The John Green Collection (97 page)

Hour Fourteen

Once the initial shock passes,
we clean. We try to shepherd as much glass from the broken Bluefin bottles as possible onto pieces of paper and then gather them into a single bag for later disposal. The minivan’s carpet is soaked with sticky Mountain Dew and Bluefin and Diet Coke, and we try to sop it up with the few napkins we’ve collected. But this will require a serious car wash, at the very least, and there’s no time for that before Agloe. Radar has looked up the side panel replacement I’ll need: $300 plus paint. The cost of this trip keeps going up, but I’ll make it back this summer working in my dad’s office, and anyway, it’s a small ransom to pay for Margo.

The sun is rising to our right. My cheek is still bleeding. The Confederate flag is stuck to the wound now, so I no longer need to hold it there.

Hour Fifteen

A thin stand of oak trees
obscures the cornfields that stretch out to the horizon. The landscape changes, but nothing else. Big interstates like this one make the country into a single place: McDonald’s, BP, Wendy’s. I know I should probably hate that about interstates and yearn for the halcyon days of yore, back when you could be drenched in local color at every turn—but whatever. I like this. I like the consistency. I like that I can drive fifteen hours from home without the world changing too much. Lacey double-belts me down in the wayback. “You need the rest,” she says. “You’ve been through a lot.” It’s amazing that no one has yet blamed me for not being more proactive in the battle against the cow.

As I trail off, I hear them making one another laugh—not the words exactly, but the cadence, the rising and falling pitches of banter. I like just listening, just loafing on the grass. And I decide that if we get there on time but don’t find her, that’s what we’ll do: we’ll drive around the Catskills and find a place to sit around and hang out, loafing on the grass, talking, telling jokes. Maybe the sure knowledge that she is alive makes all of that possible again—even if I never see proof of it. I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.

Hour Sixteen

I sleep
.

Hour Seventeen

I sleep.

Hour Eighteen

I sleep.

Hour Nineteen

When I wake up,
Radar and Ben are loudly debating the name of the car. Ben would like to name it Muhammad Ali, because, just like Muhammad Ali, the minivan takes a punch and keeps going. Radar says you can’t name a car after a historical figure. He thinks the car ought to be called Lurlene, because it sounds right.

“You want to name it
Lurlene
?” Ben asks, his voice rising with the horror of it all. “Hasn’t this poor vehicle been through enough?!”

I unbuckle one seat belt and sit up. Lacey turns around to me. “Good morning,” she says. “Welcome to the great state of New York.”

“What time is it?”

“Nine-forty-two.” Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, but the shorter strands have strayed. “How’s it going?” she asks.

I tell her. “I’m scared.”

Lacey smiles at me and nods. “Yeah, me, too. It’s like there’s too many things that could happen to prepare for all of them.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“I hope you and me stay friends this summer,” she says. And that helps, for some reason. You can never tell what is going to help.

Radar is now saying that the car should be called the Gray Goose. I lean forward a little so everyone can hear me and say, “The Dreidel. The harder you spin it, the better it performs.”

Ben nods. Radar turns around. “I think you should be the official stuff-namer.”

Hour Twenty

I’m sitting in the first bedroom
with Lacey. Ben drives. Radar’s navigating. I was asleep when they last stopped, but they picked up a map of New York. Agloe isn’t marked, but there are only five or six intersections north of Roscoe. I always thought of New York as being a sprawling and endless metropolis, but here it is just lush rolling hills that the minivan heroically strains its way up. When there’s a lull in the conversation and Ben reaches for the radio knob, I say, “Metaphysical I Spy!”

Ben starts. “I Spy with my little eye something I really like.”

“Oh, I know,” Radar says. “It’s the taste of balls.”

“No.”

“Is it the taste of penises?” I guess.

“No, dumbass,” Ben says.

“Hmm,” says Radar. “Is it the
smell
of balls?”

“The
texture
of balls?” I guess.

“Come on, asshats, it has nothing to do with genitalia. Lace?”

“Um, is it the feeling of knowing you just saved three lives?”

“No. And I think you guys are out of guesses.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“Lacey,” he says, and I can see him looking at her through the rearview.

“Dumbass,” I say, “it’s supposed to be
meta
physical I Spy. It has to be things that can’t be seen.”

“And it is,” he says. “That’s what I really like—Lacey but not the visible Lacey.”

“Oh, hurl,” Radar says, but Lacey unbuckles her seat belt and leans forward over the kitchen to whisper something in his ear. Ben blushes in response.

“Okay, I promise not to be a cheese ball,” Radar says. “I Spy with my little eye something we’re all feeling.”

I guess, “Extraordinary fatigue?”

“No, although excellent guess.”

Lacey says, “Is it that weird feeling you get from so much caffeine that, like, your heart isn’t beating so much as your whole body is beating?”

“No. Ben?”

“Um, are we feeling the need to pee, or is that just me?”

“That is, as usual, just you. More guesses?” We are silent. “The correct answer is that we are all feeling like we will be happier after an a cappella rendition of ‘Blister in the Sun.’”

And so it is. Tone deaf as I may be, I sing as loud as anybody. And when we finish, I say, “I Spy with my little eye a great story.”

No one says anything for a while. There’s just the sound of the Dreidel devouring the blacktop as she speeds downhill. And then after a while Ben says, “It’s this, isn’t it?”

I nod.

“Yeah,” Radar says. “As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”

It will help if we can find her
, I think, but I don’t say anything. Ben turns on the radio finally and finds a rock station with ballads we can sing along to.

Hour Twenty-one

After more than 1,100 miles
on interstates, it’s finally time to exit. It’s entirely impossible to drive seventy-seven miles per hour on the two-lane state highway that takes us farther north, up toward the Catskills. But we’ll be okay. Radar, ever the brilliant tactician, has banked an extra thirty minutes without telling us. It’s beautiful up here, the late-morning sunlight pouring down on old-growth forest. Even the brick buildings in the ramshackle little downtowns we drive past seem crisp in this light.

Lacey and I are telling Ben and Radar everything we can think of in hopes of helping them find Margo. Reminding them of her. Reminding ourselves of her. Her silver Honda Civic. Her chestnut hair, stick straight. Her fascination with abandoned buildings.

“She has a black notebook with her,” I say.

Ben wheels around to me. “Okay, Q. If I see a girl who looks exactly like Margo in Agloe, New York, I’m not going to do anything. Unless she has a
notebook
. That’ll be the giveaway.”

I shrug him off. I just want to remember her. One last time, I want to remember her while still hoping to see her again.

Agloe

T
he speed limit drops
from fifty-five to forty-five and then to thirty-five. We cross some railroad tracks, and we’re in Roscoe. We drive slowly through a sleepy downtown with a café, a clothing store, a dollar store, and a couple boarded-up storefronts.

I lean forward and say, “I can imagine her in there.”

“Yeah,” Ben allows. “Man, I really don’t want to break into buildings. I don’t think I would do well in New York prisons.”

The thought of exploring these buildings doesn’t strike me as particularly scary, though, since the whole town seems deserted. Nothing’s open here. Past downtown, a single road bisects the highway, and on that road sits Roscoe’s lone neighborhood and an elementary school. Modest wood-frame houses are dwarfed by the trees, which grow thick and tall here.

We turn onto a different highway, and the speed limit goes back up incrementally, but Radar is driving slowly anyway. We haven’t gone a mile when we see a dirt road on our left with no street sign to tell us its name.

“This may be it,” I say.

“That’s a
driveway
,” Ben answers, but Radar turns in anyway. But it
does
seem to be a driveway, actually, cut into the hard-packed dirt. To our left, uncut grass grows as high as the tires; I don’t see anything, although I worry that it’d be easy for a person to hide anywhere in that field. We drive for a while and the road dead-ends into a Victorian farmhouse. We turn around and head back up the two-lane highway, farther north. The highway turns into Cat Hollow Road, and we drive until we see a dirt road identical to the previous one, this time on the right side of the street, leading to a crumbling barnlike structure with grayed wood. Huge cylindrical bales of hay line the fields on either side of us, but the grass has begun to grow up again. Radar drives no faster than five miles an hour. We are looking for something unusual. Some crack in the perfectly idyllic landscape.

“Do you think that could have been the Agloe General Store?” I ask.

“That barn?”

“Yeah.”

“I dunno,” Radar says. “Did general stores look like barns?”

I blow a long breath from between pursed lips. “Dunno.”

“Is that—shit, that’s her car!” Lacey shouts next to me. “Yes yes yes yes yes her car her car!”

Radar stops the minivan as I follow Lacey’s finger back across the field, behind the building. A glint of silver. Leaning down so my face is next to hers, I can see the arc of the car’s roof. God knows how it got there, since no road leads in that direction.

Radar pulls over, and I jump out and run back toward her car. Empty. Unlocked. I pop the trunk. Empty, too, except for an open and empty suitcase. I look around, and take off toward what I now believe to be the remnants of Agloe’s General Store. Ben and Radar pass me as I run through the mown field. We enter the barn not through a door but through one of several gaping holes where the wooden wall has simply fallen away.

Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things: the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds, like her. An old claw-footed bathtub in a corner. So many holes everywhere that this place is simultaneously inside and outside.

I feel someone pull hard on my shirt. I spin my head and see Ben, his eyes shooting back and forth between me and a corner of the room. I have to look past a wide beam of bright white light shining down from the ceiling, but I can see into that corner. Two long panes of chest-high, dirty, gray-tinted Plexiglas lean against each other at an acute angle, held up on the other side by the wooden wall. It’s a triangular cubicle, if such a thing is possible.

And here’s the thing about tinted windows: the light still gets through. So I can see the jarring scene, albeit in gray scale: Margo Roth Spiegelman sits in a black leather office chair, hunched over a school desk, writing. Her hair is much shorter—she has choppy bangs above her eyebrows and everything is mussed-up, as if to emphasize the asymmetry—but it is her. She is alive. She has relocated her offices from an abandoned minimall in Florida to an abandoned barn in New York, and I have found her.

We walk toward Margo, all four of us, but she doesn’t seem to see us. She just keeps writing. Finally, someone—Radar, maybe—says, “Margo. Margo?”

She stands up on her tiptoes, her hands resting atop the make-shift cubicle’s walls. If she is surprised to see us, her eyes do not give it away. Here is Margo Roth Spiegelman, five feet away from me, her lips chapped to cracking, makeup-less, dirt in her fingernails, her eyes silent. I’ve never seen her eyes dead like that, but then again, maybe I’ve never seen her eyes before. She stares at me. I feel certain she is staring at me and not at Lacey or Ben or Radar. I haven’t felt so stared at since Robert Joyner’s dead eyes watched me in Jefferson Park.

She stands there in silence for a long time, and I am too scared of her eyes to keep walking forward. “I and this mystery here we stand,” Whitman wrote.

Finally, she says, “Give me like five minutes,” and then sits back down and resumes her writing.