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Moby Dick. Ahab was a hero, I decided. I had no particular reason for having
decided this—particularly given that I hadn’t read the book—but I decided it and
reacted thusly.
The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school
for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around thinking about the
lastness of it all: The last time I stand in a circle outside the band room in the
shade of this oak tree that has protected generations of band geeks. The last time
I eat pizza in the cafeteria with Ben. The last time I sit in this school scrawling
an essay with a cramped hand into a blue book. The last time I glance up at the
clock. The last time I see Chuck Parson prowling the halls, his smile half a sneer.
God. I was becoming nostalgic for Chuck Parson. Something sick was
happening inside of me.
It must have been like this for Margo, too. With all the planning she’d done,
she must have known she was leaving, and even she couldn’t have been totally
immune to the feeling. She’d had good days here. And on the last day, the bad
days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a
life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the
things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and
spite, kept welling up inside me. These whitewashed cinder-block walls. My
white walls. Margo’s white walls. We’d been captive in them for so long, stuck
in their belly like Jonah.
Throughout the day, I found myself thinking that maybe this feeling was why
she’d planned everything so intricately and precisely: even if you want to leave,
it is so hard. It took preparation, and maybe sitting in that minimall scrawling her
plans was both intellectual and emotional practice—Margo’s way of imagining
herself into her fate.
Ben and Radar both had a marathon band practice to make sure they would
rock “Pomp and Circumstance” at graduation. Lacey offered me a ride, but I
decided to clean out my locker, because I didn’t really want to come back here
and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.
My locker was an unadulterated crap hole—half trash can, half book storage.
Her locker had been neatly stacked with textbooks when Lacey opened it, I
remembered, as if she intended to come to school the next day. I pulled a
garbage can over to the bank of lockers and opened mine up. I began by pulling
off a picture of Radar and Ben and me goofing off. I put it inside my backpack
and then started the disgusting process of picking through a year’s worth of
accumulated filth—gum wrapped in scraps of notebook paper, pens out of ink,

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greasy napkins—and scraping it all into the garbage. All along, I kept thinking, I
will never do this again, I will never be here again, this will never be my locker
again, Radar and I will never write notes in calculus again, I will never see
Margo across the hall again. This was the first time in my life that so many
things would never happen again.
And finally it was too much. I could not talk myself down from the feeling,
and the feeling became unbearable. I reached in deep to the recesses of my
locker. I pushed everything—photographs and notes and books—into the trash
can. I left the locker open and walked away. As I walked past the band room, I
could hear through the walls the muffled sounds of “Pomp and Circumstance.” I
kept walking. It was hot outside, but not as hot as usual. It was bearable. There
are sidewalks most of the way home, I thought. So I kept walking.
And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final
leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation.
Everything that mattered except one lousy picture was in the trash, but it felt so
great. I started jogging, wanting to put even more distance between myself and
school.
It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned
thing in the world.
As I ran, I felt myself for the first time becoming Margo. I knew: she is not in
Orlando. She is not in Florida. Leaving feels too good, once you leave. If I’d
been in a car, and not on foot, I might have kept going, too. She was gone and
not coming back for graduation or anything else. I felt sure of that now.
I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But
then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them,
tramping a perpetual journey?
Ben and Radar drove past me a quarter mile from Jefferson Park, and Ben
brought RHAPAW to a screeching halt right on Lakemont in spite of traffic
everywhere, and I ran up to the car and got in. They wanted to play Resurrection
at my house, but I had to tell them no, because I was closer than I’d ever been
before.

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