I gathered my courage and stepped forward to take her hand. I didn’t want to leave Margo alone with the dead guy who might be an attack zombie, but I also didn’t care to stand around and chat about the circumstances of his demise. “What do you think happened to him?” she asked. She was close enough now to reach out and touch his foot. “I thought you closed your eyes when you died,” she said. I knew zombies weren’t real, but he sure looked like a potential zombie.Īs I took those two steps back, Margo took two equally small and quiet steps forward. I remember thinking that if I made any sudden movements, he might wake up and attack me. “He’s dead,” Margo said, as if I couldn’t tell. The mouth open in a way that mouths generally shouldn’t be. He was encircled by blood a half-dried fountain of it poured out of his mouth. But now, a guy wearing a gray suit, slumped against the trunk of the oak tree. There was a live oak a few feet ahead of us. I’d been in this park so many times before that it was mapped in my mind, so we were only a few steps inside when I began to sense that the world was out of order, even though I couldn’t immediately figure out what was different. (I still think this would be a fine idea, but it turns out that building a cannon that can shoot boulders into a low orbit is fairly complicated. The Ringolator was a gigantic cannon that would shoot big, colored rocks into a very low orbit, giving Earth the same sort of rings that Saturn has. The sky was clear, but the air tasted acidic, like it might storm later.Īt the time, I fancied myself an inventor, and after we locked up our bikes and began the short walk across the park to the playground, I told Margo about an idea I had for an invention called the Ringolator. Margo, as always, biked standing up, her arms locked as she leaned above the handlebars, her purple sneakers a circuitous blur. It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at the time. On the morning in question, she wore white shorts and a pink T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing a fire of orange glitter. I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Margo was about to show up, on account of how she was the most fantastically gorgeous creature that God had ever created. Our parents were friends, so we would sometimes play together, biking past the cul-de-sacced streets to Jefferson Park itself, the hub of our subdivision’s wheel. When he became rich and powerful, he went to court, made “Jefferson” his middle name, and then changed his first name to “Dr. He was just an orange juice salesman named Jefferson Jefferson. Jefferson Jefferson is that he was not a doctor of any kind. Jefferson Jefferson has a school named after him in Orlando and also a large charitable foundation, but the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing about Dr. Margo and I were two.īefore Jefferson Park was a Pleasantville, and before it was a navy base, it belonged to an actual Jefferson, this guy Dr. My parents and Margo’s parents ended up moving next door to one another just after the first houses were built. But then the navy didn’t need it anymore, so it returned the land to the citizens of Orlando, Florida, who decided to build a massive subdivision, because that’s what Florida does with land. Our subdivision, Jefferson Park, used to be a navy base. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.
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