How It All Goes Down
- Quentin's parents give him the minivan as a graduation gift. Now he doesn't have to borrow the keys—it's all his. He can be an independent soccer mom.
- But Quentin still can't get excited about graduation. He tries to put himself into Margo Roth Spiegelman's shoes (her Margo Roth Via Spiga-mans) and figure out how she would have planned the trip.
- He finds another definition for the term paper town online: "copyright trap" (2.20.42).
- It turns out that some mapmakers put fake towns on the map to know if someone plagiarized them.
- One of the paper towns, Agloe, New York, had it's Omnictionary (the John Green version of Wikipedia) entry updated: "fyi, whoever Edits this—the Population of agloe Will actually be One until may 29th at Noon" (2.20.48).
- Quentin recognizes that brain-damaged capitalization anywhere: It's Margo Roth Spiegelman's.
- Of course, it's May 28, so Quentin has twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes to get there.
- A navigation program tells him that all he needs is nineteen hours and four minutes. He's totally got this.
- He calls Radar, who advises him that that program won't calculate for traffic.
- Radar convinces Quentin to spare five minutes and meet them at graduation, because Quentin has their cooler of beer in the minivan.
- He does, and his friends hop in the car. They're going to skip graduation to chase down Margo Roth Spiegelman with him. Aw.