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17.
Mom came into my room the next morning and said, “You didn’t even close the
door last night, sleepyhead,” and I opened my eyes and said, “I think I have a
stomach bug.” And then I motioned toward the trash can, which contained puke.
“Quentin! Oh, goodness. When did this happen?”
“About six,” I said, which was true.
“Why didn’t you come get us?”
“Too tired,” I said, which was also true.
“You just woke up feeling ill?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, which was untrue. I woke up because my alarm went off at
six, and then I snuck into the kitchen and ate a granola bar and some orange
juice. Ten minutes later, I stuck two fingers down my throat. I didn’t want to do
it the night before because I didn’t want it stinking the room up all night. The
puking sucked, but it was over quickly.
Mom took the bucket, and I could hear her cleaning it out in the kitchen. She
returned with a fresh bucket, her lips pouting with worry. “Well, I feel like I
should take the day—” she started, but I cut her off.
“I’m honestly fine,” I said. “Just queasy. Something I ate.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ll call if it gets worse,” I said. She kissed my forehead. I could feel her
sticky lipstick on my skin. I wasn’t really sick, but still, somehow she’d made
me feel better.
“Do you want me to close the door?” she asked, one hand on it. The door
clung to its hinges, but only barely.
“No no no,” I said, perhaps too nervously.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll call school on my way to work. You let me know if
you need anything. Anything. Or if you want me to come home. And you can
always call Dad. And I’ll check up on you this afternoon, okay?”
I nodded, and then pulled the covers back up to my chin. Even though the
bucket had been cleaned, I could smell the puke underneath the detergent, and
the smell of it reminded me of the act of puking, which for some reason made
me want to puke again, but I just took slow, even mouth breaths until I heard the
Chrysler backing down the driveway. It was 7:32. For once, I thought, I would

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be on time. Not to school, admittedly. But still.
I showered and brushed my teeth and put on dark jeans and a plain black T-
shirt. I put Margo’s scrap of newspaper in my pocket. I hammered the pins back
into their hinges, and then packed. I didn’t really know what to throw into my
backpack, but I included the doorjamb-opening screwdriver, a printout of the
satellite map, directions, a bottle of water, and in case she was there, the
Whitman. I wanted to ask her about it.
Ben and Radar showed up at eight on the dot. I got in the backseat. They
were shouting along to a song by the Mountain Goats.
Ben turned around and offered me his fist. I punched it softly, even though I
hated that greeting. “Q!” he shouted over the music. “How good does this feel?”
And I knew exactly what Ben meant: he meant listening to the Mountain
Goats with your friends in a car that runs on a Wednesday morning in May on
the way to Margo and whatever Margotastic prize came with finding her. “It
beats calculus,” I answered. The music was too loud for us to talk. Once we got
out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world
would know we had good taste in music.
We drove all the way out Colonial Drive, past the movie theaters and the
bookstores that I had been driving to and past my whole life. But this drive was
different and better because it occurred during calculus, because it occurred with
Ben and Radar, because it occurred on our way to where I believed I would find
her. And finally, after twenty miles, Orlando gave way to the last remaining
orange tree groves and undeveloped ranches—the endlessly flat land grown over
thick with brush, the Spanish moss hanging off the branches of oak trees, still in
the windless heat. This was the Florida where I used to spend mosquito-bitten,
armadillo-chasing nights as a Boy Scout. The road was dominated now by
pickup trucks, and every mile or so you could see a subdivision off the highway
—little streets winding for no reason around houses that rose up out of nothing
like a volcano of vinyl siding.
Farther out we passed a rotting wooden sign that said GROVE-POINT
ACRES. A cracked blacktop road lasted only a couple hundred feet before dead-
ending into an expanse of gray dirt, signaling that Grovepoint Acres was what
my mom called a pseudovision—a subdivision abandoned before it could be
completed. Pseudovisions had been pointed out to me a couple times before on
drives with my parents, but I’d never seen one so desolate.

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We were about five miles past Grovepoint Acres when Radar turned down the
music and said, “Should be in about a mile.”
I took a long breath. The excitement of being somewhere other than school
had started to wane. This didn’t seem like a place where Margo would hide, or
even visit. It was a far cry from New York City. This was the Florida you fly
over, wondering why people ever thought to inhabit this peninsula. I stared at the
empty asphalt, the heat distorting my vision. Ahead, I saw a strip mall wavering
in the bright distance.
“Is that it?” I asked, leaning forward and pointing.
“Must be,” Radar said.
Ben pushed the power button on the stereo, and we all got very quiet as Ben
pulled into a parking lot long since reclaimed by the gray sandy dirt. There had
once been a sign for these four storefronts. A rusted pole stood about eight feet
high by the side of the road. But the sign was long gone, snapped off by a
hurricane or an accumulation of decay. The stores themselves had fared little
better: it was a single-story building with a flat roof, and bare cinder block was
visible in places. Strips of cracked paint wrinkled away from the walls, like
insects clinging to a nest. Water stains formed brown abstract paintings between
the store windows. The windows were boarded up with warped sheets of