision, where her first strings had broken. She had said she didn’t want her body found by random kids—and it made sense that out of everyone she knew, she would pick me to find her. She wouldn’t be hurting me in a new way. I’d done it before. I had experience in the field.

I saw that Radar was online and was clicking over to talk to him when an IM from him popped up on my screen.

 
But I couldn’t calm down, so I called Ben from bed and told him my theory.

“Pretty morbid shit, bro. But she’s fine. It’s all part of some game she’s playing.”

“You’re being kind of cavalier about it.”

He sighed. “Whatever, it’s a little lame of her to, like, hijack the last three weeks of high school, you know? She’s got you all worried, and she’s got Lacey all worried, and prom is in like three days, you know? Can’t we just have a fun prom?”