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16.
Tuesday evening, when she had been gone six days, I talked to my parents. It
wasn’t a big decision or anything; I just did. I was sitting at the kitchen counter
while Dad chopped vegetables and Mom browned some beef in a skillet. Dad
was razzing me about how much time I’d spent reading such a short book, and I
said, “Actually, it’s not for English; it seems like maybe Margo left it for me to
find.” They got quiet, and then I told them about Woody Guthrie and the
Whitman.
“She clearly likes to play these games of incomplete information,” my dad
said.
“I don’t blame her for wanting attention,” my mom said, and then to me
added, “but that doesn’t make her well-being your responsibility.”
Dad scraped the carrots and onions into the skillet. “Yeah, true. Not that
either of us could diagnose her without seeing her, but I suspect she’ll be home
soon.”
“We shouldn’t speculate,” my mom said to him quietly, as if I couldn’t hear
or something. Dad was about to respond but I interrupted.
“What should I do?”
“Graduate,” my mom said. “And trust that Margo can take of herself, for
which she has shown a great talent.”
“Agreed,” my dad said, but after dinner, when I went back to my room and
played Resurrection on mute, I could hear them talking quietly back and forth. I
could not hear the words, but I could hear the worry.
Later that night, Ben called my cell.
“Hey,” I said.
“Bro,” he said.
“Yes,” I answered.
“I’m about to go shoe shopping with Lacey.”
“Shoe shopping?”
“Yeah. Everything’s thirty percent off from ten to midnight. She wants me to

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help her pick out her prom shoes. I mean, she had some, but I was over at her
house yesterday and we agreed that they weren’t . . . you know, you want the
perfect shoes for prom. So she’s going to return them and then we’re going to
Burdines and we’re going to like pi—”
“Ben,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why:
I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a
penis.”
“I’m really nervous and I can’t stop thinking that I actually kinda really like
her not just in the she’s-a-hot-prom-date way but in the she’s-actually-really-
cool-and-I-like-hanging-out-with-her kinda way. And, like, maybe we’re going
to go to prom and we’ll be, like, kissing in the middle of the dance floor and
everyone will be like, holy shit and, you know, everything they ever thought
about me will just go out the window—”
“Ben,” I said, “stop the dork babble and you’ll be fine.” He kept talking for a
while, but I finally got off the phone with him.
I lay down and started to feel a little depressed about prom. I refused to feel any
kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn’t going to prom, but I had—stupidly,
embarrassingly—thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with
me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we’d walk into the
Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we’d be just in time for the
last dance, and we’d dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the
return of Margo, and then we’d fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream
at Friendly’s. So yes, like Ben, I harbored ridiculous prom fantasies. But at least
I didn’t say mine out loud.
Ben was such a self-absorbed idiot sometimes, and I had to remind myself
why I still liked him. If nothing else, he sometimes got surprisingly bright ideas.
The door thing was a good idea. It didn’t work, but it was a good idea. But
obviously Margo had intended it to mean something else to me.
To me.
The clue was mine. The doors were mine!

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On my way to the garage, I had to walk through the living room, where Mom
and Dad were watching TV. “Want to watch?” my mom asked. “They’re about to
crack the case.” It was one of those solve-the-murder crime shows.
“No, thanks,” I said, and breezed past them through the kitchen and into the
garage. I found the widest flathead screwdriver and then stuck it in the waistband
of my khaki shorts, cinching my belt tight. I grabbed a cookie out of the kitchen
and then walked back through the living room, my gait only slightly awkward,
and while they watched the televised mystery unfold, I removed the three pins
from my bedroom door. When the last one came off, the door creaked and
started to fall, so I swung it all the way open against the wall with one hand, and
as I swung it, I saw a tiny piece of paper—about the size of my thumbnail—
flutter down from the door’s top hinge. Typical Margo. Why hide something in
her own room when she could hide it in mine? I wondered when she’d done it,
how she’d gotten in. I couldn’t help but smile.
It was a sliver of the Orlando Sentinel, half straight edges and half ripped. I
could tell it was the Sentinel because one ripped edge read “do Sentinel May 6,
2.” The day she’d left. The message was clearly from her. I recognized her
handwriting: