Margo The Mystery Girl

Chapter 11

Monday morning, an extraordinary event occurred. I was late, which was normal; and then my mom dropped me off at school, which was normal; and then I stood outside talking with everyone for a while, which was normal; and then sunny and I headed inside, which was normal. But as soon as we swung open the steel door, Sunny's face became a mix of excitement and panic, like he’d just been picked out of a crowd by a magician for the get-sawn-in-half trick. I followed his gaze down the hall. Denim miniskirt. Tight white T-shirt. Scooped neck. Extraordinarily olive skin. Legs that make you care about legs. Perfectly coiffed curly brown hair. A laminated button reading ME FOR PROM QUEEN. Aisha. Walking toward us. By the band room.
“Aisha,” Sunny whispered, even though she was about three steps from us and could clearly hear him, and in fact flashed a faux-bashful smile upon hearing her name.
“Siddharth,” she said to me, and more than anything else, I found it impossible that she knew my name. She motioned with her head, and I followed her past the band room, over to a bank of lockers.

Sunny kept pace with me.

“Hi, Aisha,” I said once she stopped walking. I could smell her perfume, and I remembered the smell of it in her SUV, remembered the crunch of the chicken as Margo and I slammed her seat down.

“I hear you were with Margo.”

I just looked at her.

“That night, with the chicken? In my car?

I kept looking. I wasn’t sure what to say. A man can live a long and adventurous life without ever being spoken to by Aisha, and when that rare opportunity does arise, one does not wish to misspeak. So Sunny spoke for me. “Yeah, they hung out,” Sunny said, as if Margo and I were tight.

“Was she mad at me?” Aisha asked after a moment. She was looking down; I could see her brown eye shadow.

“What?”

She spoke quietly then, the tiniest crack in her voice, and all at once Aisha was not Aisha. She was just—like, a person. “Was she, you know, pissed at me about something?”

I thought about how to answer that for a while. “Uh, she was a little disappointed that you didn’t tell her about you dating Sarthak, but you know Margo. She’ll get over it.”
“Yeah, but it’s been like four days. That’s almost a record for her. And you know, this has really sucked, because Sarthak knew, and I was so pissed at him for not telling me that I broke up with him,
and now I’m out a farewell date, and my best friend is off wherever, in Gurgaon or whatever, thinking I

did something I would NEVER do.” I shot a look to Sunny. Sunny shot a look back to me.

“I have to run to class,” I said. “But why do you say she’s in Gurgaon?”

“I guess she told Preeti  like two days before she left that Madhya Pradesh was the only place in India where a person could actually live a halfway livable life. Maybe she was just saying it. I don’t know.”

“Okay, I gotta run,” I said.

I knew Sunny would never convince Aisha to go to farewell party with him, but I figured he at least deserved the opportunity. I jogged through the halls toward my locker, rubbing the Geek's head as I ran past him. He was talking to Anjali and a freshman girl in band. “Don’t thank me. Thank Sid,” I heard him say to
the freshman, and she called out, “Thank you for my two hundred bucks!” Without looking back I shouted, “Don’t thank me, thank Margo D Souza!” because of course she’d given me the
tools I needed.

I made it to my locker and grabbed my physics notebook, but then I just stayed, even after the second bell rang, standing still in the middle of the hallway while people rushed past me in both directions, like I was the median in their freeway. Another kid thanked me for his two hundred bucks. I smiled at him. The school felt more mine than in all my four years there. We’d gotten a measure of justice for the bikeless band geeks. Aisha had spoken to me. Sarthak  had apologized.
I knew these halls so well—and finally it was starting to feel like they knew me, too. I stood there

as the third bell rang and the crowds dwindled. Only then did I walk to physics class, sitting down just after Ms. Neetu  had started another interminable lecture.

After parking in my driveway, we walked across the strip of grass that separated Margo’s house from mine, just as we had Saturday. Shalu answered the door and said her parents wouldn’t be home
until six. 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 Sunny.

“Don’t curse in front of Shalu,” I said.

“Shalu, do you mind if I say hell?”

“We don’t believe in hell,” she said, by way of answering.

The Geek interrupted. “People,” he said. “People. The door.” The Geek 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, Shalu got bored and went downstairs to watch TV.

The Geek got at 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 Margo could have taken a line or two to tell us how to open the door.

Only when he responded did I realize the Geek was sitting at Margo’s computer. “According to The apparent,” 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  The Apparent  had told us what to do, doing it proved surprisingly easy. I got the pin off each of the three hinges and then Sunny pulled the door away. I examined the hinges, and the unfinished wood of the doorway. Nothing.

“Nothing on the door,” Sunny said. Sunny  and I placed the door back in place, and the Geek  pounded in the pins with the screwdriver’s handle.