Paper Towns

“It’s mine?”

“Yeah!” my mom almost shouted. I had a car! A car! Of my own!

I disentangled myself from my parents and shouted “ thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you”as I raced through the living room, and yanked open the front door wearing only an old T-shirt and boxer shorts. There, parked in the driveway with a huge blue bow on it, was a Ford minivan.

They’d given me a minivan. They could have picked any car, and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast of high ceilings and few horsepower!

I put on a brave face when I turned around. “Thank you thank you thank you!” I said, although surely I didn’t sound quite as effusive now that I was completely faking it.

“Well, we just knew how much you loved driving mine,” Mom said. She and Dad were beaming — clearly convinced they’d landed me the transportation of my dreams. “It’s great for getting around with your friends!” added my dad. And to think: these people specialize in the analysis and understanding of the human psyche.

“Listen,” Dad said, “we should get going pretty soon if we want to get good seats.”

I hadn’t showered or dressed or anything. Well, not that I would technically be dressing, but still. “I don’t have to be there until twelve-thirty,” I said. “I need to, like, get ready.”

Dad frowned. “Well, I really want to have a good sight line so I can take some pic— ”

I interrupted him. “I can just take MY CAR,” I said. “I can drive MYSELF in MY CAR.” I smiled broadly.

“I know!” my mom said excitedly. And what the hell — a car’s a car, after all. Driving my own minivan was surely a step up from driving someone else’s.

I went back to my computer then and informed Radar and Lacey (Ben wasn’t online) about the minivan.

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Actually that’s really good news. Can I stop by and put a cooler in your trunk? I gotta drive my parents to graduation and don’t want them to see.

QTHERESURRECTION:Sure, it’s unlocked. Cooler for what?

OMNICTIONARIAN96:Well, since no one drank at my party, there were 212 beers left over, and we’re taking them over to Lacey’s for her party tonight.

QTHERESURRECTION:212 beers?

OMNICTIONARIAN96:It’s a big cooler.

Ben came online then, SHOUTING about how he was already showered and naked and just needed to put on the cap and gown. We were all talking back and forth about our naked graduation. After everyone logged off to get ready, I got in the shower and stood up straight so that the water shot directly at my face, and I started thinking as the water pounded away at me. New York or California? Chicago or D.C.? I could go now, too, I thought. I had a car just as much as she did. I could go to the five spots on the map, and even if I didn’t find her, it would be more fun than another boiling summer in Orlando. But no. It’s like breaking into SeaWorld. It takes an immaculate plan, and then you execute it brilliantly, and then — nothing. And then it’s just Sea-World, except darker. She’d told me: the pleasure isn’t in doing the thing; the pleasure is in pla

And that’s what I thought about as I stood beneath the showerhead: the pla

But is it the kind of thing she likes to actually do? No. Because Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned: leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots.

And so when she left, she left for good. But I could not believe she had left for a perpetual journey. She had, I felt sure, left for a place — a place where she could stay long enough for it to matter, long enough for the next leaving to feel as good as the last one had. There is a corner of the world somewhere far away from here where no one knows what “Margo Roth Spiegelman” means. And Margo is sitting in that corner, scrawling in her black notebook.

The water began to get cold. I hadn’t so much as touched a bar of soap, but I got out, wrapped a towel around my waist, and sat down at the computer.

I dug up Radar’s email about his Omnictionary program and downloaded the plug-in. It really was pretty cool. First, I entered a zip code in downtown Chicago, clicked “location,” and asked for a radius of twenty miles. It spit back a hundred responses, from Navy Pier to Deerfield. The first sentence of each entry came up on my screen, and I read through them in about five minutes. Nothing stood out. Then I tried a zip code near the Catskill Park in New York. Fewer responses this time, eighty-two, organized by the date on which the Omnictionary page had been created. I started to read.

Woodstock, New York,is a town in Ulster County, New York, perhaps best known for the eponymous Woodstock concert [see Woodstock Concert] in 1969, a three-day event featuring acts from Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin, which actually occurred in a nearby town.

Lake Katrineis a small lake in Ulster County, New York, often visited by Henry David Thoreau.

The Catskill Parkcomprises 700,000 acres of land in the Catskill Mountains owned jointly by state and local governments, including a 5 percent share held by New York City, which gets much of its water from reservoirs partly inside the park.

Roscoe, New York, is a hamlet in New York State, which according to a recent census contains 261 households.

Agloe, New York, is a fictitious village created by the Esso company in the early 1930s and inserted into tourist maps as a copyright trap, or paper town.

I clicked on the link and it took me to the full article, which continued:

Located at the intersection of two dirt roads just north of Roscoe, NY, Agloe was the creation of mapmakers Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers, who invented the town name by anagramming their initials. Copyright traps have featured in mapmaking for centuries. Cartographers create fictional landmarks, streets, and municipalities and place them obscurely into their maps. If the fictional entry is found on another cartographer’s map, it becomes clear a map has been plagiarized. Copyright traps are also sometimes known as key traps, paper streets, and paper towns [see also fictitious entries]. Although few cartographic corporations acknowledge their existence, copyright traps remain a common feature even in contemporary maps.

In the 1940s, Agloe, New York, began appearing on maps created by other companies. Esso suspected copyright infringement and prepared several lawsuits, but in fact, an unknown resident had built “The Agloe General Store” at the intersection that appeared on the Esso map.

The building, which still stands [ needs citation], is the only structure in Agloe, which continues to appear on many maps and is traditionally recorded as having a population of zero.

Every Omnictionary entry contains subpages where you can view all the edits ever made to the page and any discussion by Omnictionary members about it. The Agloe page hadn’t been edited by anyone in almost a year, but there was one recent comment on the talk page by an anonymous user:

fyi, whoever Edits this — the Population of agloe Will actually be One until may 29th at Noon.

I recognized the capitalization immediately. The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence. My throat tightened, but I forced myself to calm down. The comment had been left fifteen days ago. It had been sitting there all that time, waiting for me. I looked at the clock on the computer. I had just under twenty-four hours.