“I’m happy you’re not dead,” I say to her.
“Yeah. Me, too,” she says. She smirks, and it’s the first time I’ve seen that smile I have spent so much time missing. “That’s why I had to leave. As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.”
My phone rings. It’s Ben. I answer it.
“Lacey wants to talk to Margo,” he tells me.
I walk over to Margo, hand her the phone, and linger there as she sits with her shoulders hunched, listening. I can hear the noises coming through the phone, and then I hear Margo cut her off and say, “Listen, I’m really sorry. I was just so scared.” And then silence. Lacey starts talking again finally, and Margo laughs, and says something. I feel like they should have some privacy, so I do some exploring. Against the same wall as the office, but in the opposite corner of the barn, Margo has set up a kind of bed—four forklift pallets beneath an orange air mattress. Her small, neatly folded collection of clothes sits next to the bed on a pallet of its own. There’s a toothbrush and toothpaste, along with a large plastic cup from Subway. Those items sit atop two books: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I can’t believe she’s been living like this, this irreconcilable mix of tidy suburbanality and creepy decay. But then again, I can’t believe how much time I wasted believing she was living any other way.
“They’re staying at a motel in the park. Lace said to tell you they’re leaving in the morning, with or without you,” Margo says from behind me. It is when she says you and not us that I think for the first time of what comes after this.
“I’m mostly self-sufficient,” she says, standing next to me now. “There’s an outhouse here, but it’s not in great shape, so I usually go to the bathroom at this truck stop east of Roscoe. They have showers there, too, and the girls’ shower is pretty clean because there aren’t a lot of female truckers. Plus, they have Internet there. It’s like this is my house, and the truck stop is my beach house.” I laugh.
She walks past me and kneels down, looking inside the pallets beneath the bed. She pulls out a flashlight and a square, thin piece of plastic. “These are the only two things I’ve purchased in the whole month except gas and food. I’ve only spent about three hundred dollars.” I take the square thing from her and finally realize that it’s a battery-powered record player. “I brought a couple albums,” she says. “I’m gonna get more in the City, though.”
“The City?”
“Yeah. I’m leaving for New York City today. Hence the Omnictionary thing. I’m going to start really traveling. Originally, this was the day I was going to leave Orlando—I was going to go to graduation and then do all of these elaborate pranks on graduation night with you, and then I was going to leave the next morning. But I just couldn’t take it anymore. I seriously could not take it for one more hour. And when I heard about Jase—I was like, ‘I have it all planned; I’m just changing the day.’ I’m sorry I scared you, though. I was trying not to scare you, but that last part was so rushed. Not my best work.”
As dashed-together escape plans replete with clues go, I thought it was pretty impressive. But mostly I was surprised that she’d wanted me involved in her original plan, too. “Maybe you’ll fill me in,” I said, managing a smile. “I have, you know, been wondering. What was planned and what wasn’t? What meant what? Why the clues went to me, why you left, that kind of thing.”
“Um, okay. Okay. For that story, we have to start with a different story.” She gets up and I follow her footsteps as she nimbly avoids the rotting patches of floor. Returning to her office, she digs into the backpack and pulls out the black moleskin notebook. She sits down on the floor, her legs crossed, and pats a patch of wood next to her. I sit. She taps the closed book. “So this,” she says, “this goes back a long way. When I was in, like, fourth grade, I started writing a story in this notebook. It was kind of a detective story.”
I think that if I grab this book from her, I can use it as blackmail. I can use it to get her back to Orlando, and she can get a summer job and live in an apartment till college starts, and at least we’ll have the summer. But I just listen.
“I mean, I don’t like to brag, but this is an unusually brilliant piece of literature. Just kidding. It’s the retarded wish-fulfilling magical-thinking ramblings of ten-year-old me. It stars this girl, named Margo Spiegelman, who is just like ten-year-old me in every way except her parents are nice and rich and buy her anything she wants. Margo has a crush on this boy named Quentin, who is just like you in every way except all fearless and heroic and willing to die to protect me and everything. Also, it stars Myrna Mountweazel, who is exactly like Myrna Mountweazel except with magical powers. Like, for example, in the story, anyone who pets Myrna Mountweazel finds it impossible to tell a lie for ten minutes. Also, she can talk. Of course she can talk. Has a ten-year-old ever written a book about a dog that can’t talk?”
I laugh, but I’m still thinking about ten-year-old Margo having a crush on ten-year-old me.
“So, in the story,” she continues, “Quentin and Margo and Myrna Mountweazel are investigating the death of Robert Joyner, whose death is exactly like his real-life death except instead of having obviously shot himself in the face, someone else shot him in the face. And the story is about us finding out who did it.”
“Who did it?”
She laughs. “You want me to spoil the entire story for you?”
“Well,” I say, “I’d rather read it.” She pulls open the book and shows me a page. The writing is indecipherable, not because Margo’s handwriting is bad, but because on top of the horizontal lines of text, writing also goes vertically down the page. “I write crosshatch,” she says. “Very hard for non-Margo readers to decode. So, okay, I’m going to spoil the story for you, but first you have to promise not to get mad.”
“Promise,” I say.
“It turns out that the crime was committed by Robert Joyner’s alcoholic ex-wife’s sister’s brother, who was insane because he’d been possessed by the spirit of an evil ancient Egyptian house cat. Like I said, really top-notch storytelling. But anyway, in the story, you and me and Myrna Mountweazel go and confront the killer, and he tries to shoot me, but you jump in front of the bullet, and you die very heroically in my arms.”
I laugh. “Great. This story was all promising with the beautiful girl who has a crush on me and the mystery and the intrigue, and then I get whacked.”
“Well, yeah.” She smiles. “But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn’t really emotionally ready to write about at ten.”
“Fair enough,” I say. “But in the revision, I want to get some action.”
“After you get shot up by the bad guy, maybe. A kiss before dying.”
“How kind of you.” I could stand up and go to her and kiss her. I could. But there is still too much to be ruined.
“So anyway, I finished this story in fifth grade. A few years later, I decide I’m going to run away to Mississippi. And then I write all my plans for this epic event into this notebook on top of the old story, and then I finally do it—take Mom’s car and put a thousand miles on it and leave these clues in the soup. I didn’t even like the road trip, really—it was incredibly lonely— but I love having done it, right? So I start crosshatching more schemes—pranks and ideas for matching up certain girls with certain guys and huge TPing campaigns and more secret road trips and whatever else. The notebook is half full by the start of junior year, and that’s when I decide that I’m going to do one more thing, one big thing, and then leave.”
“That graffiti,” I said. “God, Margo, I walked through so many of those abandoned subdivisions looking for your body. I really thought—I really thought you were dead.”
She gets up and searches around her backpack for a moment, and then reaches over and grabs The Bell Jar, and reads to me.
“‘But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.’” She sits back down next to me, close, facing me, the fabric of our jeans touching without our knees actually touching. Margo says, “I know what she’s talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It’s like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don’t meet up right.”
“I like that,” I say. “Or it’s like cracks in the hull of a ship.”
“Right, right.”