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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.

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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

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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

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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.