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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 SeaWorld, 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

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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.