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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.

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    “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 spec-tacular. 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.” 54/307
    “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 55/307
    it, and then she counted to three, and in one motion we slammed the seat down on the fish. I heard