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.
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, 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 once told me about a kid she worked with who went through something really unusual. He seemed like a completely normal kid until he was nine, when his dad died. Although many nine-year-olds face the loss of a parent without losing their grip on reality, this kid was different.
Here’s what he did: he took a pencil and one of those steel compass things and started drawing circles on a piece of paper, each one exactly two inches in diameter. He would keep drawing circles until the entire sheet was black, then he’d start on a new sheet and keep going. This became his daily routine. He stopped paying attention in school, covered his tests with circles, and focused entirely on this obsessive task. My mom said his problem was that he created a coping mechanism that eventually became self-destructive. After some therapy sessions where he talked about his dad, he stopped drawing circles and, as far as my mom knew, lived a happier life.
I sometimes think about the circle-drawing kid because I get him, in a way. I’ve always found comfort in routine and never thought boredom was all that boring. I might not be able to explain it to someone like Margo, but the idea of drawing circles through life seems like a reasonable kind of insanity to me.
So, even though not going to New York was probably for the best, I couldn’t shake the feeling that sticking to my routine was pulling me further away from reconnecting with her. It gnawed at me as I went through my daily tasks and the next day at school.
