Paper Towns pdfdrive com

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.

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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.

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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

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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

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