The Strings 3 страница

“Why the hell would you do that? ” Margo asked as I turned on the lights and, driving forward now, began to navigate the suburban labyrinth back toward the interstate.

“I felt bad for him. ”

“For him? Why? Because he’s been cheating on me for six weeks? Because he’s probably given me god-only-knows-what disease? Because he’s a disgusting idiot who will probably be rich and happy his whole life, thus proving the absolute unfairness of the cosmos? ”

“He just looked sort of desperate, ” I said.

“Whatever. We’re going to Karin’s house. It’s on Pennsylvania, by the ABC Liquors. ”

“Don’t be pissed at me, ” I said. “I just had a guy point a freaking shotgun at me for helping you, so don’t be pissed at me. ”

“I’M NOT PISSED AT YOU! ” Margo shouted, and then punched the dashboard.

“Well, you’re screaming. ”

“I thought maybe — whatever. I thought maybe he wasn’t cheating. ”

“Oh. ”

“Karin told me at school. And I guess a lot of people have known for a long time. And no one told me until Karin. I thought maybe she was just trying to stir up drama or something. ”

“I’m sorry, ” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah. I can’t believe I even care. ”

“My heart is really pounding, ” I said.

“That’s how you know you’re having fun, ” Margo said.

But it didn’t feel like fun; it felt like a heart attack. I pulled over into a 7-Eleven parking lot and held my finger to my jugular vein while watching the: in the digital clock blink every second. When I turned to Margo, she was rolling her eyes at me. “My pulse is dangerously high, ” I explained.

“I don’t even remember the last time I got excited about something like that. The adrenaline in the throat and the lungs expanding. ”

“In through the nose out through the mouth, ” I answered her.

“All your little anxieties. It’s just so. . ”

“Cute? ”

“Is that what they’re calling childish these days? ” She smiled.

Margo crawled into the backseat and came back with a purse. How much shit did she put back there? I thought. She opened up the purse and pulled out a full bottle of nail polish so darkly red it was almost black. “While you calm down, I’m going to paint my nails, ” she said, smiling up at me through her bangs. “You just take your time. ”

And so we sat there, she with her nail polish balanced on the dash, and me with a shaky finger on the pulse of myself. It was a good color of nail polish, and Margo had nice fingers, thinner and bonier than the rest of her, which was all curves and soft edges. She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own. I remembered them against my hip bone in Wal-Mart, which felt like days ago. My heartbeat slowed. And I tried to tell myself: Margo’s right. There’s nothing out here to be afraid of, not in this little city on this quiet night.

“Part Six, ” Margo said once we were driving again. She was waving her fingernails through the air, almost like she was playing piano. “Leave flowers on Karin’s doorstep with apologetic note. ”

“What’d you do to her? ”

“Well, when she told me about Jase, I sort of shot the messenger. ”

“How so? ” I asked. We were pulled up to a stoplight, and some kids in a sports car next to us were revving their engine — as if I was going to race the Chrysler. When you floored it, it whimpered.

“Well, I don’t remember exactly what I called her, but it was something along the lines of ‘sniveling, repulsive, idiotic, backne-ridden, snaggletoothed, fat-assed bitch with the worst hair in Central Florida — and that’s saying something. ’”

“Her hair is ridiculous, ” I said.

I know. That was the only thing I said about her that was “true. When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can’t really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes. ”

As I drove up to Karin’s house, Margo disappeared into the way-back and returned with the bouquet of tulips. Taped to one of the flowers’ stems was a note Margo’d folded to look like an envelope. She handed me the bouquet once I stopped, and I sprinted down a sidewalk, placed the flowers on Karin’s doorstep, and sprinted back.

“Part Seven, ” she said as soon as I was back in the minivan. “Leave a fish for the lovely Mr. Worthington. ”

“I suspect he won’t be home yet, ” I said, just the slightest hint of pity in my voice.

“I hope the cops find him barefoot, frenzied, and naked in some roadside ditch a week from now, ” Margo answered dispassionately.

“Remind me never to cross Margo Roth Spiegelman, ” I mumbled, and Margo laughed.

“Seriously, ” she said. “We bring the fucking rain down on our enemies. ”

“Your enemies, ” I corrected.

“We’ll see, ” she answered quickly, and then perked up and said, “Oh, hey, I’ll handle this one. The thing about Jason’s house is they have this crazy good security system. And we can’t have another panic attack. ”

“Um, ” I said.

Jason lived just down the road from Karin, in this uber-rich subdivision called Casavilla. All the houses in Casavilla are Spanish-style with the red-tile roofs and everything, only they weren’t built by the Spanish. They were built by Jason’s dad, who is one of the richest land developers in Florida. “Big, ugly homes for big, ugly people, ” I told Margo as we pulled into Casavilla.

“No shit. If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me. ”

We pulled up in front of Jase’s house, an architectural monstrosity that looked generally like an oversize Spanish hacienda except for three thick Doric columns going up to the roof. Margo grabbed the second catfish from the backseat, uncapped a pen with her teeth, and scrawled in handwriting that didn’t look much like hers:

MS’s love For you: it Sleeps With the Fishes “Listen, keep the car on, ” she said. She put Jase’s WPHS baseball hat on backward.

“Okay, ” I said.

“Keep it in drive, ” she said.

“Okay, ” I said, and felt my pulse rising. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Catfish and spray paint in hand, Margo threw the door open, jogged across the Worthingtons’ expansive front lawn, and then hid behind an oak tree. She waved at me through the darkness, and I waved back, and then she took a dramatically deep breath, puffed her cheeks out, turned, and ran.

She’d only taken one stride when the house lit up like a municipal Christmas tree, and a siren started blaring. I briefly contemplated abandoning Margo to her fate, but just kept breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth as she ran toward the house. She heaved the fish through a window, but the sirens were so loud I could barely even hear the glass breaking. And then, just because she’s Margo Roth Spiegelman, she took a moment to carefully spray-paint a lovely M on the part of the window that wasn’t shattered. Then she was running all out toward the car, and I had a foot on the accelerator and a foot on the brake, and the Chrysler felt at that moment like a Thoroughbred racehorse. Margo ran so fast her hat blew off behind her, and then she jumped into the car, and we were gone before she even got the door closed.

I stopped at the stop sign at the end of the street, and Margo said, “What the hell? Go go go go go, ” and I said, “Oh, right, ” because I had forgotten that I was throwing caution to the wind and everything. I rolled through the three other stop signs in Casavilla, and we were a mile down Pennsylvania Avenue before we saw a cop car roar past us with its lights on.

“That was pretty hardcore, ” Margo said. “I mean, even for me. To put it Q-style, my pulse is a little elevated. ”

“Jesus, ” I said. “I mean, you couldn’t have just left it in his car? Or at least at the doorstep? ”

“We bring the fucking rain, Q. Not the scattered showers. ”

“Tell me Part Eight is less terrifying. ”

“Don’t worry. Part Eight is child’s play. We’re going back to Jefferson Park. Lacey’s house. You know where she lives, right? ” I did, although God knows Lacey Pemberton would never deign to have me over. She lived on the opposite side of Jefferson Park, a mile away from me, in a nice condo on top of a stationery store— the same block the dead guy had lived on, actually. I’d been to the building before, because friends of my parents lived on the third floor. There were two locked doors before you even got to the condos. I figured even Margo Roth Spiegelman couldn’t break into that place.

“So has Lacey been naughty or nice? ” I asked.

“Lacey has been distinctly naughty, ” Margo answered. She was looking out the passenger window again, talking away from me, so I could barely hear her. “I mean, we have been friends since kindergarten. ”

“And? ”

“And she didn’t tell me about Jase. But not just that. When I look back on it, she’s just a terrible friend. I mean, for instance, do you think I’m fat? ”

“Jesus, no, ” I said. “You’re—” And I stopped myself from saying not skinny, but that’s the whole point of you; the point of you is that you don’t look like a boy. “You should not lose any weight. ”

She laughed, waved her hand at me, and said, “You just love my big ass. ” I turned from the road for a second and glanced over, and I shouldn’t have, because she could read my face and my face said: Well, first off I wouldn’t say it’s big exactly and second off, it is kind of spectacular. But it was more than that. You can’t divorce Margo the person from Margo the body. You can’t see one without seeing the other. You looked at Margo’s eyes and you saw both their blueness and their Margo-ness. In the end, you could not say that Margo Roth Spiegelman was fat, or that she was skinny, any more than you can say that the Eiffel Tower is or is not lonely. Margo’s beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection — uncracked and uncrackable.

“But she would always make these little comments, ” Margo continued. “‘I’d loan you these shorts but I don’t think they’d fit right on you. ’ Or, ‘You’re so spunky. I love how you just make guys fall in love with your personality. ’ Constantly undermining me. I don’t think she ever said anything that wasn’t an attempt at undermination. ”

“Undermining. ”

“Thank you, Annoying McMasterGrammician. ”

“Grammarian, ” I said.

“Oh my God I’m going to kill you! ” But she was laughing.

I drove around the perimeter of Jefferson Park so we could avoid driving past our houses, just in case our parents had woken up and discovered us missing. We drove in along the lake (Lake Jefferson), and then turned onto Jefferson Court and drove into Jefferson Park’s little faux downtown, which felt eerily deserted and quiet. We found Lacey’s black SUV parked in front of the sushi restaurant. We stopped a block away in the first parking spot we could find not beneath a streetlight.

“Would you please hand me the last fish? ” Margo asked me. I was glad to get rid of the fish because it was already starting to smell. And then Margo wrote on the paper wrapper in her lettering: your Friendship with ms Sleeps with The fishes We wove our way around the circular glow of the streetlights, walking as casually as two people can when one of them (Margo) is holding a sizable fish wrapped in paper and the other one (me) is holding a can of blue spray paint. A dog barked, and we both froze, but then it was quiet again, and soon we were at Lacey’s car.

“Well, that makes it harder, ” Margo said, seeing it was locked. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a length of wire that had once been a coat hanger. It took her less than a minute to jimmy the lock open. I was duly awed.

Once she had the driver’s-side door open, she reached over and opened my side. “Hey, help me get the seat up, ” she whispered. Together we pulled the backseat up. Margo slipped the fish underneath it, and then she counted to three, and in one motion we slammed the seat down on the fish. I heard the disgusting sound of catfish guts exploding. I let myself imagine the way Lacey’s SUV would smell after just one day of roasting in the sun, and I’ll admit that a kind of serenity washed over me. And then Margo said, “Put an M on the roof for me. ”

I didn’t even have to think about it for a full second before I nodded, scrambled up onto the back bumper, and then leaned over, quickly spraying a gigantic M all across the roof. Generally, I am opposed to vandalism. But I am also generally opposed to Lacey Pemberton — and in the end, that proved to be the more deeply held conviction. I jumped off the car. I ran through the darkness — my breath coming fast and short — for the block back to the minivan. As I put my hand on the steering wheel, I noticed my pointer finger was blue. I held it up for Margo to see. She smiled, and held out her own blue finger, and then they touched, and her blue finger was pushing against mine softly and my pulse failed to slow. And then after a long time, she said, “Part Nine— downtown. ”

It was 2: 49 in the morning. I had never, in my entire life, felt less tired.

Tourists never go to downtown Orlando, because there’s nothing there but a few skyscrapers owned by banks and insurance companies. It’s the kind of downtown that becomes absolutely deserted at night and on the weekends, except for a few nightclubs half-filled with the desperate and the desperately lame. As I followed Margo’s directions through the maze of one-way streets, we saw a few people sleeping on the sidewalk or sitting on benches, but nobody was moving. Margo rolled down the window, and I felt the thick air blow across my face, warmer than night ought to be. I glanced over and saw strands of hair blowing all around her face. Even though I could see her there, I felt entirely alone among these big and empty buildings, like I’d survived the apocalypse and the world had been given to me, this whole and amazing and endless world, mine for the exploring.

“You just giving me the tour? ” I asked.

“No, ” she said. “I’m trying to get to the SunTrust Building. It’s right next to the Asparagus. ”

“Oh, ” I said, because for once on this night I had useful information. “That’s on South. ” I drove down a few blocks and then turned. Margo pointed happily, and yes, there, before us, was the Asparagus.

The Asparagus is not, technically, an asparagus spear, nor is it derived from asparagus parts. It is just a sculpture that bears an uncanny resemblance to a thirty-foot-tall piece of asparagus— although I’ve also heard it likened to:

1. A green-glass beanstalk

2. An abstract representation of a tree

3. A greener, glassier, uglier Washington Monument

4. The Jolly Green Giant’s gigantic jolly green phallus

At any rate, it certainly does not look like a Tower of Light, which is the actual name of the sculpture. I pulled in front of a parking meter and looked over at Margo. I caught her staring into the middle distance just for a moment, her eyes blank, looking not at the Asparagus, but past it. It was the first time I thought something might be wrong — not my-boyfriend-is-an-ass wrong, but really wrong. And I should have said something. Of course. I should have said thing after thing after thing after thing. But I only said, “May I ask why you have taken me to the Asparagus? ”

She turned her head to me and shot me a smile. Margo was so beautiful that even her fake smiles were convincing. “We gotta check on our progress. And the best place to do that is from the top of the SunTrust Building. ”

I rolled my eyes. “Nope. No. No way. You said no breaking and entering. ”

“This isn’t breaking and entering. It’s just entering, because there’s an unlocked door. ”

“Margo, that’s ridiculous. Of c—”

“I will acknowledge that over the course of the evening there has been both breaking and entering. There was entering at Becca’s house. There was breaking at Jase’s house. And there will be entering here. But there has never been simultaneous breaking and entering. Theoretically, the cops could charge us with breaking, and they could charge us with entering, but they could not charge us with breaking and entering. So I’ve kept my promise. ”

“Surely the SunTrust Building has, like, a security guard or whatever, ” I said.

“They do, ” she said, unbuckling her seat belt. “Of course they do. His name is Gus. ”

We walked in through the front door. Sitting behind a broad, semicircular desk sat a young guy with a struggling goatee wearing a Regents Security uniform. “What’s up, Margo? ” he said.

“Hey, Gus, ” she answered.

“Who’s the kid? ”

WE ARE THE SAME AGE! I wanted to shout, but I let Margo talk for me. “This is my colleague, Q. Q, this is Gus. ”

“What’s up, Q? ” asked Gus.

Oh, we’re just scattering some dead fish about town, breaking some windows, photographing naked guys, hanging out in skyscraper lobbies at three-fifteen in the morning, that kind of thing. “Not much, ” I answered.

“Elevators are down for the night, ” Gus said. “Had to shut ’em off at three. You’re welcome to take the stairs, though. ”

“Cool. See ya, Gus. ”

“See ya, Margo. ”

“How the hell do you know the security guard at the SunTrust Building? ” I asked once we were safely in the stairwell.

“He was a senior when we were freshmen, ” she answered. “We gotta hustle, okay? Time’s a-wastin’. ” Margo started taking the stairs two at a time, flying up, one arm on the rail, and I tried to keep pace with her, but couldn’t. Margo didn’t play any sports, but she liked to run — I sometimes saw her running by herself listening to music in Jefferson Park. I, however, did not like to run. Or, for that matter, engage in any kind of physical exertion. But now I tried to keep up a steady pace, wiping the sweat off my forehead and ignoring the burning in my legs. When I got to the twenty-fifth floor, Margo was standing on the landing, waiting for me.

“Check it out, ” she said. She opened the stairwell door and we were inside a huge room with an oak table as long as two cars, and a long bank of floor-to-ceiling windows. “Conference room, ” she said. “It’s got the best view in the whole building. ” I followed her as she walked along the windows. “Okay, so there, ” she said pointing, “is Jefferson Park. See our houses? Lights still off, so that’s good. ” She moved over a few panes. “Jase’s house. Lights off, no more cop cars. Excellent, although it might mean he’s made it home, which is unfortunate. ” Becca’s house was too far away to see, even from up here.

She was quiet for a moment, and then she walked right up to the glass and leaned her forehead against it. I hung back, but then she grabbed my T-shirt and pulled me forward. I didn’t want our collective weight against a single pane of glass, but she kept pulling me forward, and I could feel her balled fist in my side, and finally I put my head against the glass as gently as possible and looked around.

From above, Orlando was pretty well lit. Beneath us I could see the flashing DON’T WALK signs at intersections, and the streetlights running up and down the city in a perfect grid until downtown ended and the winding streets and cul-de-sacs of Orlando’s infinite suburb started.

“It’s beautiful, ” I said.

Margo scoffed. “Really? You seriously think so? ”

“I mean, well, maybe not, ” I said, although it was. When I saw Orlando from an airplane, it looked like a LEGO set sunk into an ocean of green. Here, at night, it looked like a real place — but for the first time a place I could see. As I walked around the conference room, and then through the other offices on the floor, I could see it all: there was school. There was Jefferson Park. There, in the distance, Disney World. There was Wet ’n Wild. There, the 7-Eleven where Margo painted her nails and I fought for breath. It was all here — my whole world, and I could see it just by walking around a building. “It’s more impressive, ” I said out loud. “From a distance, I mean. You can’t see the wear on things, you know? You can’t see the rust or the weeds or the paint cracking. You see the place as someone once imagined it. ”

“Everything’s uglier close up, ” she said.

“Not you, ” I answered before thinking better of it.

Her forehead still against the glass, she turned to me and smiled. “Here’s a tip: you’re cute when you’re confident. And less when you’re not. ” Before I had a chance to say anything, her eyes went back to the view and she started talking. “Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters. ”

“I’ll try not to take that personally, ” I said. We were both staring into the inky distance, the cul-de-sacs and quarter-acre lots. But her shoulder was against my arm, and the backs of our hands were touching, and although I was not looking at Margo, pressing myself against the glass felt almost like pressing myself against her.

“Sorry, ” she said. “Maybe things would have been different for me if I’d been hanging out with you the whole time instead of — ugh. Just, God. I just hate myself so much for even caring about my, quote, friends. I mean, just so you know, it’s not that I am oh-so-upset about Jason. Or Becca. Or even Lacey, although I actually liked her. But it was the last string. It was a lame string, for sure, but it was the one I had left, and every paper girl needs at least one string, right? ”

And here is what I said. I said, “You would be welcome at our lunch table tomorrow. ”

“That’s sweet, ” she answered, her voice trailing off. She turned to me and nodded softly. I smiled. She smiled. I believed the smile. We walked to the stairs and then ran down them. At the bottom of each flight, I jumped off the bottom step and clicked my heels to make her laugh, and she laughed. I thought I was cheering her up. I thought she was cheerable. I thought maybe if I could be confident, something might happen between us.

I was wrong.

Sitting in the minivan with the keys in the ignition but the engine not yet started, she asked, “What time do your parents get up, by the way? ”

“I don’t know, like, six-fifteen? ” It was 3: 51. “I mean, we have two-plus hours and we’re through with nine parts. ”

“I know, but I saved the most laborious one for last. Anyway, we’ll get it all done. Part Ten — Q’s turn to pick a victim. ”

“What? ”

“I already picked a punishment. Now you just pick who we’re going to rain our mighty wrath down on. ”

“Upon whom we are going to rain our mighty wrath, ” I corrected her, and she shook her head in disgust. “And I don’t really have anyone upon whom I want to rain down my wrath, ” I said, because in truth I didn’t. I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies. Example: Historically, Germany has had more enemies than Luxembourg. Margo Roth Spiegelman was Germany. And Great Britain. And the United States. And czarist Russia. Me, I’m Luxembourg. Just sitting around, tending sheep, and yodeling.

“What about Chuck? ” she asked.

“Hmm, ” I said. Chuck Parson was pretty horrible in all those years before he’d been reined in. Aside from the cafeteria conveyor belt debacle, he once grabbed me outside school while I waited for the bus and twisted my arm and kept saying, “Call yourself a faggot. ” That was his all-purpose, I-have-a-vocabulary-of-twelve-words-so-don’t-expect-a-wide-variety-of-insults insult. And even though it was ridiculously childish, in the end I had to call myself a faggot, which really annoyed me, because 1. I don’t think that word should ever be used by anyone, let alone me, and 2. As it happens, I am not gay, and furthermore, 3. Chuck Parson made it out like calling yourself a faggot was the ultimate humiliation, even though there’s nothing at all embarrassing about being gay, which I was trying to say while he twisted my arm farther and farther toward my shoulder blade, but he just kept saying, “If you’re so proud of being a faggot, why don’t you admit that you’re a faggot, faggot? ”

Clearly, Chuck Parson was no Aristotle when it came to logic. But he was six three, and 270 pounds, which counts for something.

“You could make a case for Chuck, ” I acknowledged. And then I turned on the car and started to make my way back toward the interstate. I didn’t know where we were going, but we sure as hell weren’t staying downtown.

“Remember at the Crown School of Dance? ” she asked. “I was just thinking about that tonight. ”

“Ugh. Yeah. ”

“I’m sorry about that, by the way. I have no idea why I went along with him. ”

“Yeah. It’s all good, ” I said, but remembering the godforsaken Crown School of Dance pissed me off, and I said, “Yeah. Chuck Parson. You know where he lives? ”

“I knew I could bring out your vengeful side. He’s in College Park. Get off at Princeton. ” I turned onto the interstate entrance ramp and floored it. “Whoa there, ” Margo said. “Don’t break the Chrysler. ”

In sixth grade, a bunch of kids including Margo and Chuck and me were forced by our parents to take ballroom dancing lessons at the Crown School of Humiliation, Degradation, and Dance. And how it worked was the boys would stand on one side and the girls would stand on the other and then when the teacher told us to, the boys would walk over to the girls and the boy would say, “May I have this dance? ” and the girl would say, “You may. ” Girls were not allowed to say no. But then one day — we were doing the fox-trot — Chuck Parson convinced every single girl to say no to me. Not anyone else. Just me. So I walked across to Mary Beth Shortz and I said, “May I have this dance? ” and she said no. And then I asked another girl, and then another, and then Margo, who also said no, and then another, and then I started to cry.

The only thing worse than getting rejected at dance school is crying about getting rejected at dance school, and the only thing worse than that is going to the dance teacher and saying through your tears, “The girls are saying no to me and they’re not supposedtuh. ” So of course I went weeping to the teacher, and I spent the majority of middle school trying to live down that one embarrassing event. So, long story short, Chuck Parson kept me from ever dancing the fox-trot, which doesn’t seem like a particularly horrible thing to do to a sixth-grader. And I wasn’t really pissed about it anymore, or about everything else he’d done to me over the years. But I certainly wasn’t going to lament his suffering.

“Wait, he won’t know it’s me, will he? ”

“Nope. Why? ”

“I don’t want him to think I give enough of a shit about him to hurt him. ” I put a hand down on the center console and Margo patted it. “Don’t worry, ” she said. “He’ll never know what depilatated him. ”

“I think you just misused a word, but I don’t know what it means. ”

“I know a word you don’t know, ” Margo chanted. “I’M THE NEW QUEEN OF VOCABULARY! I’VE USURPED YOU! ”

“Spell usurped, ” I told her.

“No, ” she answered, laughing. “I’m not giving up my crown over usurped. You’ll have to do better. ”

“Fine. ” I smiled.

We drove through College Park, a neighborhood that passes for Orlando’s historic district on account of how the houses were mostly built thirty whole years ago. Margo couldn’t remember Chuck’s exact address, or what his house looked like, or even for sure what street it was on (“I’m almost like ninety-five percent positive it’s on Vassar. ”). Finally, after the Chrysler had prowled three blocks of Vassar Street, Margo pointed to her left and said, “That one. ”

“Are you sure? ” I asked.

“I’m like ninety-seven-point-two percent sure. I mean, I’m pretty sure his bedroom is right there, ” she said, pointing. “One time he had a party, and when the cops came I shimmied out his window. I’m pretty sure it’s the same window. ”

“This seems like we could get in trouble. ”

“But if the window is open, there’s no breaking involved. Only entering. And we just did entering at the SunTrust, and it wasn’t that big of a deal, right? ”

I laughed. “It’s like you’re turning me into a badass. ”

“That’s the idea. Okay, supplies: get the Veet, the spray paint, and the Vaseline. ”

“Okay. ” I grabbed them.

“Now don’t freak out on me, Q. The good news is that Chuck sleeps like a hibernating bear — I know because I had English with him last year and he wouldn’t wake up even when Ms. Johnston swatted him with Jane Eyre. So we’re going to go up to his bedroom window, we’re gonna open it, we’re gonna take off our shoes, and then very quietly go inside, and I’m going to screw with Chuck. Then you and I are going to fan out to opposite sides of the house, and we’re going to cover every door handle in Vaseline, so even if someone wakes up, they’ll have a hella hard time getting out of the house in time to catch us. Then we’ll screw with Chuck some more, paint his house a little, and we’re out of there. And no talking. ”

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