Paper Towns

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 youeven 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 hermap.

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 a

I started trying to read the Whitman again, but between it and thinking of Margo, I felt exposed enough for this night. So finally I put the book down. I couldn’t be bothered to get up and turn off the light. I just stared at the wall, my blinks growing longer. And every time I opened my eyes, I saw where each map had been — the four holes marking the rectangle, and the pinholes seemingly randomly distributed inside the rectangle. I’d seen a similar pattern before. In the empty room above the rolled-up carpet.

A map. With plotted points.

27

I woke up with the sunlight just before seven on Saturday morning. Amazingly, Radar was online.

QTHERESURRECTION:I thought you’d be sleeping for sure.

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Nah, man. I’ve been up since six, expanding the article on this Malaysian pop singer.

Angela’s still in bed, though.

QTHERESURRECTION:Ooh she stayed over?

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Yeah but my purity is still intact.

Graduation night, though. . I think maybe.

QTHERESURRECTION: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?

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Like a route.

QTHERESURRECTION:Exactly.

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Wa

QTHERESURRECTION:Sounds good.

He called at ten. I picked him up in the minivan and then we drove to Ben’s house, figuring that a surprise attack would be the only way to wake him up. But even singing “You Are My Sunshine” outside his window only resulted in him opening the window and spitting at us. “I’m not doing anything until noon,” he said authoritatively.

So it was just Radar and me on the drive out. He talked a little about Angela and how much he liked her and how weird it was to fall in love just a few months before they would leave for different colleges, but I found it hard to listen very well. I wanted that map. I wanted to see the places she’d pinpointed. I wanted to get those tacks back into the wall.

We walked in through the office, hustled through the library, paused briefly to examine the holes in the bedroom wall, and entered the souvenir shop. The place didn’t scare me at all anymore. Once we’d been in each room and established we were alone, I felt as safe as I did at home. Beneath a display counter, I found the box of maps and brochures I’d rifled through on prom night. I lifted it out and balanced it on the corners of a broken glass counter. Radar sorted through them initially, looking for anything with a map, and then I unfolded them, sca

We were getting near the bottom of the box when Radar pulled out a black-and-white brochure entitled FIVE THOUSAND AMERICAN CITIES. It was copyrighted 1972 by the Esso company. As I carefully unfolded the map, trying to smooth the creases, I saw a pinhole in a corner. “This is it,” I said, my voice rising. There was a small rip around the pinhole, like it’d been torn off the wall. It was a yellowing, brittle, classroom-size map of the United States printed thick with potential destinations. The rips in the map told me that she had not intended this as a clue— Margo was too precise and assured with her clues to muddy the waters. Somehow or another, we’d stumbled into something she hadn’tpla

I ran all the way back to the office and found a bunch of thumbtacks in a desk adjacent to Margo’s, before Radar and I carefully carried the unfurled map back to Margo’s room. I held it up against the wall while Radar tried to get the tacks into the corners, but three of the four corners had ripped, as had three of the five locations, presumably when the map was taken off the wall. “Higher and to the left,” he said. “No, down. Yeah. Don’t move.” Finally we got the map on the wall, and then we started lining up the holes in the map with the ones on the wall. We got all five pins in pretty easily. But some of these pinholes were also ripped, so it was impossible to tell their EXACT location. And exact location mattered in a map blackened with the names of five thousand places. The lettering was so small and exact that I had to stand up on the carpet and put my bare eyeballs inches away from the map even to guess each location. As I suggested town names, Radar pulled out his handheld and looked them up on Omnictionary.

There were two unripped dots: one looked like Los Angeles, although there were a bunch of towns clustered so close together in Southern California that the type overlapped. The other unripped hole was over Chicago. There was a ripped one in New York that, judging from the location of the hole in the wall, was one of the five boroughs of New York City.