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We also get our first look at the way quirkiness in personality becomes a defining characteristic of each individual in Paper Towns, in one way or another. In this example: Margo provides Quentin a shopping list to gather materials for the night’s events. The capitalization is screwy on this list, with the middle of some words capitalized while the initial letters are not. Margo’s rationale behind this? She feels that common grammatical rules are unfair to all the letters in the middle of each word.

Their night out consists of exposing Margo’s boyfriend to be cheating on her with one of her friends, and humiliating both of them (and the friends who knew about it but did not tell Margo) to varying degrees. The night concludes with the both of them sneaking into Sea World (why this particular theme park was utilized of all options is a mystery, but I’ve got to hand it to Green; his evocation here of the collision between theme-park bigness and tourist-trap tackiness in Orlando/Kissimmee is positively dead to rights). They break into Sea World, bond a bit, they drive back to their subdivision.

The next morning, Margo is gone. She’s disappeared without leaving much of a trace, which is nothing new to her parents nor to the narrator (and likely most of the student population). Contrary to worrying about their daughter’s disappearance, her parents are more or less tired of going through this and are ready to totally cut Margo loose.

At this point, Paper Towns shifts its gears, from a high-school social study to a more intimate personal study. Margo’s disappearance has caused a stir throughout the school, as you’d expect from someone who’s popular. The impact it has on Quentin, though, is significant - and all the more notable because he’s had a total of eight hours of time with Margo in the past eight years, yet his first reaction when he hears the news of her disappearance (lying and inferring that he’d had little contact with her as opposed to an entire night’s worth) is consistent with an idea that he is privy to some status that eludes everyone else.

The scene with Margo’s parents after her disappearance is actually significant on its own: we’re introduced to a detective character who provides the book’s most evocative piece of dialogue, while describing the impulse that leads a person like Margo to up and "disappear," and the impulse that leads people who admire them to cover for them. The syntax and use of slang here is a little cloying, but Green touches on something natural in the detective’s tone - a tone that feels weary and adult and perceptive, and instantly sells us on his legitimacy.

This is in sharp, sharp contrast to the other big players in this sustained passage: Quentin’s own parents. They are both psychologists, which is cause for them to have the most teeth-grindingly overwritten “analytical” conversations in the history of mankind. I exaggerate, but not by a whole lot. They really are just terrible characters - not an inkling of depth, not a drop of academic credibility. Thankfully, they’re comparatively minor.

The meat of the book after this is given over to a type of scavenger hunt crossed with an exploration of just how little we know the people that we have a tendency to idealize. Margo has not left totally undetected. From a poster hung in her bedroom window and facing Quentin’s, to an address written on a scrap of paper, hidden in a doorjamb, and referred to by the circling of a passage in a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that Quentin retrieves from Margo’s bedroom, the clues that Margo leaves behind seem to be aimed specifically at Quentin, and attempting to put all of these clues together into a substantive narrative of where she might have gone begins to consume a large part of his spring.

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