Paper Towns — Chapter no 27

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: Wanna go over? I have to wait till Ange

gets up, though.

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, scanning for pinholes.

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’t

planned, and in seeing what she hadn’t planned, I thought again of how

much she had planned. And maybe, I thought, that’s what she did in the

quiet dark here. Traveling while loafing, like Whitman had, as she prepared

for the real thing.

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.

“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.