by Green, John
Radar laughed, and Ben continued. “I mean, seriously. My balls are so big that when you order french fries from McDonald’s, you can choose one of four sizes: small, medium, large, and my balls.”
Lacey cut her eyes at Ben and said, “Not. Appropriate.”
“Sorry,” Ben mumbled. “I think she’s in Orlando,” he said. “Watching us look. And watching her parents not look.”
“I’m still for New York,” Lacey said.
“All still possible,” I said. A Margo for each of us—and each more mirror than window.
The minimall looked as it had a couple days before. Ben parked, and I took them through the push-open door to the office. Once everyone was inside, I said softly, “Don’t turn on the flashlight yet. Give your eyes a chance to adjust.” I felt fingernails dig at my forearm. I whispered, “It’s okay, Lace.”
“Whoops,” she said. “Wrong arm.” She’d been searching, I realized, for Ben.
Slowly, the room came into a hazy gray focus. I could see the desks lined up, still waiting for workers. I turned on my flashlight, and then everyone else turned theirs on as well. Ben and Lacey stayed together, walking toward the Troll Hole to explore the other rooms. Radar walked with me to Margo’s desk. He knelt down to look closely at the paper calendar frozen on June.
I was leaning in next to him when I heard fast footsteps coming toward us.
“People,” Ben whispered urgently. He ducked down behind Margo’s desk, pulling Lacey with him.
“What? Where?”
“Next room!” he said. “Wearing masks. Official-looking. Gotta go.”
Radar shone his flashlight in the direction of the Troll Hole but Ben knocked it down forcefully. “We. Have. To. Get. Out. Of. Here.” Lacey was looking up at me, big-eyed and probably a little bit pissed off that I’d falsely promised her safety.
“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay, everybody out, through the door. Very cool, very quick.” I had just started to walk when I heard a booming voice shout, “WHO GOES THERE!”
Shit. “Um,” I said, “we’re just visiting.” What an outlandishly lame thing to say. Through the Troll Hole, a white light blinded me. It might have been God Himself.
“What are your intentions?” The voice had a slight faked Britishness to it.
I watched Ben stand up next to me. It felt good not to be alone. “We’re here investigating a disappearance,” he said with great confidence. “We weren’t going to break anything.” The light snapped off, and I blinked away the blindness until I saw three figures, each wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a mask with two circular filters. One of them pulled the mask up to his forehead and looked at us. I recognized the goatee and flat, wide mouth.
“Gus?” asked Lacey. She stood up. The SunTrust security guard.
“Lacey Pemberton. Jesus. What are you doing here? With no mask? This place has a ton of asbestos.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Exploring,” he said. Somehow Ben was emboldened with enough confidence to walk up to the other guys and offer hand-shakes. They introduced themselves as Ace and the Carpenter. I would venture to guess that these were pseudonyms.
We pulled around some rolling desk chairs and sat in an approximate circle. “Did you guys break the particleboard?” Gus asked.
“Well, I did,” Ben explained.
“We taped that up because we didn’t want anyone else in. If people can see a way in from the road, you get a lot of people coming in who don’t know shit about exploring. Bums and crack addicts and everything.”
I stepped forward toward them and said, “So, you, uh, knew that Margo came here?”
Before Gus answered, Ace spoke through the mask. His voice was slightly modulated but easy to understand. “Man, Margo was here all the damned time. We only come here a few times a year; it’s got asbestos, and anyway, it’s not even that good. But we probably saw her, like, what, like more than half the time we came here in the last couple years. She was hot, huh?”
“Was?” asked Lacey pointedly.
“She ran away, right?”
“What do you know about that?” Lacey asked.
“Nothing, Jesus. I saw Margo with him,” Gus said, nodding toward me, “a couple weeks ago. And then I heard that she ran away. It occurred to me a few days later she might be here, so we visited.”
“I never got why she liked this place so much. There’s not much here,” said the Carpenter. “It’s not great exploring.”
“What do you mean exploring?” Lacey asked Gus.
“Urban exploring. We enter abandoned buildings, explore them, photograph them. We take nothing; we leave nothing. We’re just observers.”
“It’s a hobby,” said Ace. “Gus used to let Margo tag along on exploring trips when we were still in school.”
“She had a great eye, even though she was only, like, thirteen,” Gus said. “She could figure a way into anywhere. It was just occasional back then, but now we go out like three times a week. There’s places all over. There’s an abandoned mental hospital over in Clearwater. It’s amazing. You can see where they strapped down the crazies and gave them electroshock. And there’s an old jail out west of here. But she wasn’t really into it. She liked to break into the places, but then she just wanted to stay.”
“Yeah, God that was annoying,” added Ace.
The Carpenter said, “She wouldn’t even, like, take pictures. Or run around and find stuff. She just wanted to go inside and, like, sit. Remember, she had that black notebook? And she would just sit in the corner and write, like she was in her house, doing homework or something.”
“Honestly,” Gus said, “she never really got what it’s all about. The adventure. She seemed pretty depressed, actually.”
I wanted to let them keep talking, because I figured everything they said would help me imagine Margo. But all of a sudden, Lacey stood up and kicked her chair behind her. “And you never thought to ask her about how she was pretty depressed actually? Or why she hung out in these sketch-ass places? That never bothered you?” She was standing above him now, shouting, and he stood up, too, half a foot taller than her, and then the Carpenter said, “Jesus, somebody calm that bitch down.”
“Oh no you didn’t!” Ben yelled, and before I even knew what was going on, Ben tackled the Carpenter, who fell awkwardly out of his chair onto his shoulder. Ben straddled the guy and started pounding on him, furiously and awkwardly smacking and punching his mask, shouting, “SHE’S NOT THE BITCH, YOU ARE!” I scrambled up and grabbed one of Ben’s arms as Radar grabbed the other. We pulled him away, but he was still shouting, “I have a lot of anger right now! I was enjoying punching the guy! I want to go back to punching him!”
“Ben,” I said, trying to sound calm, trying to sound like my mom. “Ben, it’s okay. You made your point.”
Gus and Ace picked up the Carpenter, and Gus said, “Jesus Christ, we’re getting out of here, okay? It’s all yours.”
Ace picked up their camera equipment, and they hustled out the back door. Lacey started to explain to me how she knew him, saying, “He was a senior when we were fr—.” But I waved it off. None of it mattered anyway.
Radar knew what mattered. He returned immediately to the calendar, his eyes an inch away from the paper. “I don’t think anything was written on the May page,” he says. “The paper is pretty thin and I can’t see any marks. But it’s impossible to say for sure.” He went off to search for more clues, and I saw Lacey’s and Ben’s flashlights dipping as they went through a Troll Hole, but I just stood there in the office, imagining her. I thought of her following these guys, four years older than her, into abandoned buildings. That was Margo as I’d seen her. But then, inside the buildings, she is not the Margo I’d always imagined. While everyone else walks off to explore and take pictures and bounce around the walls, Margo sits on the floor, writing something.
From next door, Ben shouted, “Q! We got something!”
I wiped sweat from my face with both sleeves an
d used Margo’s desk to pull myself up. I walked across the room, ducked through the Troll Hole, and headed toward the three flashlights scanning the wall above the rolled-up carpet.
“Look,” Ben said, using the beam to draw a square on the wall. “You know those little holes you mentioned?”
“Yeah?”
“They had to have been mementos tacked up there. Postcards or pictures, we think, from the spacing of the holes. Which maybe she took with her,” Ben said.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “I wish we could find that notebook Gus was talking about.”
“Yeah, when he said that, I remembered that notebook,” Lacey said, the beam of my flashlight lighting up only her legs. “She had one with her all the time. I never saw her write in it, but I just figured it was like a day planner or whatever. God, I never asked about it. I get pissed at Gus, who wasn’t even her friend. But what did I ever ask her?”
“She wouldn’t have answered anyway,” I said. It was dishonest to act like Margo hadn’t participated in her own obfuscation.
We walked around for another hour, and just when I felt sure the trip had been a waste, my flashlight happened over the subdivision brochures that had been built into a house of cards when we first came here. One of the brochures was for Grovepoint Acres. My breath caught as I spread out the other brochures. I jogged to my backpack by the door and came back with a pen and a notebook and wrote down the names of all the advertised subdivisions. I recognized one immediately: Collier Farms—one of the two pseudovisions on my list I hadn’t yet visited. I finished copying the subdivision names and returned my notebook to my backpack. Call me selfish, but if I found her, I wanted it to be alone.
17.
The moment Mom got home from work on Friday, I told her that I was going to a concert with Radar and then proceeded to drive out to rural Seminole County to see Collier Farms. All the other subdivisions from the brochures turned out to exist—most of them on the north side of town, which had been totally developed a long time ago.
I only recognized the turnoff for Collier Farms because I’d become something of an expert in hard-to-see dirt access roads. But Collier Farms was like none of the other pseudovisions I’d seen, because it was wildly overgrown, as if it had been abandoned for fifty years. I didn’t know if it was older than the other pseudovisions, or if the low-lying, swamp-wet land made everything grow faster, but the Collier Farms access road became impassable just after I turned in because a thick grove of brambly brush had sprouted across the entire road.
I got out and walked. The overgrown grass scraped at my shins, and my sneakers sunk into the mud with each step. I couldn’t help but hope she had a tent pitched out here somewhere on some little piece of land two feet higher than everything else, keeping the rain off. I walked slowly, because there was more to see than at any of the others, more places to hide, and because I knew this pseudovision had a direct connection to the minimall. The ground was so thick I had to walk slowly as I let myself take in each new landscape, checking each place big enough to fit a person. At the end of the street I saw a blue-and-white cardboard box in the mud, and for a second it looked like the same nutrition bars I’d found in the minimall. But, no. A rotting container for a twelve-pack of beer. I trudged back to the minivan and headed for a place called Logan Pines farther to the north.
It took an hour to get there, and by now I was up near the Ocala National Forest, not really even the Orlando metro area anymore. I was a few miles away when Ben called.
“What’s up?”
“You hittin’ those paper towns?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m almost to the last one I know of. Nothing yet.”
“So listen, bro, Radar’s parents had to leave town real suddenly.”
“Is everything okay?” I asked. I knew Radar’s grandparents were really old and lived in a nursing home down in Miami.
“Yeah, get this: you know the guy in Pittsburgh with the world’s second-largest collection of black Santas?”
“Yeah?”
“He just bit it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Bro, I don’t kid about the demise of black Santa collectors. This guy had an aneurysm, and so Radar’s folks are flying to Pennsylvania to try to buy his entire collection. So we’re having a few people over.”
“Who’s we?”
“You and me and Radar. We’re the hosts.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
There was a pause, and then Ben used my full name. “Quentin,” he said, “I know you want to find her. I know she is the most important thing to you. And that’s cool. But we graduate in, like, a week. I’m not asking you to abandon the search. I’m asking you to come to a party with your two best friends who you have known for half your life. I’m asking you to spend two to three hours drinking sugary wine coolers like the pretty little girl you are, and then another two to three hours vomiting the aforementioned wine coolers through your nose. And then you can go back to poking around abandoned housing projects.”
It bothered me that Ben only wanted to talk about Margo when it involved an adventure that appealed to him, that he thought there was something wrong with me for focusing on her over my friends, even though she was missing and they weren’t. But Ben was Ben, like Radar said. And I had nothing left to search after Logan Pines anyway. “I’ve got to go to this last place and then I’ll be over.”
Because Logan Pines was the last pseudovision in Central Florida—or at least the last one I knew about—I had placed so much hope in it. But as I walked around its single dead-end street with a flashlight, I saw no tent. No campfire. No food wrappers. No sign of people. No Margo. At the end of the road, I found a single concrete foundation dug into the dirt. But there was nothing built atop it, just the hole cut into the earth like a dead mouth agape, tangles of briars and waist-high grass growing up all around. If she’d wanted me to see these places, I could not understand why. And if Margo had gone to the pseudovisions never to come back, she knew about a place I hadn’t uncovered in all my research.
It took an hour and a half to drive back to Jefferson Park. I parked the minivan at home, changed into a polo shirt and my only nice pair of jeans, and walked down Jefferson Way to Jefferson Court, and then took a right onto Jefferson Road. A few cars were already lined up on both sides of Jefferson Place, Radar’s street. It was only eight-forty-five.
I opened the door and was greeted by Radar, who had an armful of plaster black Santas. “Gotta put away all of the nice ones,” he said. “God forbid one of them breaks.”
“Need any help?” I asked. Radar nodded toward the living room, where the tables on either side of the couch held three sets of unnested black Santa nesting dolls. As I renested them, I couldn’t help but notice that they were really very beautiful—hand-painted and extraordinarily detailed. I didn’t say this to Radar, though, for fear that he would beat me to death with the black Santa lamp in the living room.
I carried the matryoshka dolls into the guest bedroom, where Radar was carefully stashing Santas into a dresser. “You know, when you see them all together, it really does make you question the way we imagine our myths.”
Radar rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I always find myself questioning the way I imagine my myths when I’m eating my Lucky Charms every morning with a goddamned black Santa spoon.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder spinning me around. It was Ben, his feet fidgeting in fast-motion like he needed to pee or something. “We kissed. Like, she kissed me. About ten minutes ago. On Radar’s parents’ bed.”
“That’s disgusting,” Radar said. “Don’t make out in my parents’ bed.”
“Wow, I figured you’d already gotten past that,” I said. “What with you being such a pimp and everything.”
“Shut up, bro. I’m freaked out,” he said, looking at me, his eyes almost crossed. “I don’t think I’m very good.”
“At what?”
“At kissing. And, I mean, she’s done a lot more kissing
than me over the years. I don’t want to suck so bad she dumps me. Girls dig you,” he said to me, which was at best true only if you defined the word girls as “girls in the marching band.” “Bro, I’m asking for advice.”
I was tempted to bring up all Ben’s endless blather about the various ways in which he would rock various bodies, but I just said, “As far as I can tell, there are two basic rules: 1. Don’t bite anything without permission, and 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it’s very powerful, and should be used sparingly.”
Ben’s eyes suddenly grew bright with panic. I winced, and said, “She’s standing behind me, isn’t she?”
“ ‘The human tongue is like wasabi,’” Lacey mimicked in a deep, goofy voice that I hoped didn’t really resemble mine. I wheeled around. “I actually think Ben’s tongue is like sunscreen,” she said. “It’s good for your health and should be applied liberally.”
“I just threw up in my mouth,” Radar said.
“Lacey, you just kind of took away my will to go on,” I added.
“I wish I could stop imagining that,” Radar said.
I said, “The very idea is so offensive that it’s actually illegal to say the words ‘Ben Starling’s tongue’ on television.”
“The penalty for violating that law is either ten years in prison or one Ben Starling tongue bath,” Radar said.
“Everyone,” I said.
“Chooses,” Radar said, smiling.
“Prison,” we finished together.
And then Lacey kissed Ben in front of us. “Oh God,” Radar said, waving his arms in front of his face. “Oh, God. I’m blind. I’m blind.”
“Please stop,” I said. “You’re upsetting the black Santas.”
The party ended up in the formal living room on the second floor of Radar’s house, all twenty of us. I leaned against a wall, my head inches from a black Santa portrait painted on velvet. Radar had one of those sectional couches, and everyone was crowded onto it. There was beer in a cooler by the TV, but no one was drinking. Instead, they were telling stories about one another. I’d heard most of them before—band camp stories and Ben Starling stories and first kiss stories—but Lacey hadn’t heard any of them, and anyway, they were still entertaining. I stayed mostly out of it until Ben said, “Q, how are we going to graduate?”
