“Hey,” she says to Lacey, smiling. She hugs Lacey first, then shakes Ben’s hand, then Radar’s. She raises her eyebrows and says, “Hi, Q,” and then hugs me, quickly and not hard. I want to hold on. I want an event. I want to feel her heaving sobs against my chest, tears running down her dusty cheeks onto my shirt. But she just hugs me quickly and sits down on the floor. I sit down across from her, with Ben and Radar and Lacey following in a line, so that we are all facing Margo.
“It’s good to see you,” I say after a while, feeling like I’m breaking a silent prayer.
She pushes her bangs to the side. She seems to be deciding exactly what to say before she says it. “I, uh. Uh. I’m rarely at a loss for words, huh? Not much talking to people lately. Um. I guess maybe we should start with, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Margo,” Lacey says. “Christ, we were so worried.”
“No need to worry,” Margo answers cheerfully. “I’m good.” She gives us two thumbs-up. “I am A-OK.”
“You could have called us and let us know that,” Ben says, his voice tinged with frustration. “Saved us a hell of a drive.”
“In my experience, Bloody Ben, when you leave a place, it’s best to leave. Why are you wearing a dress, by the way?”
Ben blushes. “Don’t call him that,” Lacey snaps.
Margo cuts a look at Lacey. “Oh, my God, are you hooking up with him?” Lacey says nothing. “You’re not actually hooking up with him,” Margo says.
“Actually, yes,” Lacey says. “And actually he’s great. And actually you’re a bitch. And actually, I’m leaving. It’s nice to see you again, Margo. Thanks for terrifying me and making me feel like shit for the entire last month of my senior year, and then being a bitch when we track you down to make sure you’re okay. It’s been a real pleasure knowing you.”
“You, too. I mean, without you, how would I have ever known how fat I was?” Lacey gets up and stomps off, her footfalls vibrating through the crumbling floor. Ben follows. I look over, and Radar has stood up, too.
“I never knew you until I got to know you through your clues,” he says. “I like the clues more than I like you.”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Margo asks me. Radar doesn’t answer. He just leaves.
I should, too, of course. They’re my friends—more than Margo, certainly. But I have questions. As Margo stands and starts to walk back toward her cubicle, I start with the obvious one. “Why are you acting like such a brat?”
She spins around and grabs a fistful of my shirt and shouts into my face, “Where do you get off showing up here without any kind of warning?!”
“How could I have warned you when you completely dropped off the face of the planet?!” I see a long blink and know she has no response for this, so I keep going. I’m so pissed at her. For . . . for, I don’t know. Not being the Margo I had expected her to be. Not being the Margo I thought I had finally imagined correctly. “I thought for sure there was a good reason why you never got in touch with anyone after that night. And . . . this is your good reason? So you can live like a bum?”
She lets go of my shirt and pushes away from me. “Now who’s being a brat? I left the only way you can leave. You pull your life off all at once—like a Band-Aid. And then you get to be you and Lace gets to be Lace and everybody gets to be everybody and I get to be me.”
“Except I didn’t get to be me, Margo, because I thought you were dead. For the longest time. So I had to do all kinds of crap that I would never do.”
She screams at me now, pulling herself up by my shirt so she can get in my face. “Oh, bullshit. You didn’t come here to make sure I was okay. You came here because you wanted to save poor little Margo from her troubled little self, so that I would be oh-so-thankful to my knight in shining armor that I would strip my clothes off and beg you to ravage my body.”
“Bullshit!” I shout, which it mostly is. “You were just playing with us, weren’t you? You just wanted to make sure that even after you left to go have your fun, you were still the axis we spun around.”
She’s screaming back, louder than I thought possible. “You’re not even pissed at me, Q! You’re pissed at this idea of me you keep inside your brain from when we were little!”
She tries to turn away from me, but I grab her shoulders and hold her in front of me and say, “Did you ever even think about what your leaving meant? About Ruthie? About me or Lacey or any of the other people who cared about you? No. Of course you didn’t. Because if it doesn’t happen to you, it doesn’t happen at all. Isn’t that it, Margo? Isn’t it?”
She doesn’t fight me now. She just slumps her shoulders, turns, and walks back to her office. She kicks down both of the Plexiglas walls, and they clamor against the desk and chair before sliding onto the ground. “SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU ASSHOLE.”
“Okay,” I say. Something about Margo completely losing her temper allows me to regain mine. I try to talk like my mom. “I’ll shut up. We’re both upset. Lots of, uh, unresolved issues on my side.”
She sits down in the desk chair, her feet on what had been the wall of her office. She’s looking into a corner of the barn. At least ten feet between us. “How the hell did you even find me?”
“I thought you wanted us to,” I answer. My voice is so small I’m surprised she even hears me, but she spins the chair to glare at me.
“I sure as shit did not.”
“‘Song of Myself,’” I say. “Guthrie took me to Whitman. Whitman took me to the door. The door took me to the mini-mall. We figured out how to read the painted-over graffiti. I didn’t understand ‘paper towns’; it can also mean subdivisions that never got built, and so I thought you had gone to one and were never coming back. I thought you were dead in one of these places, that you had killed yourself and wanted me to find you for whatever reason. So I went to a bunch of them, looking for you. But then I matched the map in the gift shop to the thumbtack holes. I started reading the poem more closely, figured out you weren’t running probably, just holed up, planning. Writing in that notebook. I found Agloe from the map, saw your comment on the talk page of Omnictionary, skipped graduation, and drove here.”
She brushes her hair down, but it isn’t long enough to fall over her face anymore. “I hate this haircut,” she says. “I wanted to look different, but—it looks ridiculous.”
“I like it,” I say. “It frames your face nicely.”
“I’m sorry I was being so bitchy,” she says. “You just have to understand—I mean, you guys walk in here out of nowhere and you scare the shit out of me—”
“You could have just said, like, ‘Guys, you are scaring the shit out of me,’” I said.
She scoffs. “Yeah, right, ’cause that’s the Margo Roth Spiegelman everybody knows and loves.” Margo is quiet for a moment, and then says, “I knew I shouldn’t have said that on Omnictionary. I just thought it would be funny for them to find it later. I thought the cops might trace it somehow, but not soon enough. There’s like a billion pages on Omnictionary or whatever. I never thought . . .”
“What?”
“I thought about you a lot, to answer your question. And Ruthie. And my parents. Of course, okay? Maybe I am the most horribly self-centered person in the history of the world. But God, do you think I would have done it if I didn’t need to?” She shakes her head. Now, finally, she leans toward me, elbows on knees, and we are talking. At a distance, but still. “I couldn’t figure out any other way that I could leave without getting dragged back.”
“I’m happy you’re not dead,” I say to her.
“Yeah. Me, too,” she says. She smirks, and it’s the first time I’ve seen that smile I have spent so much time missing. “That’s why I had to leave. As much as life can suck, it always beats the alternative.”
My phone rings. It’s Ben. I answer it.
“Lacey wants to talk to Margo,” he tells me.
I walk over to Margo, hand her the phone, and linger there as she sits with her shoulders hunched, listening. I can hear the noises coming through the phone, and then I hear Margo cut her off and say, “Listen, I’m really sorry. I was just so scared.” And then silence. Lacey starts talking again finally, and Margo laughs, and says something. I feel like they should have some privacy, so I do some exploring. Against the same wall as the office, but in the opposite corner of the barn, Margo has set up a kind of bed—four forklift pallets beneath an orange air mattress. Her small, neatly folded collection of clothes sits next to the bed on a pallet of its own. There’s a toothbrush and toothpaste, along with a large plastic cup from Subway. Those items sit atop two books: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I can’t believe she’s been living like this, this irreconcilable mix of tidy suburbanality and creepy decay. But then again, I can’t believe how much time I wasted believing she was living any other way.