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Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
I spent most of my afternoon trying to make sense of that quote, thinking
maybe it was Margo’s way of telling me to become more of a badass or
something. But I also read and reread everything highlighted in blue:
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . .
nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on
the spectres in books.
I tramp a perpetual journey
All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

---

The final three stanzas of “Song of Myself” were also highlighted.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you
It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the
poem she’d left for me. I could never get anywhere with the lines, but I kept
thinking about them anyway, because I didn’t want to disappoint her. She wanted
me to play out the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was
waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it dead-ended into her.

---

14.
Monday morning, an extraordinary event occurred. I was late, which was
normal; and then my mom dropped me off at school, which was normal; and
then I stood outside talking with everyone for a while, which was normal; and
then Ben and I headed inside, which was normal. But as soon as we swung open
the steel door, Ben’s face became a mix of excitement and panic, like he’d just
been picked out of a crowd by a magician for the get-sawn-in-half trick. I
followed his gaze down the hall.
Denim miniskirt. Tight white T-shirt. Scooped neck. Extraordinarily olive
skin. Legs that make you care about legs. Perfectly coiffed curly brown hair. A
laminated button reading ME FOR PROM QUEEN. Lacey Pemberton. Walking
toward us. By the band room.
“Lacey Pemberton,” Ben whispered, even though she was about three steps
from us and could clearly hear him, and in fact flashed a faux-bashful smile
upon hearing her name.
“Quentin,” she said to me, and more than anything else, I found it impossible
that she knew my name. She motioned with her head, and I followed her past the
band room, over to a bank of lockers. Ben kept pace with me.
“Hi, Lacey,” I said once she stopped walking. I could smell her perfume, and
I remembered the smell of it in her SUV, remembered the crunch of the catfish
as Margo and I slammed her seat down.
“I hear you were with Margo.”
I just looked at her.
“That night, with the fish? In my car? And in Becca’s closet? And through
Jase’s window?”
I kept looking. I wasn’t sure what to say. A man can live a long and
adventurous life without ever being spoken to by Lacey Pemberton, and when
that rare opportunity does arise, one does not wish to misspeak. So Ben spoke
for me. “Yeah, they hung out,” Ben said, as if Margo and I were tight.
“Was she mad at me?” Lacey asked after a moment. She was looking down; I
could see her brown eye shadow.
“What?”
She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Lacey

---

Pemberton was not Lacey Pemberton. She was just—like, a person. “Was she,
you know, pissed at me about something?”
I thought about how to answer that for a while. “Uh, she was a little
disappointed that you didn’t tell her about Jase and Becca, but you know Margo.
She’ll get over it.”
Lacey started walking down the hall. Ben and I let her go, but then she
slowed down. She wanted us to walk with her. Ben nudged me, and then we
started walking together. “I didn’t even know about Jase and Becca. That’s the
thing. God, I hope I can explain that to her soon. For a while, I was really
worried that maybe she had like really left, but then I went into her locker ’cause
I know her combination and she still has all her pictures up and everything, and
all her books are stacked there.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s been like four days. That’s almost a record for her. And you
know, this has really sucked, because Craig knew, and I was so pissed at him for
not telling me that I broke up with him, and now I’m out a prom date, and my
best friend is off wherever, in New York or whatever, thinking I did something I
would NEVER do.” I shot a look to Ben. Ben shot a look back to me.
“I have to run to class,” I said. “But why do you say she’s in New York?”
“I guess she told Jase like two days before she left that New York was the
only place in America where a person could actually live a halfway livable life.
Maybe she was just saying it. I don’t know.”
“Okay, I gotta run,” I said.
I knew Ben would never convince Lacey to go to prom with him, but I
figured he at least deserved the opportunity. I jogged through the halls toward
my locker, rubbing Radar’s head as I ran past him. He was talking to Angela and
a freshman girl in band. “Don’t thank me. Thank Q,” I heard him say to the
freshman, and she called out, “Thank you for my two hundred dollars!” Without
looking back I shouted, “Don’t thank me, thank Margo Roth Spiegelman!”
because of course she’d given me the tools I needed.
I made it to my locker and grabbed my calc notebook, but then I just stayed,
even after the second bell rang, standing still in the middle of the hallway while
people rushed past me in both directions, like I was the median in their freeway.
Another kid thanked me for his two hundred dollars. I smiled at him. The school
felt more mine than in all my four years there. We’d gotten a measure of justice
for the bikeless band geeks. Lacey Pemberton had spoken to me. Chuck Parson
had apologized.

---

I knew these halls so well—and finally it was starting to feel like they knew
me, too. I stood there as the third bell rang and the crowds dwindled. Only then
did I walk to calc, sitting down just after Mr. Jiminez had started another
interminable lecture.
I’d brought Margo’s copy of Leaves of Grass to school, and I started reading
the highlighted parts of “Song of Myself” again, under the desk while Mr.
Jiminez scratched away at the blackboard. There were no direct references to
New York that I could see. I handed it to Radar after a few minutes, and he
looked at it for a while before writing on the corner of his notebook closest to
me, The green highlighting must mean something. Maybe she wants you to open