Paper Towns

“That makes sense with what we know.”



“Yeah,” I said. “But God, where in 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 Annapolis or Chesapeake Bay. That one could be a bunch of things, actually.”



“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 dinner, so I took a break from practicing Ovid translations and logged onto IM. I saw Lacey online. I’d only just gotten her screen name from Ben, but I figured I knew her well enough to IM her.



QTHERESURRECTION: Hey, it’s Q.



SACKCLOTHANDASHES: Hi!



QTHERESURRECTION: Did you ever think about how much time Margo must have spent planning everything?



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 where in 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 exactly a 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 gonna be there.” I just shook my head. Since everyone had the same lunch period, the cafeteria was beyond packed, so we exercised our rights as seniors and drove to Wendy’s. I tried to stay focused on my coming calc exam, but I was starting to feel like maybe there was more string to the story. If Ben was right about the twenty-three-day trip, that was very interesting, indeed. Maybe that’s what she’d been planning in her black notebook, a long and lonesome road trip. It didn’t explain everything, but it did fit with Margo as a planner. Not that this brought me closer to her. As hard as it is to pinpoint a dot inside a ripped segment of a map, it only becomes harder when the dot is moving.



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 become other 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.”



I put the book down and lay on my side, staring out the window that had always been between us. It is not enough just to see her or hear her. To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman.



And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.



I limped through my physics and government finals the next day and then stayed up till 2 A.M. on Tuesday finishing my final reaction paper for English about Moby Dick. Ahab was a hero, I decided. I had no particular reason for having decided this—particularly given that I hadn’t read the book—but I decided it and reacted thusly.



The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around thinking about the lastness of it all: The last time I stand in a circle outside the band room in the shade of this oak tree that has protected generations of band geeks. The last time I eat pizza in the cafeteria with Ben. The last time I sit in this school scrawling an essay with a cramped hand into a blue book. The last time I glance up at the clock. The last time I see Chuck Parson prowling the halls, his smile half a sneer. God. I was becoming nostalgic for Chuck Parson. Something sick was happening inside of me.



It must have been like this for Margo, too. With all the planning she’d done, she must have known she was leaving, and even she couldn’t have been totally immune to the feeling. She’d had good days here. And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me. These whitewashed cinder-block walls. My white walls. Margo’s white walls. We’d been captive in them for so long, stuck in their belly like Jonah.



Throughout the day, I found myself thinking that maybe this feeling was why she’d planned everything so intricately and precisely: even if you want to leave, it is so hard. It took preparation, and maybe sitting in that minimall scrawling her plans was both intellectual and emotional practice—Margo’s way of imagining herself into her fate.



Ben and Radar both had a marathon band practice to make sure they would rock “Pomp and Circumstance” at graduation. Lacey offered me a ride, but I decided to clean out my locker, because I didn’t really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.



My locker was an unadulterated crap hole—half trash can, half book storage. Her locker had been neatly stacked with textbooks when Lacey opened it, I remembered, as if she intended to come to school the next day. I pulled a garbage can over to the bank of lockers and opened mine up. I began by pulling off a picture of Radar and Ben and me goofing off. I put it inside my backpack and then started the disgusting process of picking through a year’s worth of accumulated filth—gum wrapped in scraps of notebook paper, pens out of ink, greasy napkins—and scraping it all into the garbage. All along, I kept thinking, I will never do this again, I will never be here again, this will never be my locker again, Radar and I will never write notes in calculus again, I will never see Margo across the hall again. This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again.



And finally it was too much. I could not talk myself down from the feeling, and the feeling became unbearable. I reached in deep to the recesses of my locker. I pushed everything—photographs and notes and books—into the trash can. I left the locker open and walked away. As I walked past the band room, I could hear through the walls the muffled sounds of “Pomp and Circumstance.” I kept walking. It was hot outside, but not as hot as usual. It was bearable. There are sidewalks most of the way home, I thought. So I kept walking.



And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation. Everything that mattered except one lousy picture was in the trash, but it felt so great. I started jogging, wanting to put even more distance between myself and school.



It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.



As I ran, I felt myself for the first time becoming Margo. I knew: she is not in Orlando. She is not in Florida. Leaving feels too good, once you leave. If I’d been in a car, and not on foot, I might have kept going, too. She was gone and not coming back for graduation or anything else. I felt sure of that now.



I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?



Ben and Radar drove past me a quarter mile from Jefferson Park, and Ben brought RHAPAW to a screeching halt right on Lakemont in spite of traffic everywhere, and I ran up to the car and got in. They wanted to play Resurrection at my house, but I had to tell them no, because I was closer than I’d ever been before.



29.



All night Wednesday, and all day Thursday, I tried to use my new understanding of her to figure out some meaning to the clues I had—some relationship between the map and the travel books, or else some link between the Whitman and the map that would allow me to understand her travelogue. But increasingly I felt like maybe she had become too enthralled with the pleasure of leaving to construct a proper bread crumb trail. And if that were the case, the map she had never intended for us to see might be our best chance to find her. But no site on the map was adequately specific. Even the Catskill Park dot, which interested me because it was the only location not in or near a big city, was far too big and populous to find a single person. “Song of Myself” made references to places in New York City, but there were too many locations to track them all down. How do you pinpoint a spot on the map when the spot seems to be moving from metropolis to metropolis?