Margo The Mystery Girl

Chapter 10

We didn’t have a view of the front door or the garage from my bedroom: for that, we needed to sit in the family room. So while Sunny  continued playing Resurrection, The Geek and I went out to the family room and pretended to watch TV while keeping watch on the D'Souzas’ front door through a picture window, waiting for Margo’s mom and dad to leave. Inspector black Crown Victoria
was still in the driveway.

He left after about fifteen minutes, but neither the garage door nor the front door opened again for an hour. Radar and I were watching some half-funny stoner comedy on HBO, and I had started to get into the story when The Geek said, “Garage door.” I jumped off the couch and got close to the window so that I
could see clearly who was in the car. Both Mr. and Mrs. D'Souza. Shalu was still at home. “Sunny!”

I shouted. He was out in a flash, and as the D'Souza turned off Palam Vihar park.
We raced outside into the muggy morning.

We walked through the D'Souzas’ lawn to their front door. I rang the doorbell and heard Rocky's paws scurrying on the hardwood floors, and then she was barking like crazy, staring at us through the sidelight glass. Shalu opened the door. She was a sweet girl, maybe eleven.
“Hey, Shalu.”
“Hi, Siddharth,” she said.
“Hey, are your parents here?”
“They just left,” she said, “to go to Target.” She had Margo’s big eyes, but hers were hazel. She looked up at me, her lips pursed with worry. “Did you meet the policeman?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He seemed nice.”
“Mom says that it’s like if Margo went to college early.”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking that the easiest way to solve a mystery is to decide that there is no mystery to solve. But it seemed clear to me now that she had left the clues to a mystery behind.
“Listen, Shalu, we need to look in Margo’s room,” I said. “But the thing is—it’s like when Margo would ask you to do top-secret stuff. We’re in the same situation here.”
“Margo doesn’t like people in her room,” Shalu said. “’Cept me. And sometimes Mommy.”
“But we’re her friends.”
“She doesn’t like her friends in her room,” Shalu said.
I leaned down toward her. “Shalu, please.”
“And you don’t want me to tell Mommy and Dad,” she said.
“Correct.”
“Hundred rupees,” she said. I was about to bargain with her, but then the Geek produced a hundred note and handed it to her. “If I see the car in the driveway, I’ll let you know,” she said conspiratorially. I knelt down to give the aging-but-always-enthusiastic the Rocky a good petting, and then we raced upstairs to Margo’s room. As I put my hand on the doorknob, it occurred to me that I had not seen Margo’s entire room since I was about ten years old.

I walked in. Much neater than you’d expect Margo to be, but maybe her mom had just picked everything up. To my right, a closet packed-to-bursting with clothes. On the back of the door, a shoe rack with a couple dozen pairs of shoes, from Mary Janes to prom heels. It didn’t seem like much could be missing from that closet.
“All her schoolbooks are still here,” I heard Sunny  say. “Plus some other books by her bedside table. No journal.”

But I was distracted by Margo’s book collection. She liked everything. I could never have imagined her reading to all these genres. I’d seen her reading while driving, but I’d
never suspected this kind of obsession. I’d never heard of most of the authors.
I kept going through the A’s and then the B’s—making my way through Chetan Bhagat and Dan Brown and I started to rifle through them more quickly, so quickly that I didn’t even see the back cover of her journal , in bold letters it was scribbled PAPER TOWNS.  I had my hopes  maybe Margo needed to see my confidence. Maybe this time she wanted to be found, and to be found by me. Maybe —just as she had chosen me on the longest night, she had chosen me again.
Sunny and the Geek  left soon after we got back to my house, after they’d each looked through the journal  and not found any obvious clues. I grabbed some cold Amul cool from the fridge for supplement and went to my room.  I read a little from the introduction  about her childhood and then paged through the journal. There were several quotes highlighted in blue, all  and there were two lines from highlighted in green:

                                 Fairy dust in your eyes
                                  I could see no more.

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 :

                              They say the soul never dies
                             What did yours leave me for
                              My darling you have kept me alive
                               you soothed the rocky roads before me
                             I'm shattered as I m dead inside
                              Burnt into thin air, this was our destiny.
                             

          Until we meet again, one day our worlds will collide
             Till then you always own a piece of my heart just
                        Tell him not to further break it apart.

  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.