Paper Towns

10

I’d been asleep for just about thirty minutes when my alarm clock went off at 6:32. But I did not personally notice that my alarm clock was going off for seventeen minutes, not until I felt hands on my shoulders and heard the distant voice of my mother saying, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

“Uhh,” I responded. I felt significantly more tired than I had back at 5:55, and I would have skipped school, except I had perfect attendance, and while I realized that perfect attendance is not particularly impressive or even necessarily admirable, I wanted to keep the streak alive. Plus, I wanted to see how Margo would act around me.

When I walked into the kitchen, Dad was telling Mom something while they ate at the breakfast counter. Dad paused when he saw me and said, “How’d you sleep?”

“I slept fantastically,” I said, which was true. Briefly, but well.

He smiled. “I was just telling your mom that I have this recurring anxiety dream,” he said. “So I’m in college. And I’m taking a Hebrew class, except the professor doesn’t speak Hebrew, and the tests aren’t in Hebrew — they’re in gibberish. But everyone is acting like this made-up language with a made-up alphabet is Hebrew. And so I have this test, and I have to write in a language I don’t know using an alphabet I can’t decipher.”

“Interesting,” I said, although in point of fact it wasn’t. Nothing is as boring as other people’s dreams.

“It’s a metaphor for adolescence,” my mother piped up. “Writing in a language — adulthood — you can’t comprehend, using an alphabet — mature social interaction — you can’t recognize.” My mother worked with crazy teenagers in juvenile detention centers and prisons. I think that’s why she never really worried about me — as long as I wasn’t ritually decapitating gerbils or urinating on my own face, she figured I was a success.

A normal mother might have said, “Hey, I notice you look like you’re coming down off a meth binge and smell vaguely of algae. Were you perchance dancing with a snakebit Margo Roth Spiegelman a couple hours ago?” But no. They preferred dreams.

I showered, put on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. I was late, but then again, I was always late.

“You’re late,” Mom said when I made it back to the kitchen. I tried to shake the fog in my brain enough to remember how to tie my sneakers.

“I am aware,” I answered groggily.

Mom drove me to school. I sat in the seat that had been Margo’s. Mom was mostly quiet on the drive, which was good, because I was entirely asleep, the side of my head against the minivan window.

As Mom pulled up to school, I saw Margo’s usual spot empty in the senior parking lot. Couldn’t blame her for being late, really. Her friends didn’t gather as early as mine.

As I walked up toward the band kids, Ben shouted, “Jacobsen, was I dreaming or did you—” I gave him the slightest shake of my head, and he changed gears midsentence— “and me go on a wild adventure in French Polynesia last night, traveling in a sailboat made of bananas?”

“That was one delicious sailboat,” I answered. Radar raised his eyes at me and ambled into the shade of a tree. I followed him. “Asked Angela about a date for Ben. No dice.” I glanced over at Ben, who was talking animatedly, a coffee stirrer dancing in his mouth as he spoke.

“That sucks,” I said. “It’s all good, though. He and I will hang out and have a marathon session of Resurrection or something.”

Ben came over then, and said, “Are you trying to be subtle? Because I know you’re talking about the honeybunnyless prom tragedy that is my life.” He turned around and headed inside. Radar and I followed him, talking as we went past the band room, where freshmen and sophomores were sitting and chatting amid a slew of instrument cases.

“Why do you even want to go?” I asked.

“Bro, it’s our senior prom. It’s my last best chance to be some honeybunny’s fondest high school memory.” I rolled my eyes.

The first bell rang, meaning five minutes to class, and like Pavlov’s dogs, people started rushing around, filling up the hallways. Ben and Radar and I stood by Radar’s locker. “So why’d you call me at three in the morning for Chuck Parson’s address?”

I was mulling over how to best answer that question when I saw Chuck Parson walking toward us. I elbowed Ben’s side and cut my eyes toward Chuck. Chuck, incidentally, had decided that the best strategy was to shave off Lefty. “Holy shitstickers,” Ben said.

Soon enough, Chuck was in my face as I scrunched back against the locker, his forehead deliciously hairless. “What are you assholes looking at?”

“Nothing,” said Radar. “We’re certainly not looking at your eyebrows.” Chuck flicked Radar off, slammed an open palm against the locker next to me, and walked away.

“You did that?” Ben asked, incredulous.

“You can never tell anyone,” I said to both of them. And then quietly added, “I was with Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

Ben’s voice rose with excitement. “You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.?” I nodded. “Alone?” I nodded. “Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel of Margo Roth Spiegelman’s breasts. Thirty pages, minimum!”

“I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing,” Radar said.

“A sculpture would also be acceptable,” Ben added.

Radar half raised his hand. I dutifully called on him. “Yes, I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman’s breasts? Your six words are: pink, round, firmness, succulent, supple, and pillowy.”

“Personally,” Ben said, “I think at least one of the words should be buhbuhbuhbuh.”

“I don’t think I’m familiar with that word,” I said.

“It’s the sound my mouth makes when I’m giving a honey-bunny the patented Ben Starling Speedboat.” At which point Ben mimicked what he would do in the unlikely event that his face ever encountered cleavage.

“Right now,” I said, “although they have no idea why, thousands of girls all across America are feeling a chill of fear and disgust run down their spines. Anyway, I didn’t hook up with her, perv.”

“Typical,” Ben said. “I’m the only guy I know with the balls to give a honeybunny what she wants, and the only one with no opportunities.”

“What an amazing coincidence,” I said. It was life as it had always been — only more fatigued. I had hoped that last night would change my life, but it hadn’t — at least not yet.

The second bell rang. We hustled off to class.

I became extremely tired during calc first period. I mean, I had been tired since waking, but combining fatigue with calculus seemed unfair. To stay awake, I was scribbling a note to Margo— nothing I’d ever send to her, just a summary of my favorite moments from the night before — but even that could not keep me awake. At some point, my pen just stopped moving, and I found my field of vision shrinking and shrinking, and then I was trying to remember if tunnel vision was a symptom of fatigue. I decided it must be, because there was only one thing in front of me, and it was Mr. Jiminez at the blackboard, and this was the only thing that my brain could process, and so when Mr. Jiminez said, “Quentin?” I was extraordinarily confused, because the one thing happening in my universe was Mr. Jiminez writing on the blackboard, and I couldn’t fathom how he could be both an auditory and a visual presence in my life.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Did you hear the question?”

“Yes?” I asked again.

“And you raised your hand to answer it?” I looked up, and sure enough my hand was raised, but I did not know how it had come to be raised, and I only sort of knew how to go about de-raising it. But then after considerable struggle, my brain was able to tell my arm to lower itself, and my arm was able to do so, and then finally I said, “I just needed to ask to go to the bathroom?”

And he said, “Go ahead,” and then someone else raised a hand and answered some question about some kind of differential equation.

I walked to the bathroom, splashed water on my face, and then leaned over the sink, close to the mirror, and appraised myself. I tried to rub the bloodshotedness out of my eyes, but I couldn’t. And then I had a brilliant idea. I went into a stall, put the seat down, sat down, leaned against the side, and fell asleep. The sleep lasted for about sixteen milliseconds before the second period bell rang. I got up and walked to Latin, and then to physics, and then finally it was fourth period, and I found Ben in the cafeteria and said, “I really need a nap or something.”

“Let’s have lunch with RHAPAW,” he answered.

RHAPAW was a fifteen-year-old Buick that had been driven with impunity by all three of Ben’s older siblings and was, by the time it reached Ben, composed primarily out of duct tape and spackle. Her full name was Rode Hard And Put Away Wet, but we called her RHAPAW for short. RHAPAW ran not on gasoline, but on the inexhaustible fuel of human hope. You would sit on the blisteringly hot vinyl seat and hope she would start, and then Ben would turn the key and the engine would turn over a couple times, like a fish on land making its last, meager, dying flops. And then you would hope harder, and the engine would turn over a couple more times. You hoped some more, and it would finally catch.

Ben started RHAPAW and turned the AC on high. Three of the four windows didn’t even open, but the air conditioner worked magnificently, though for the first few minutes it was just hot air blasting out of the vents and mixing with the hot stale air in the car. I reclined the passenger seat all the way back, so that I was almost lying down, and I told him everything: Margo at my window, the Wal-Mart, the revenge, the SunTrust Building, entering the wrong house, SeaWorld, the I-will-miss-hanging-out-with-you.

He didn’t interrupt me once — Ben was a good friend in the not-interrupting way — but when I finished, he immediately asked me the most pressing question in his mind.

“Wait, so about Jase Worthington, how small are we talking?”

“Shrinkage may have played a role, since he was under significant anxiety, but have you ever seen a pencil?” I asked him, and Ben nodded. “Well, have you ever seen a pencil eraser?” He nodded again. “Well, have you ever seen the little shavings of rubber left on the paper after you erase something?” More nodding. “I’d say three shavings long and one shaving wide,” I said. Ben had taken a lot of crap from guys like Jason Worthington and Chuck Parson, so I figured he was entitled to enjoy it a little. But he didn’t even laugh. He was just shaking his head slowly, awestruck.

“God, she is such a badass.”

“I know.”

“She’s the kind of person who either dies tragically at twenty-seven, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, or else grows up to win, like, the first-ever Nobel Prize for Awesome.”

“Yeah,” I said. I rarely tired of talking about Margo Roth Spiegelman, but I was rarely this tired. I leaned back against the cracked vinyl headrest and fell immediately asleep. When I woke up, a Wendy’s hamburger was sitting in my lap with a note. Had to go to class, bro. See you after band.

Later, after my last class, I translated Ovid while sitting up against the cinder-block wall outside the band room, trying to ignore the groaning cacophony coming from inside. I always hung around school for the extra hour during band practice, because to leave before Ben and Radar meant enduring the unbearable humiliation of being the lone senior on the bus.

After they got out, Ben dropped Radar off at his house right by the Jefferson Park “village center,” near where Lacey lived. Then he took me home. I noticed Margo’s car was not parked in her driveway, either. So she hadn’t skipped school to sleep. She’d skipped school for another adventure — a me-less adventure. She’d probably spent her day spreading hair-removal cream on the pillows of other enemies or something. I felt a little left out as I walked into the house, but of course she knew I would never have joined her anyway — I cared too much about a day of school. And who even knew if it would be just a day for Margo. Maybe she was off on another three-day jaunt to Mississippi, or temporarily joining the circus. But it wasn’t either of those, of course. It was something I couldn’t imagine, that I would never imagine, because I couldn’t be Margo.

I wondered what stories she would come home with this time. And I wondered if she would tell them to me, sitting across from me at lunch. Maybe, I thought, this is what she meant by I will miss hanging out with you. She knew she was heading somewhere for another of her brief respites from Orlando’s paperness. But when she came back, who knew? She couldn’t spend the last weeks of school with the friends she’d always had, so maybe she would spend them with me after all.

She didn’t have to be gone long for the rumors to start. Ben called me that night after dinner. “I hear she’s not answering her phone. Someone on Facebook said she’d told them she might move into a secret storage room in Tomorrowland at Disney.”

“That’s idiotic,” I said.

“I know. I mean, Tomorrowland is by far the crappiest of the Lands. Someone else said she met a guy online.”

“Ridiculous,” I said.

“Okay, fine, but what?”

“She’s somewhere by herself having the kind of fun we can only imagine,” I said.

Ben giggled. “Are you saying that she’s playing with herself?”

I groaned. “Come on, Ben. I mean she’s just doing Margo stuff. Making stories. Rocking worlds.”

That night, I lay on my side, staring out the window into the invisible world outside. I kept trying to fall asleep, but then my eyes would dart open, just to check. I couldn’t help but hope that Margo Roth Spiegelman would return to my window and drag my tired ass through one more night I’d never forget.

11

Margo left often enough that there weren’t any Find Margo rallies at school or anything, but we all felt her absence. High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship — nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change. Specifically, they get worse. It was during Margo’s trip to Mississippi sophomore year, for example, that Becca had unleashed the Bloody Ben story to the world. And this was no different. The little girl with her finger in the dam had run off. Flooding was inevitable.

That morning, I was on time for once and got a ride with Ben. We found everyone unusually quiet outside the band room. “Dude,” our friend Frank said with great seriousness.

“What?”

“Chuck Parson, Taddy Mac, and Clint Bauer took Clint’s Tahoe and ran over twelve bikes belonging to freshmen and sophomores.”

“That sucks,” I said, shaking my head.

Our friend Ashley added, “Also, yesterday somebody posted our phone numbers in the boys’ bathroom with — well, with dirty stuff.”

I shook my head again, and then joined the silence. We couldn’t turn them in; we’d tried that plenty in middle school, and it inevitably resulted in more punishment. Usually, we’d just have to wait until someone like Margo reminded everyone what immature jackasses they all were.

But Margo had given me a way of starting a counteroffensive. And I was just about to say something when, in my peripheral vision, I saw a large individual running toward us at a full sprint. He wore a black ski mask and carried a large, complex green water cannon. As he ran past he tagged me on the shoulder and I lost my footing, landing against the cracked concrete on my left side. As he reached the door, he turned back and shouted toward me, “You screw with us and you’re gonna get smackdown.” The voice was not familiar to me.

Ben and another of our friends picked me up. My shoulder hurt, but I didn’t want to rub it. “You okay?” asked Radar.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I rubbed the shoulder now.

Radar shook his head. “Someone needs to tell him that while it is possible to get smacked down, and it is also possible to get a smackdown, it is not possible to get ‘smackdown.’” I laughed. Someone nodded toward the parking lot, and I looked up to see two little freshmen guys walking toward us, their T-shirts hanging wet and limp from their narrow frames.

“It was pee!” one of them shouted at us. The other one didn’t say anything; he just held his hands far away from his T-shirt, which only sort of worked. I could see rivulets of liquid snaking from his sleeve down his arm.

“Was it animal pee or human pee?” someone asked.

“How would I know! What, am I an expert in the study of pee?”

I walked over to the kid. I put my hand on the top of his head, the only place that seemed totally dry. “We’ll fix this,” I said. The second bell rang, and Radar and I raced to calc. As I slid into my desk I dinged my arm, and the pain radiated into my shoulder. Radar tapped his notebook, where he’d circled a note: Shoulder okay?

I wrote on the corner of my notebook: Compared to those freshmen, I spent the morning in a field of rainbows frolicking with puppies.

Radar laughed enough for Mr. Jiminez to shoot him a look. I wrote, I have a plan, but we have to figure out who it was.

Radar wrote back, Jasper Hanson, and circled it several times. That was a surprise.

How do you know?

Radar wrote, You didn’t notice? Dumbass was wearing his own football jersey.

Jasper Hanson was a junior. I’d always thought him harmless, and actually sort of nice — in that bumbling, dude-how’s-it-going kind of way. Not the kind of guy you’d expect to see shooting geysers of pee at freshmen. Honestly, in the governmental bureaucracy of Winter Park High School, Jasper Hanson was like Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Athletics and Malfeasance. When a guy like that gets promoted to Executive Vice President of Urine Gunning, immediate action must be taken.

So when I got home that afternoon, I created an email account and wrote my old friend Jason Worthington.

From: mavenger@gmail.com

To: jworthington90@yahoo.com

Subject: You, Me, Becca Arrington’s House, Your Penis, Etc.

Dear Mr. Worthington,

1. $200 in cash should be provided to each of the 12 people whose bikes your colleagues destroyed via Chevy Tahoe. This shouldn’t be a problem, given your magnificent wealth.

2. This graffiti situation in the boys’ bathroom has to stop.

3. Water guns? With pee? Really? Grow up.

4. You should treat your fellow students with respect, particularly those less socially fortunate than you.

5. You should probably instruct members of your clan to behave in similarly considerate ways.

I realize that it will be very difficult to accomplish some of these tasks. But then again, it will also be very difficult not to share the attached photograph with the world.

Yours truly,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Nemesis

The reply came twelve minutes later.

Look, Quentin, and yeah, I know it’s you. You know it wasn’t me who squirt-peed those freshmen. I’m sorry, but it’s not like I control the actions of other people.

My answer:

Mr. Worthington,

I understand that you do not control Chuck and Jasper.

But you see, I am in a similar situation. I do not control the little devil sitting on my left shoulder. The devil is saying, “PRINT THE PICTURE PRINT THE PICTURE TAPE IT UP ALL OVER SCHOOL DO IT DO IT DO IT.” And then on my right shoulder, there is a little tiny white angel. And the angel is saying, “Man, I sure as shit hope all those freshmen get their money bright and early on Monday morning.”

So do I, little angel. So do I.

Best wishes,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Nemesis

He did not reply, and he didn’t need to. Everything had been said.

Ben came over after dinner and we played Resurrection, pausing every half hour or so to call Radar, who was on a date with Angela. We left him eleven messages, each more annoying and salacious than the last. It was after nine o’clock when the doorbell rang. “Quentin!” my mom shouted. Ben and I figured it was Radar, so we paused the game and walked out into the living room. Chuck Parson and Jason Worthington were standing in my doorway. I walked over to them, and Jason said, “Hey, Quentin,” and I nodded my head. Jason glanced over at Chuck, who looked at me and mumbled, “Sorry, Quentin.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For telling Jasper to piss-gun those freshmen,” he mumbled. He paused, and then said, “And the bikes.”

Ben opened his arms, as if to hug. “C’mere, bro,” he said.

“What?”

“C’mere,” he said again. Chuck stepped forward. “Closer,” Ben said. Chuck was standing fully in the entryway now, maybe a foot from Ben. Out of nowhere, Ben slammed a punch into Chuck’s gut. Chuck barely flinched, but he immediately reared back to clobber Ben. Jase grabbed his arm, though. “Chill, bro,” Jase said. “It’s not like it hurt.” Jase reached out his hand, to shake. “I like your guts, bro,” he said. “I mean, you’re an asshole. But still.” I shook his hand.

They left then, getting into Jase’s Lexus and backing down the driveway. As soon as I closed the front door, Ben let out a mighty groan. “Ahhhhhhhggg. Oh, sweet Lord Jesus, my hand.” He attempted to make a fist and winced. “I think Chuck Parson had a textbook strapped to his stomach.”

“Those are called abs,” I told him.

“Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of those.” I clapped him on the back and we headed back to the bedroom to play Resurrection. We’d just unpaused it when Ben said, “By the way, did you notice that Jase says ‘bro’? I’ve totally brought bro back. Just with the sheer force of my own awesomeness.”

“Yeah, you’re spending Friday night gaming and nursing the hand you broke while trying to sucker punch somebody. No wonder Jase Worthington has chosen to hitch his star to your wagon.”

“At least I’m good at Resurrection,” he said, whereupon he shot me in the back even though we were playing in team mode.

We played for a while longer, until Ben just curled onto the floor, holding the controller up to his chest, and went to sleep. I was tired, too — it had been a long day. I figured Margo would be back by Monday anyway, but even so, I felt a little pride at having been the person who stemmed the tide of lame.

12

Every morning, I now looked up through my bedroom window to check whether there was any sign of life in Margo’s room. She always kept her rattan shades closed, but since she’d left, her mom or somebody had pulled them up, so I could see a little snippet of blue wall and white ceiling. On that Saturday morning, with her only forty-eight hours gone, I figured she wouldn’t be home yet, but even so, I felt a flicker of disappointment when I saw the shade still pulled up.

I brushed my teeth and then, after briefly kicking at Ben in an attempt to wake him, walked out in shorts and a T-shirt. Five people were seated at the dining room table. My mom and dad. Margo’s mom and dad. And a tall, stout African-American man with oversize glasses wearing a gray suit, holding a manila folder.

“Uh, hi,” I said.

“Quentin,” my mom asked, “did you see Margo on Wednesday night?”

I walked into the dining room and leaned against the wall, standing opposite the stranger. I’d thought of my answer to this question already. “Yeah,” I said. “She showed up at my window at like midnight and we talked for a minute and then Mr. Spiegelman caught her and she went back to her house.”

“And was that—? Did you see her after that?” Mr. Spiegelman asked. He seemed quite calm.

“No, why?” I asked.

Margo’s mom answered, her voice shrill. “Well,” she said, “it seems that Margo has run away. Again.” She sighed. “This would be — what is it, Josh, the fourth time?”

“Oh, I’ve lost count,” her dad answered, annoyed.

The African-American man spoke up then. “Fifth time you’ve filed a report.” The man nodded at me and said, “Detective Otis Warren.”

“Quentin Jacobsen,” I said.

Mom stood up and put her hands on Mrs. Spiegelman’s shoulders. “Debbie,” she said, “I’m so sorry. It’s a very frustrating situation.” I knew this trick. It was a psychology trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood. Mom does it to me all the time.

“I’m not frustrated,” Mrs. Spiegelman answered. “I’m done.”

“That’s right,” Mr. Spiegelman said. “We’ve got a locksmith coming this afternoon. We’re changing the locks. She’s eighteen. I mean, the detective has just said there’s nothing we can do—”

“Well,” Detective Warren interrupted, “I didn’t quite say that. I said that she’s not a missing minor, and so she has the right to leave home.”

Mr. Spiegelman continued talking to my mom. “We’re happy to pay for her to go to college, but we can’t support this. . this silliness. Connie, she’s eighteen! And still so self-centered! She needs to see some consequences.”

My mom removed her hands from Mrs. Spiegelman. “I would argue she needs to see loving consequences,” my mom said.

“Well, she’s not your daughter, Connie. She hasn’t walked all over you like a doormat for a decade. We’ve got another child to think about.”

“And ourselves,” Mr. Spiegelman added. He looked up at me then. “Quentin, I’m sorry if she tried to drag you into her little game. You can imagine how. . just how embarrassing this is for us. You’re such a good boy, and she. . well.”

I pushed myself off the wall and stood up straight. I knew Margo’s parents a little, but I’d never seen them act so bitchy. No wonder she was annoyed with them Wednesday night. I glanced over at the detective. He was flipping through pages in the folder. “She’s been known to leave a bit of a bread crumb trail; is that right?”

“Clues,” Mr. Spiegelman said, standing up now. The detective had placed the folder on the table, and Margo’s dad leaned forward to look at it with him. “Clues everywhere. The day she ran away to Mississippi, she ate alphabet soup and left exactly four letters in her soup bowl: An M, an I, an S, and a P. She was disappointed when we didn’t piece it together, although as I told her when she finally returned: ‘How can we find you when all we know is Mississippi? It’s a big state, Margo!’”

The detective cleared his throat. “And she left Minnie Mouse on her bed when she spent a night inside Disney World.”

“Yes,” her mom said. “The clues. The stupid clues. But you can never follow them anywhere, trust me.”

The detective looked up from his notebook. “We’ll get the word out, of course, but she can’t be compelled to come home; you shouldn’t necessarily expect her back under your roof in the near future.”

“I don’t want her under our roof.” Mrs. Spiegelman raised a tissue to her eyes, although I heard no crying in her voice. “I know that’s terrible, but it’s true.”

“Deb,” my mom said in her therapist voice.

Mrs. Spiegelman just shook her head — the smallest shake. “What can we do? We told the detective. We filed a report. She’s an adult, Connie.”

“She’s your adult,” my mom said, still calm.

“Oh, come on, Connie. Look, is it sick that it’s a blessing to have her out of the house? Of course it’s sick. But she was a sickness in this family! How do you look for someone who announces she won’t be found, who always leaves clues that lead nowhere, who runs away constantly? You can’t!”

My mom and dad shared a glance, and then the detective spoke to me. “Son, I’m wondering if we can chat privately?” I nodded. We ended up in my parents’ bedroom, he in an easy chair and me sitting on the corner of their bed.

“Kid,” he said once he’d settled into the chair, “let me give you some advice: never work for the government. Because when you work for the government, you work for the people. And when you work for the people, you have to interact with the people, even the Spiegelmans.” I laughed a little.

“Let me be frank with you, kid. Those people know how to parent like I know how to diet. I’ve worked with them before, and I don’t like them. I don’t care if you tell her parents where she is, but I’d appreciate it if you told me.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”

“Kid, I’ve been thinking about this girl. This stuff she does— she breaks into Disney World, for instance, right? She goes to Mississippi and leaves alphabet soup clues. She organizes a huge campaign to toilet paper houses.”

“How do you know about that?” Two years before, Margo had led the TP-ing of two hundred houses in a single night. Needless to say, I wasn’t invited on that adventure.

“I worked this case before. So, kid, here’s where I need your help: who plans this stuff? These crazy schemes? She’s the mouthpiece for it all, the one crazy enough to do everything. But who plans it? Who’s sitting around with notebooks full of diagrams figuring out how much toilet paper you need to toilet paper a ton of houses?”

“It’s all her, I assume.”

“But she might have a partner, somebody helpin’ her do all these big and brilliant things, and maybe the person who’s in on her secret isn’t the obvious person, isn’t her best friend or her boyfriend. Maybe it’s somebody you wouldn’t think of right off,” he said. He took a breath and was about to say something more when I cut him off.

“I don’t know where she is,” I said. “I swear to God.”

“Just checking, kid. Anyway, you know something, don’t you? So let’s start there.” I told him everything. I trusted the guy. He took a few notes while I talked, but nothing very detailed. And something about telling him, and his scribbling in the notebook, and her parents being so lame — something about all of it made the possibility of her being lastingly missing well up in me for the first time. I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath when I finished talking. The detective didn’t say anything for a while. He just leaned forward in the chair and stared past me until he’d seen whatever he was waiting to see, and then he started talking.

“Listen, kid. This is what happens: somebody — girl usually— got a free spirit, doesn’t get on too good with her parents. These kids, they’re like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again. It lands in Canada or somethin’, gets work at a restaurant, and before the balloon even notices, it’s been pouring coffee in that same diner to the same sad bastards for thirty years. Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home, because it needs money, or it sobered up, or it misses its kid brother. But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.”

“Yeah, bu—”

“I’m not finished, kid. The thing about these balloons is that there are so goddamned many of them. The sky is choked full of them, rubbing up against one another as they float to here or from there, and every one of those damned balloons ends up on my desk one way or another, and after a while a man can get discouraged. Everywhere the balloons, and each of them with a mother or a father, or God forbid both, and after a while, you can’t even see ’em individually. You look up at all the balloons in the sky and you can see all of the balloons, but you cannot see any one balloon.” He paused then, and inhaled sharply, as if he was realizing something. “But then every now and again you talk to some big-eyed kid with too much hair for his head and you want to lie to him because he seems like a good kid. And you feel bad for this kid, because the only thing worse than the skyful of balloons you see is what he sees: a clear blue day interrupted by just the one balloon. But once that string gets cut, kid, you can’t uncut it. Do you get what I’m saying?”

I nodded, although I wasn’t sure I did understand. He stood up. “I do think she’ll be back soon, kid. If that helps.”

I liked the image of Margo as a balloon, but I figured that in his urge for the poetic, the detective had seen more worry in me than the pang I’d actually felt. I knew she’d be back. She’d deflate and float back to Jefferson Park. She always had.

I followed the detective back to the dining room, and then he said he wanted to go back over to the Spiegelmans’ house and pick through her room a little. Mrs. Spiegelman gave me a hug and said, “You’ve always been such a good boy; I’m sorry she ever got you caught up in this ridiculousness.” Mr. Spiegelman shook my hand, and they left. As soon as the door closed, my dad said, “Wow.”

“Wow,” agreed Mom.

My dad put his arm around me. “Those are some very troubling dynamics, eh, bud?”

“They’re kind of assholes,” I said. My parents always liked it when I cursed in front of them. I could see the pleasure of it in their faces. It signified that I trusted them, that I was myself in front of them. But even so, they seemed sad.

“Margo’s parents suffer a severe narcissistic injury whenever she acts out,” Dad said to me.

“It prevents them from parenting effectively,” my mom added.

“They’re assholes,” I repeated.

“Honestly,” my dad said, “they’re probably right. She probably is in need of attention. And God knows, I would need attention, too, if I had those two for parents.”

“When she comes back,” my mom said, “she’s going to be devastated. To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.”

“Maybe she could live here when she comes back,” I said, and in saying it I realized what a fantastically great idea it was. My mom’s eyes lit up, too, but then she saw something in my dad’s expression and answered me in her usual measured way.

“Well, she’d certainly be welcome, although that would come with its own challenges — being next door to the Spiegelmans. But when she returns to school, please do tell her that she’s welcome here, and that if she doesn’t want to stay with us, there are many resources available to her that we’re happy to discuss.”

Ben came out then, his bedhead seeming to challenge our basic understanding of the force gravity exerts upon matter. “Mr. and Mrs. Jacobsen — always a pleasure.”

“Good morning, Ben. I wasn’t aware you were staying the night.”

“Neither was I, actually,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

I told Ben about the detective and the Spiegelmans and Margo being technically a missing adult. And when I had finished, he nodded and said, “We should probably discuss this over a piping hot plate of Resurrection.” I smiled and followed him back to my room. Radar came over shortly thereafter, and as soon as he arrived, I was kicked off the team, because we were facing a difficult mission and despite being the only one of us who actually owned the game, I wasn’t very good at Resurrection. As I watched them tramp through a ghoul-infested space station, Ben said, “Goblin, Radar, goblin.”

“I see him.”

“Come here, you little bastard,” Ben said, the controller twisting in his hand. “Daddy’s gonna put you on a sailboat across the River Styx.”

“Did you just use Greek mythology to talk trash?” I asked.

Radar laughed. Ben started pummeling buttons, shouting, “Eat it, goblin! Eat it like Zeus ate Metis!”

“I would think that she’d be back by Monday,” I said. “You don’t want to miss too much school, even if you’re Margo Roth Spiegelman. Maybe she can stay here till graduation.”

Radar answered me in the disjointed way of someone playing Resurrection. “I don’t even get why she left, was it just imp six o’clock no dude use the ray gun like because of lost love? I would have figured her to be where is the crypt is it to the left immune to that kind of stuff.”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that, I don’t think. Not just that, anyway. She kind of hates Orlando; she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy. I think she just wanted a vacation from that.”

I happened to glance out my window, and I saw immediately that someone — the detective, I guessed — had lowered the shade in Margo’s room. But I wasn’t seeing the shade. Instead, I was seeing a black-and-white poster, taped to the back of the shade. In the photograph, a man stands, his shoulders slightly slumped, staring ahead. A cigarette dangles out of his mouth. A guitar is slung over his shoulder, and the guitar is painted with the words THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.

“There’s something in Margo’s window.” The game music stopped, and Radar and Ben knelt down on either side of me. “That’s new?” asked Radar.

“I’ve seen the back of that shade a million times,” I answered, “but I’ve never seen that poster before.”

“Weird,” Ben said.

“Margo’s parents just said this morning that she sometimes leaves clues,” I said. “But never anything, like, concrete enough to find her before she comes home.”

Radar already had his handheld out; he was searching Omnictionary for the phrase. “The picture’s of Woody Guthrie,” he said. “A folksinger, 1912 to 1967. Sang about the working class. ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ Bit of a Communist. Um, inspired Bob Dylan.” Radar played a snippet of one of his songs — a high-pitched scratchy voice sang about unions.

“I’ll email the guy who wrote most of this page and see if there are any obvious connections between Woody Guthrie and Margo,” Radar said.

“I can’t imagine she likes his songs,” I said.

“Seriously,” Ben said. “This guy sounds like an alcoholic Kermit the Frog with throat cancer.”

Radar opened the window and stuck his head out, swiveling it around. “It sure seems she left this for you, though, Q. I mean, does she know anyone else who could see this window?” I shook my head no.

After a moment, Ben added, “The way he’s staring at us — it’s like, ‘pay attention to me.’ And his head like that, you know? It’s not like he’s standing on a stage; it’s like he’s standing in a doorway or something.”

“I think he wants us to come inside,” I said.

13

We didn’t have a view of the front door or the garage from my bedroom: for that, we needed to sit in the family room. So while Ben continued playing Resurrection, Radar and I went out to the family room and pretended to watch TV while keeping watch on the Spiegelmans’ front door through a picture window, waiting for Margo’s mom and dad to leave. Detective Warren’s black Crown Victoria was still in the driveway.

He left after about fifteen minutes, but neither the garage door nor the front door opened again for an hour. Radar and I were watching some half-funny stoner comedy on HBO, and I had started to get into the story when Radar said, “Garage door.” I jumped off the couch and got close to the window so that I could see clearly who was in the car. Both Mr. and Mrs. Spiegelman. Ruthie was still at home. “Ben!” I shouted. He was out in a flash, and as the Spiegelmans turned off Jefferson Way and onto Jefferson Road, we raced outside into the muggy morning.

We walked through the Spiegelmans’ lawn to their front door. I rang the doorbell and heard Myrna Mountweazel’s paws scurrying on the hardwood floors, and then she was barking like crazy, staring at us through the sidelight glass. Ruthie opened the door. She was a sweet girl, maybe eleven.

“Hey, Ruthie.”

“Hi, Quentin,” she said.

“Hey, are your parents here?”

“They just left,” she said, “to go to Target.” She had Margo’s big eyes, but hers were hazel. She looked up at me, her lips pursed with worry. “Did you meet the policeman?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He seemed nice.”

“Mom says that it’s like if Margo went to college early.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking that the easiest way to solve a mystery is to decide that there is no mystery to solve. But it seemed clear to me now that she had left the clues to a mystery behind.

“Listen, Ruthie, we need to look in Margo’s room,” I said. “But the thing is — it’s like when Margo would ask you to do top-secret stuff. We’re in the same situation here.”

“Margo doesn’t like people in her room,” Ruthie said. “’Cept me. And sometimes Mommy.”

“But we’re her friends.”

“She doesn’t like her friends in her room,” Ruthie said.

I leaned down toward her. “Ruthie, please.”

“And you don’t want me to tell Mommy and Dad,” she said.

“Correct.”

“Five dollars,” she said. I was about to bargain with her, but then Radar produced a five-dollar bill and handed it to her. “If I see the car in the driveway, I’ll let you know,” she said conspiratorially.

I knelt down to give the aging-but-always-enthusiastic Myrna Mountweazel a good petting, and then we raced upstairs to Margo’s room. As I put my hand on the doorknob, it occurred to me that I had not seen Margo’s entire room since I was about ten years old.

I walked in. Much neater than you’d expect Margo to be, but maybe her mom had just picked everything up. To my right, a closet packed-to-bursting with clothes. On the back of the door, a shoe rack with a couple dozen pairs of shoes, from Mary Janes to prom heels. It didn’t seem like much could be missing from that closet.

“I’m on the computer,” Radar said. Ben was fiddling with the shade. “The poster is taped on,” he said. “Just Scotch tape. Nothing strong.”

The great surprise was on the wall next to the computer desk: bookcases as tall as me and twice as long, filled with vinyl records. Hundreds of them. “John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is in the record player,” Ben said.

“God, that is a brilliant album,” Radar said without looking away from the computer. “Girl’s got taste.” I looked at Ben, confused, and then Ben said, “He was a sax player.” I nodded.

Still typing, Radar said, “I can’t believe Q has never heard of Coltrane. Trane’s playing is literally the most convincing proof of God’s existence I’ve ever come across.”

I began to look through the records. They were organized alphabetically by artist, so I scanned through, looking for the G’s. Dizzy Gillespie, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Green Day, Guided by Voices, George Harrison. “She has, like, every musician in the world except Woody Guthrie,” I said. And then I went back and started from the A’s.

“All her schoolbooks are still here,” I heard Ben say. “Plus some other books by her bedside table. No journal.”

But I was distracted by Margo’s music collection. She liked everything. I could never have imagined her listening to all these old records. I’d seen her listening to music while running, but I’d never suspected this kind of obsession. I’d never heard of most of the bands, and I was surprised to learn that vinyl records were even being produced for the newer ones.

I kept going through the A’s and then the B’s — making my way through the Beatles and the Blind Boys of Alabama and Blondie — and I started to rifle through them more quickly, so quickly that I didn’t even see the back cover of Billy Bragg’s Mermaid Avenue until I was looking at the Buzzcocks. I stopped, went back, and pulled out the Billy Bragg record. The front was a photograph of urban row houses. But on the back, Woody Guthrie was staring at me, a cigarette hanging out of his lips, holding a guitar that said THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.

“Hey,” I said. Ben looked over.

“Holy shitstickers,” he said. “Nice find.” Radar spun around the chair and said, “Impressive. Wonder what’s inside.”

Unfortunately, only a record was inside. The record looked exactly like a record. I put it on Margo’s record player and eventually figured out how to turn it on and put down the needle. It was some guy singing Woody Guthrie songs. He sang better than Woody Guthrie.

“What is it, just a crazy coincidence?”

Ben was holding the album cover. “Look,” he said. He was pointing at the song list. In thin black pen, the song title “Walt Whitman’s Niece” had been circled.

“Interesting,” I said. Margo’s mom had said that Margo’s clues never led anywhere, but I knew now that Margo had created a chain of clues — and she had seemingly made them for me. I immediately thought of her in the SunTrust Building, telling me I was better when I showed confidence. I turned the record over and played it. “Walt Whitman’s Niece” was the first song on side two. Not bad, actually.

I saw Ruthie in the doorway then. She looked at me. “Got any clues for us, Ruthie?” She shook her head. “I already looked,” she said glumly. Radar looked at me and gestured his head toward Ruthie.

“Can you please keep watch for your mom for us?” I asked. She nodded and left. I closed the door.

“What’s up?” I asked Radar. He motioned us over to the computer. “In the week before she left, Margo was on Omnictionary a bunch. I can tell from minutes logged by her username, which she stored in her passwords. But she erased her browsing history, so I can’t tell what she was looking at.”

“Hey, Radar, look up who Walt Whitman was,” Ben said.

“He was a poet,” I answered. “Nineteenth century.”

“Great,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “Poetry.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“Poetry is just so emo,” he said. “Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.”

“Yeah, I believe that’s Shakespeare,” I said dismissively. “Did Whitman have any nieces?” I asked Radar. He was already on Whitman’s Omnictionary page. A burly guy with this huge beard. I’d never read him, but he looked like a good poet.

“Uh, no one famous. Says he had a couple brothers, but no mention of whether they had kids. I can probably find out if you want.” I shook my head. That didn’t seem right. I went back to looking around the room. The bottom shelf of her record collection included some books — middle school yearbooks, a beat-up copy of The Outsiders—and some back issues of teen magazines. Nothing relating to Walt Whitman’s niece, certainly.

I looked through the books by her bedside table. Nothing of interest. “It would make sense if she had a book of his poetry,” I said. “But she doesn’t seem to.”

“She does!” Ben said excitedly. I went over to where he had knelt by the bookshelves, and saw it now. I’d looked right past the slim volume on the bottom shelf, wedged between two yearbooks. Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. I pulled out the book. There was a photograph of Whitman on the cover, his light eyes staring back at me.

“Not bad,” I told Ben.

He nodded. “Yeah, now can we get out of here? Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather not be here when Margo’s parents get back.”

“Is there anything we’re missing?”

Radar stood up. “It really seems like she’s drawing a pretty straight line; there’s gotta be something in that book. It’s weird, though — I mean, no offense, but if she always left clues for her parents, why would she leave them for you this time?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know the answer, but of course I had my hopes: maybe Margo needed to see my confidence. Maybe this time she wanted to be found, and to be found by me. Maybe — just as she had chosen me on the longest night, she had chosen me again. And maybe untold riches awaited he who found her.

Ben and Radar left soon after we got back to my house, after they’d each looked through the book and not found any obvious clues. I grabbed some cold lasagna from the fridge for lunch and went to my room with Walt. It was the Penguin Classics version of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. I read a little from the introduction and then paged through the book. There were several quotes highlighted in blue, all from the epically long poem known as “Song of Myself.” And there were two lines from the poem that were highlighted in green:

Unscrew the locks from the doors!

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

I spent most of my afternoon trying to make sense of that quote, thinking maybe it was Margo’s way of telling me to become more of a badass or something. But I also read and reread everything highlighted in blue:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand. .

nor look through the eyes of the dead. . nor feed on

the spectres in books.

I tramp a perpetual journey

All goes onward and outward. . and nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and

luckier.

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

The final three stanzas of “Song of Myself” were also highlighted.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop some where waiting for you

It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she’d left for me. I could never get anywhere with the lines, but I kept thinking about them anyway, because I didn’t want to disappoint her. She wanted me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it dead-ended into her.

14

Monday morning, an extraordinary event occurred. I was late, which was normal; and then my mom dropped me off at school, which was normal; and then I stood outside talking with everyone for a while, which was normal; and then Ben and I headed inside, which was normal. But as soon as we swung open the steel door, Ben’s face became a mix of excitement and panic, like he’d just been picked out of a crowd by a magician for the get-sawn-in-half trick. I followed his gaze down the hall.

Denim miniskirt. Tight white T-shirt. Scooped neck. Extraordinarily olive skin. Legs that make you care about legs. Perfectly coiffed curly brown hair. A laminated button reading ME FOR PROM QUEEN. Lacey Pemberton. Walking toward us. By the band room.

“Lacey Pemberton,” Ben whispered, even though she was about three steps from us and could clearly hear him, and in fact flashed a faux-bashful smile upon hearing her name.

“Quentin,” she said to me, and more than anything else, I found it impossible that she knew my name. She motioned with her head, and I followed her past the band room, over to a bank of lockers. Ben kept pace with me.

“Hi, Lacey,” I said once she stopped walking. I could smell her perfume, and I remembered the smell of it in her SUV, remembered the crunch of the catfish as Margo and I slammed her seat down.

“I hear you were with Margo.”

I just looked at her.

“That night, with the fish? In my car? And in Becca’s closet? And through Jase’s window?”

I kept looking. I wasn’t sure what to say. A man can live a long and adventurous life without ever being spoken to by Lacey Pemberton, and when that rare opportunity does arise, one does not wish to misspeak. So Ben spoke for me. “Yeah, they hung out,” Ben said, as if Margo and I were tight.

“Was she mad at me?” Lacey asked after a moment. She was looking down; I could see her brown eye shadow.

“What?”

She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey Pemberton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just — like, a person. “Was she, you know, pissed at me about something?”

I thought about how to answer that for a while. “Uh, she was a little disappointed that you didn’t tell her about Jase and Becca, but you know Margo. She’ll get over it.”

Lacey started walking down the hall. Ben and I let her go, but then she slowed down. She wanted us to walk with her. Ben nudged me, and then we started walking together. “I didn’t even know about Jase and Becca. That’s the thing. God, I hope I can explain that to her soon. For a while, I was really worried that maybe she had like really left, but then I went into her locker ’cause I know her combination and she still has all her pictures up and everything, and all her books are stacked there.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s been like four days. That’s almost a record for her. And you know, this has really sucked, because Craig knew, and I was so pissed at him for not telling me that I broke up with him, and now I’m out a prom date, and my best friend is off wherever, in New York or whatever, thinking I did something I would NEVER do.” I shot a look to Ben. Ben shot a look back to me.

“I have to run to class,” I said. “But why do you say she’s in New York?”

“I guess she told Jase like two days before she left that New York was the only place in America where a person could actually live a halfway livable life. Maybe she was just saying it. I don’t know.”

“Okay, I gotta run,” I said.

I knew Ben would never convince Lacey to go to prom with him, but I figured he at least deserved the opportunity. I jogged through the halls toward my locker, rubbing Radar’s head as I ran past him. He was talking to Angela and a freshman girl in band. “Don’t thank me. Thank Q,” I heard him say to the freshman, and she called out, “Thank you for my two hundred dollars!” Without looking back I shouted, “Don’t thank me, thank Margo Roth Spiegelman!” because of course she’d given me the tools I needed.

I made it to my locker and grabbed my calc notebook, but then I just stayed, even after the second bell rang, standing still in the middle of the hallway while people rushed past me in both directions, like I was the median in their freeway. Another kid thanked me for his two hundred dollars. I smiled at him. The school felt more mine than in all my four years there. We’d gotten a measure of justice for the bikeless band geeks. Lacey Pemberton had spoken to me. Chuck Parson had apologized.

I knew these halls so well — and finally it was starting to feel like they knew me, too. I stood there as the third bell rang and the crowds dwindled. Only then did I walk to calc, sitting down just after Mr. Jiminez had started another interminable lecture.

I’d brought Margo’s copy of Leaves of Grass to school, and I started reading the highlighted parts of “Song of Myself” again, under the desk while Mr. Jiminez scratched away at the blackboard. There were no direct references to New York that I could see. I handed it to Radar after a few minutes, and he looked at it for a while before writing on the corner of his notebook closest to me, The green highlighting must mean something. Maybe she wants you to open the door of your mind? I shrugged, and wrote back, Or maybe she just read the poem on two different days with two different highlighters.

A few minutes later, as I glanced toward the clock for only the thirty-seventh time, I saw Ben Starling standing outside the classroom door, a hall pass in his hand, dancing a spastic jig.

When the bell rang for lunch, I raced to my locker, but somehow Ben had beaten me there, and somehow he was talking to Lacey Pemberton. He was crowding her, slumping slightly so he could talk toward her face. Talking to Ben could make me feel a little claustrophobic sometimes, and I wasn’t even a hot girl.

“Hey, guys,” I said when I got up to them.

“Hey,” Lacey answered, taking an obvious step back from Ben. “Ben was just bringing me up-to-date on Margo. No one ever went into her room, you know. She said her parents didn’t allow her to have friends over.”

“Really?” Lacey nodded. “Did you know that Margo owns, like, a thousand records?”

Lacey threw up her hands. “No, that’s what Ben was saying! Margo never talked about music. I mean, she would say she liked something on the radio or whatever. But — no. She’s so weird.”

I shrugged. Maybe she was weird, or maybe the rest of us were weird. Lacey kept talking. “But we were just saying that Walt Whitman was from New York.”

“And according to Omnictionary, Woody Guthrie lived there for a long time, too,” Ben said.

I nodded. “I can totally see her in New York. I think we have to figure out the next clue, though. It can’t end with the book. There must be some code in the highlighted lines or something.”

“Yeah, can I look at it during lunch?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Or I can make you a copy in the library if you want.”

“Nah, I can just read it. I mean, I don’t know crap about poetry. Oh, but anyway, I have a cousin in college there, at NYU, and I sent her a flyer she could print. So I’m going to tell her to put them up in record stores. I mean, I know there are a lot of record stores, but still.”

“Good idea,” I said. They started to walk to the cafeteria, and I followed them.

“Hey,” Ben asked Lacey, “what color is your dress?”

“Um, it’s kind of sapphire, why?”

“Just want to make sure my tux matches,” Ben said. I’d never seen Ben’s smile so giddy-ridiculous, and that’s saying something, because he was a fairly giddy-ridiculous person.

Lacey nodded. “Well, but we don’t want to be too matchy-matchy. Maybe if you go traditional: black tux and a black vest?”

“No cummerbund, you don’t think?”

“Well, they’re okay, but you don’t want to get one with really fat pleats, you know?”

They kept talking — apparently, the ideal level of pleat-fatness is a conversational topic to which hours can be devoted — but I stopped listening as I waited in the Pizza Hut line. Ben had found his prom date, and Lacey had found a boy who would happily talk prom for hours. Now everyone had a date — except me, and I wasn’t going. The only girl I’d want to take was off tramping some kind of perpetual journey or something.

When we sat down, Lacey started reading “Song of Myself,” and she agreed that none of it sounded like anything and certainly none of it sounded like Margo. We still had no idea what, if anything, Margo was trying to say. She gave the book back to me, and they started talking about prom again.

All afternoon, I kept feeling like it wasn’t doing any good to look at the highlighted quotes, but then I would get bored and reach into my backpack and put the book on my lap and go back to it. I had English at the end of the day, seventh period, and we were just starting to read Moby Dick, so Dr. Holden was talking quite a lot about fishing in the nineteenth century. I kept Moby Dick on the desk and Whitman in my lap, but even being in English class couldn’t help. For once, I went a few minutes without looking at the clock, so I was surprised by the bell ringing, and took longer than everyone else to get my backpack packed. As I slung it over one shoulder and started to leave, Dr. Holden smiled at me and said, “Walt Whitman, huh?”

I nodded sheepishly.

“Good stuff,” she said. “So good that I’m almost okay with you reading it in class. But not quite.” I mumbled sorry and then walked out to the senior parking lot.

While Ben and Radar banded, I sat in RHAPAW with the doors open, a slow husky breeze blowing through. I read from The Federalist Papers to prepare for a quiz I had the next day in government, but my mind kept returning to its continuous loop: Guthrie and Whitman and New York and Margo. Had she gone to New York to immerse herself in folk music? Was there some secret folk music-loving Margo I’d never known? Was she maybe staying in an apartment where one of them had once lived? And why did she want to tell me about it?

I saw Ben and Radar approaching in the sideview mirror, Radar swinging his sax case as he walked quickly toward RHAPAW. They hustled in through the already-open door, and Ben turned the key and RHAPAW sputtered, and then we hoped, and then she sputtered again, and then we hoped some more, and finally she gurgled to life. Ben raced out of the parking lot and turned off campus before saying to me, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT!” He could hardly contain his glee.

He started hitting the car’s horn, but of course the horn didn’t work, so every time he hit it, he just yelled, “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! HONK IF YOU’RE GOING TO PROM WITH TRUE-BLUE HONEYBUNNY LACEY PEMBERTON! HONK, BABY, HONK!”

Ben could hardly shut up the whole way home. “You know what did it? Aside from desperation? I guess she and Becca Arrington are fighting because Becca’s, you know, a cheater, and I think she started to feel bad about the whole Bloody Ben thing. She didn’t say that, but she sort of acted it. So in the end, Bloody Ben is going to get me some puh-lay-hey.” I was happy for him and everything, but I wanted to focus on the game of getting to Margo.

“Do you guys have any ideas at all?”

It was quiet for a moment, and then Radar looked at me through the rearview mirror and said, “That doors thing is the only one marked different from the others, and it’s also the most random; I really think that’s the one with the clue. What is it again?”

“‘Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’” I replied.

“Admittedly, Jefferson Park is not really the best place to unscrew the doors of closed-mindedness from their jambs,” Radar allowed. “Maybe that’s what she’s saying. Like the paper town thing she said about Orlando? Maybe she’s saying that’s why she left.”

Ben slowed for a stoplight and then turned around to look at Radar. “Bro,” he said, “I think you guys are giving Margo Honey-bunny way too much credit.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Unscrew the locks from the doors,” he said. “Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs.”

“Yeah,” I said. The light turned green and Ben hit the gas. RHAPAW shuddered like she might disintegrate but then began to move.

“It’s not poetry. It’s not metaphor. It’s instructions. We are supposed to go to Margo’s room and unscrew the lock from the door and unscrew the door itself from its jamb.”

Radar looked at me in the rearview mirror, and I looked back at him. “Sometimes,” Radar said to me, “he’s so retarded that he becomes kind of brilliant.”

15

After parking in my driveway, we walked across the strip of grass that separated Margo’s house from mine, just as we had Saturday. Ruthie answered the door and said her parents wouldn’t be home until six; Myrna Mountweazel ran excited circles around us; we went upstairs. Ruthie brought us a toolbox from the garage, and then we all stared at the door leading to Margo’s bedroom for a while. We were not handy people.

“What the hell are you supposed to do?” asked Ben.

“Don’t curse in front of Ruthie,” I said.

“Ruthie, do you mind if I say hell?”

“We don’t believe in hell,” she said, by way of answering.

Radar interrupted. “People,” he said. “People. The door.” Radar dug out a Phillips-head screwdriver from the mess of a toolbox and knelt down, unscrewing the locking doorknob. I grabbed a bigger screwdriver and tried to unscrew the hinges, but there didn’t seem to be any screws involved. I looked at the door some more. Eventually, Ruthie got bored and went downstairs to watch TV.

Radar got the doorknob loose, and we each, in turn, peered inside at the unpainted, unfinished wood around the knob. No message. No note. Nothing. Annoyed, I moved onto the hinges, wondering how to open them. I swung the door open and shut, trying to understand its mechanics. “That poem is so damned long,” I said. “You’d think old Walt could have taken a line or two to tell us how to unscrew the door itself from its jamb.”

Only when he responded did I realize Radar was sitting at Margo’s computer. “According to Omnictionary,” he said, “we’re looking at a butt hinge. And you just use the screwdriver as a lever to pop out the pin. Incidentally, some vandal has added that butt hinges function well because they are powered by farts. Oh, Omnictionary. Wilt thou ever be accurate?”

Once Omnictionary had told us what to do, doing it proved surprisingly easy. I got the pin off each of the three hinges and then Ben pulled the door away. I examined the hinges, and the unfinished wood of the doorway. Nothing.

“Nothing on the door,” Ben said. Ben and I placed the door back in place, and Radar pounded in the pins with the screwdriver’s handle.

Radar and I went over to Ben’s house, which was architecturally identical to mine, to play a game called Arctic Fury. We were playing this game-within-a-game where you shoot each other with paintballs on a glacier. You received extra points for shooting your opponents in the balls. It was very sophisticated. “Bro, she’s definitely in New York City,” Ben said. I saw the muzzle of his rifle around a corner, but before I could move, he shot me between the legs. “Shit,” I mumbled.

Radar said, “In the past, it seems like her clues have pointed to a place. She tells Jase; she leaves us clues involving two people who both lived in New York City most of their lives. It does make sense.”

Ben said, “Dude, that’s what she wants.” Just as I was creeping up on Ben, he paused the game. “She wants you to go to New York. What if she arranged to make that the only way to find her? To actually go?”

“What? It’s a city of like twelve million people.”

“She could have a mole here,” Radar said. “Who will tell her if you go.”

“Lacey!” Ben said. “It’s totally Lacey. Yes! You gotta get on a plane and go to New York City right now. And when Lacey finds out, Margo will pick you up at the airport. Yes. Bro, I am going to take you to your house, and you’re gonna pack, and then I’m driving your ass to the airport, and you’re gonna put a plane ticket on your emergencies-only credit card, and then when Margo finds out what a badass you are, the kind of badass Jase Worthington only dreams about being, all three of us will be taking hotties to prom.”

I didn’t doubt there was a flight to New York City leaving shortly. From Orlando, there’s a flight to everywhere leaving shortly. But I doubted everything else. “If you call Lacey. . ” I said.

“She’s not going to confess!” Ben said. “Think of all the misdirection they used — they probably only acted like they were fighting so you wouldn’t suspect she was the mole.”

Radar said, “I don’t know, that doesn’t really add up.” He kept talking, but I was only half listening. Staring at the paused screen, I thought it over. If Margo and Lacey were fake-fighting, did Lacey fake-break-up with her boyfriend? Had she faked her concern? Lacey had been fielding dozens of emails — none with real information — from the flyers her cousin had put in record stores in New York. She was no mole, and Ben’s plan was idiotic. Still, the mere idea of a plan appealed to me. But there were only two and a half weeks left of school, and I’d miss at least two days if I went to New York — not to mention my parents would kill me for putting a plane ticket on my credit card. The more I thought about it, the dumber it was. Still, if I could see her tomorrow. . But no. “I can’t miss school,” I finally said. I unpaused the game.

“I have a French quiz tomorrow.”

“You know,” Ben said, “your romanticism is a real inspiration.”

I played for a few more minutes and then walked across Jefferson Park back home.

My mom told me once about this crazy kid she worked with. He was a completely normal kid until he was nine, when his dad died. And even though obviously a lot of nine-year-olds have had a lot of dead fathers and most of the time the kids don’t go crazy, I guess this kid was an exception.

So what he did was he took a pencil and one of those steel compass things, and he started drawing circles onto a piece of paper. All the circles exactly two inches in diameter. And he would draw the circles until the entire piece of paper was completely black, and then he would get another piece of paper and draw more circles, and he did this every day, all day, and didn’t pay attention in school and drew circles all over all of his tests and shit, and my mom said that this kid’s problem was that he had created a routine to cope with his loss, only the routine became destructive. So anyway, then my mom made him cry about his dad or whatever and the kid stopped drawing circles and presumably lived happily ever after. But I think about the circles kid sometimes, because I can sort of understand him. I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo, but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.

So I should have felt fine about not going to New York — it was a dumb idea, anyway. But as I went about my routine that night and the next day at school, it ate away at me, as if the routine itself was taking me farther from reuniting with her.

16

Tuesday evening, when she had been gone six days, I talked to my parents. It wasn’t a big decision or anything; I just did. I was sitting at the kitchen counter while Dad chopped vegetables and Mom browned some beef in a skillet. Dad was razzing me about how much time I’d spent reading such a short book, and I said, “Actually, it’s not for English; it seems like maybe Margo left it for me to find.” They got quiet, and then I told them about Woody Guthrie and the Whitman.

“She clearly likes to play these games of incomplete information,” my dad said.

“I don’t blame her for wanting attention,” my mom said, and then to me added, “but that doesn’t make her well-being your responsibility.”

Dad scraped the carrots and onions into the skillet. “Yeah, true. Not that either of us could diagnose her without seeing her, but I suspect she’ll be home soon.”

“We shouldn’t speculate,” my mom said to him quietly, as if I couldn’t hear or something. Dad was about to respond but I interrupted.

“What should I do?”

“Graduate,” my mom said. “And trust that Margo can take of herself, for which she has shown a great talent.”

“Agreed,” my dad said, but after dinner, when I went back to my room and played Resurrection on mute, I could hear them talking quietly back and forth. I could not hear the words, but I could hear the worry.

Later that night, Ben called my cell.

“Hey,” I said.

“Bro,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered.

“I’m about to go shoe shopping with Lacey.”

“Shoe shopping?”

“Yeah. Everything’s thirty percent off from ten to midnight. She wants me to help her pick out her prom shoes. I mean, she had some, but I was over at her house yesterday and we agreed that they weren’t. . you know, you want the perfect shoes for prom. So she’s going to return them and then we’re going to Burdines and we’re going to like pi—”

“Ben,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.”

“I’m really nervous and I can’t stop thinking that I actually kinda really like her not just in the she’s-a-hot-prom-date way but in the she’s-actually-really-cool-and-I-like-hanging-out-with-her kinda way. And, like, maybe we’re going to go to prom and we’ll be, like, kissing in the middle of the dance floor and everyone will be like, holy shit and, you know, everything they ever thought about me will just go out the window—”

“Ben,” I said, “stop the dork babble and you’ll be fine.” He kept talking for a while, but I finally got off the phone with him.

I lay down and started to feel a little depressed about prom. I refused to feel any kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn’t going to prom, but I had — stupidly, embarrassingly — thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we’d walk into the Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we’d be just in time for the last dance, and we’d dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the return of Margo, and then we’d fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream at Friendly’s. So yes, like Ben, I harbored ridiculous prom fantasies. But at least I didn’t say mine out loud.

Ben was such a self-absorbed idiot sometimes, and I had to remind myself why I still liked him. If nothing else, he sometimes got surprisingly bright ideas. The door thing was a good idea. It didn’t work, but it was a good idea. But obviously Margo had intended it to mean something else to me.

To me.

The clue was mine. The doors were mine!

On my way to the garage, I had to walk through the living room, where Mom and Dad were watching TV. “Want to watch?” my mom asked. “They’re about to crack the case.” It was one of those solve-the-murder crime shows.

“No, thanks,” I said, and breezed past them through the kitchen and into the garage. I found the widest flathead screwdriver and then stuck it in the waistband of my khaki shorts, cinching my belt tight. I grabbed a cookie out of the kitchen and then walked back through the living room, my gait only slightly awkward, and while they watched the televised mystery unfold, I removed the three pins from my bedroom door. When the last one came off, the door creaked and started to fall, so I swung it all the way open against the wall with one hand, and as I swung it, I saw a tiny piece of paper — about the size of my thumbnail — flutter down from the door’s top hinge. Typical Margo. Why hide something in her own room when she could hide it in mine? I wondered when she’d done it, how she’d gotten in. I couldn’t help but smile.

It was a sliver of the Orlando Sentinel, half straight edges and half ripped. I could tell it was the Sentinel because one ripped edge read “do Sentinel May 6, 2.” The day she’d left. The message was clearly from her. I recognized her handwriting:

8328 bartlesville Avenue

I couldn’t put the door back on without beating the pins back into place with the screwdriver, which would have definitely alerted my parents, so I just propped the door on its hinges and kept it all the way open. I pocketed the pins and then went to my computer and looked up a map of 8328 Bartlesville Avenue. I’d never heard of the street.

It was 34.6 miles away, way the hell out Colonial Drive almost to the town of Christmas, Florida. When I zoomed in on the satellite image of the building, it looked like a black rectangle fronted by dull silver and then grass behind. A mobile home, maybe? It was hard to get a sense of scale, because it was surrounded by so much green.

I called Ben and told him. “So I was right!” he said. “I can’t wait to tell Lacey, because she totally thought it was a good idea, too!”

I ignored the Lacey comment. “I think I’m gonna go,” I said.

“Well, yeah, of course you’ve gotta go. I’m coming. Let’s go on Sunday morning. I’ll be tired from all-night prom partying, but whatever.”

“No, I mean I’m going tonight,” I said.

“Bro, it’s dark. You can’t go to a strange building with a mysterious address in the dark. Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie?”

“She could be there,” I said.

“Yeah, and a demon who can only be nourished by the pancreases of young boys could also be there,” he said. “Christ, at least wait till tomorrow, although I’ve got to order her corsage after band, and then I want to be home in case Lacey IM’s, because we’ve been IM’ing a lot—”

I cut him off. “No, tonight. I want to see her.” I could feel the circle closing. In an hour, if I hurried, I could be looking at her.

“Bro, I am not letting you go to some sketchy address in the middle of the night. I will Tase your ass if necessary.”

“Tomorrow morning,” I said, mostly to myself. “I’ll just go tomorrow morning.” I was tired of having perfect attendance anyway. Ben was quiet. I heard him blowing air between his front teeth.

“I do feel a little something coming on,” he said. “Fever. Cough. Aches. Pains.” I smiled. After I hung up, I called Radar.

“I’m on the other line with Ben,” he said. “Let me call you back.”

He called back a minute later. Before I could even say hello, Radar said, “Q, I’ve got this terrible migraine. There’s no way I can go to school tomorrow.” I laughed.

After I got off the phone, I stripped down to T-shirt and boxers, emptied my garbage can into a drawer, and put the can next to the bed. I set my alarm for the ungodly hour of six in the morning, and spent the next few hours trying in vain to fall asleep.

17

Mom came into my room the next morning and said, “You didn’t even close the door last night, sleepyhead,” and I opened my eyes and said, “I think I have a stomach bug.” And then I motioned toward the trash can, which contained puke.

“Quentin! Oh, goodness. When did this happen?”

“About six,” I said, which was true.

“Why didn’t you come get us?”

“Too tired,” I said, which was also true.

“You just woke up feeling ill?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, which was untrue. I woke up because my alarm went off at six, and then I snuck into the kitchen and ate a granola bar and some orange juice. Ten minutes later, I stuck two fingers down my throat. I didn’t want to do it the night before because I didn’t want it stinking the room up all night. The puking sucked, but it was over quickly.

Mom took the bucket, and I could hear her cleaning it out in the kitchen. She returned with a fresh bucket, her lips pouting with worry. “Well, I feel like I should take the day—” she started, but I cut her off.

“I’m honestly fine,” I said. “Just queasy. Something I ate.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll call if it gets worse,” I said. She kissed my forehead. I could feel her sticky lipstick on my skin. I wasn’t really sick, but still, somehow she’d made me feel better.

“Do you want me to close the door?” she asked, one hand on it. The door clung to its hinges, but only barely.

“No no no,” I said, perhaps too nervously.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll call school on my way to work. You let me know if you need anything. Anything. Or if you want me to come home. And you can always call Dad. And I’ll check up on you this afternoon, okay?”

I nodded, and then pulled the covers back up to my chin. Even though the bucket had been cleaned, I could smell the puke underneath the detergent, and the smell of it reminded me of the act of puking, which for some reason made me want to puke again, but I just took slow, even mouth breaths until I heard the Chrysler backing down the driveway. It was 7:32. For once, I thought, I would be on time. Not to school, admittedly. But still.

I showered and brushed my teeth and put on dark jeans and a plain black T-shirt. I put Margo’s scrap of newspaper in my pocket. I hammered the pins back into their hinges, and then packed. I didn’t really know what to throw into my backpack, but I included the doorjamb-opening screwdriver, a printout of the satellite map, directions, a bottle of water, and in case she was there, the Whitman. I wanted to ask her about it.

Ben and Radar showed up at eight on the dot. I got in the backseat. They were shouting along to a song by the Mountain Goats.

Ben turned around and offered me his fist. I punched it softly, even though I hated that greeting. “Q!” he shouted over the music. “How good does this feel?”

And I knew exactly what Ben meant: he meant listening to the Mountain Goats with your friends in a car that runs on a Wednesday morning in May on the way to Margo and whatever Margotastic prize came with finding her. “It beats calculus,” I answered. The music was too loud for us to talk. Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music.

We drove all the way out Colonial Drive, past the movie theaters and the bookstores that I had been driving to and past my whole life. But this drive was different and better because it occurred during calculus, because it occurred with Ben and Radar, because it occurred on our way to where I believed I would find her. And finally, after twenty miles, Orlando gave way to the last remaining orange tree groves and undeveloped ranches — the endlessly flat land grown over thick with brush, the Spanish moss hanging off the branches of oak trees, still in the windless heat. This was the Florida where I used to spend mosquito-bitten, armadillo-chasing nights as a Boy Scout. The road was dominated now by pickup trucks, and every mile or so you could see a subdivision off the highway — little streets winding for no reason around houses that rose up out of nothing like a volcano of vinyl siding.

Farther out we passed a rotting wooden sign that said GROVE-POINT ACRES. A cracked blacktop road lasted only a couple hundred feet before dead-ending into an expanse of gray dirt, signaling that Grovepoint Acres was what my mom called a pseudovision — a subdivision abandoned before it could be completed. Pseudovisions had been pointed out to me a couple times before on drives with my parents, but I’d never seen one so desolate.

We were about five miles past Grovepoint Acres when Radar turned down the music and said, “Should be in about a mile.”

I took a long breath. The excitement of being somewhere other than school had started to wane. This didn’t seem like a place where Margo would hide, or even visit. It was a far cry from New York City. This was the Florida you fly over, wondering why people ever thought to inhabit this peninsula. I stared at the empty asphalt, the heat distorting my vision. Ahead, I saw a strip mall wavering in the bright distance.

“Is that it?” I asked, leaning forward and pointing.

“Must be,” Radar said.

Ben pushed the power button on the stereo, and we all got very quiet as Ben pulled into a parking lot long since reclaimed by the gray sandy dirt. There had once been a sign for these four storefronts. A rusted pole stood about eight feet high by the side of the road. But the sign was long gone, snapped off by a hurricane or an accumulation of decay. The stores themselves had fared little better: it was a single-story building with a flat roof, and bare cinder block was visible in places. Strips of cracked paint wrinkled away from the walls, like insects clinging to a nest. Water stains formed brown abstract paintings between the store windows. The windows were boarded up with warped sheets of particleboard. I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness: it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

As soon as the car stopped, my nose and mouth were flooded with the rancid smell of death. I had to swallow back a rush of puke that rose up into the raw soreness in the back of my throat. Only now, after all this lost time, did I realize how terribly I had misunderstood both her game and the prize for winning it.

I get out of the car and Ben is standing next to me, and Radar next to him. And I know all at once that this isn’t funny, that this hasn’t been prove-to-me-you’re-good-enough-to-hang-out-with-me. I can hear Margo that night as we drove around Orlando. I can hear her saying to me, “I don’t want some kids to find me swarmed with flies on a Saturday morning in Jefferson Park.” Not wanting to be found by some kids in Jefferson Park isn’t the same thing as not wanting to die.

There is no evidence that anyone has been here in a long time except for the smell, that sickly sour stench designed to keep the living from the dead. I tell myself she can’t smell like that, but of course she can. We all can. I hold my forearm up to my nose so I can smell sweat and skin and anything but death.

“MARGO?” Radar calls. A mockingbird perched on the rusted gutter of the building spits out two syllables in response. “MARGO!” he shouts again. Nothing. He digs a parabola into the sand with his foot and sighs. “Shit.”

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

The smell leaves me seized by desperate panic — panic not like my lungs are out of air, but like the atmosphere itself is out of air. I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.

“Bro, we should leave,” Ben says. “We should call the cops or something.” We have not looked at each other yet. We are all still looking at this building, this long-abandoned building that cannot possibly hold anything but corpses.

“No,” Radar says. “No no no no no. We call if there’s something to call about. She left the address for Q. Not for the cops. We have to find a way in there.”

“In there?” Ben says dubiously.

I clap Ben on the back, and for the first time all day, the three of us are looking not forward but at one another. That makes it bearable. Something about seeing them makes me feel as if she is not dead until we find her. “Yeah, in there,” I say.

I don’t know who she is anymore, or who she was, but I need to find her.

18

We walk around the back of the building and find four locked steel doors and nothing but ranch land, patches of palmettos dotting an expanse of gold-green grass. The stench is worse here, and I feel afraid to keep walking. Ben and Radar are just behind me, to my right and left. We form a triangle together, walking slowly, our eyes scanning the area.

“It’s a raccoon!” Ben shouts. “Oh, thank God. It’s a raccoon. Jesus.” Radar and I walk away from the building to join him near a shallow drainage ditch. A huge, bloated raccoon with matted hair lies dead, no visible trauma, its fur falling off, one of its ribs exposed. Radar turns away and heaves, but nothing comes out. I lean down next to him and put my arm between his shoulder blades, and when he gets his breath back, he says, “I am so fucking glad to see that dead fucking raccoon.”

But even so, I cannot picture her here alive. It occurs to me that the Whitman could be a suicide note. I think about things she highlighted: “To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” For a moment, I feel a flash of hope when I think about the last line of the poem: “I stop some where waiting for you.” But then I think that the I does not need to be a person. The I can also be a body.

Radar has walked away from the raccoon and is tugging on the handle of one of the four locked steel doors. I feel like praying for the dead — saying Kaddish for this raccoon — but I don’t even know how. I’m so sorry for him, and so sorry for how happy I am to see him like this.

“It’s giving a little,” Radar shouts to us. “Come help.”

Ben and I both put our arms around Radar’s waist and pull back. He puts his foot up against the wall to give himself extra leverage as he pulls, and then all at once they collapse onto me, Radar’s sweat-soaked T-shirt pressed up against my face. For a moment, I’m excited, thinking we’re in. But then I see Radar holding the door handle. I scramble up and look at the door. Still locked.

“Piece of shit forty-year-old goddamned doorknob,” Radar says. I’ve never heard him talk like this before.

“It’s okay,” I say. “There’s a way. There has to be.”

We walk all the way around to the front of the building. No doors, no holes, no visible tunnels. But I need in. Ben and Radar try to peel the slabs of particleboard from the windows, but they’re all nailed shut. Radar kicks at the board, but it doesn’t give. Ben turns back to me. “There’s no glass behind one of these boards,” he says, and then he starts jogging away from the building, his sneakers splashing sand as he goes.

I give him a confused look. “I’m going to bust through the particleboard,” he explains.

“You can’t do that.” He is the smallest of our light trio. If anyone tries to smash through the boarded-up windows, it should be me.

He balls his hands into fists and then extends his fingers out. As I walk toward him, he starts talking to me. “When my mom was trying to keep me from getting beat up in third grade, she put me in tae kwon do. I only went to like three classes, and I only learned one thing, but the thing comes in handy sometimes: we watched this tae kwon do master punch through a thick wooden block, and we were all like, dude, how did he do that, and he told us that if you move as though your hand will go through the block, and if you believe that your hand will go through the block, then it will.”

I’m about to refute this idiotic logic when he takes off, running past me in a blur. His acceleration continues as he approaches the board, and then utterly without fear, he leaps up at the last possible second, twists his body sideways — his shoulder out to bear the brunt of the force — and slams into the wood. I half-expect him to burst through and leave a Ben-shaped cutout, like a cartoon. Instead, he bounces off the board and falls onto his ass in a patch of bright grass amid the sea of sandy dirt. Ben rolls onto his side, rubbing his shoulder. “It broke,” he announces.

I assume he means his shoulder as I race toward him, but then he stands up, and I’m looking at a Ben-high crack in the particle-board. I start kicking at it, and the crack spreads horizontally, and then Radar and I get our fingers inside the crack and start tugging. I squint to keep the sweat from burning my eyes, and pull with all my force back and forth until the crack starts to make a jagged opening. Radar and I urge it on with silent work, until eventually he has to take a break and Ben replaces him. Finally we are able to punch a big chunk of the board into the minimall. I climb in feetfirst, landing blindly onto what feels like a stack of papers.

The hole we’ve carved into this building gives a little light, but I can’t even make out the dimensions of the room, or whether there is a ceiling. The air in here is so stale and hot that inhaling and exhaling feel identical.

I turn around and my chin hits Ben’s forehead. I find myself whispering, even though there’s no reason to. “Do you have a—”

“No,” he whispers back before I can finish. “Radar, did you bring a flashlight?”

I hear Radar coming through the hole. “I have one on my key chain. It’s not much, though.”

The light comes on, and I still can’t see very well, but I can tell we’ve stepped into a big room filled with a labyrinth of metal shelves. The papers on the floor are pages from an old day-by-day calendar, the days scattered through the room, all of them yellowing and mouse-bit. I wonder if this might once have been a little bookstore, although it’s been decades since these shelves held anything but dust.

We fall into line behind Radar. I hear something creak above us, and we all stop moving. I try to swallow the panic. I can hear each of Radar’s and Ben’s breaths, their shuffling footsteps. I want out of here, but that could be Margo creaking for all I know. It could also be crack addicts.

“Just the building settling,” Radar whispers, but he seems less sure than usual. I stand there unable to move. After a moment, I hear Ben’s voice. “The last time I was this scared, I peed myself.”

“The last time I was this scared,” Radar says, “I actually had to face a Dark Lord in order to make the world safe for wizards.”

I made a feeble attempt. “The last time I was this scared I had to sleep in Mommy’s room.”

Ben chuckles. “Q, if I were you, I would get that scared Every. Single. Night.”

I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, and so we begin to explore. We walk through each row of shelves, finding nothing but a few copies of Reader’s Digest from the 1970s lying on the floor. After a while, I find my eyes adjusting to the darkness, and in the gray light we start walking in different directions at different speeds.

“No one leaves the room until everyone leaves the room,” I whisper, and they whisper okay’s back. I get to a side wall of the room and find the first evidence that someone has been here since everyone left. A jagged semicircular, waist-high tunnel has been cut out of the wall. The words TROLL HOLE have been spray-painted in orange above the hole, with a helpful arrow pointing down to the hole. “Guys,” Radar says, so loud that the spell breaks for just a moment. I follow his voice and find him standing by the opposite wall, his flashlight illuminating another Troll Hole. The graffiti doesn’t look particularly like Margo’s, but it’s hard to tell for sure. I’ve only seen her spray-paint a single letter.

Radar shines the light through the hole as I duck down and lead the way through. This room is entirely empty except for a rolled carpet in one corner. As the flashlight scans the floor, I can see glue stains on the concrete from where the carpet had once been. Across the room, I can just make out another hole cut into the wall, this time without the graffiti.

I crawl through that Troll Hole into a room lined with clothing racks, the stainless-steel poles still bolted into walls wine-stained with water damage. This room is better lit, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s because there are several holes in the roof — tar paper hangs down, and I can see places where the roof sags against exposed steel girders.

“Souvenir store,” Ben whispers in front of me, and I know immediately he is right.

In the middle of the room five display cases form a pentagon. The glass that once kept the tourists from their tourist crap has mostly been shattered and lies in shards around the cases. The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay.

Strangely, though, there’s still some merchandise: there’s a Mickey Mouse phone I recognize from some way back part of childhood. Moth-bit but still-folded SUNNY ORLANDO T-shirts are on display, splattered with broken glass. Beneath the glass cases, Radar finds a box filled with maps and old tourist brochures advertising Gator World and Crystal Gardens and fun houses that no longer exist. Ben waves me over and silently points out the green glass alligator tchotchke lying alone in the case, almost buried in the dust. This is the value of our souvenirs, I think: you can’t give this shit away.

We make our way back through the empty room and the shelved room and crawl through the last Troll Hole. This room looks like an office only without computers, and it appears to have been abandoned in a great hurry, like its employees were beamed up to space or something. Twenty desks sit in four rows. There are still pens on some of the desks, and they all feature oversize paper calendars lying flat against the desks. On each calendar, it is perpetually February of 1986. Ben pushes a cloth desk chair and it spins, creaking rhythmically. Thousands of Post-it notes advertising The Martin-Gale Mortgage Corp. are piled beside one desk in a rickety pyramid. Open boxes contain stacks of paper from old dot matrix printers, detailing the expenses and income of the Martin-Gale Mortgage Corp. On one of the desks, someone has stacked brochures for subdivisions into a single-story house of cards. I spread the brochures out, thinking that they may hold a clue, but no.

Radar fingers through the papers, whispering, “Nothing after 1986.” I start to go through the desk drawers. I find Q-tips and stickpins. Pens and pencils packed a dozen each in flimsy cardboard packaging with retro fonts and design. Napkins. A pair of golf gloves.

“Do you guys see anything,” I ask, “that gives any hint that anyone has been here in the last, say, twenty years?”

“Nothing but the Troll Holes,” Ben answers. It’s a tomb, everything wrapped in dust.

“So why did she lead us here?” asks Radar. We are speaking now.

“Dunno,” I say. She is clearly not here.

“There are some spots,” Radar says, “with less dust. There’s a dustless rectangle in the empty room, like something was moved. But I don’t know.”

“And there’s that painted part,” Ben says. Ben points and Radar’s flashlight shows me that a piece of the far wall in this office has been brushed over with white primer, like someone got the idea to remodel the place but abandoned the project after half an hour. I walk over to the wall, and up close, I can see that there’s some red graffiti behind the white paint. But I can only see occasional hints of the red paint bleeding through — not nearly enough to make anything out. There’s a can of primer up against the wall, open. I kneel down and push my finger into the paint. There’s a hard surface, but it breaks easily, and my finger comes up drenched in white. As the paint drips off my finger, I don’t say anything, because we’ve all come to the same conclusion, that someone has been here recently after all, and then the building creaks again and Radar drops the flashlight and curses.

“This is freaky,” he says.

“Guys,” Ben says. The flashlight is still on the ground, and I take a step back, to pick it up, but then I see Ben pointing. He is pointing at the wall. A trick of the indirect light has made the graffiti letters float up through the coat of primer, a ghost-gray print I recognize immediately as Margo’s.

YOU WILL GO TO THE PAPER TOWNS

AND YOU WILL NEVER COME BACK

I pick up the flashlight and shine it on the paint directly, and the message disappears. But when I shine it against a different part of the wall, I can read it again. “Shit,” Radar says under his breath.

And now Ben says, “Bro, can we go now? Because the last time I was this scared. . screw it. I’m freaked out. There’s nothing funny about this shit.”

There’s nothing funny about this shit is the closest Ben can come to the terror I feel, maybe. And it is close enough for me. I fast-walk toward the Troll Hole. I can feel the walls closing in on us.

19

Ben and Radar dropped me off at my house — even though they’d skipped school, they couldn’t afford to skip band practice. I sat alone with “Song of Myself” for a long time, and for about the tenth time I tried to read the entire poem starting at the beginning, but the problem was that it’s like eighty pages long and weird and repetitive, and although I could understand each word of it, I couldn’t understand anything about it as a whole. Even though I knew the highlighted parts were probably the only important parts, I wanted to know whether it was a suicide-note kind of poem. But I couldn’t make sense of it.

I was ten confusing pages into the poem when I got so freaked out that I decided to call the detective. I dug his business card out of a pair of shorts in the laundry hamper. He answered on the second ring.

“Warren.”

“Hi, um, it’s Quentin Jacobsen. I’m a friend of Margo Roth Spiegelman?”

“Sure, kid, I remember you. What’s up?”

I told him about the clues and the minimall and about paper towns, about how she had called Orlando a paper town from the top of the SunTrust Building, but she hadn’t used it in the plural, about her telling me that she wouldn’t want to be found, about finding her underneath our bootsoles. He didn’t even tell me not to break into abandoned buildings, or ask why I was at an abandoned building at 10 A.M. on a school day. He just waited until I stopped talking and said, “Jesus, kid, you’re almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what’s your theory?”

“I’m worried that she might have, um, I guess killed herself.”

“It never crossed my mind this girl did anything but run off, kid. I can see your case, but you gotta remember she’s done this before. The clues, I mean. Adds drama to the whole enterprise. Honestly, kid, if she wanted you to find her — dead or alive — you already would have.”

“But don’t you—”

“Kid, the unfortunate thing is that she’s a legal adult with free will, you know? Let me give you some advice: let her come home. I mean, at some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”

I hung up with a bad taste in my mouth — I realized it wasn’t Warren’s poetry that would take me to Margo. I kept thinking about those lines at the end Margo had underlined: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” That grass, Whitman writes in the first few pages, is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” But where were the graves? Where were the paper towns?

I logged onto Omnictionary to see if it knew anything more about the phrase “paper towns” than I did. They had an extremely thoughtful and helpful entry created by a user named skunkbutt: “A Paper Town is a town that’s got a paper mill in it.” This was the shortcoming of Omnictionary: the stuff written by Radar was thorough and extremely helpful; the unedited work of skunk-butt left something to be desired. But when I searched the whole Web, I found something interesting buried forty entries down on a forum about real estate in Kansas.

Looks like Madison Estates isn’t going to get built; my husband and I bought property there, but someone called this week to say they’re refunding us our deposit because they didn’t presell enough houses to finance the project. Another paper town for KS! — Marge in Cawker, KS

A pseudovision! You will go to the pseudovisions and you will never come back. I took a deep breath and stared at the screen for a while.

The conclusion seemed inescapable. Even with everything broken and decided inside her, she couldn’t quite allow herself to disappear for good. And she had decided to leave her body — to leave it for me — in a shadow version of our subdivision, where her first strings had broken. She had said she didn’t want her body found by random kids — and it made sense that out of everyone she knew, she would pick me to find her. She wouldn’t be hurting me in a new way. I’d done it before. I had experience in the field.

I saw that Radar was online and was clicking over to talk to him when an IM from him popped up on my screen.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Hey.

QTHERESURRECTION: Paper towns = pseudovisions.

I think she wants me to find her body. Because she thinks I can handle it. Because we found that dead guy when we were kids.

I sent him the link.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Slow down. Let me look at the link.

QTHERESURRECTION: K.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Okay, don’t be so morbid. You don’t know anything for sure. I think she’s probably fine.

QTHERESURRECTION: No you don’t.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Okay, I don’t. But if anybody’s alive in the face of this evidence. .

QTHERESURRECTION: Yeah, I guess. I’m gonna go lie down. My parents get home soon.

But I couldn’t calm down, so I called Ben from bed and told him my theory.

“Pretty morbid shit, bro. But she’s fine. It’s all part of some game she’s playing.”

“You’re being kind of cavalier about it.”

He sighed. “Whatever, it’s a little lame of her to, like, hijack the last three weeks of high school, you know? She’s got you all worried, and she’s got Lacey all worried, and prom is in like three days, you know? Can’t we just have a fun prom?”

“Are you serious? She could be dead, Ben.”

“She’s not dead. She’s a drama queen. Wants attention. I mean, I know her parents are assholes, but they know her better than we do, don’t they? And they think so, too.”

“You can be such a tool,” I said.

“Whatever, bro. We both had a long day. Too much drama. I’ll TTYS.” I wanted to ridicule him for using chatspeak IRL, but I found myself lacking the energy.

After I hung up with Ben, I went back online, looking for a list of pseudovisions in Florida. I couldn’t find a list anywhere, but after searching “abandoned subdivisions” and “Grovepoint Acres” and the like for a while, I managed to compile a list of five places within three hours of Jefferson Park. I printed out a map of Central Florida, tacked the map to the wall above my computer, and then added a tack for each of the five locations. Looking at the map, I could detect no pattern among them. They were randomly distributed among the far-flung suburbs, and it would take me at least a week to get to all of them. Why hadn’t she left me a specific place? All these scary-as-hell clues. All this intimation of tragedy. But no place. Nothing to hold on to. Like trying to climb a mountain of gravel.

Ben gave me permission to borrow RHAPAW the next day, since he was going to be driving around, prom shopping with Lacey in her SUV. So for once I didn’t have to sit outside the band room — the seventh-period bell rang and I raced out to his car. I lacked Ben’s talent for getting RHAPAW to start, so I was one of the first people to arrive at the senior parking lot and one of the last to leave, but finally the engine caught, and I was off to Grovepoint Acres.

I drove out of town on Colonial, driving slowly, watching for any other pseudovisions I might have missed online. A long line of cars trailed behind me, and I felt anxious about holding them up; I marveled at how I could still have room to worry about such petty, ridiculous crap as whether the guy in the SUV behind me thought I was an excessively cautious driver. I wanted Margo’s disappearance to change me; but it hadn’t, not really.

As the line of cars snaked behind me like some kind of unwilling funeral procession, I found myself talking out loud to her. I will play out the string. I will not betray your trust. I will find you.

Talking like this to her kept me calm, strangely. It kept me from imagining the possibilities. I came again to the sagging wooden sign for Grovepoint Acres. I could almost hear the sighs of relief from the bottleneck behind me as I turned left onto the dead-end asphalt road. It looked like a driveway without a house. I left RHAPAW running and got out. From close up, I could see that Grovepoint Acres was more finished than it initially appeared. Two dirt roads ending in cul-de-sacs had been cut into the dusty ground, although the roads had eroded so much I could barely see their outlines. As I walked up and down both streets, I could feel the heat in my nose with each breath. The scalding sun made it hard to move, but I knew the beautiful, if morbid, truth: heat made death reek, and Grovepoint Acres smelled like nothing except cooked air and car exhaust — our cumulative exhalations held close to the surface by the humidity.

I looked for evidence she had been there: footprints or something written in the dirt or some memento. But I seemed to be the first person to walk on these unnamed dirt streets in years. The ground was flat, and not much brush had grown back yet, so I could see for a ways in every direction. No tents. No campfires. No Margo.

I got back in RHAPAW and drove to I-4 and then went northeast of town, up to a place called Holly Meadows. I drove past Holly Meadows three times before I finally found it — everything in the area was oak trees and ranch land, and Holly Meadows — lacking a sign at its entrance — didn’t stand out much. But once I drove a few feet down a dirt road through the initial roadside stand of oak and pine trees, it was every bit as desolate as Grovepoint Acres. The main dirt road just slowly evaporated into a field of dirt. There were no other roads that I could make out, but as I walked around, I did find a few spray-painted wooden stakes lying on the ground; I guessed that they had once been lot line markers. I couldn’t smell or see anything suspicious, but even so I felt a fear standing on my chest, and at first I couldn’t understand why, but then I saw it: when they’d clear-cut the area to build, they’d left a solitary live oak tree near the back of the field. And the gnarled tree with its thick-barked branches looked so much like the one where we’d found Robert Joyner in Jefferson Park that I felt sure she was there, on the other side of the tree.

And for the first time, I had to picture it: Margo Roth Spiegelman, slumped against the tree, her eyes silent, the black blood pouring out of her mouth, everything bloated and distorted because I had taken so long to find her. She had trusted me to find her sooner. She had trusted me with her last night. And I had failed her. And even though the air tasted like nothing but it-might-rain-later, I was sure I’d found her.

But no. It was only a tree, alone in the empty silver dirt. I sat down against the tree and let my breath come back. I hated doing this alone. I hated it. If she thought Robert Joyner had prepared me for this, she was wrong. I didn’t know Robert Joyner. I didn’t love Robert Joyner.

I hit at the dirt with the heels of my fists, and then pounded it again and again, the sand scattering around my hands until I was hitting the bare roots of the tree, and I kept it up, the pain shooting up through my palms and wrists. I had not cried for Margo until then, but now finally I did, pounding against the ground and shouting because there was no one to hear: I missed her I missed her I missed her I miss her.

I stayed there even after my arms got tired and my eyes dried up, sitting there and thinking about her until the light got gray.

20

The next morning at school, I found Ben standing beside the band door talking to Lacey, Radar, and Angela in the shade of a tree with low-hanging branches. It was hard for me to listen as they talked about prom, and about how Lacey was feuding with Becca or whatever. I was waiting for a chance to tell them what I’d seen, but then when I had the chance, when I finally said, “I took a pretty long look at the two pseudovisions but didn’t find much,” I realized that there was nothing new to say, really.

No one even seemed that concerned, except Lacey. She shook her head as I talked about the pseudovisions, and then said, “I was reading online last night that people who are suicidal end relationships with people they’re angry with. And they give away their stuff. Margo gave me like five pairs of jeans last week because she said I could wear them better, which isn’t even true because she’s so much more, like, curvy.” I liked Lacey, but I saw Margo’s point about the undermining.

Something about telling us that story made her start to cry, and Ben put an arm around her, and she tucked her head into his shoulder, which was hard to do, because in her heels she was actually taller than him.

“Lacey, we just have to find a location. I mean, talk to your friends. Did she ever mention paper towns? Did she ever talk about a specific place? Was there some subdivision somewhere that meant something to her?” She shrugged into Ben’s shoulder.

“Bro, don’t push her,” Ben said. I sighed, but shut up.

“I’m on the online stuff,” Radar said, “but her username hasn’t logged on to Omnictionary since she left.”

And then all at once they were back on the topic of prom. Lacey emerged from Ben’s shoulder still looking sad and distracted, but she tried to smile as Radar and Ben swapped tales of corsage purchasing.

The day passed as it always did — in slow motion, with a thousand plaintive glances at the clock. But now it was even more unbearable, because every minute I wasted in school was another minute in which I failed to find her.

My only vaguely interesting class that day was English, when Dr. Holden completely ruined Moby Dick for me by incorrectly assuming we’d all read it and talking about Captain Ahab and his obsession with finding and killing this white whale. But it was fun to watch her get more and more excited as she talked. “Ahab’s a madman railing against fate. You never see Ahab wanting anything else in this whole novel, do you? He has a singular obsession. And because he is the captain of his ship, no one can stop him. You can argue — indeed, you may argue, if you choose to write about him for your final reaction papers — that Ahab is a fool for being obsessed. But you could also argue that there is something tragically heroic about fighting this battle he is doomed to lose. Is Ahab’s hope a kind of insanity, or is it the very definition of humanness?” I wrote down as much as I could of what she said, realizing that I could probably pull off my final reaction paper without actually reading the book. As she talked, it occurred to me that Dr. Holden was unusually good at reading stuff. And she’d said she liked Whitman. So when the bell rang, I took Leaves of Grass from my bag and then zipped it back up slowly while everyone raced off either to home or to extracurriculars. I waited behind someone asking for an extension on an already late paper, and then he left.

“It’s my favorite Whitman reader,” she said.

I forced a smile. “Do you know Margo Roth Spiegelman?” I asked.

She sat down behind her desk and motioned for me to sit. “I never had her in class,” Dr. Holden said, “but I’ve certainly heard of her. I know that she ran away.”

“She sort of left me this book of poems before she, uh, disappeared.” I handed the book over, and Dr. Holden began paging through it slowly. As she did, I told her, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the highlighted parts. If you go to the end of ‘Song of Myself,’ she highlights this stuff about dying. Like, ‘If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.’”

“She left this for you,” Dr. Holden said quietly.

“Yeah,” I said.

She flipped back and tapped at the green highlighted quote with her fingernail. “What is this about the doorjambs? That’s a great moment in the poem, where Whitman — I mean, you can feel him shouting at you: ‘Open the doors! In fact, remove the doors!’”

“She actually left me something else inside my doorjamb.”

Dr. Holden laughed. “Wow. Clever. But it’s such a great poem — I hate to see it reduced to such a literal reading. And she seems to have responded very darkly to what is finally a very optimistic poem. The poem is about our connectedness — each of us sharing the same root system like leaves of grass.”

“But, I mean, from what she highlighted, it seems kinda like a suicide note,” I said. Dr. Holden read the last stanzas again and then looked up at me.

“What a mistake it is to distill this poem into something hopeless. I hope that’s not the case, Quentin. If you read the whole poem, I don’t see how you can come to any conclusion except that life is sacred and valuable. But — who knows. Maybe she skimmed it for what she was looking for. We often read poems that way. But if so, she completely misunderstood what Whitman was asking of her.”

“And what’s that?”

She closed the book and looked right at me in a way that made it impossible for me to hold her gaze. “What do you think of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, staring at a stack of graded papers on her desk. “I’ve tried to read it straight through a bunch of times, but I haven’t gotten very far. Mostly I just read the parts she highlighted. I’m reading it to try to understand Margo, not to try to understand Whitman.”

She picked up a pencil and wrote something on the back of an envelope. “Hold on. I’m writing that down.”

“What?”

“What you just said,” she explained.

“Why?”

“Because I think that is precisely what Whitman would have wanted. For you to see ‘Song of Myself’ not just as a poem but as a way into understanding another. But I wonder if maybe you have to read it as a poem, instead of just reading these fragments for quotes and clues. I do think there are some interesting connections between the poet in ‘Song of Myself’ and Margo Spiegelman — all that wild charisma and wanderlust. But a poem can’t do its work if you only read snippets of it.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. I took the book and stood up. I didn’t feel much better.

I got a ride home with Ben that afternoon and stayed at his house until he left to go pick up Radar for some pre-prom party being thrown by our friend Jake, whose parents were out of town. Ben asked me to go, but I didn’t feel like it.

I walked back to my house, across the park where Margo and I had found the dead guy. I remembered that morning, and I felt something twist at my gut in the remembering of it — not because of the dead guy, but because I remembered that she had found him first. Even in my own neighborhood’s playground, I’d been unable to find a body on my own — how the hell would I do it now?

I tried to read “Song of Myself” again when I got home that night, but despite Dr. Holden’s advice, it still turned into a jumble of nonsensical words.

I woke up early the next morning, just after eight, and went to the computer. Ben was online, so I IM’ed him.

QTHERESURRECTION: How was the party?

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Lame, of course. Every party I go to is lame.

QTHERESURRECTION: Sorry I missed it. You’re up early. Want to come over, play Resurrection?

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Are you kidding?

QTHERESURRECTION: uh. . no?

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Do you know what day it is?

QTHERESURRECTION: Saturday May 15?

ITWASAKIDNEYINFECTION: Bro, prom starts in eleven hours and fourteen minutes. I have to pick Lacey up in less than nine hours. I haven’t even washed and waxed RHAPAW yet, which by the way you did a nice job of dirtying up. Then after that I have to shower and shave and trim nasal hairs and wash and wax myself. God, don’t even get me started. I have a lot to do. Listen, I’ll call you later if I have a chance.

Radar was on, too, so I IM’ed him.

QTHERESURRECTION: What is Ben’s problem?

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Whoa there, cowboy.

QTHERESURRECTION: Sorry, I’m just pissed that he thinks prom is oh-so important.

OMNICTIONARIAN96: You’re going to be pretty pissed when you hear that the only reason I’m up this early is that I really need to go because I have to pick up my tux, aren’t you?

QTHERESURRECTION: Jesus Christ. Seriously?

OMNICTIONARIAN96: Q, tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and all the days for the rest of my life, I am happy to participate in your investigation. But I have a girlfriend. She wants to have a nice prom. I want to have a nice prom. It’s not my fault that Margo Roth Spiegelman didn’t want us to have a nice prom.

I didn’t know what to say. He was right, maybe. Maybe she deserved to be forgotten. But at any rate, I couldn’t forget her.

My mom and dad were still in bed, watching an old movie on TV. “Can I take the minivan?” I asked.

“Sure, why?”

“Decided to go to prom,” I answered hurriedly. The lie occurred to me as I told it. “Gotta pick out a tux and then get over to Ben’s. We’re both going stag.” My mom sat up, smiling.

“Well, I think that’s great, hon. It’ll be great for you. Will you come back so we can take pictures?”

“Mom, do you really need pictures of me going to prom stag? I mean, hasn’t my life been humiliating enough?”

She laughed.

“Call before curfew,” my dad said, which was midnight.

“Sure thing,” I said. It was so easy to lie to them that I found myself wondering why I’d never much done it before that night with Margo.

I took I-4 west toward Kissimmee and the theme parks, and then passed I-Drive where Margo and I had broken into SeaWorld, and then took Highway 27 down toward Haines City. There are a lot of lakes down there, and wherever there are lakes in Florida, there are rich people to congregate around them, so it seemed an unlikely place for a pseudovision. But the Website I’d found had been very specific about there being this huge parcel of oft-foreclosed land that no one had ever managed to develop. I recognized the place immediately, because every other subdivision on the access road was walled in, whereas Quail Hollow was just a plastic sign hammered into the ground. As I turned in, little plastic posters read FOR SALE, PRIME LOCATION, and GREAT DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIE$!

Unlike the previous pseudovisions, someone was keeping up Quail Hollow. No houses had been built, but the lots were marked with surveying stakes, and the grass was freshly mown. All the streets were paved and named with road signs. In the subdivision’s center, a perfectly circular lake had been dug and then, for some reason, drained. As I drove up in the minivan, I could see it was about ten feet deep and several hundred feet in diameter. A hose snaked across the bottom of the crater to the middle, where a steel-and-aluminum fountain rose from the bottom to eye level. I found myself feeling thankful the lake was empty, so I wouldn’t have to stare into the water and wonder if she was in the bottom somewhere, expecting me to put on scuba gear to find her.

I felt certain Margo could not be in Quail Hollow. It abutted too many subdivisions for it to be a good place to hide, whether you were a person or a body. But I looked anyway, and as I idled down the streets in the minivan, I felt so hopeless. I wanted to be happy that it wasn’t here. But if it wasn’t Quail Hollow, it would be the next place, or the one after that, or the one after that. Or maybe I’d never find her. Was that the better fate?

I finished my rounds, finding nothing, and headed back toward the highway. I got lunch at a drive-thru and then ate as I drove out west toward the minimall.

21

As I pulled into the minimall parking lot, I noticed that blue painters’ tape had been used to seal our hole in the board. I wondered who could have been there after us.

I drove around to the back and parked the minivan next to a rusted Dumpster that hadn’t encountered a garbage truck in decades. I figured I could bust through the painters’ tape if I needed to, and I was walking around toward the front when I noticed that the steel back doors to the stores didn’t have any visible hinges.

I’d learned a thing or two about hinges thanks to Margo, and I realized why we hadn’t had any luck pulling on all those doors: they opened in. I walked up to the door to the mortgage company office and pushed. It opened with no resistance whatsoever. God, we were such idiots. Surely, whoever cared for the building knew about the unlocked door, which made the painters’ tape seem even more out of place.

I wiggled out of the backpack I’d packed that morning and pulled out my dad’s high-powered Maglite and flashed it around the room. Something sizable in the rafters scurried. I shivered. Little lizards jump-ran through the path of the light.

A single shaft of light from a hole in the ceiling shone in the front corner of the room, and sunlight peeked out from behind the particleboard, but I mostly relied on the flashlight. I walked up and down the rows of desks, looking at the items we’d found in the drawers, which we’d left. It was profoundly creepy to see desktop after desktop with the same unmarked calendar: February 1986. February 1986. February 1986. June 1986. February 1986. I spun around and shone the light on a desk in the very center of the room. The calendar had been changed to June. I leaned in close and looked at the paper of the calendar, hoping to see a jagged edge where previous months had been torn off, or some marks on the page where a pen had pushed through the paper, but there was nothing different from the other calendars, save the date.

With the flashlight crooked between my neck and shoulder, I started to look through desk drawers again, paying special attention to the June desk: some napkins, some still-sharp pencils, memos about mortgages addressed to one Dennis McMahon, an empty pack of Marlboro Lights, and an almost-full bottle of red nail polish.

I took the flashlight in one hand and the nail polish in the other and stared at it closely. So red it was almost black. I’d seen this color before. It had been on the minivan’s dash that night. Suddenly, the scurrying in the rafters and the creaking in the building became irrelevant — I felt a perverted euphoria. I couldn’t know if it was the same bottle, of course, but it was certainly the same color.

I rotated the bottle around and saw, unambiguously, a tiny smear of blue spray paint on the outside of the bottle. From her spray-painted fingers. I could be sure now. She’d been here after we parted ways that morning. Maybe she was still staying here. Maybe she only showed up late at night. Maybe she had taped up the particleboard to keep her privacy.

I resolved right then to stay until morning. If Margo had slept here, I could, too. And thus commenced a brief conversation with myself.

Me: But the rats.

Me: Yeah, but they seem to stay in the ceiling.

Me: But the lizards.

Me: Oh, come on. You used to pull their tails off when you were little. You’re not scared of lizards.

Me: But the rats.

Me: Rats can’t really hurt you anyway. They’re more scared of you than you are of them.

Me: Okay, but what about the rats?

Me: Shut up.

In the end, the rats didn’t matter, not really, because I was in a place where Margo had been alive. I was in a place that saw her after I did, and the warmth of that made the minimall almost comfortable. I mean, I didn’t feel like an infant being held by Mommy or anything, but my breath had stopped catching each time I heard a noise. And in becoming comfortable, I found it easier to explore. I knew there was more to find, and now, I felt ready to find it.

I left the office, ducking through a Troll Hole into the room with the labyrinthine shelves. I walked up and down the aisles for a while. At the end of the room I crawled through the next Troll Hole into the empty room. I sat down on the carpet rolled against the far wall. The cracked white paint crunched against my back. I stayed there for a while, long enough that the jagged beam of light coming through a hole in the ceiling crept an inch along the floor as I let myself become accustomed to the sounds.

After a while, I got bored and crawled through the last Troll Hole into the souvenir shop. I rifled through the T-shirts. I pulled the box of tourist brochures out from under the display case and looked through them, looking for some hand-scrawled message from Margo, but I found nothing.

I returned to the room I now found myself calling the library. I thumbed through the Reader’s Digests and found a stack of National Geographics from the 1960s, but the box was covered in so much dust that I knew Margo had never been inside it.

I began to find evidence of human habitation only when I got back to the empty room. On the wall with the rolled-up carpet, I discovered nine thumbtack holes in the cracked and paint-peeled wall. Four of the holes made an approximate square, and then there were five holes inside the square. I thought perhaps Margo had stayed here long enough to hang up some posters, although there were none obviously missing from her room when we searched it.

I unrolled the carpet partway and immediately found something else: a flattened, empty box that had once contained twenty-four nutrition bars. I found myself able to imagine Margo here, leaning against the wall with musty rolled-up carpet for a seat, eating a nutrition bar. She is all alone, with only this to eat. Maybe she drives once a day to a convenience store to buy a sandwich and some Mountain Dew, but most of every day is spent here, on or near this carpet. This image seemed too sad to be true — it all struck me as so lonely and so very unMargo. But all the evidence of the past ten days accumulated toward a surprising conclusion: Margo herself was — at least part of the time — very unMargo.

I rolled out the carpet farther and found a blue knit blanket, almost newspaper thin. I grabbed it and held it to my face and there, God, yes. Her smell. The lilac shampoo and the almond in her skin lotion and beneath all of that the faint sweetness of the skin itself.

And I could picture her again: she unravels the carpet halfway each night so her hip isn’t against bare concrete as she lies on her side. She crawls beneath the blanket, uses the rest of the carpet as a pillow, and sleeps. But why here? How is this better than home? And if it’s so great, why leave? These are the things I cannot imagine, and I realize that I cannot imagine them because I didn’t know Margo. I knew how she smelled, and I knew how she acted in front of me, and I knew how she acted in front of others, and I knew that she liked Mountain Dew and adventure and dramatic gestures, and I knew that she was funny and smart and just generally more than the rest of us. But I didn’t know what brought her here, or what kept her here, or what made her leave. I didn’t know why she owned thousands of records but never told anyone she even liked music. I didn’t know what she did at night, with the shades down, with the door locked, in the sealed privacy of her room.

And maybe this was what I needed to do above all. I needed to discover what Margo was like when she wasn’t being Margo.

I lay there with the her-scented blanket for a while, staring up at the ceiling. I could see a sliver of late-afternoon sky through a crack in the roof, like a jagged canvas painted a bright blue. This would be the perfect place to sleep: one could see stars at night without getting rained on.

I called my parents to check in. My dad answered, and I said we were in the car on the way to meet Radar and Angela, and that I was staying with Ben overnight. He told me not to drink, and I told him I wouldn’t, and he said he was proud of me for going to prom, and I wondered if he would be proud of me for doing what I was actually doing.

This place was boring. I mean, once you got past the rodents and the mysterious the-building-is-falling-apart groans in the walls, there wasn’t anything to do. No Internet, no TV, no music. I was bored, so it again confused me that she would pick this place, since Margo always struck me as a person with a very limited tolerance for boredom. Maybe she liked the idea of slumming it? Unlikely. Margo wore designer jeans to break into SeaWorld.

It was the lack of alternative stimuli that led me back to “Song of Myself,” the only certain gift I had from her. I moved to a water-stained patch of concrete floor directly beneath the hole in the ceiling, sat down cross-legged, and angled my body so the light shone upon the book. And for some reason, finally, I could read it.

The thing is that the poem starts out really slowly — it’s just sort of a long introduction, but around the ninetieth line, Whitman finally starts to tell a bit of a story, and that’s where it picked up for me. So Whitman is sitting around (which he calls loafing) on the grass, and then:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full

hands;

How could I answer the child?. . . I do not know what

it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful

green stuff woven.

There was the hope Dr. Holden had talked about — the grass was a metaphor for his hope. But that’s not all. He continues,

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Like grass is a metaphor for God’s greatness or something. .

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. .

And then soon after that,

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow

zones,

Growing among black folks as among white.

So maybe the grass is a metaphor for our equality and our essential connectedness, as Dr. Holden had said. And then finally, he says of grass,

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

So grass is death, too — it grows out of our buried bodies. The grass was so many different things at once, it was bewildering. So grass is a metaphor for life, and for death, and for equality, and for connectedness, and for children, and for God, and for hope.

I couldn’t figure out which of these ideas, if any, was at the core of the poem. But thinking about the grass and all the different ways you can see it made me think about all the ways I’d seen and mis-seen Margo. There was no shortage of ways to see her. I’d been focused on what had become of her, but now with my head trying to understand the multiplicity of grass and her smell from the blanket still in my throat, I realized that the most important question was who I was looking for. If “What is the grass?” has such a complicated answer, I thought, so, too, must “Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman?” Like a metaphor rendered incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos.

I had to narrow her down, and I figured there had to be things here that I was seeing wrong or not seeing. I wanted to tear off the roof and light up the whole place so that I could see it all at once, instead of one flashlight beam at a time. I put aside Margo’s blanket and shouted, loud enough for all the rats to hear, “I Am Going To Find Something Here!”

I went through each desk in the office again, but it seemed more and more obvious that Margo had used only the desk with the nail polish in the drawer and the calendar set to June.

I ducked through a Troll Hole and made my way back to the library, walking again through the abandoned metal shelves. On each shelf I looked for dustless shapes that would tell me Margo had used this space for something, but I couldn’t find any. But then my darting flashlight happened across something atop the shelf in a corner of the room, right near the boarded-up storefront window. It was the spine of a book.

The book was called Roadside America: Your Travel Guide, and had been published in 1998, after this place had been abandoned. I flipped through it with the flashlight crooked between neck and shoulder. The book listed hundreds of attractions you could visit, from the world’s largest ball of twine in Darwin, Minnesota, to the world’s largest ball of stamps in Omaha, Nebraska. Someone had folded down the corners of several seemingly random pages. The book wasn’t too dusty. Maybe SeaWorld was only the first stop on some kind of whirlwind adventure. Yes. That made sense. That was Margo. She found out about this place somehow, came here to gather her supplies, spent a night or two, and then hit the road. I could imagine her pinballing among tourist traps.

As the last light fled from the holes in the ceiling, I found more books above other bookshelves. The Rough Guide to Nepal; The Great Sights of Canada; America by Car; Fodor’s Guide to the Bahamas; Let’s Go Bhutan. There seemed to be no connection at all among the books, except that they were all about traveling and had all been published after the minimall was abandoned. I tucked the Maglite under my chin, scooped up the books into a stack that extended from my waist to my chest, and carried them into the empty room I was now imagining as the bedroom.

So it turned out that I did spend prom night with Margo, just not quite as I’d dreamed. Instead of busting into prom together, I sat against her rolled-up carpet with her ratty blanket draped over my knees, alternately reading travel guides by flashlight and sitting still in the dark as the cicadas hummed above and around me.

Maybe she had sat here in the cacophonous darkness and felt some kind of desperation take her over, and maybe she found it impossible to unthink the thought of death. I could imagine that, of course.

But I could also imagine this: Margo picking these books up at various garage sales, buying every travel guide she could get her hands on for a quarter or less. And then coming here — even before she disappeared — to read the books away from prying eyes. Reading them, trying to decide on destinations. Yes. She would stay on the road and in hiding, a balloon floating through the sky, eating up hundreds of miles a day with the help of a perpetual tailwind. And in this imagining, she was alive. Had she brought me here to give me the clues to piece together an itinerary? Maybe. Of course I was nowhere near an itinerary. Judging from the books, she could be in Jamaica or Namibia, Topeka or Beijing. But I had only just begun to look.

22

In my dream, her head was on my shoulder as I lay on my back, only the corner of carpet between us and the concrete floor. Her arm was around my rib cage. We were just lying there, sleeping.

God help me. The only teenaged guy in America who dreams of sleeping with girls, and just sleeping with them. And then my phone rang. It took two more rings before my fumbling hands found the phone lying on the unrolled carpet. It was 3:18 A.M. Ben was calling.

“Good morning, Ben,” I said.

“YESSS!!!!!” he answered, screaming, and I could tell right away that now was not the time to try to explain to him all I had learned and imagined about Margo. I could damn near smell the booze on his breath. That one word, in the way it was shouted, contained more exclamation points than anything Ben had ever said to me in his entire life.

“I take it prom is going well?”

“YESSSS! Quentin Jacobsen! The Q! America’s greatest Quentin! Yes!” His voice got distant then but I could still hear him. “Everybody, hey, shut up, hold on, shut up — QUENTIN! JACOBSEN! IS INSIDE MY PHONE!” There was a cheer then, and Ben’s voice returned. “Yes, Quentin! Yes! Bro, you have got to come over here.”

“Where is here?” I asked.

“Becca’s! Do you know where it is?”

As it happened, I knew precisely where it was. I’d been in her basement. “I know where it is, but it’s the middle of the night, Ben. And I’m in—”

“YESSS!!! You have to come right now. Right now!”

“Ben, there are more important things going on,” I answered.

“DESIGNATED DRIVER!”

“What?”

“You’re my designated driver! Yes! You are so designated! I love that you answered! That’s so awesome! I have to be home by six! And I designate you to get me there! YESSSSSSS!”

“Can’t you just spend the night there?” I asked.

“NOOOO! Booooo. Booo on Quentin. Hey, everybody! Boooo Quentin!” And then I was booed. “Everybody’s drunk. Ben drunk. Lacey drunk. Radar drunk. Nobody drive. Home by six. Promised Mom. Boo, Sleepy Quentin! Yay, Designated Driver! YESSSS!”

I took a long breath. If Margo were going to show up, she would have showed up by three. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YESSSSSS!!!! YES! YES!”

Ben was still making assertions of affirmation when I hung up the phone. I lay there for a moment, telling myself to get up, and then I did. Still half asleep, I crawled through Troll Holes past the library and into the office, then pulled open the back door and got into the minivan.

I turned in to Becca Arrington’s subdivision just before four. There were dozens of cars parked along both sides of Becca’s street, and I knew there would be more people inside, since many of them had been dropped off via limo. I found a spot a couple cars away from RHAPAW.

I had never seen Ben drunk. In tenth grade, I once drank a bottle of pink “wine” at a band party. It tasted as bad going down as it did coming up. It was Ben who sat with me in Cassie Hiney’s Winnie-the-Pooh — themed bathroom while I projectile-vomited pink liquid all over a painting of Eeyore. I think the experience soured both of us on alcoholic pursuits. Until tonight, anyway.

Now, I knew Ben was going to be drunk. I’d heard him on the phone. No sober person says “yes” that many times per minute. Nonetheless, when I pushed past some people smoking cigarettes on Becca’s front lawn and opened the door to her house, I did not expect to see Jase Worthington and two other baseball players holding a tuxedo-clad Ben upside down above a keg of beer. The spout of the beer keg was in Ben’s mouth, and the entire room was transfixed on him. They were all chanting in unison, “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty,” and for a moment, I thought Ben was getting — like — hazed or something. But no, as he sucked on that beer spout like it was mother’s milk, little trickles of beer spilled from the sides of his mouth, because he was smiling. “Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five,” the people shouted, and you could hear their enthusiasm. Apparently, something remarkable was taking place.

It all seemed so trivial, so embarrassing. It all seemed like paper kids having their paper fun. I made my way through the crowd toward Ben, and was surprised to happen across Radar and Angela.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

Radar paused from counting and looked over at me. “Yes!” he said. “The Designated Driver cometh! Yes!”

“Why is everyone saying ‘yes’ so much tonight?”

“Good question,” Angela shouted to me. She puffed out her cheeks and sighed. She looked almost as annoyed as I felt.

“Hell yes, it’s a good question!” Radar said, holding a red plastic cup full of beer in each hand.

“They’re both his,” Angela explained to me calmly.

“Why aren’t you designated driver?” I asked.

“They wanted you,” she said. “Thought it would get you here.” I rolled my eyes. She rolled hers back, sympathetically.

“You must really like him,” I said, nodding toward Radar, who was holding both beers over his head, joining in the counting. Everybody seemed so proud of the fact that they could count.

“Even now he’s sort of adorable,” she answered.

“Gross,” I said.

Radar nudged me with one of the beer cups. “Look at our boy Ben! He’s some kind of autistic savant when it comes to keg stands. Apparently he’s like setting a world record right now or something.”

“What is a keg stand?” I asked.

Angela pointed at Ben. “That,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, it’s — I mean, how hard can it be to hang upside down?”

“Apparently, the longest keg stand in Winter Park history is sixty-two seconds,” she explained. “And it was set by Tony Yorrick,” who’s this gigantic guy who’d graduated when we were freshmen and now played for the University of Florida football team.

I was all for Ben setting records, but I couldn’t bring myself to join in as everyone shouted, “Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three!” And then Ben pulled the spout out of his mouth and screamed, “YESSS! I MUST BE THE GREATEST! I SHOOK UP THE WORLD!” Jase and some baseball players flipped him right-side-up and carried him around on their shoulders. And then Ben caught sight of me, pointed, and let out the loudest and most passionate “YESSSS!!!!!!” I’d ever heard. I mean, soccer players don’t get that excited about winning the World Cup.

Ben jumped off the baseball players’ shoulders, landing in an awkward crouch, and then swayed a bit on his way to standing. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “YES!” he said again. “Quentin is here! The Great Man! Let’s hear it for Quentin, the best friend of the fucking keg stand world record holder!” Jase rubbed the top of my head and said, “You’re the man, Q!” and then I heard Radar in my ear, “By the way, we are like folk heroes to these people. Angela and I left our afterparty to come here because Ben told me I’d be greeted as a king. I mean, they were chanting my name. Apparently they all think Ben is hilarious or something, and so they like us, too.”

To Radar, and also to everyone else, I said, “Wow.”

Ben turned away from us, and I watched him grab Cassie Hiney. His hands were on her shoulders, and she put her hands on his shoulders, and he said, “My prom date was almost prom queen,” and Cassie said, “I know. That’s great,” and Ben said, “I’ve wanted to kiss you every single day for the last three years,” and Cassie said, “I think you should,” and then Ben said, “YES! That’s awesome!” But he didn’t kiss Cassie. He just turned around to me and said, “Cassie wants to kiss me!” And I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “That’s so awesome.” And then he seemed to forget about Cassie and me both, as if the idea of kissing Cassie Hiney felt better than actually kissing her ever could.

Cassie said to me, “This party is so great, isn’t it?” and I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “This is like the opposite of band parties, huh?” And I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Ben is a spaz, but I love him.” And I said, “Yeah.” “Plus he’s got really green eyes,” she added, and I said, “Uh-huh,” and then she said, “Everyone says you’re cuter, but I like Ben,” and I said, “Okay,” and she said, “This party is so great, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yeah.” Talking to a drunk person was like talking to an extremely happy, severely brain-damaged three-year-old.

Chuck Parson walked up to me just as Cassie walked away. “Jacobsen,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“Parson,” I answered.

“You shaved my fucking eyebrow, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t shave it, actually,” I said. “I used a depilatory cream.”

He poked me quite hard in the middle of my chest. “You’re a douche,” he said, but he was laughing. “That took such big balls, bro. And now you’re all puppet master and shit. I mean, maybe I’m just drunk, but I’m feeling a little love for your douchey ass right now.”

“Thank you,” I said. I felt so detached from all this shit, all this high-school-is-ending-so-we-have-to-reveal-that-deep-down-we-all-love-everybody bullshit. And I imagined her at this party, or at thousands like this one. The life drawn out of her eyes. I imagined her listening to Chuck Parson babble at her and thinking about ways out, about the living ways out and the dead ways out. I could imagine the two paths with equal clarity.

“You want a beer, dicklicker?” Chuck asked. I might have forgotten he was even there, but the smell of booze on his breath made it hard to overlook his presence. I just shook my head, and he wandered off.

I wanted to go home, but I knew I couldn’t rush Ben. This was probably the single greatest day of his life. He was entitled to it.

So instead, I found a stairway and headed down to the basement. I’d been in the dark so long I was still craving it, and I just wanted to lie down somewhere halfway quiet and halfway dark and go back to imagining Margo. But as I walked past Becca’s bedroom, I heard some muffled noises — specifically, moanish noises — and so I paused outside her door, which was open just a crack.

I could see the top two-thirds of Jase, shirtless, on top of Becca, and she had her legs wrapped around him. Nobody was naked or anything, but they were headed in that direction. And maybe a better person would have turned away, but people like me don’t get a lot of chances to see people like Becca Arrington naked, so I stayed there in the doorway, peering into the room. And then they rolled around so Becca was on top of Jason, and she was sighing as she kissed him, and she was reaching down for her shirt. “Do you think I’m hot?” she said.

“God yeah, you are so hot, Margo,” Jase said.

“What!?” Becca said, furious, and it became quickly clear to me that I wasn’t going to see Becca naked. She started screaming; I backed away from the door; Jase spotted me and screamed, “What’s your problem?” And Becca shouted, “Screw him. Who gives a shit about him? What about me?! Why are you thinking about her and not me!”

That seemed like as good a time as any to take my leave of the situation, so I closed the door and went to the bathroom. I did need to pee, but mostly I just needed to be away from the human voice.

It always takes a few seconds for me to start peeing after all the equipment has been properly set up, and so I stood there for a second, waiting, and then I started peeing. I’d just gotten to the full-stream, shudder-of-relief part of peeing when a girl’s voice from the general area of the bathtub said, “Who’s there?”

And I said, “Uh, Lacey?”

“Quentin? What the hell are you doing here?” I wanted to stop peeing but couldn’t, of course. Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.

“Um, peeing,” I said.

“How’s it going?” she asked through the curtain.

“Um, fine?” I shook out the last of it, zipped my shorts, and flushed.

“You wanna hang out in the bathtub?” she asked. “That’s not a come-on.”

After a moment, I said, “Sure.” I pulled the shower curtain back. Lacey smiled up at me, and then pulled her knees up to her chest. I sat down across from her, my back against the cold sloping porcelain. Our feet were intertwined. She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and these cute little flip-flops. Her makeup was just a little smeared around her eyes. Her hair was half up, still styled for prom, and her legs were tan. It must be said that Lacey Pemberton was very beautiful. She was not the kind of girl who could make you forget about Margo Roth Spiegelman, but she was the kind of girl who could make you forget about a lot of things.

“How was prom?” I asked.

“Ben is really sweet,” she answered. “I had fun. But then Becca and I had a huge fight and she called me a whore and then she stood up on the couch upstairs and she shushed the entire party and then she told everyone I have an STD.”

I winced. “God,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m sort of ruined. It’s just. . God. It sucks, honestly, because. . it’s just so humiliating, and she knew it would be, and. . it sucks. So then I went to the bathtub and then Ben came down here and I told him to leave me alone. Nothing against Ben, but he wasn’t very good at, like, listening. He’s kinda drunk. I don’t even have it. I had it. It’s cured. Whatever. It’s just, I’m not a slut. It was one guy. One lame-ass guy. God, I can’t believe I ever told her. I should have just told Margo when Becca wasn’t around.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “The thing is that Becca is just jealous.”

“Why would she be jealous? She’s prom queen. She’s dating Jase. She’s the new Margo.”

My butt was sore against the porcelain, so I tried to rearrange myself. My knees were touching her knees. “No one will ever be the new Margo,” I said. “Anyway, you have what she really wants. People like you. People think you’re cuter.”

Lacey shrugged bashfully. “Do you think I’m superficial?”

“Well, yeah.” I thought of myself standing outside Becca’s bedroom, hoping she’d take her shirt off. “But so am I,” I added. “So is everyone.” I’d often thought, If only I had the body of Jase Worthington. Walked like I knew how to walk. Kissed like I knew how to kiss.

“But not in the same way. Ben and I are superficial in the same way. You don’t give a shit if people like you.”

Which was both true and not. “I care more than I’d like to,” I said.

“Everything sucks without Margo,” she said. She was drunk, too, but I didn’t mind her variety of drunk.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I want you to take me to that place,” she said. “That strip mall. Ben told me about it.”

“Yeah, we can go whenever you want,” I said. I told her I’d been there all night, that I’d found Margo’s nail polish and her blanket.

Lacey was quiet for a while, breathing through her open mouth. When she finally said it, she almost whispered it. Worded like a question and spoken like a statement: “She’s dead, isn’t she.”

“I don’t know, Lacey. I thought so until tonight, but now I don’t know.”

“She’s dead and we’re all. . doing this.”

I thought of the highlighted Whitman: “If no other in the world be aware I sit content, / And if each and all be aware I sit content.” I said, “Maybe that’s what she wanted, for life to go on.”

“That doesn’t sound like my Margo,” she said, and I thought of my Margo, and Lacey’s Margo, and Mrs. Spiegelman’s Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different fun house mirrors. I was going to say something, but Lacey’s open mouth became truly slack-jawed, and she leaned her head against the cold gray tile of the bathroom wall, asleep.

It wasn’t until after two people had come into the bathroom to pee that I decided to wake her up. It was almost 5 A.M., and I needed to take Ben home.

“Lace, wake up,” I said, touching her flip-flop with my shoe.

She shook her head. “I like being called that,” she said. “You know that you’re, like, currently my best friend?”

“I’m thrilled,” I said, even though she was drunk and tired and lying. “So listen, we’re going to go upstairs together, and if anybody says anything about you, I will defend your honor.”

“Okay,” she said. And so we went upstairs together, and the party had thinned out a little, but there were still some baseball players, including Jase, over by the keg. Mostly there were people sleeping in sleeping bags all over the floor; some of them were squeezed onto the pullout couch. Angela and Radar were lying together on a love seat, Radar’s legs dangling over the side. They were sleeping over.

Just as I was about to ask the guys by the keg if they’d seen Ben, he ran into the living room. He wore a blue baby bonnet on his head and was wielding a sword made out of eight empty cans of Milwaukee’s Best Light, which had, I assumed, been glued together.

“I SEE YOU!” Ben shouted, pointing at me with the sword. “I SPY QUENTIN JACOBSEN! YESSS! Come here! Get on your knees!” he shouted.

“What? Ben, calm down.”

“KNEES!”

I obediently knelt, looking up at him.

He lowered the beer sword and tapped me on each shoulder. “By the power of the superglue beer sword, I hereby designate you my driver!”

“Thanks,” I said. “Don’t puke in the minivan.”

“YES!” he shouted. And then when I tried to get up, he pushed me back down with his non-beer-sworded hand, and he tapped me again with the beer sword, and he said, “By the power of the superglue beer sword, I hereby announce that you will be naked under your robe at graduation.”

“What?” I stood then.

“YES! Me and you and Radar! Naked under our robes! At graduation! It will be so awesome!”

“Well,” I said, “it will be really hot.”

“YES!” he said. “Swear you will do it! I already made Radar swear. RADAR, DIDN’T YOU SWEAR?”

Radar turned his head ever so slightly, and opened his eyes a slit. “I swore,” he mumbled.

“Well then, I swear, too,” I said.

“YES!” Then Ben turned to Lacey. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Ben.”

“No, I love you. Not like a sister loves a brother or like a friend loves a friend. I love you like a really drunk guy loves the best girl ever.” She smiled.

I took a step forward, trying to save him from further embarrassment, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “If we’re gonna get you home by six, we should be leaving,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “I just gotta thank Becca for this awesome party.”

So Lacey and I followed Ben downstairs, where he opened the door to Becca’s room and said, “Your party kicked so much ass! Even though you suck so much! It’s like instead of blood, your heart pumps liquid suck! But thanks for the beer!” Becca was alone, lying on top of her covers, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t even glance over at him. She just mumbled, “Oh, go to hell, shit-face. I hope your date gives you her crabs.”

Without a hint of irony in his voice, Ben answered, “Great talking to you!” and then closed the door. I don’t think he had the faintest idea he’d just been insulted.

And then we were upstairs again and getting ready to walk out the door. “Ben,” I said, “you’re going to have to leave the beer sword here.”

“Right,” he said, and then I grabbed the sword’s tip and tugged, but Ben refused to relinquish it. I was about to start screaming at his drunk ass when I realized he couldn’t let go of the sword.

Lacey laughed. “Ben, did you glue yourself to the beer sword?”

“No,” Ben answered. “I superglued. That way no one can steal it from me!”

“Good thinking,” Lacey deadpanned.

Lacey and I managed to break off all the beer cans except the one that was superglued directly to Ben’s hand. No matter how hard I pulled, Ben’s hand just limply followed along, like the beer was the string and his hand the puppet. Finally, Lacey just said, “We gotta go.” So we did. We strapped Ben into the backseat of the minivan. Lacey sat next to him, because “I should make sure he doesn’t puke or beat himself to death with his beer hand or whatever.”

But he was far enough gone for Lacey to feel comfortable talking about him. As I drove down the interstate, she said, “There’s something to be said for trying hard, you know? I mean, I know he tries too hard, but why is that such a bad thing? And he’s sweet, isn’t he?”

“I guess so,” I said. Ben’s head was lolling around, seemingly unconnected to a spine. He didn’t strike me as particularly sweet, but whatever.

I dropped Lacey off first on the other side of Jefferson Park. When she leaned over and pecked him on the mouth, he perked up enough to mumble, “Yes.” She walked up to the driver’s-side door on the way to her condo. “Thanks,” she said. I just nodded.

I drove across the subdivision. It wasn’t night and it wasn’t morning. Ben snored quietly in the back. I pulled up in front of his house, got out, opened the sliding door of the minivan, and unfastened his seat belt.

“Time to go home, Benners.”

He sniffed and shook his head, then awoke. He reached up to rub his eyes and seemed surprised to find an empty can of Milwaukee’s Best Light attached to his right hand. He tried to make a fist and dented the can some, but did not dislodge it. He looked at it for a minute, and then nodded. “The Beast is stuck to me,” he noted.

He climbed out of the minivan and staggered up the sidewalk to his house, and when he was standing on the front porch, he turned around, smiling. I waved at him. The beer waved back.

23

I slept for a few hours and then spent the morning poring over the travel guides I’d discovered the day before. I waited until noon to call Ben and Radar. I called Ben first. “Good morning, Sunshine,” I said.

“Oh, God,” Ben said, his voice dripping abject misery. “Oh, sweet baby Jesus, come and comfort your little bro Ben. Oh, Lord. Shower me with your mercy.”

“There’ve been a lot of Margo developments,” I said excitedly, “so you need to come over. I’m gonna call Radar, too.”

Ben seemed not to have heard me. “Hey, when my mom came into my room at nine o’clock this morning, why is it that as I reached up to yawn, she and I both discovered a beer can was stuck to my hand?”

“You superglued a bunch of beers together to make a beer sword, and then you superglued your hand to it.”

“Oh, yeah. The beer sword. That rings a bell. ”

“Ben, come over.”

“Bro. I feel like shit.”

“Then I’ll come over to your house. How soon?”

“Bro, you can’t come over here. I have to sleep for ten thousand hours. I have to drink ten thousand gallons of water, and take ten thousand Advils. I’ll just see you tomorrow at school.”

I took a deep breath and tried not to sound pissed. “I drove across Central Florida in the middle of the night to be sober at the world’s drunkest party and drive your soggy ass home, and this is—” I would have kept talking, but I noticed that Ben had hung up. He hung up on me. Asshole.

As time passed, I only got more pissed. It’s one thing not to give a shit about Margo. But really, Ben didn’t give a shit about me, either. Maybe our friendship had always been about convenience— he didn’t have anyone cooler than me to play video games with. And now he didn’t have to be nice to me, or care about the things I cared about, because he had Jase Worthington. He had the school keg stand record. He had a hot prom date. He’d jumped at his first opportunity to join the fraternity of vapid asshats.

Five minutes after he hung up on me, I called his cell again. He didn’t answer, so I left a message. “You want to be cool like Chuck, Bloody Ben? That’s what you always wanted? Well, congratulations. You got it. And you deserve him, because you’re also a shitbag. Don’t call back.”

Then I called Radar. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he answered. “I just threw up in the shower. Can I call you back?”

“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound angry. I just wanted someone to help me sort through the world according to Margo. But Radar wasn’t Ben; he called back just a couple minutes later.

“It was so disgusting that I puked while cleaning it up, and then while cleaning that up, I puked again. It’s like a perpetual motion machine. If you just kept feeding me, I could have just kept puking forever.”

“Can you come over? Or can I come over to your house?”

“Yeah, of course. What’s up?”

“Margo was alive and in the minimall for at least one night after her disappearance.”

“I’ll come to you. Four minutes.”

Radar showed up at my window precisely four minutes later.

“You should know I’m having a huge fight with Ben,” I said as he climbed in.

“I’m too hungover to mediate,” Radar answered quietly. He lay down on the bed, his eyes half closed, and rubbed his buzzed hair. “It’s like I got hit by lightning.” He sniffed. “Okay, bring me up-to-date.” I sat down in the desk chair and told Radar about my evening in Margo’s vacation house, trying hard not to leave out any possibly helpful details. I knew Radar was better at puzzles than I, and I was hoping he’d piece together this one.

He waited to talk until I’d said, “And then Ben called me and I left for that party.”

“Do you have that book, the one with the turned-down corners?” he asked. I got up and fished for it under the bed, finally pulling it out. Radar held it above his head, squinting through his headache, and flipped through the pages.

“Write this down,” he said. “Omaha, Nebraska. Sac City, Iowa. Alexandria, Indiana. Darwin, Minnesota. Hollywood, California. Alliance, Nebraska. Okay. Those are the locations of all the things she — well, or whoever read this book — found interesting.” He got up, motioned me out of the chair, and then swiveled to the computer. Radar had an amazing talent for carrying on conversations while typing. “There’s a map mash-up that allows you to enter multiple destinations and it will spit out a variety of itineraries. Not that she’d know about this program. But still, I want to see.”

“How do you know all this shit?” I asked.

“Um, reminder: I. Spend. My. Entire. Life. On. Omnictionary. In the hour between when I got home this morning and when I hurled in the shower, I completely rewrote the page for the Blue-spotted Anglerfish. I have a problem. Okay, look at this,” he said. I leaned in and saw several jagged routes drawn onto a map of the United States. All began in Orlando and ended in Hollywood, California.

“Maybe she’ll stay in LA?” Radar suggested.

“Maybe,” I said. “There’s no way to tell her route, though.”

“True. Also nothing else points to LA. What she said to Jase points to New York. The ‘go to the paper towns and never come back’ points to a nearby pseudovision, it seems. The nail polish also points to maybe her still being in the area? I’m just saying we can now add the location of the world’s largest ball of popcorn to our list of possible Margo locales.”

“The traveling would fit with one of the Whitman quotes: ‘I tramp a perpetual journey.’”

Radar stayed hunched over the computer. I went to sit down on the bed. “Hey, will you just print out a map of the U.S. so I can plot the points?” I asked.

“I can just do it online,” he said.

“Yeah, but I want to be able to look at it.” The printer fired up a few seconds later and I placed the U.S. map next to the one with the pseudovisions on the wall. I put a tack in for each of the six locations she (or someone) had marked in the book. I tried to look at them as a constellation, to see if they formed a shape or a letter — but I couldn’t see anything. It was a totally random distribution, like she’d blindfolded herself and thrown darts at the map.

I sighed. “You know what would be nice?” Radar asked. “If we could find some evidence that she was checking her email or anywhere on the Internet. I search for her name every day; I’ve got a bot that will alert me if she ever logs on to Omnictionary with that username. I track IP addresses of people who search for the phrase ‘paper towns.’ It’s incredibly frustrating.”

“I didn’t know you were doing all that stuff,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Only doing what I’d want someone else to do. I know I wasn’t friends with her, but she deserves to be found, you know?”

“Unless she doesn’t want to be,” I said.

“Yeah, I guess that’s possible. It’s all still possible.” I nodded. “Yeah, so — okay,” he said. “Can we brainstorm over video games?”

“I’m not really in the mood.”

“Can we call Ben then?”

“No. Ben’s an asshole.”

Radar looked at me sideways. “Of course he is. You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it’s going with my girlfriend — but I don’t give a shit, man, because you’re you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that’s okay. They’re them. I’m too obsessed with a reference Web site to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That’s okay, too. That’s me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You’re funny, and you’re smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t complimenting you. Just saying: stop thinking Ben should be you, and he needs to stop thinking you should be him, and y’all just chill the hell out.”

“All right,” I said finally, and called Ben. The news that Radar was over and wanted to play video games led to a miraculous hangover recovery.

“So,” I said after hanging up. “How’s Angela?”

Radar laughed. “She’s good, man. She’s real good. Thanks for asking.”

“You still a virgin?” I asked.

“I don’t kiss and tell. Although, yes. Oh, and we had our first fight this morning. We had breakfast at Waffle House, and she was going on about how awesome the black Santas are, and how my parents are great people for collecting them because it’s important for us not to presume that everybody cool in our culture like God and Santa Claus is white, and how the black Santa empowers the whole African-American community.”

“I actually think I kind of agree with her,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it’s a fine idea, but it happens to be bullshit. They’re not trying to spread the black Santa gospel. If they were, they’d make black Santas. Instead, they’re trying to buy the entire world supply. There’s this old guy in Pittsburgh with the second-biggest collection, and they’re always trying to buy it off him.”

Ben spoke from the doorway. He’d been there a while, apparently. “Radar, your failure to bop that lovely honeybunny is the greatest humanitarian tragedy of our time.”

“What’s up, Ben?” I said.

“Thanks for the ride last night, bro.”

24

Even though we only had a week before finals, I spent Monday afternoon reading “Song of Myself.” I’d wanted to go to the last two pseudovisions, but Ben needed his car. I was no longer looking for clues in the poem so much as I was looking for Margo herself. I’d made it about halfway through “Song of Myself” this time when I stumbled into another section that I found myself reading and rereading.

“I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,” Whitman writes. And then for two pages, he’s just hearing: hearing a steam whistle, hearing people’s voices, hearing an opera. He sits on the grass and lets the sound pour through him. And this is what I was trying to do, too, I guess: to listen to all the little sounds of her, because before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard. For so long, I hadn’t really heard Margo — I’d seen her screaming and thought her laughing — that now I figured it was my job. To try, even at this great remove, to hear the opera of her.

If I couldn’t hear Margo, I could at least listen to what she once heard, so I downloaded the album of Woody Guthrie covers. I sat at the computer, my eyes closed, elbows against the desk, and listened to a voice singing in a minor key. I tried to hear, inside a song I’d never heard before, the voice I had trouble remembering after twelve days.

I was still listening — but now to another of her favorites, Bob Dylan — when my mom got home. “Dad’s gonna be late,” she said through the closed door. “I thought I might make turkey burgers?”

“Sounds good,” I answered, and then closed my eyes again and listened to the music. I didn’t sit up again until Dad called me for dinner an album and a half later.

At dinner, Mom and Dad were talking about politics in the Middle East. Even though they completely agreed with each other, they still managed to yell about it, saying that so-and-so was a liar, and so-and-so was a liar and a thief, and that the lot of them should resign. I focused on the turkey burger, which was excellent, dripping with ketchup and smothered with grilled onions.

“Okay, enough,” my mom said after a while. “Quentin, how was your day?”

“Fine,” I said. “Getting ready for finals, I guess.”

“I can’t believe this is your last week of classes,” Dad said. “It really does just seem like yesterday. .”

“It does,” Mom said. A voice in my head was like: WARNING NOSTALGIA ALERT WARNING WARNING WARNING. Great people, my parents, but prone to bouts of crippling sentimentality.

“We’re just very proud of you,” she said. “But, God, we’ll miss you next fall.”

“Yeah, well, don’t speak too soon. I could still fail English.”

My mom laughed, and then said, “Oh, guess who I saw at the YMCA yesterday? Betty Parson. She said Chuck was going to the University of Georgia next fall. I was pleased for him; he’s always struggled.”

“He’s an asshole,” I said.

“Well,” my dad said, “he was a bully. And his behavior was deplorable.” This was typical of my parents: in their minds, no one was just an asshole. There was always something wrong with people other than just sucking: they had socialization disorders, or borderline personality syndrome, or whatever.

My mom picked up the thread. “But Chuck has learning difficulties. He has all kinds of problems — just like anyone. I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them — the bad kids and the good kids and all kids — as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self-actualized. But you know, I always liked Betty, and I always had hopes for Chuck. So it’s good that he’s going to college, don’t you think?”

“Honestly, Mom, I don’t really care about him one way or another.” But I did think, if everyone is such a person, how come Mom and Dad still hated all the politicians in Israel and Palestine? They didn’t talk about them like they were people.

My dad finished chewing something and then put his fork down and looked at me. “The longer I do my job,” he said, “the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It’s so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”

“That is really lovely,” my mom said. I liked that they liked each other. “But isn’t it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”

“True. Consciousness makes for poor windows, too. I don’t think I’d ever thought about it quite that way.”

I was sitting back. I was listening. And I was hearing something about her and about windows and mirrors. Chuck Parson was a person. Like me. Margo Roth Spiegelman was a person, too. And I had never quite thought of her that way, not really; it was a failure of all my previous imaginings. All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unscaleable wall surrounding her. I thought of her asleep on the carpet with only that jagged sliver of sky above her. Maybe Margo felt comfortable there because Margo the person lived like that all the time: in an abandoned room with blocked-out windows, the only light pouring in through holes in the roof. Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made — and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make — was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

25

The clock was always punishing, but feeling like I was closer to unraveling the knots made time seem to stop entirely on Tuesday. We’d all decided to go to the minimall right after school, and the waiting was unbearable. When the bell finally rang for the end of English, I raced downstairs and was almost out the door when I realized we couldn’t leave until Ben and Radar finished band practice. I sat down outside the band room and took a personal pizza wrapped in napkins from my backpack, where I’d had it since lunch. I was through the first quarter when Lacey Pemberton sat down next to me. I offered her a piece. She declined.

We talked about Margo, of course. The hole we had in common. “What I need to figure out,” I said, rubbing pizza grease onto my jeans, “is a place. But I don’t even know if I’m close with the pseudovisions. Sometimes I think we’re just entirely off track.”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Honestly, everything else aside, I like finding stuff out about her. I mean, that I didn’t know before. I had no idea who she really was. I honestly never thought of her as anything but my crazy beautiful friend who does all the crazy beautiful things.”

“Right, but she didn’t come up with these things on the fly,” I said. “I mean, all of her adventures had a certain. . I don’t know.”

“Elegance,” Lacey said. “She is the only person I know who’s not, like, grown up who has total elegance.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s hard to imagine her in some gross unlit dusty room.”

“Yeah,” I said. “With rats.”

Lacey pulled her knees to her chest and assumed the fetal position. “Ick. That’s so not Margo.”

Somehow Lacey got shotgun, although she was the shortest of us. Ben was driving. I sighed quite loudly as Radar, seated next to me, pulled out his handheld and started working on Omnictionary.

“Just deleting vandalism on the Chuck Norris page,” he said. “For instance, while I do think Chuck Norris specializes in the roundhouse kick, I don’t think it’s accurate to say, ‘Chuck Norris’s tears can cure cancer, but unfortunately he has never cried.’ Anyway, vandalism-deletion only takes like four percent of my brain.”

I understood Radar was trying to make me laugh, but I only wanted to talk about one thing. “I’m not convinced she’s in a pseudovision. Maybe that’s not even what she meant by ‘paper towns,’ you know? There are so many place hints, but nothing specific.”

Radar looked up for a second and then back down at the screen. “Personally, I think she’s far away, doing some ridiculous roadside attraction tour that she wrongly thinks she left enough clues to explain. So I think she’s currently in, like, Omaha, Nebraska, visiting the world’s largest ball of stamps, or in Minnesota checking out the world’s largest ball of twine.”

With a glance into the rearview mirror, Ben said, “So you think that Margo is on a national tour in search of various World’s Largest Balls?” Radar nodded.

“Well,” Ben went on, “someone should just tell her to come on home, because she can find the world’s largest balls right here in Orlando, Florida. They’re located in a special display case known as ‘my scrotum.’”

Radar laughed, and Ben continued. “I mean, seriously. My balls are so big that when you order french fries from McDonald’s, you can choose one of four sizes: small, medium, large, and my balls.”

Lacey cut her eyes at Ben and said, “Not. Appropriate.”

“Sorry,” Ben mumbled. “I think she’s in Orlando,” he said. “Watching us look. And watching her parents not look.”

“I’m still for New York,” Lacey said.

“All still possible,” I said. A Margo for each of us — and each more mirror than window.

The minimall looked as it had a couple days before. Ben parked, and I took them through the push-open door to the office. Once everyone was inside, I said softly, “Don’t turn on the flashlight yet. Give your eyes a chance to adjust.” I felt fingernails dig at my forearm. I whispered, “It’s okay, Lace.”

“Whoops,” she said. “Wrong arm.” She’d been searching, I realized, for Ben.

Slowly, the room came into a hazy gray focus. I could see the desks lined up, still waiting for workers. I turned on my flashlight, and then everyone else turned theirs on as well. Ben and Lacey stayed together, walking toward the Troll Hole to explore the other rooms. Radar walked with me to Margo’s desk. He knelt down to look closely at the paper calendar frozen on June.

I was leaning in next to him when I heard fast footsteps coming toward us.

“People,” Ben whispered urgently. He ducked down behind Margo’s desk, pulling Lacey with him.

“What? Where?”

“Next room!” he said. “Wearing masks. Official-looking. Gotta go.”

Radar shone his flashlight in the direction of the Troll Hole but Ben knocked it down forcefully. “We. Have. To. Get. Out. Of. Here.” Lacey was looking up at me, big-eyed and probably a little bit pissed off that I’d falsely promised her safety.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay, everybody out, through the door. Very cool, very quick.” I had just started to walk when I heard a booming voice shout, “WHO GOES THERE!”

Shit. “Um,” I said, “we’re just visiting.” What an outlandishly lame thing to say. Through the Troll Hole, a white light blinded me. It might have been God Himself.

“What are your intentions?” The voice had a slight faked Britishness to it.

I watched Ben stand up next to me. It felt good not to be alone. “We’re here investigating a disappearance,” he said with great confidence. “We weren’t going to break anything.” The light snapped off, and I blinked away the blindness until I saw three figures, each wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a mask with two circular filters. One of them pulled the mask up to his forehead and looked at us. I recognized the goatee and flat, wide mouth.

“Gus?” asked Lacey. She stood up. The SunTrust security guard.

“Lacey Pemberton. Jesus. What are you doing here? With no mask? This place has a ton of asbestos.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Exploring,” he said. Somehow Ben was emboldened with enough confidence to walk up to the other guys and offer handshakes. They introduced themselves as Ace and the Carpenter. I would venture to guess that these were pseudonyms.

We pulled around some rolling desk chairs and sat in an approximate circle. “Did you guys break the particleboard?” Gus asked.

“Well, I did,” Ben explained.

“We taped that up because we didn’t want anyone else in. If people can see a way in from the road, you get a lot of people coming in who don’t know shit about exploring. Bums and crack addicts and everything.”

I stepped forward toward them and said, “So, you, uh, knew that Margo came here?”

Before Gus answered, Ace spoke through the mask. His voice was slightly modulated but easy to understand. “Man, Margo was here all the damned time. We only come here a few times a year; it’s got asbestos, and anyway, it’s not even that good. But we probably saw her, like, what, like more than half the time we came here in the last couple years. She was hot, huh?”

“Was?” asked Lacey pointedly.

“She ran away, right?”

“What do you know about that?” Lacey asked.

“Nothing, Jesus. I saw Margo with him,” Gus said, nodding toward me, “a couple weeks ago. And then I heard that she ran away. It occurred to me a few days later she might be here, so we visited.”

“I never got why she liked this place so much. There’s not much here,” said the Carpenter. “It’s not great exploring.”

“What do you mean exploring?” Lacey asked Gus.

“Urban exploring. We enter abandoned buildings, explore them, photograph them. We take nothing; we leave nothing. We’re just observers.”

“It’s a hobby,” said Ace. “Gus used to let Margo tag along on exploring trips when we were still in school.”

“She had a great eye, even though she was only, like, thirteen,” Gus said. “She could figure a way into anywhere. It was just occasional back then, but now we go out like three times a week. There’s places all over. There’s an abandoned mental hospital over in Clearwater. It’s amazing. You can see where they strapped down the crazies and gave them electroshock. And there’s an old jail out west of here. But she wasn’t really into it. She liked to break into the places, but then she just wanted to stay.”

“Yeah, God that was annoying,” added Ace.

The Carpenter said, “She wouldn’t even, like, take pictures. Or run around and find stuff. She just wanted to go inside and, like, sit. Remember, she had that black notebook? And she would just sit in the corner and write, like she was in her house, doing homework or something.”

“Honestly,” Gus said, “she never really got what it’s all about. The adventure. She seemed pretty depressed, actually.”

I wanted to let them keep talking, because I figured everything they said would help me imagine Margo. But all of a sudden, Lacey stood up and kicked her chair behind her. “And you never thought to ask her about how she was pretty depressed actually? Or why she hung out in these sketch-ass places? That never bothered you?” She was standing above him now, shouting, and he stood up, too, half a foot taller than her, and then the Carpenter said, “Jesus, somebody calm that bitch down.”

“Oh no you didn’t!” Ben yelled, and before I even knew what was going on, Ben tackled the Carpenter, who fell awkwardly out of his chair onto his shoulder. Ben straddled the guy and started pounding on him, furiously and awkwardly smacking and punching his mask, shouting, “SHE’S NOT THE BITCH, YOU ARE!” I scrambled up and grabbed one of Ben’s arms as Radar grabbed the other. We pulled him away, but he was still shouting, “I have a lot of anger right now! I was enjoying punching the guy! I want to go back to punching him!”

“Ben,” I said, trying to sound calm, trying to sound like my mom. “Ben, it’s okay. You made your point.”

Gus and Ace picked up the Carpenter, and Gus said, “Jesus Christ, we’re getting out of here, okay? It’s all yours.”

Ace picked up their camera equipment, and they hustled out the back door. Lacey started to explain to me how she knew him, saying, “He was a senior when we were fr—.” But I waved it off. None of it mattered anyway.

Radar knew what mattered. He returned immediately to the calendar, his eyes an inch away from the paper. “I don’t think anything was written on the May page,” he says. “The paper is pretty thin and I can’t see any marks. But it’s impossible to say for sure.” He went off to search for more clues, and I saw Lacey’s and Ben’s flashlights dipping as they went through a Troll Hole, but I just stood there in the office, imagining her. I thought of her following these guys, four years older than her, into abandoned buildings. That was Margo as I’d seen her. But then, inside the buildings, she is not the Margo I’d always imagined. While everyone else walks off to explore and take pictures and bounce around the walls, Margo sits on the floor, writing something.

From next door, Ben shouted, “Q! We got something!”

I wiped sweat from my face with both sleeves and used Margo’s desk to pull myself up. I walked across the room, ducked through the Troll Hole, and headed toward the three flashlights scanning the wall above the rolled-up carpet.

“Look,” Ben said, using the beam to draw a square on the wall. “You know those little holes you mentioned?”

“Yeah?”

“They had to have been mementos tacked up there. Postcards or pictures, we think, from the spacing of the holes. Which maybe she took with her,” Ben said.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “I wish we could find that notebook Gus was talking about.”

“Yeah, when he said that, I remembered that notebook,” Lacey said, the beam of my flashlight lighting up only her legs. “She had one with her all the time. I never saw her write in it, but I just figured it was like a day planner or whatever. God, I never asked about it. I get pissed at Gus, who wasn’t even her friend. But what did I ever ask her?”

“She wouldn’t have answered anyway,” I said. It was dishonest to act like Margo hadn’t participated in her own obfuscation.

We walked around for another hour, and just when I felt sure the trip had been a waste, my flashlight happened over the subdivision brochures that had been built into a house of cards when we first came here. One of the brochures was for Grovepoint Acres. My breath caught as I spread out the other brochures. I jogged to my backpack by the door and came back with a pen and a notebook and wrote down the names of all the advertised subdivisions. I recognized one immediately: Collier Farms — one of the two pseudovisions on my list I hadn’t yet visited. I finished copying the subdivision names and returned my notebook to my backpack. Call me selfish, but if I found her, I wanted it to be alone.

26

The moment Mom got home from work on Friday, I told her that I was going to a concert with Radar and then proceeded to drive out to rural Seminole County to see Collier Farms. All the other subdivisions from the brochures turned out to exist— most of them on the north side of town, which had been totally developed a long time ago.

I only recognized the turnoff for Collier Farms because I’d become something of an expert in hard-to-see dirt access roads. But Collier Farms was like none of the other pseudovisions I’d seen, because it was wildly overgrown, as if it had been abandoned for fifty years. I didn’t know if it was older than the other pseudovisions, or if the low-lying, swamp-wet land made everything grow faster, but the Collier Farms access road became impassable just after I turned in because a thick grove of brambly brush had sprouted across the entire road.

I got out and walked. The overgrown grass scraped at my shins, and my sneakers sunk into the mud with each step. I couldn’t help but hope she had a tent pitched out here somewhere on some little piece of land two feet higher than everything else, keeping the rain off. I walked slowly, because there was more to see than at any of the others, more places to hide, and because I knew this pseudovision had a direct connection to the minimall. The ground was so thick I had to walk slowly as I let myself take in each new landscape, checking each place big enough to fit a person. At the end of the street I saw a blue-and-white cardboard box in the mud, and for a second it looked like the same nutrition bars I’d found in the minimall. But, no. A rotting container for a twelve-pack of beer. I trudged back to the minivan and headed for a place called Logan Pines farther to the north.

It took an hour to get there, and by now I was up near the Ocala National Forest, not really even the Orlando metro area anymore. I was a few miles away when Ben called.

“What’s up?”

“You hittin’ those paper towns?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m almost to the last one I know of. Nothing yet.”

“So listen, bro, Radar’s parents had to leave town real suddenly.”

“Is everything okay?” I asked. I knew Radar’s grandparents were really old and lived in a nursing home down in Miami.

“Yeah, get this: you know the guy in Pittsburgh with the world’s second-largest collection of black Santas?”

“Yeah?”

“He just bit it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Bro, I don’t kid about the demise of black Santa collectors. This guy had an aneurysm, and so Radar’s folks are flying to Pennsylvania to try to buy his entire collection. So we’re having a few people over.”

“Who’s we?”

“You and me and Radar. We’re the hosts.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

There was a pause, and then Ben used my full name. “Quentin,” he said, “I know you want to find her. I know she is the most important thing to you. And that’s cool. But we graduate in, like, a week. I’m not asking you to abandon the search. I’m asking you to come to a party with your two best friends who you have known for half your life. I’m asking you to spend two to three hours drinking sugary wine coolers like the pretty little girl you are, and then another two to three hours vomiting the aforementioned wine coolers through your nose. And then you can go back to poking around abandoned housing projects.”

It bothered me that Ben only wanted to talk about Margo when it involved an adventure that appealed to him, that he thought there was something wrong with me for focusing on her over my friends, even though she was missing and they weren’t. But Ben was Ben, like Radar said. And I had nothing left to search after Logan Pines anyway. “I’ve got to go to this last place and then I’ll be over.”

Because Logan Pines was the last pseudovision in Central Florida— or at least the last one I knew about — I had placed so much hope in it. But as I walked around its single dead-end street with a flashlight, I saw no tent. No campfire. No food wrappers. No sign of people. No Margo. At the end of the road, I found a single concrete foundation dug into the dirt. But there was nothing built atop it, just the hole cut into the earth like a dead mouth agape, tangles of briars and waist-high grass growing up all around. If she’d wanted me to see these places, I could not understand why. And if Margo had gone to the pseudovisions never to come back, she knew about a place I hadn’t uncovered in all my research.

It took an hour and a half to drive back to Jefferson Park. I parked the minivan at home, changed into a polo shirt and my only nice pair of jeans, and walked down Jefferson Way to Jefferson Court, and then took a right onto Jefferson Road. A few cars were already lined up on both sides of Jefferson Place, Radar’s street. It was only eight-forty-five.

I opened the door and was greeted by Radar, who had an armful of plaster black Santas. “Gotta put away all of the nice ones,” he said. “God forbid one of them breaks.”

“Need any help?” I asked. Radar nodded toward the living room, where the tables on either side of the couch held three sets of unnested black Santa nesting dolls. As I renested them, I couldn’t help but notice that they were really very beautiful— hand-painted and extraordinarily detailed. I didn’t say this to Radar, though, for fear that he would beat me to death with the black Santa lamp in the living room.

I carried the matryoshka dolls into the guest bedroom, where Radar was carefully stashing Santas into a dresser. “You know, when you see them all together, it really does make you question the way we imagine our myths.”

Radar rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I always find myself questioning the way I imagine my myths when I’m eating my Lucky Charms every morning with a goddamned black Santa spoon.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder spinning me around. It was Ben, his feet fidgeting in fast-motion like he needed to pee or something. “We kissed. Like, she kissed me. About ten minutes ago. On Radar’s parents’ bed.”

“That’s disgusting,” Radar said. “Don’t make out in my parents’ bed.”

“Wow, I figured you’d already gotten past that,” I said. “What with you being such a pimp and everything.”

“Shut up, bro. I’m freaked out,” he said, looking at me, his eyes almost crossed. “I don’t think I’m very good.”

“At what?”

“At kissing. And, I mean, she’s done a lot more kissing than me over the years. I don’t want to suck so bad she dumps me. Girls dig you,” he said to me, which was at best true only if you defined the word girls as “girls in the marching band.” “Bro, I’m asking for advice.”

I was tempted to bring up all Ben’s endless blather about the various ways in which he would rock various bodies, but I just said, “As far as I can tell, there are two basic rules: 1. Don’t bite anything without permission, and 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it’s very powerful, and should be used sparingly.”

Ben’s eyes suddenly grew bright with panic. I winced, and said, “She’s standing behind me, isn’t she?”

“‘The human tongue is like wasabi,’” Lacey mimicked in a deep, goofy voice that I hoped didn’t really resemble mine.

I wheeled around. “I actually think Ben’s tongue is like sunscreen,” she said. “It’s good for your health and should be applied liberally.”

“I just threw up in my mouth,” Radar said.

“Lacey, you just kind of took away my will to go on,” I added.

“I wish I could stop imagining that,” Radar said.

I said, “The very idea is so offensive that it’s actually illegal to say the words ‘Ben Starling’s tongue’ on television.”

“The penalty for violating that law is either ten years in prison or one Ben Starling tongue bath,” Radar said.

“Everyone,” I said.

“Chooses,” Radar said, smiling.

“Prison,” we finished together.

And then Lacey kissed Ben in front of us. “Oh God,” Radar said, waving his arms in front of his face. “Oh, God. I’m blind. I’m blind.”

“Please stop,” I said. “You’re upsetting the black Santas.”

The party ended up in the formal living room on the second floor of Radar’s house, all twenty of us. I leaned against a wall, my head inches from a black Santa portrait painted on velvet. Radar had one of those sectional couches, and everyone was crowded onto it. There was beer in a cooler by the TV, but no one was drinking. Instead, they were telling stories about one another. I’d heard most of them before — band camp stories and Ben Starling stories and first kiss stories — but Lacey hadn’t heard any of them, and anyway, they were still entertaining.

I stayed mostly out of it until Ben said, “Q, how are we going to graduate?”

I smirked. “Naked but for our robes,” I said.

“Yes!” Ben sipped a Dr Pepper.

“I’m not even bringing clothes, so I don’t wuss out,” Radar said.

“Me neither! Q, swear not to bring clothes.”

I smiled. “Duly sworn,” I said.

“I’m in!” said our friend Frank. And then more and more of the guys got behind the idea. The girls, for some reason, were resistant.

Radar said to Angela, “Your refusal to do this makes me question the whole foundation of our love.”

“You don’t get it,” Lacey said. “It’s not that we’re afraid. It’s just that we already have our dresses picked out.”

Angela pointed at Lacey. “Exactly.” Angela added, “Y’all better hope it’s not windy.”

“I hope it is windy,” Ben said. “The world’s largest balls benefit from fresh air.”

Lacey put a hand to her face, ashamed. “You’re a challenging boyfriend,” she said. “Rewarding, but challenging.” We laughed.

This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened — the stories on my mind weren’t that funny.

I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them — it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

I left just before midnight. Some people were staying later, but it was my curfew, and plus I didn’t feel like staying. Mom was half asleep on the couch, but she perked up when she saw me. “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was pretty chill.”

“Just like you,” she said, smiling. This sentiment struck me as hilarious, but I didn’t say anything. She stood up and pulled me into her, kissing me on the cheek. “I really like being your mom,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

I went to bed with the Whitman, flipping to the part I’d liked before, where he spends all the time hearing the opera and the people.

After all that hearing, he writes, “I am exposed. . cut by bitter and poisoned hail.” That was perfect, I thought: you listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you’re trying to listen to.

Walking through pseudovisions and trying to listen to her does not crack the Margo Roth Spiegelman case so much as it cracks me. Pages later — hearing and exposed — Whitman starts to write about all the travel he can do by imagining, and lists all the places he can visit while loafing on the grass. “My palms cover continents,” he writes.

I kept thinking about maps, like the way sometimes when I was a kid I would look at atlases, and just the looking was kind of like being somewhere else. This is what I had to do. I had to hear and imagine my way into her map.

But hadn’t I been trying to do that? I looked up at the maps above my computer. I had tried to plot her possible travels, but just as the grass stood for too much, so Margo stood for too much. It seemed impossible to pin her down with maps. She was too small and the space covered by the maps too big. They were more than a waste of time — they were the physical representation of the total fruitlessness of all of it, my absolute inability to develop the kinds of palms that cover continents, to have the kind of mind that correctly imagines.

I got up and walked over to the maps and tore them off the wall, the pins and tacks flying out with the paper and falling to the ground. I balled up the maps and threw them in the garbage can. On my way back to bed I stepped on a tack, like an idiot, and even though I was annoyed and exhausted and out of pseudovisions and ideas, I had to pick up all the thumbtacks scattered around the carpet so I didn’t step on them later. I just wanted to punch the wall, but I had to pick up those stupid goddamned thumbtacks. When I finished, I got back into bed and socked my pillow, my teeth clenched.

I started trying to read the Whitman again, but between it and thinking of Margo, I felt exposed enough for this night. So finally I put the book down. I couldn’t be bothered to get up and turn off the light. I just stared at the wall, my blinks growing longer. And every time I opened my eyes, I saw where each map had been — the four holes marking the rectangle, and the pinholes seemingly randomly distributed inside the rectangle. I’d seen a similar pattern before. In the empty room above the rolled-up carpet.

A map. With plotted points.

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.

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?

I was already up and paging through travel guides when my parents came into my room on Friday morning. They rarely both entered the room at the same time, and I felt a ripple of nausea — maybe they had bad news about Margo — before I remembered it was my graduation day.

“Ready, bud?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s not that big of a deal, but it’ll be fun.”

“You only graduate from high school once,” Mom said.

“Yeah,” I said. They sat down on the bed across from me. I noticed them share a glance and giggle. “What?” I asked.

“Well, we want to give you your graduation present,” Mom said. “We’re really proud of you, Quentin. You’re the greatest accomplishment of our lives, and this is just such a great day for you, and we’re— You’re just a great young man.”

I smiled and looked down. And then my dad produced a very small gift wrapped in blue wrapping paper.

“No,” I said, snatching it from him.

“Go ahead and open it.”

“No way,” I said, staring at it. It was the size of a key. It was the weight of a key. When I shook the box, it rattled like a key.

“Just open it, sweetie,” my mom urged.

I tore off the wrapping paper. A KEY! I examined it closely. A Ford key! Neither of our cars was a Ford. “You got me a car?!”

“We did,” my dad said. “It’s not brand-new — but only two years old and just twenty thousand miles on it.” I jumped up and hugged both of them.

“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 planning it.

And that’s what I thought about as I stood beneath the showerhead: the planning. She sits in the minimall with her notebook, planning. Maybe she’s planning a road trip, using the map to imagine routes. She reads the Whitman and highlights “I tramp a perpetual journey,” because that’s the kind of thing she likes to imagine herself doing, the kind of thing she likes to plan.

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

The Catskill Park comprises 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.

For the first time in weeks, she seemed completely and undeniably alive to me. She was alive. For one more day at least, she was alive. I had focused on her whereabouts for so long in an attempt to keep me from obsessively wondering whether she was alive that I had no idea how terrified I’d been until now, but oh, my God. She was alive.

I jumped up, let the towel drop, and called Radar. I cradled the phone in the crook of my neck while pulling on boxers and then shorts. “I know what paper towns means! Do you have your handheld?”

“Yeah. You should really be here, dude. They’re about to make us line up.”

I heard Ben shout into the phone, “Tell him he better be naked!”

“Radar,” I said, trying to convey the importance of it. “Look up the page for Agloe, New York. Got it?”

“Yes. Reading. Hold on. Wow. Wow. This could be the Catskills spot on the map?”

“Yes, I think so. It’s pretty close. Go to the discussion page.”

“. .”

“Radar?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I know, I know!” I shouted. I didn’t hear his response because I was pulling my shirt on, but when the phone got back to my ear, I could hear him talking to Ben. I just hung up.

Online, I searched for driving directions from Orlando to Agloe, but the map system had never heard of Agloe, so instead I searched for Roscoe. Averaging sixty-five miles per hour, the computer said it would be a nineteen-hour-and-four-minute trip. It was two fifteen. I had twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes to get there. I printed the directions, grabbed the keys to the minivan, and locked the front door behind me.

“It’s nineteen hours and four minutes away,” I said into the cell phone. It was Radar’s cell phone, but Ben had answered it.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked. “Are you flying there?”

“No, I don’t have enough money, and anyway it’s like eight hours away from New York City. So I’m driving.”

Suddenly Radar had the phone back. “How long is the trip?”

“Nineteen hours and four minutes.”

“According to who?”

“Google maps.”

“Crap,” Radar said. “None of those map programs calculate for traffic. I’ll call you back. And hurry. We’ve got to line up like right now!”

“I’m not going. Can’t risk the time,” I said, but I was talking to dead air. Radar called back a minute later. “If you average sixty-five miles per hour, don’t stop, and account for average traffic patterns, it’s going to take you twenty-three hours and nine minutes. Which puts you there just after one P.M., so you’re going to have to make up time when you can.”

“What? But the—”

Radar said, “I don’t want to criticize, but maybe on this particular topic, the person who is chronically late needs to listen to the person who is always punctual. But you gotta come here at least for a second because otherwise your parents will freak out when you don’t show when your name is called, and also, not that it is the most important consideration or anything, but I’m just saying — you have all our beer in there.”

“I obviously don’t have time,” I answered.

Ben leaned into the phone. “Don’t be an asshat. It’ll cost you five minutes.”

“Okay, fine.” I hooked a right on red and gunned the minivan— it had better pickup than Mom’s but only just barely— toward school. I made it to the gym parking lot in three minutes. I did not park the minivan so much as I stopped it in the middle of the parking lot and jumped out. As I sprinted toward the gym I saw three robed individuals running toward me. I could see Radar’s spindly dark legs as his robe blew up around him, and next to him Ben, wearing sneakers without socks. Lacey was just behind them.

“You get the beer,” I said as I ran past them. “I gotta talk to my parents.”

The families of graduates were spread out across the bleachers, and I ran back and forth across the basketball court a couple times before I spotted Mom and Dad about halfway up. They were waving at me. I ran up the stairs two at a time, and so was a little out of breath when I knelt down next to them and said, “Okay, so I’m not going [breath] to walk, because I [breath] think I found Margo and [breath] I just have to go, and I’ll have my cell phone on [breath] and please don’t be pissed at me and thank you again for the car.”

And my mom wrapped her hand around my wrist and said, “What? Quentin, what are you talking about? Slow down.”

I said, “I’m going to Agloe, New York, and I have to go right now. That’s the whole story. Okay, I gotta go. I’m crunched for time here. I have my cell. Okay, love you.”

I had to pull free from her light grasp. Before they could say anything, I bounded down the stairs and took off, sprinting back toward the minivan. I was inside and had the thing in gear and was starting to move when I looked over and saw Ben sitting in the passenger’s seat.

“Get the beer and get out of the car!” I shouted.

“We’re coming with,” he said. “You’d fall asleep if you tried to drive for that long anyway.”

I turned back, and Lacey and Radar were both holding cell phones to their ears. “Gotta tell my parents,” Lacey explained, tapping the phone. “C’mon, Q. Go go go go go go.”