Paper Towns 101-200

Margo’s parents are not upset by the fact that she ran away. They always just kind of have seen her as a pain, so they don’t really put a lot of effort into finding her. Quentin knows that if she’s going to be found, he’s going to have to be the one to find her. He knows that when she’s disappeared in the past, she’s left clues to where she was. The window of his room and the window of her room face each other, and he notices a poster on the back of her window shades that has never been there before. Quentin and his friends Ben and Radar go into Margo’s room at look at the poster. It is of Woody Guthrie. After they see the poster, they find a Woody Guthrie record in her room with the song “Walt Whitman’s Niece” circled. After this, they find a Walt Whitman poetry book in her room with a lot of seemingly random things highlighted, one of them being “Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” They couldn’t figure out a figurative meaning for any of the highlighted quotes, so they decided to try a literal meaning. They went back to Margo’s house and unscrewed her door from it’s jamb, but found nothing. Then he realized that the clue might be for his door, so he unscrewed his own door and found a piece of paper with an address. The address leads them to an old deserted strip mall near where they live. It’s really creepy in there, and they see some graffiti on the wall that is in Margo’s print that says “You will go to the paper towns and you will never come back.” Q looks up paper towns and discovers that they are subdivisions that were built but nobody ever lived in them. Q starts to think that Margo might be dead. He thinks the Whitman poetry might have been like a suicide note. Q goes back to the mall to see if he can figure out anything new, and he notices a few subtle differences to know that somebody has been there, and he figures it was Margo, so he’s pretty sure now that she’s not dead. He also found many travel books with different things highlighted, so he studies those too, but there are still no solid clues as to where she is.