“How was prom?” I asked.
“Ben is really sweet,” she answered. “I had fun. But then Becca and I had a huge fight and she called me a whore and then she stood up on the couch upstairs and she shushed the entire party and then she told everyone I have an STD.”
I winced. “God,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m sort of ruined. It’s just . . . God. It sucks, honestly, because . . . it’s just so humiliating, and she knew it would be, and . . . it sucks. So then I went to the bathtub and then Ben came down here and I told him to leave me alone. Nothing against Ben, but he wasn’t very good at, like, listening. He’s kinda drunk. I don’t even have it. I had it. It’s cured. Whatever. It’s just, I’m not a slut. It was one guy. One lame-ass guy. God, I can’t believe I ever told her. I should have just told Margo when Becca wasn’t around.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The thing is that Becca is just jealous.”
“Why would she be jealous? She’s prom queen. She’s dating Jase. She’s the new Margo.”
My butt was sore against the porcelain, so I tried to rearrange myself. My knees were touching her knees. “No one will ever be the new Margo,” I said. “Anyway, you have what she really wants. People like you. People think you’re cuter.”
Lacey shrugged bashfully. “Do you think I’m superficial?”
“Well, yeah.” I thought of myself standing outside Becca’s bedroom, hoping she’d take her shirt off. “But so am I,” I added. “So is everyone.” I’d often thought, If only I had the body of Jase Worthington. Walked like I knew how to walk. Kissed like I knew how to kiss.
“But not in the same way. Ben and I are superficial in the same way. You don’t give a shit if people like you.”
Which was both true and not. “I care more than I’d like to,” I said.
“Everything sucks without Margo,” she said. She was drunk, too, but I didn’t mind her variety of drunk.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I want you to take me to that place,” she said. “That strip mall. Ben told me about it.”
“Yeah, we can go whenever you want,” I said. I told her I’d been there all night, that I’d found Margo’s nail polish and her blanket.
Lacey was quiet for a while, breathing through her open mouth. When she finally said it, she almost whispered it. Worded like a question and spoken like a statement: “She’s dead, isn’t she.”
“I don’t know, Lacey. I thought so until tonight, but now I don’t know.”
“She’s dead and we’re all . . . doing this.”
I thought of the highlighted Whitman: “If no other in the world be aware I sit content, / And if each and all be aware I sit content.” I said, “Maybe that’s what she wanted, for life to go on.”
“That doesn’t sound like my Margo,” she said, and I thought of my Margo, and Lacey’s Margo, and Mrs. Spiegelman’s Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different fun house mirrors. I was going to say something, but Lacey’s open mouth became truly slack-jawed, and she leaned her head against the cold gray tile of the bathroom wall, asleep.
It wasn’t until after two people had come into the bathroom to pee that I decided to wake her up. It was almost 5 A.M., and I needed to take Ben home.
“Lace, wake up,” I said, touching her flip-flop with my shoe.
She shook her head. “I like being called that,” she said. “You know that you’re, like, currently my best friend?”
“I’m thrilled,” I said, even though she was drunk and tired and lying. “So listen, we’re going to go upstairs together, and if anybody says anything about you, I will defend your honor.”
“Okay,” she said. And so we went upstairs together, and the party had thinned out a little, but there were still some baseball players, including Jase, over by the keg. Mostly there were people sleeping in sleeping bags all over the floor; some of them were squeezed onto the pullout couch. Angela and Radar were lying together on a love seat, Radar’s legs dangling over the side. They were sleeping over.
Just as I was about to ask the guys by the keg if they’d seen Ben, he ran into the living room. He wore a blue baby bonnet on his head and was wielding a sword made out of eight empty cans of Milwaukee’s Best Light, which had, I assumed, been glued together.
“I SEE YOU!” Ben shouted, pointing at me with the sword. “I SPY QUENTIN JACOBSEN! YESSS! Come here! Get on your knees!” he shouted.
“What? Ben, calm down.”
“KNEES!”
I obediently knelt, looking up at him.
He lowered the beer sword and tapped me on each shoulder. “By the power of the superglue beer sword, I hereby designate you my driver!”
“Thanks,” I said. “Don’t puke in the minivan.”
“YES!” he shouted. And then when I tried to get up, he pushed me back down with his non-beer-sworded hand, and he tapped me again with the beer sword, and he said, “By the power of the superglue beer sword, I hereby announce that you will be naked under your robe at graduation.”
“What?” I stood then.
“YES! Me and you and Radar! Naked under our robes! At graduation! It will be so awesome!”
“Well,” I said, “it will be really hot.”
“YES!” he said. “Swear you will do it! I already made Radar swear. RADAR, DIDN’T YOU SWEAR?”
Radar turned his head ever so slightly, and opened his eyes a slit. “I swore,” he mumbled.
“Well then, I swear, too,” I said.
“YES!” Then Ben turned to Lacey. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Ben.”
“No, I love you. Not like a sister loves a brother or like a friend loves a friend. I love you like a really drunk guy loves the best girl ever.” She smiled.
I took a step forward, trying to save him from further embarrassment, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “If we’re gonna get you home by six, we should be leaving,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “I just gotta thank Becca for this awesome party.”
So Lacey and I followed Ben downstairs, where he opened the door to Becca’s room and said, “Your party kicked so much ass! Even though you suck so much! It’s like instead of blood, your heart pumps liquid suck! But thanks for the beer!” Becca was alone, lying on top of her covers, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t even glance over at him. She just mumbled, “Oh, go to hell, shit-face. I hope your date gives you her crabs.”
Without a hint of irony in his voice, Ben answered, “Great talking to you!” and then closed the door. I don’t think he had the faintest idea he’d just been insulted.
And then we were upstairs again and getting ready to walk out the door. “Ben,” I said, “you’re going to have to leave the beer sword here.”
“Right,” he said, and then I grabbed the sword’s tip and tugged, but Ben refused to relinquish it. I was about to start screaming at his drunk ass when I realized he couldn’t let go of the sword.
Lacey laughed. “Ben, did you glue yourself to the beer sword?”
“No,” Ben answered. “I superglued. That way no one can steal it from me!”
“Good thinking,” Lacey deadpanned.
Lacey and I managed to break off all the beer cans except the one that was superglued directly to Ben’s hand. No matter how hard I pulled, Ben’s hand just limply followed along, like the beer was the string and his hand the puppet. Finally, Lacey just said, “We gotta go.” So we did. We strapped Ben into the backseat of the minivan. Lacey sat next to him, because “I should make sure he doesn’t puke or beat himself to death with his beer hand or whatever.”
But he was far enough gone for Lacey to feel comfortable talking about him. As I drove down the interstate, she said, “There’s something to be said for trying hard, you know? I mean, I know he tries too hard, but why is that such a bad thing? And he’s sweet, isn’t he?”
“I guess so,” I said. Ben’s head was lolling around, seemingly unconnected to a spine. He didn’t strike me as particularly sweet, but whatever.
I dropped Lacey off first on the other side of Jefferson Park. When she leaned over and pecked him on the mouth, he perked up enough to mumble, “Yes.” She walked up to the driver’s-side door on the way to her condo. “Thanks,” she said. I just nodded.
I drove across the subdivision. It wasn’t night and it wasn’t morning. Ben snored quietly in the back. I pulled up in front of his house, got out, opened the sliding door of the minivan, and unfastened his seat belt.
“Time to go home, Benners.”
He sniffed and shook his head, then awoke. He reached up to rub his eyes and seemed surprised to find an empty can of Milwaukee’s Best Light attached to his right hand. He tried to make a fist and dented the can some, but did not dislodge it. He looked at it for a minute, and then nodded. “The Beast is stuck to me,” he noted.
He climbed out of the minivan and staggered up the sidewalk to his house, and when he was standing on the front porch, he turned around, smiling. I waved at him. The beer waved back.
23.
I slept for a few hours and then spent the morning poring over the travel guides I’d discovered the day before. I waited until noon to call Ben and Radar. I called Ben first. “Good morning, Sunshine,” I said.
“Oh, God,” Ben said, his voice dripping abject misery. “Oh, sweet baby Jesus, come and comfort your little bro Ben. Oh, Lord. Shower me with your mercy.”
“There’ve been a lot of Margo developments,” I said excitedly, “so you need to come over. I’m gonna call Radar, too.”
Ben seemed not to have heard me. “Hey, when my mom came into my room at nine o’clock this morning, why is it that as I reached up to yawn, she and I both discovered a beer can was stuck to my hand?”
“You superglued a bunch of beers together to make a beer sword, and then you superglued your hand to it.”
“Oh, yeah. The beer sword. That rings a bell. ”
“Ben, come over.”
“Bro. I feel like shit.”
“Then I’ll come over to your house. How soon?”
“Bro, you can’t come over here. I have to sleep for ten thousand hours. I have to drink ten thousand gallons of water, and take ten thousand Advils. I’ll just see you tomorrow at school.”
I took a deep breath and tried not to sound pissed. “I drove across Central Florida in the middle of the night to be sober at the world’s drunkest party and drive your soggy ass home, and this is—” I would have kept talking, but I noticed that Ben had hung up. He hung up on me. Asshole.
As time passed, I only got more pissed. It’s one thing not to give a shit about Margo. But really, Ben didn’t give a shit about me, either. Maybe our friendship had always been about convenience— he didn’t have anyone cooler than me to play video games with. And now he didn’t have to be nice to me, or care about the things I cared about, because he had Jase Worthington. He had the school keg stand record. He had a hot prom date. He’d jumped at his first opportunity to join the fraternity of vapid asshats.
Five minutes after he hung up on me, I called his cell again. He didn’t answer, so I left a message. “You want to be cool like Chuck, Bloody Ben? That’s what you always wanted? Well, congratulations. You got it. And you deserve him, because you’re also a shitbag. Don’t call back.”
Then I called Radar. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he answered. “I just threw up in the shower. Can I call you back?”
“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound angry. I just wanted someone to help me sort through the world according to Margo. But Radar wasn’t Ben; he called back just a couple minutes later.
“It was so disgusting that I puked while cleaning it up, and then while cleaning that up, I puked again. It’s like a perpetual motion machine. If you just kept feeding me, I could have just kept puking forever.”
“Can you come over? Or can I come over to your house?”
“Yeah, of course. What’s up?”
“Margo was alive and in the minimall for at least one night after her disappearance.”
“I’ll come to you. Four minutes.”
Radar showed up at my window precisely four minutes later.
“You should know I’m having a huge fight with Ben,” I said as he climbed in.
“I’m too hungover to mediate,” Radar answered quietly. He lay down on the bed, his eyes half closed, and rubbed his buzzed hair. “It’s like I got hit by lightning.” He sniffed. “Okay, bring me up-to-date.” I sat down in the desk chair and told Radar about my evening in Margo’s vacation house, trying hard not to leave out any possibly helpful details. I knew Radar was better at puzzles than I, and I was hoping he’d piece together this one.
He waited to talk until I’d said, “And then Ben called me and I left for that party.”
“Do you have that book, the one with the turned-down corners?” he asked. I got up and fished for it under the bed, finally pulling it out. Radar held it above his head, squinting through his headache, and flipped through the pages.
“Write this down,” he said. “Omaha, Nebraska. Sac City, Iowa. Alexandria, Indiana. Darwin, Minnesota. Hollywood, California. Alliance, Nebraska. Okay. Those are the locations of all the things she—well, or whoever read this book—found interesting.” He got up, motioned me out of the chair, and then swiveled to the computer. Radar had an amazing talent for carrying on conversations while typing. “There’s a map mash-up that allows you to enter multiple destinations and it will spit out a variety of itineraries. Not that she’d know about this program. But still, I want to see.”
