Paper Towns

“That makes sense with what we know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But God, wherein New York? That’s the question.”

“We’re missing something,” he says. “Some locational hint. What’re the other dots?”

“There’s another in New York State, but not near the city. I mean, look, all the towns are tiny. It might be Poughkeepsie or Woodstock or the Catskill Park.”

“Woodstock,” Radar said. “That’d be interesting. She’s not much of a hippie, but she has that whole free-spirit vibe.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The last one is either Washington, D.C., or else maybe A

“It’d be helpful if there was only one point on the map,” Radar said sullenly.

“But she’s probably going from place to place,” I said. Tramping her perpetual journey.

I sat on the carpet for a while as Radar read to me more about New York, about the Catskill Mountains, about the nation’s capital, about the concert at Woodstock in 1969. Nothing seemed to help. I felt as if we’d played out the string and found nothing.

After I dropped Radar off that afternoon, I sat around the house reading “Song of Myself” and halfheartedly studying for finals.

I had calc and Latin on Monday, probably my two toughest subjects, and I couldn’t afford to ignore them completely. I studied most of Saturday night and throughout the day Sunday, but then a Margo idea popped into my head just after di

QTHERESURRECTION:Hey, it’s Q.

SACKCLOTHANDASHES:Hi!

QTHERESURRECTION:Did you ever think about how much time Margo must have spent pla

SACKCLOTHANDASHES:Yeah, like leaving the letters in the alphabet soup before Mississippi and leading you to the minimall, you mean?

QTHERESURRECTION:Yeah, these aren’t things you think up in ten minutes.

SACKCLOTHANDASHES:Maybe the notebook.

QTHERESURRECTION: Exactly.

SACKCLOTHANDASHES:Yeah. I was thinking about it today because I remembered one time when we were shopping, she kept sticking the notebook into purses she liked, to make sure it fit.

QTHERESURRECTION:I wish I had that notebook.

SACKCLOTHANDASHES:Yeah, probably with her, though.

QTHERESURRECTION:Yeah. It wasn’t in her locker?

SACKCLOTHANDASHES:No, just textbooks, stacked neat like they always were.

I studied at my desk and waited for other people to come online. Ben did after a while, and I invited him into a chat room with me and Lacey. They did most of the talking — I was still sort of translating — until Radar logged in and joined the room. Then I put down my pencil for the night.

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Someone from New York City searched Omnictionary for Margo Roth Spiegelman today.

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION:Can you tell wherein New York City?

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Unfortunately, no.

SACKCLOTHANDASHES:Also there are still some posters up in record stores there. It was probably just someone trying to find out about her.

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Oh, right. I forgot about that.

Suck.

QTHERESURRECTION:Hey, I’m in and out because I’m using that site Radar showed me to map routes between the places she pinholed.

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION:Link?

QTHERESURRECTION:thelongwayround.com

OMNICTIONARIAN96:I have a new theory. She’s going to show up for graduation, sitting in the audience.

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION:I have an old theory, that she is somewhere in Orlando, screwing with us and making sure that she’s the center of our universe.

SACKCLOTHANDASHES:Ben!

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION:Sorry, but I’m totally right.

They went on like that, talking about their Margos, as I tried to map her route. If she hadn’t intended the map as a clue — and the ripped tack holes told me she hadn’t — I figured we’d gotten all the clues she’d intended for us and now much more. Surely I had what I needed, then. But I still felt very far away from her.

28

After three long hours alone with eight hundred words from Ovid on Monday morning, I walked through the halls feeling as if my brain might drip out of my ears. But I’d done okay. We had an hour and a half for lunch, to give our minds time to firm back up before the second exam period of the day. Radar was waiting for me at my locker.

“I just bombed me some Spanish,” Radar said.

“I’m sure you did okay.” He was going to Dartmouth on a huge scholarship. He was plenty smart.

“Dude, I don’t know. I kept falling asleep during the oral part. But listen, I was up half the night building this program. It’s so awesome. What it does is it allows you to enter a category — it can be a geographical area or like a family in the animal kingdom— and then you can read the first sentences of up to a hundred Omnictionary articles about your topic on a single page. So, like, say you are trying to find a particular kind of rabbit but can’t remember its name. You can read an introduction to all twenty-one species of rabbits on the same page in, like, three minutes.”

“You did this the night before finals?” I asked.

“Yeah, I know, right? Anyway I’ll email it to you. It’s nerd-tastic.”

Ben showed up then. “I swear to God, Q, Lacey and I were up on IM until two o’clock in the morning playing on that site, the-longwayround? And having now plotted every single possible trip that Margo could have taken between Orlando and those five points, I realize I was wrong all this time. She’s not in Orlando. Radar’s right. She’s coming back here for graduation day.”

“Why?”

“The timing is perfect. To drive from Orlando to New York to the mountains to Chicago to Los Angeles back to Orlando is like exactlya twenty-three-day trip. Plus, it’s a totally retarded joke, but it’s a Margo joke. You make everyone think you offed yourself. Surround yourself with an air of mystery so that everyone pays attention. And then right as all the attention starts to go away, you show up at graduation.”

“No,” I said. “No way.” I knew Margo better than that by now. She did want attention. I believed that. But Margo didn’t play life for laughs. She didn’t get off on mere trickery.

“I’m telling you, bro. Look for her at graduation. She’s go

After a long day of finals, returning to the comfortable impenetrability of “Song of Myself” was almost a relief. I had reached a weird part of the poem — after all this time listening and hearing people, and then traveling alongside them, Whitman stops hearing and he stops visiting, and he starts to becomeother people. Like, actually inhabit them. He tells the story of a ship’s captain who saved everyone on his boat except himself. The poet can tell the story, he argues, because he has become the captain. As he writes, “I am the man. . I suffered. . I was there.” A few lines later, it becomes even more clear that Whitman no longer needs to listen to become another: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels. . I myself become the wounded person.”