Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body

Set in 1990s Virginia, the novel follows Margaret Worms across multiple time periods and narrative forms, blending girl-detective pastiche, present-tense realism, second-person treatment-center sections, and a final reflective letter to trace one person's path through adolescence, eating disorder, and the discovery of a transgender identity.

The story opens with Margaret at sixteen, a junior at Hillside High School in South Chesterfield. Her days follow a monotonous cycle of school, debate, field hockey, and weekend shifts at the mall. Two years earlier, the detective club she co-founded with her best friends Angie Stern and Jina Castle, Girls Can Solve Anything (GCSA), disbanded under circumstances Margaret still does not fully understand. She blames herself and has reinstated a private Tuesday ritual of sitting in her car, listening to Fiona Apple's Tidal, and revisiting old cases. She reflects on Gretchen McGann, a fourth GCSA member whose talent for shifting roles made Gretchen both valuable and suspect. Margaret decides to pursue her crush Stephen Colson through instant messaging after losing two more pounds, then resolves to end club time permanently and whispers "Goodbye" (12). At home, her brother Brian is volatile with grief over the recent death of his friend in a drunk driving accident.

The narrative shifts into a pastiche of a girl-detective series novel set when Margaret is twelve. GCSA began as a failed babysitting club before the girls stumbled into a genuine mystery and pivoted to detective work. The central case involves Mrs. Stillwater, Margaret's science teacher, who has stolen rare butterflies from the botanical gardens to conduct bioengineering experiments combining human and butterfly DNA. The investigation brings Gretchen into the club after she performs a pageant routine playing a detective replaced by a femme fatale. When the girls confront Mrs. Stillwater, Gretchen advocates compassion over punishment. Margaret agrees, swayed less by the argument than by her desire for Gretchen to like her, and notices unsettling flutterings around Gretchen that she does not yet understand.

Back in the present-tense frame, fragmented vignettes show Margaret's deteriorating state. Her friendship with her coworker Eisha has grown strained: Margaret shares excited updates about Stephen while Eisha is dealing with an abusive mother. Her friend Davina Gupta gently tells Margaret she has been self-involved. Margaret recalls collapsing in the locker room after hearing teammates say that if they were fat, they would kill themselves. She connects with Stephen at a party, but when he kisses her at a restaurant, her stomach lurches from laxatives and she flees.

A second detective pastiche presents the case that destroys GCSA when the girls are thirteen. Gretchen asks Margaret to the school dance; Margaret freezes, unable to tell whether the invitation is romantic or friendly. She recalls a childhood friendship with Lavender Bean that ended after a teacher read aloud an effusive letter Margaret had written about everything she loved about Lavender. Margaret internalized the lesson that expressing deep feeling toward female friends was suspect. Unable to respond to Gretchen, she sneaks into Gretchen's bedroom and reads her diary, discovering a secret boyfriend and evidence linking Gretchen to the night a local girl, Melanie Flowers, disappeared. Margaret publicly confronts Gretchen; Jina and Angie side with Gretchen. Melanie's body is later found, and a man is arrested for her murder. At the final GCSA meeting, only Margaret and Angie remain. Angie says she wants to focus on school. The club dissolves.

The present-tense narrative resumes after Margaret faints in church and is examined by her family doctor, who tells her mother the solution is simple: She needs to eat more. Margaret had hoped the doctor would find her sick enough for a treatment facility, but he prescribes iron pills instead. She feels she is "not bad enough. Yet" (101). Driving home, she sees what she believes is Gretchen in the car behind her, realizes it is her own reflection, and crashes into a tree.

The narrative voice shifts to the second person as Margaret enters Briarwood Residential Treatment Center after being hospitalized with a cracked rib and stitches. She found the center online; her diagnosis is eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS). Briarwood operates on a level system of earned privileges with supervised meals and therapy. Her roommate Carrie, thin and charismatic on her third treatment stay, tells Margaret the system is a game and offers her hidden laxatives. The two form an intense bond, scheming to manipulate weigh-ins with stones from the decorative pond. In a utility closet, Carrie kisses Margaret; the kiss tastes "hungry" (132). Margaret, overwhelmed, jerks away. When Carrie later initiates physical closeness, Margaret recoils, and days of silence follow.

On Visiting Day, Margaret's mother mentions telling everyone Margaret had complications from the car wreck. After her parents leave, Margaret binges on hoarded food and glimpses a ghostly woman in the bathroom mirror. She confesses to Irene, a staff member, about the binge, the laxatives, and the stones she has been hiding during weigh-ins. She is demoted to Level One and moved in with Evie, a talkative seventeen-year-old on her fourth stay. Dr. Grunch, the senior clinician, announces Carrie's treatment has been discontinued. Margaret feels responsible.

In Dr. Grunch's office, Margaret discovers photographs of Briarwood's history as a girls' school, presided over by Nell Edmonds, the first headmistress, who refused to eat and died young. That night, Nell's ghost summons Margaret. With Evie and Ian, the center's only male patient, Margaret picks the lock to the office, which transforms into a schoolroom. Nell teaches a lesson interweaving suffrage history with her own story: Born in 1881, she starved herself to escape an arranged marriage, recovered and founded the school with two friends, then relapsed after both left and died at forty. Looseleaf pages in the desks contain layered stories from past Briarwood residents, and the three patients add their own. Ian raises the question of experiencing a body outside cultural meanings: "What if I don't have to be 'a guy'?" (207). Margaret resists but is unsettled.

Nell's ghost convulses and dissolves into the floor, opening a passage into a surreal, giant body. Margaret, Evie, and Ian navigate three levels: feeding a chamber of hungry mouths, traversing a wall of warm fat, and passing through intestinal corridors. Margaret is twice swallowed by a mouth that tells her she does not belong and is not really a girl. She apologizes to Ian for lashing out, admitting he reminds her of her former confident, fat self, the version she killed to lose weight. In the final corridor, terrified that leaving means the end of the group, she breaks away and becomes encased in a membrane. Suspended in stillness, she realizes she does not want to be alone. Evie and Ian rescue her, and together they are expelled into Briarwood's cafeteria, where Margaret clears her plate easily.

The novel closes with a letter from an adult Margaret, now signed "M.," addressed to Carrie years later. Margaret reveals they are transmasculine and undergoing hormone replacement therapy. Ian, now Lana, transitioned first; Margaret followed. Margaret has stayed in touch with Evie, Lana, and Jess, a fellow former patient, but lost contact with Carrie, who has since died. Margaret reflects on the 1990s as a contradictory era for girls, frames eating disorders as simultaneously feminist protest, coping mechanism, and transgender practice, and describes the hunger brought on by hormone therapy as different from the old emptiness: "My body wasn't missing; it's been here all along" (257). The letter closes with Margaret mourning Carrie, affirming the friendships that taught them how to love, and ending: "I wish you were still in it" (259).