Cover (13 page)

Radar looked at me and gestured his head toward Ruthie.

“Can you please keep watch for your mom for us?” I asked. She nodded and left. I closed the door.

“What’s up?” I asked Radar. He motioned us over to the computer. “In the week before she left, Margo was on Omnictionary a bunch. I can tell from minutes logged by her username, which she stored in her passwords. But she erased her browsing history, so I can’t tell what she was looking at.”

“Hey, Radar, look up who Walt Whitman was,” Ben said.

“He was a poet,” I answered. “Nineteenth century.”

“Great,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “Poetry.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.

“Poetry is just so emo,” he said. “Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.”

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“Yeah, I believe that’s Shakespeare,” I said dismissively. “Did Whitman have any nieces?” I asked Radar. He was already on Whitman’s Omnictionary page. A burly guy with this huge beard. I’d never read him, but he
looked
like a good poet.

“Uh, no one famous. Says he had a couple brothers, but no mention of whether they had kids. I can probably find out if you want.” I shook my head. That didn’t seem right. I went back to looking around the room. The bottom shelf of her record collection included some books—middle school yearbooks, a beat-up copy of
The Out-siders
—and some back issues of teen magazines. Nothing relating to Walt Whitman’s niece, certainly.

I looked through the books by her bedside table. Nothing of interest.

“It would make sense if she had a book of his poetry,” I said. “But she doesn’t seem to.”

“She does!” Ben said excitedly. I went over to where he had knelt by the bookshelves, and saw it now. I’d looked right past the slim volume on the bottom shelf, wedged between two yearbooks. Walt Whitman.

Leaves of Grass
. I pulled out the book. There was a photograph of Whitman on the cover, his light eyes staring back at me.

“Not bad,” I told Ben.

He nodded. “Yeah, now can we get out of here? Call me old-fashioned, but I’d rather not be here when Margo’s parents get back.”

“Is there anything we’re missing?”

Radar stood up. “It really seems like she’s drawing a pretty straight line; there’s gotta be something in that book. It’s weird, though—I mean, no offense, but if she always left clues for her parents, why would she leave them for you this time?” I shrugged my shoulders. I 117/307

didn’t know the answer, but of course I had my hopes: maybe Margo needed to see my confidence. Maybe this time she
wanted
to be found, and to be found by
me
. Maybe—just as she had chosen me on the longest night, she had chosen me again. And maybe untold riches awaited he who found her.

Ben and Radar left soon after we got back to my house, after they’d each looked through the book and not found any obvious clues. I grabbed some cold lasagna from the fridge for lunch and went to my room with Walt. It was the Penguin Classics version of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass
. I read a little from the introduction and then paged through the book. There were several quotes highlighted in blue, all from the epically long poem known as “Song of Myself.” And there were two lines from the poem that were highlighted in green:
Unscrew the locks from the doors!

Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

I spent most of my afternoon trying to make sense of that quote, thinking maybe it was Margo’s way of telling me to become more of a badass or something. But I also read and reread everything highlighted in blue:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . .

nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on
the spectres in books.

I tramp a perpetual journey

All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses,
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And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

The final three stanzas of “Song of Myself” were also highlighted.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you

It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she’d left for me. I could never get anywhere with the lines, but I kept thinking about them anyway, because I didn’t want to disappoint her. She wanted me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it dead-ended into her.

14.

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Monday morning,
an extraordinary event occurred. I was late, which was normal; and then my mom dropped me off at school, which was normal; and then I stood outside talking with everyone for a while, which was normal; and then Ben and I headed inside, which was normal. But as soon as we swung open the steel door, Ben’s face became a mix of excitement and panic, like he’d just been picked out of a crowd by a magician for the get-sawn-in-half trick. I followed his gaze down the hall.

Denim miniskirt. Tight white T-shirt. Scooped neck. Extraordinarily olive skin. Legs that make you care about legs. Perfectly coiffed curly brown hair. A laminated button reading ME FOR PROM QUEEN.

Lacey Pemberton. Walking toward us. By the
band room
.

“
Lacey Pemberton
,” Ben whispered, even though she was about three steps from us and could clearly hear him, and in fact flashed a faux-bashful smile upon hearing her name.

“Quentin,” she said to me, and more than anything else, I found it impossible that she knew my name. She motioned with her head, and I followed her past the band room, over to a bank of lockers. Ben kept pace with me.

“Hi, Lacey,” I said once she stopped walking. I could smell her per-fume, and I remembered the smell of it in her SUV, remembered the crunch of the catfish as Margo and I slammed her seat down.

“I hear you were with Margo.”

I just looked at her.

“That night, with the fish? In my car? And in Becca’s closet? And through Jase’s window?” I kept looking. I wasn’t sure what to say. A man can live a long and adventurous life without ever being spoken to 120/307

by Lacey Pemberton, and when that rare opportunity does arise, one does not wish to misspeak. So Ben spoke for me. “Yeah, they hung out,” Ben said, as if Margo and I were tight.

“Was she mad at me?” Lacey asked after a moment. She was looking down; I could see her brown eye shadow.

“What?”

She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey Pemberton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just—like, a person. “Was she, you know, pissed at me about something?” I thought about how to answer that for a while. “Uh, she was a little disappointed that you didn’t tell her about Jase and Becca, but you know Margo.

She’ll get over it.”

Lacey started walking down the hall. Ben and I let her go, but then she slowed down. She wanted us to walk with her. Ben nudged me, and then we started walking together. “I didn’t even
know
about Jase and Becca. That’s the thing. God, I hope I can explain that to her soon. For a while, I was really worried that maybe she had like really left, but then I went into her locker ’cause I know her combination and she still has all her pictures up and everything, and all her books are stacked there.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Yeah, but it’s been like four days. That’s almost a record for her. And you know, this has really sucked, because Craig knew, and I was so pissed at him for not telling me that I broke up with him, and now I’m out a prom date, and my best friend is off wherever, in New York or 121/307

whatever, thinking I did something I would NEVER do.” I shot a look to Ben. Ben shot a look back to me.

“I have to run to class,” I said. “But why do you say she’s in New York?”

“I guess she told Jase like two days before she left that New York was the only place in America where a person could actually live a halfway livable life.

Maybe she was just saying it. I don’t know.”

“Okay, I gotta run,” I said.

I knew Ben would never convince Lacey to go to prom with him, but I figured he at least deserved the opportunity. I jogged through the halls toward my locker, rubbing Radar’s head as I ran past him. He was talking to Angela and a freshman girl in band. “Don’t thank me. Thank Q,” I heard him say to the freshman, and she called out, “Thank you for my two hundred dollars!” Without looking back I shouted, “Don’t thank me, thank Margo Roth Spiegelman!” because of course she’d given me the tools I needed.

I made it to my locker and grabbed my calc notebook, but then I just stayed, even after the second bell rang, standing still in the middle of the hallway while people rushed past me in both directions, like I was the median in their freeway. Another kid thanked me for his two hundred dollars. I smiled at him.

The school felt more
mine
than in all my four years there. We’d gotten a measure of justice for the bikeless band geeks. Lacey Pemberton had spoken to me. Chuck Parson had apologized.

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I knew these halls so well —and finally it was starting to feel like they knew me, too. I stood there as the third bell rang and the crowds dwindled. Only then did I walk to calc, sitting down just after Mr.

Jiminez had started another interminable lecture.

I’d brought Margo’s copy of
Leaves of Grass
to school, and I started reading the highlighted parts of “Song of Myself” again, under the desk while Mr.

Jiminez scratched away at the blackboard. There were no direct references to New York that I could see. I handed it to Radar after a few minutes, and he looked at it for a while before writing on the corner of his notebook closest to me,
The green highlighting must mean
something. Maybe she wants you to open the door of your mind?
I shrugged, and wrote back,
Or maybe she just read the poem on two
different days with two different highlighters.

A few minutes later, as I glanced toward the clock for only the thirty-seventh time, I saw Ben Starling standing outside the classroom door, a hall pass in his hand, dancing a spastic jig.

When the bell rang for lunch, I raced to my locker, but somehow Ben had beaten me there, and somehow he was talking to Lacey Pemberton. He was crowding her, slumping slightly so he could talk toward her face. Talking to Ben could make me feel a little claustrophobic sometimes, and I wasn’t even a hot girl.

“Hey, guys,” I said when I got up to them.

“Hey,” Lacey answered, taking an obvious step back from Ben. “Ben was just bringing me up-to-date on Margo. No one ever went into her room, you know. She said her parents didn’t allow her to have friends over.”

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“Really?” Lacey nodded. “Did you know that Margo owns, like, a thousand records?” Lacey threw up her hands. “No, that’s what Ben was saying! Margo never talked about music. I mean, she would say she liked something on the radio or whatever. But—no. She’s so
weird
.” I shrugged. Maybe she was weird, or maybe the rest of us were weird.

Lacey kept talking. “But we were just saying that Walt Whitman was from New York.”

“And according to Omnictionary, Woody Guthrie lived there for a long time, too,” Ben said.

I nodded. “I can totally see her in New York. I think we have to figure out the next clue, though. It can’t end with the book. There must be some code in the highlighted lines or something.”

“Yeah, can I look at it during lunch?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Or I can make you a copy in the library if you want.”

“Nah, I can just read it. I mean, I don’t know crap about poetry. Oh, but anyway, I have a cousin in college there, at NYU, and I sent her a flyer she could print. So I’m going to tell her to put them up in record stores. I mean, I know there are a lot of record stores, but still.”

“Good idea,” I said. They started to walk to the cafeteria, and I followed them.

“Hey,” Ben asked Lacey, “what color is your dress?”

“Um, it’s kind of sapphire, why?”

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“Just want to make sure my tux matches,” Ben said. I’d never seen Ben’s smile so giddy-ridiculous, and that’s saying something, because he was a fairly giddy-ridiculous person.

Lacey nodded. “Well, but we don’t want to be
too
matchy-matchy.

Maybe if you go traditional: black tux and a black vest?”

“No cummerbund, you don’t think?”

“Well, they’re okay, but you don’t want to get one with really fat pleats, you know?” They kept talking—apparently, the ideal level of pleat-fat-ness is a conversational topic to which hours can be devoted—but I stopped listening as I waited in the Pizza Hut line. Ben had found his prom date, and Lacey had found a boy who would happily talk prom for hours. Now everyone had a date