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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.”
“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.”

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“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?”
“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-fatness 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—except
me, and I wasn’t going. The only girl I’d want to take was off tramping some
kind of perpetual journey or something.
When we sat down, Lacey started reading “Song of Myself,” and she agreed
that none of it sounded like anything and certainly none of it sounded like
Margo. We still had no idea what, if anything, Margo was trying to say. She gave
the book back to me, and they started talking about prom again.
All afternoon, I kept feeling like it wasn’t doing any good to look at the
highlighted quotes, but then I would get bored and reach into my backpack and
put the book on my lap and go back to it. I had English at the end of the day,
seventh period, and we were just starting to read Moby Dick, so Dr. Holden was
talking quite a lot about fishing in the nineteenth century. I kept Moby Dick on
the desk and Whitman in my lap, but even being in English class couldn’t help.
For once, I went a few minutes without looking at the clock, so I was surprised

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by the bell ringing, and took longer than everyone else to get my backpack
packed. As I slung it over one shoulder and started to leave, Dr. Holden smiled at
me and said, “Walt Whitman, huh?”
I nodded sheepishly.
“Good stuff,” she said. “So good that I’m almost okay with you reading it in
class. But not quite.” I mumbled sorry and then walked out to the senior parking
lot.
While Ben and Radar banded, I sat in RHAPAW with the doors open, a slow
husky breeze blowing through. I read from The Federalist Papers to prepare for
a quiz I had the next day in government, but my mind kept returning to its
continuous loop: Guthrie and Whitman and New York and Margo. Had she gone
to New York to immerse herself in folk music? Was there some secret folk
music-loving Margo I’d never known? Was she maybe staying in an apartment
where one of them had once lived? And why did she want to tell me about it?
I saw Ben and Radar approaching in the sideview mirror, Radar swinging his
sax case as he walked quickly toward RHAPAW. They hustled in through the
already-open door, and Ben turned the key and RHAPAW sputtered, and then we
hoped, and then she sputtered again, and then we hoped some more, and finally
she gurgled to life. Ben raced out of the parking lot and turned off campus before
saying to me, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SHIT!” He could hardly contain his
glee.
He started hitting the car’s horn, but of course the horn didn’t work, so every
time he hit it, he just yelled, “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! HONK IF YOU’RE GOING
TO PROM WITH TRUE-BLUE HONEYBUNNY LACEY PEMBERTON!
HONK, BABY, HONK!”
Ben could hardly shut up the whole way home. “You know what did it?
Aside from desperation? I guess she and Becca Arrington are fighting because
Becca’s, you know, a cheater, and I think she started to feel bad about the whole
Bloody Ben thing. She didn’t say that, but she sort of acted it. So in the end,
Bloody Ben is going to get me some puh-lay-hey.” I was happy for him and
everything, but I wanted to focus on the game of getting to Margo.
“Do you guys have any ideas at all?”
It was quiet for a moment, and then Radar looked at me through the rearview
mirror and said, “That doors thing is the only one marked different from the

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others, and it’s also the most random; I really think that’s the one with the clue.
What is it again?”
“‘Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from
their jambs!’” I replied.
“Admittedly, Jefferson Park is not really the best place to unscrew the doors
of closed-mindedness from their jambs,” Radar allowed. “Maybe that’s what
she’s saying. Like the paper town thing she said about Orlando? Maybe she’s
saying that’s why she left.”
Ben slowed for a stoplight and then turned around to look at Radar. “Bro,” he
said, “I think you guys are giving Margo Honey-bunny way too much credit.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Unscrew the locks from the doors,” he said. “Unscrew the doors themselves
from their jambs.”
“Yeah,” I said. The light turned green and Ben hit the gas. RHAPAW
shuddered like she might disintegrate but then began to move.
“It’s not poetry. It’s not metaphor. It’s instructions. We are supposed to go to
Margo’s room and unscrew the lock from the door and unscrew the door itself
from its jamb.”
Radar looked at me in the rearview mirror, and I looked back at him.
“Sometimes,” Radar said to me, “he’s so retarded that he becomes kind of
brilliant.”

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