Travel among the same route Quinton, Ben, Radar, and Lacy travelled
on when they went on an expedition to find Margo Roth Spiegelman. It leads to the
fictional town in New York named Algoe. The trip entailed peeing in beer
bottles, singing to rock ballads, wearing over-sized T-shirts that read World’s Best Grandma, playing intangible
I Spy, almost hitting a cow, nasty protein bars, and having an extreme buzz of caffeine
the entire ride. Sounds amazing, right?? If you’re looking for an exciting and
fun-filled road trip, then this is definitely the one for you. With ups, downs,
and even zig-zags that you’ll never see coming.
When the always loved and adored, Margo Roth Spiegelman, goes
missing, the world comes to a halt. Atleast for Q it does. Growing up as kids,
they lived in the same subdivision called Jefferson Park. It started out as a
plain and ordinary day until they stumbled upon the corpse of a dead man
swarmed with flies and crawling maggots. Quinton shook with fear, whereas the
gears in Margo’s head were turning. She was interested in the death of the man
and why it had occurred. Her head pondered with ideas. They exchanged thoughts
and assumptions as to what might have actually happened until Margo finally
came out and said, “Maybe all the strings inside of him broke.” Since then Q still
hasn’t stopped thinking of what that phrase meant.
The night before Margo vanished, she had asked Q to be her getaway
driver. She had a plan to prank all of those who had wronged her, but not just
any old pranks. She’s Margo- meaning she had schemed the entire night of
pranking; down to the every last detail. Spray paint, rotting fish, and cameras
to capture all the action. If she wanted to prank someone, you better believe
she’d go all out.
At the end of the night, they stood at the top of the
SunTrust bank building they had broken into- examining the city lights of
Orlando and all it had to offer. Quinton was astonished with how beautiful it
was, but Margo begged to differ. She said, “Here’s what’s not beautiful about
it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you
can tell what the place really is. You see
how fake it all is. It’s a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all
those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses
that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper
houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some
bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the
mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the
people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my
life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.” This was the quote
that sparked the match and started the enormous wildfire- also known as Margo
Roth Speigelman’s conscience. Which I can’t forget to mention, was very difficult
for Q and his friends to figure out. Through all the poems and footprints left
by Margo, they finally discovered where she had run off to; Algoe New York.
Margo wasn’t any average girl. There were things, not even
the bestest of friends knew about her. Her thoughts were a mystery Q had to
figure out, even if it meant skipping graduation to do so. In the end he
realizes she never wanted to be found. She was serious about how she felt about
society and how the town she grew up in was made of paper; fragile, fake, and
meaningless. She ran away to have a taste of what it would be like outside the
paper town and then realized she could never get enough it. It then became
clear to Q that she wasn’t returning to Orlando. She said, “I’m in love with cities
I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.” From her constant reference of
metaphors relating back to how she thought of life such as: being tied by
strings, being individual blades of grass, or a cracked vessel- she knew how
she wanted to map out her life. No pun intended.
