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15.
After parking in my driveway, we walked across the strip of grass that
separated Margo’s house from mine, just as we had Saturday. Ruthie answered
the door and said her parents wouldn’t be home until six; Myrna Mountweazel
ran excited circles around us; we went upstairs. Ruthie brought us a toolbox
from the garage, and then we all stared at the door leading to Margo’s bedroom
for a while. We were not handy people.
“What the hell are you supposed to do?” asked Ben.
“Don’t curse in front of Ruthie,” I said.
“Ruthie, do you mind if I say hell?”
“We don’t believe in hell,” she said, by way of answering.
Radar interrupted. “People,” he said. “People. The door.” Radar dug out a
Phillips-head screwdriver from the mess of a toolbox and knelt down,
unscrewing the locking doorknob. I grabbed a bigger screwdriver and tried to
unscrew the hinges, but there didn’t seem to be any screws involved. I looked at
the door some more. Eventually, Ruthie got bored and went downstairs to watch
TV.
Radar got the doorknob loose, and we each, in turn, peered inside at the
unpainted, unfinished wood around the knob. No message. No note. Nothing.
Annoyed, I moved onto the hinges, wondering how to open them. I swung the
door open and shut, trying to understand its mechanics. “That poem is so
damned long,” I said. “You’d think old Walt could have taken a line or two to
tell us how to unscrew the door itself from its jamb.”
Only when he responded did I realize Radar was sitting at Margo’s computer.
“According to Omnictionary,” he said, “we’re looking at a butt hinge. And you
just use the screwdriver as a lever to pop out the pin. Incidentally, some vandal
has added that butt hinges function well because they are powered by farts. Oh,
Omnictionary. Wilt thou ever be accurate?”
Once Omnictionary had told us what to do, doing it proved surprisingly easy.
I got the pin off each of the three hinges and then Ben pulled the door away. I
examined the hinges, and the unfinished wood of the doorway. Nothing.
“Nothing on the door,” Ben said. Ben and I placed the door back in place,
and Radar pounded in the pins with the screwdriver’s handle.

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Radar and I went over to Ben’s house, which was architecturally identical to
mine, to play a game called Arctic Fury. We were playing this game-within-a-
game where you shoot each other with paintballs on a glacier. You received extra
points for shooting your opponents in the balls. It was very sophisticated. “Bro,
she’s definitely in New York City,” Ben said. I saw the muzzle of his rifle around
a corner, but before I could move, he shot me between the legs. “Shit,” I
mumbled.
Radar said, “In the past, it seems like her clues have pointed to a place. She
tells Jase; she leaves us clues involving two people who both lived in New York
City most of their lives. It does make sense.”
Ben said, “Dude, that’s what she wants.” Just as I was creeping up on Ben, he
paused the game. “She wants you to go to New York. What if she arranged to
make that the only way to find her? To actually go?”
“What? It’s a city of like twelve million people.”
“She could have a mole here,” Radar said. “Who will tell her if you go.”
“Lacey!” Ben said. “It’s totally Lacey. Yes! You gotta get on a plane and go
to New York City right now. And when Lacey finds out, Margo will pick you up
at the airport. Yes. Bro, I am going to take you to your house, and you’re gonna
pack, and then I’m driving your ass to the airport, and you’re gonna put a plane
ticket on your emergencies-only credit card, and then when Margo finds out
what a badass you are, the kind of badass Jase Worthington only dreams about
being, all three of us will be taking hotties to prom.”
I didn’t doubt there was a flight to New York City leaving shortly. From
Orlando, there’s a flight to everywhere leaving shortly. But I doubted everything
else. “If you call Lacey . . . ” I said.
“She’s not going to confess!” Ben said. “Think of all the misdirection they
used—they probably only acted like they were fighting so you wouldn’t suspect
she was the mole.”
Radar said, “I don’t know, that doesn’t really add up.” He kept talking, but I
was only half listening. Staring at the paused screen, I thought it over. If Margo
and Lacey were fake-fighting, did Lacey fake-break-up with her boyfriend? Had
she faked her concern? Lacey had been fielding dozens of emails—none with
real information—from the flyers her cousin had put in record stores in New
York. She was no mole, and Ben’s plan was idiotic. Still, the mere idea of a plan
appealed to me. But there were only two and a half weeks left of school, and I’d
miss at least two days if I went to New York—not to mention my parents would
kill me for putting a plane ticket on my credit card. The more I thought about it,

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the dumber it was. Still, if I could see her tomorrow. . . . But no. “I can’t miss
school,” I finally said. I unpaused the game.
“I have a French quiz tomorrow.”
“You know,” Ben said, “your romanticism is a real inspiration.”
I played for a few more minutes and then walked across Jefferson Park back
home.
My mom told me once about this crazy kid she worked with. He was a
completely normal kid until he was nine, when his dad died. And even though
obviously a lot of nine-year-olds have had a lot of dead fathers and most of the
time the kids don’t go crazy, I guess this kid was an exception.
So what he did was he took a pencil and one of those steel compass things,
and he started drawing circles onto a piece of paper. All the circles exactly two
inches in diameter. And he would draw the circles until the entire piece of paper
was completely black, and then he would get another piece of paper and draw
more circles, and he did this every day, all day, and didn’t pay attention in school
and drew circles all over all of his tests and shit, and my mom said that this kid’s
problem was that he had created a routine to cope with his loss, only the routine
became destructive. So anyway, then my mom made him cry about his dad or
whatever and the kid stopped drawing circles and presumably lived happily ever
after. But I think about the circles kid sometimes, because I can sort of
understand him. I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very
boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo, but drawing circles
through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.
So I should have felt fine about not going to New York—it was a dumb idea,
anyway. But as I went about my routine that night and the next day at school, it
ate away at me, as if the routine itself was taking me farther from reuniting with
her.

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