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While Mortals Walk Past. As I got closer, I thought maybe she wasn’t laughing
after all. Maybe she’d received a surprise or a gift or something. She couldn’t
seem to close her mouth.
“Yeah,” I said to Ben, still not listening, still trying to see as much of her as I
could without being too obvious. It wasn’t even that she was so pretty. She was
just so awesome, and in the literal sense. And then we were too far past her, too
many people walking between her and me, and I never even got close enough to
hear her speak or understand whatever the hilarious surprise had been. Ben
shook his head, because he had seen me see her a thousand times, and he was
used to it.
“Honestly, she’s hot, but she’s not that hot. You know who’s seriously hot?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Lacey,” he said, who was Margo’s other best friend. “Also your mom. Bro, I
saw your mom kiss you on the cheek this morning, and forgive me, but I swear
to God I was like, man, I wish I was Q. And also, I wish my cheeks had penises.”
I elbowed him in the ribs, but I was still thinking about Margo, because she was
the only legend who lived next door to me. Margo Roth Spiegelman, whose six-
syllable name was often spoken in its entirety with a kind of quiet reverence.
Margo Roth Spiegelman, whose stories of epic adventures would blow through
school like a summer storm: an old guy living in a broken-down house in Hot
Coffee, Mississippi, taught Margo how to play the guitar. Margo Roth
Spiegelman, who spent three days traveling with the circus—they thought she
had potential on the trapeze. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who drank a cup of herbal
tea with the Mallionaires backstage after a concert in St. Louis while they drank
whiskey. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who got into that concert by telling the
bouncer she was the bassist’s girlfriend, and didn’t they recognize her, and come
on guys seriously, my name is Margo Roth Spiegelman and if you go back there
and ask the bassist to take one look at me, he will tell you that I either am his
girlfriend or he wishes I was, and then the bouncer did so, and then the bassist
said “yeah that’s my girlfriend let her in the show,” and then later the bassist
wanted to hook up with her and she rejected the bassist from the Mallionaires.
The stories, when they were shared, inevitably ended with, I mean, can you
believe it? We often could not, but they always proved true.
And then we were at our lockers. Radar was leaning against Ben’s locker,
typing into a handheld device.

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“So you’re going to prom,” I said to him. He looked up, and then looked
back down.
“I’m de-vandalizing the Omnictionary article about a former prime minister
of France. Last night someone deleted the entire entry and then replaced it with
the sentence ‘Jacques Chirac is a gay,’ which as it happens is incorrect both
factually and grammatically.” Radar is a big-time editor of this online user-
created reference source called Omnictionary. His whole life is devoted to the
maintenance and well-being of Omnictionary. This was but one of several
reasons why his having a prom date was somewhat surprising.
“So you’re going to prom,” I repeated.
“Sorry,” he said without looking up. It was a well-known fact that I was
opposed to prom. Absolutely nothing about any of it appealed to me—not slow
dancing, not fast dancing, not the dresses, and definitely not the rented tuxedo.
Renting a tuxedo seemed to me an excellent way to contract some hideous
disease from its previous tenant, and I did not aspire to become the world’s only
virgin with pubic lice.
“Bro,” Ben said to Radar, “the freshhoneys know about the Bloody Ben
story.” Radar put the handheld away finally and nodded sympathetically. “So
anyway,” Ben continued, “my two remaining strategies are either to purchase a
prom date on the Internet or fly to Missouri and kidnap some nice corn-fed little
honeybunny.” I’d tried telling Ben that “honeybunny” sounded more sexist and
lame than retro-cool, but he refused to abandon the practice. He called his own
mother a honeybunny. There was no fixing him.
“I’ll ask Angela if she knows anybody,” Radar said. “Although getting you a
date to prom will be harder than turning lead into gold.”
“Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is
actually used to cut diamonds,” I added.
Radar tapped a locker twice with his fist to express his approval, and then
came back with another. “Ben, getting you a date to prom is so hard that the
American government believes the problem cannot be solved with diplomacy,
but will instead require force.”
I was trying to think of another one when we all three simultaneously saw the
human-shaped container of anabolic steroids known as Chuck Parson walking
toward us with some intent. Chuck Parson did not participate in organized
sports, because to do so would distract from the larger goal of his life: to one day
be convicted of homicide. “Hey, faggots,” he called.
“Chuck,” I answered, as friendly as I could muster. Chuck hadn’t given us

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any serious trouble in a couple years—someone in cool kid land laid down the
edict that we were to be left alone. So it was a little unusual for him even to talk
to us.
Maybe because I spoke and maybe not, he slammed his hands against the
lockers on either side of me and then leaned in close enough for me to
contemplate his toothpaste brand. “What do you know about Margo and Jase?”
“Uh,” I said. I thought of everything I knew about them: Jase was Margo
Roth Spiegelman’s first and only serious boyfriend. They began dating at the tail
end of last year. They were both going to University of Florida next year. Jase
got a baseball scholarship there. He was never over at her house, except to pick
her up. She never acted as if she liked him all that much, but then she never
acted as if she liked anyone all that much. “Nothing,” I said finally.
“Don’t shit me around,” he growled.
“I barely even know her,” I said, which had become true.
He considered my answer for a minute, and I tried hard to stare at his close-
set eyes. He nodded very slightly, pushed off the lockers, and walked away to
attend his first-period class: The Care and Feeding of Pectoral Muscles. The
second bell rang. One minute to class. Radar and I had calc; Ben had finite
mathematics. The classrooms were adjacent; we walked toward them together,
the three of us in a row, trusting that the tide of classmates would part enough to
let us by, and it did.
I said, “Getting you a date to prom is so hard that a thousand monkeys typing
at a thousand typewriters for a thousand years would never once type ‘I will go