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particleboard. I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken
back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness: it seemed to me that this
was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.
As soon as the car stopped, my nose and mouth were flooded with the rancid
smell of death. I had to swallow back a rush of puke that rose up into the raw
soreness in the back of my throat. Only now, after all this lost time, did I realize
how terribly I had misunderstood both her game and the prize for winning it.
I get out of the car and Ben is standing next to me, and Radar next to him. And I
know all at once that this isn’t funny, that this hasn’t been prove-to-me-you’re-
good-enough-to-hang-out-with-me. I can hear Margo that night as we drove
around Orlando. I can hear her saying to me, “I don’t want some kids to find me
swarmed with flies on a Saturday morning in Jefferson Park.” Not wanting to be
found by some kids in Jefferson Park isn’t the same thing as not wanting to die.
There is no evidence that anyone has been here in a long time except for the
smell, that sickly sour stench designed to keep the living from the dead. I tell

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myself she can’t smell like that, but of course she can. We all can. I hold my
forearm up to my nose so I can smell sweat and skin and anything but death.
“MARGO?” Radar calls. A mockingbird perched on the rusted gutter of the
building spits out two syllables in response. “MARGO!” he shouts again.
Nothing. He digs a parabola into the sand with his foot and sighs. “Shit.”
Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is
not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to
happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of
seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped
outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing
exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest
of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before
this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish
crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear
that makes us bury our dead.
The smell leaves me seized by desperate panic—panic not like my lungs are
out of air, but like the atmosphere itself is out of air. I think maybe the reason I
have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare
myself, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.
“Bro, we should leave,” Ben says. “We should call the cops or something.”
We have not looked at each other yet. We are all still looking at this building,
this long-abandoned building that cannot possibly hold anything but corpses.
“No,” Radar says. “No no no no no. We call if there’s something to call
about. She left the address for Q. Not for the cops. We have to find a way in
there.”
“In there?” Ben says dubiously.
I clap Ben on the back, and for the first time all day, the three of us are
looking not forward but at one another. That makes it bearable. Something about
seeing them makes me feel as if she is not dead until we find her. “Yeah, in
there,” I say.
I don’t know who she is anymore, or who she was, but I need to find her.

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