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.

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 exactlya 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 becomeother 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.”