Paper Towns(60)

“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.”