When You Reach Me (10 page)

New Year’s Day was weirdly warm and sunny Sal’s basketball was going strong by about nine in the morning. I sneaked a look down into the alley and saw him running back and forth in just a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. He was wearing the watch Louisa had given him for Christmas. She’d come up to show it to us beforehand. It was kind of old-fashioned, with Roman numerals and a leather band, and I hadn’t been sure Sal would like it. But it looked like he did.

Mom was sleeping late. I wrote her a note:
I went out. I’ll get you a bagel
.

The laughing man wasn’t on the corner—maybe he didn’t work holidays. Belle’s was closed. Everything felt kind of peaceful and sad and deserted.

My feet carried me to school, which was closed, of course. The yard gate was open, and I went in and sat on the jungle gym for a few minutes, letting myself feel how strange it was to be there alone. I was sort of deliberately trying to weird myself out, I think, to get my energy up. To call Annemarie.

Ten days of silence had grown into a question that my brain shouted inside my head: “Is Annemarie even your friend anymore?” There was a pay phone on the corner. I had a dime in my coat.

As I dialed, I noticed someone leaning over the garbage can across the street. When he pulled himself upright I saw it was the laughing man. He stood there with his hands on his hips looking down at the garbage. I quickly turned my back to him, worried that he might recognize me and come over.

The receiver of the pay phone was cold against my ear. Only after it started ringing did it occur to me that if my mother was sleeping, Annemarie’s parents might be sleeping too.

“Yello!” Annemarie’s dad answered the phone. He sounded as if he’d been up for hours, just sitting by the phone and hoping, hoping, hoping it would ring.

“Hi… it’s Miranda—”

“Hi, Miranda! Happy New Year!”

“Hi. I mean, Happy New Year to you too. I was wondering if Annemarie is there.”

“She is! But she’s in the shower. Are you by any chance outside, Miranda? It sounds like you might be at a pay phone.”

“Oh. Yeah, I am, actually.”

“In the neighborhood?”

“Um, yeah. I’m right by school.”

“Well, come on over. I’m pouring you some orange juice right now!”

“Uh, okay.”

“You can surprise Annemarie!”

Would I ever. I walked up the hill, where the sunlight seemed to touch everything like it was a hyper kid running all over a toy store—it bounced off the dirty metal lampposts, the shiny brass awning posts, even the sunglasses of a woman walking her dogs with a cup of coffee in one hand. Everything
shined
.

“Miss Miranda, Happy New Year!” Annemarie’s doorman was standing just outside the building’s polished doors. He smiled and waved me in.

On the way up, it hit me that it was truly strange to come over here without talking to Annemarie first. But at the exact same time I got nervous about that, I also got this other feeling, which I can only describe as love for Annemarie’s elevator. The wood paneling, the cloth-covered stool in one corner, the little bell that went off every time we passed another floor. It was all so nice and cozy that I thought it would be wonderful to stay inside it forever, or at least to sit down on the little stool and close my eyes for a while. The whole thing was beyond weird. And then the elevator stopped on Annemarie’s floor, and of course I got out, because that’s what people do when the elevator gets to their floor.

Annemarie answered the door in her robe, with wet hair.

“Hi,” I started. “I just called to say Happy New Year, and your dad said—”

She smiled. “Come on in.”

It was the best morning. Annemarie showed me her Christmas presents. She got all kinds of cool art stuff, and we ended up spreading it all over the dining room table and drawing comic strips on this special comic-strip paper that came with stickers for the talking bubbles and the thinking bubbles. And then her mom showed us how to make origami frogs, and I was actually good at it. Meanwhile, her dad kept bringing in these plates of bacon and, for me, French toast strips I could pick up with my hands.

Then Mom called. I had completely forgotten about her. She was frantic, she was angry, and she was coming to get me. Even Annemarie’s dad looked mad.

“Better get your coat on,” he said when I hung up the phone, even though my mom couldn’t possibly get to Annemarie’s apartment that fast. So I waited by the door, overheating in my coat, and Annemarie waited with me.

“So, about what happened at Jimmy’s …,” I said. “You know, I really never meant… what he thought I meant. Not for one second.”

She looked at the floor. “I totally believe you. And I don’t know why I said that thing I said, about… money. It was stupid.”

“It’s okay.” I was so grateful that she had something to apologize for that it didn’t really occur to me to think about how it had actually made me feel. But I have thought about it since then. It didn’t make me feel good.

*    *    *

We heard the elevator’s ding and I opened Annemarie’s front door before Mom had a chance to ring the bell. I thought I might be able to escape without Annemarie’s parents talking to her.

No such luck. “Jerry?” Mom called out, and Annemarie’s dad came rushing over saying, “Oh, you’re here. I didn’t hear the bell—”

“I’m so sorry about this,” Mom said.

“No,
I’m
sorry. I had no idea—”

“It’ll never happen again—”

“—always check with you first.”

They cross-talked for a while, then hit one of those natural breaks in the conversation and both turned to look at me.

“Let’s go,” Mom said coldly, and I said, “Thanks for having me,” and Annemarie’s dad smiled at me, but only because he’s the nicest person on earth.

The elevator opened right away, so there was no awkward waiting. On the way down, I knew I should apologize, but I just waited for Mom to jump all over me. Instead she burst into tears.

Which made me cry. So we both cried through the lobby, past the doorman, and out into the sunlight, where we magically stopped. She took a deep breath and looked at me. “I was scared,” she said. “When you didn’t come back, I got really scared. Don’t ever do that again.”

I nodded.

“Okay,” she said. “What now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe a movie?”

So that’s what we did. We went to the movies, and ate candy and popcorn, and held hands for a few minutes on the way home.

The laughing man was at his regular post, doing his kicks into the street. When he saw us he yelled, “Smart kid!” But having Mom there made it different, like walking down the street with a blanket wrapped tight around me.

Richard was leaning up against our building, reading a newspaper.

“Hey!” he said. “We had a plan. Did you forget about me?”

He made a sad face, and Mom said, “Oh, no! How late am I?” and then she looked at me and we both started laughing.

Richard said, “Seriously. Would it kill you to give me a key?” And Mom shrugged and said it was only three-thirty and she didn’t much feel like going upstairs anyway. So we turned around and went to eat at the diner, which was full of people just waking up and having breakfast.

It was 1979—a new year, a new decade, almost, but school was still just school. Jay Stringer was still a genius, music assemblies were still boring, and Alice Evans was still too shy to admit when she had to go to the bathroom. The fourth grade’s violin performance had only just started, and already Alice was squirming in her seat next to me. Jay was on my other side, somehow reading a book while listening to the world’s worst music.

I located Sal’s blond head a few rows ahead on my right. I stared at the back of it for a while, trying to see if I could make him turn around with the sheer power of my brain waves, but it was hard to concentrate with Alice doing a Mexican hat dance in her chair. I tried to make a face at Annemarie, who was on the other side of Alice, but Annemarie seemed fully absorbed by the music. She’s extremely non-judgmental that way. So I went back to looking at Sal.

Directly in front of me was Julia. She was obviously as bored as I was—her head kept bobbing around. And then she turned and looked at Annemarie. I glanced over and saw that Annemarie’s eyes were still on the stage. Julia watched Annemarie. And I watched Julia watching Annemarie. And what I saw were eyes that were sixty-percent-cacao chocolate, a face that was café au lait, and an expression that was so familiar it made my whole body ring like a bell. Julia’s look was my look. My looking at Sal.

And suddenly I knew three things:

First, it was Julia who had left the rose for Annemarie.

Second, Julia cared about Annemarie, but Annemarie didn’t see it. Because I was standing in the way.

Third, Alice Evans was about to pee in her pants.

I turned to Alice. “Hey,” I said, “I have to go to the bathroom. Be my partner?”

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It’s like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to. It was like that when I asked Alice Evans to be my bathroom partner. I wasn’t one of the girls who tortured her on purpose, but I had never lifted a finger to help her before, or even spent one minute being nice to her.

She stopped squirming and looked at me suspiciously. “You have to go?” she said. “Really?”

“Yeah.” And in that moment, I wanted nothing as much as I wanted Alice to feel safe with me. “Really.”

I leaned forward in my seat and waved my arm up and down so that Mr. Tompkin turned to look at me from his seat at the end of the row, and I spoke over the laps of Jay Stringer and Colin, who were sitting between us.

“I have to go to the bathroom.” These words felt like some kind of sacrifice, a precious offering to the universe. I didn’t know why, but Julia’s look had given me this total determination to get Alice Evans to the bathroom before she wet herself.

“Now?”
Mr. Tompkin whispered.

“Please!”

He rolled his eyes. “Fine.”

Mr. Tompkin tilted his knees to one side to let us pass, and Jay Stringer and Colin put their heads together and then Jay laughed. My mind processed that—if Jay was the one who’d laughed, then Colin was the one who’d made the joke. A joke about me, maybe. I grabbed Alice’s hand and pulled her after me. And then we were running up the aisle.

As soon as Alice went into the bathroom, I ran down the hall toward the office. There were so many things I wanted to do but couldn’t, like hug my mom, or be less jealous of Annemarie, and I didn’t want this to become one of them. But I had to work fast.

“Miranda?” Wheelie looked up at me doubtfully. “Aren’t you supposed to be in assembly?”

“Yes, I am in assembly—I mean, I was, and I’m going right back. Alice is in the bathroom. Can I have a piece of paper?”

“No, ma’am! I don’t have paper to be just giving away.”

“Please—just a little piece. A corner of a piece!” If I didn’t do this now, I never would.

Wheelie sighed. Then, still in her chair, she kicked her way over to the next desk, where there was one of those pink message pads. She ripped off the top sheet, folded it, folded it again, and then carefully ripped the paper along the first fold, and then along the second fold. “Hurry,” my brain said. “Hurry.”

“Here.” She held out a quarter of a pink message slip and looked at me with a face that said “I hope you won’t be coming around here looking for another handout anytime soon.”

I picked up a pen from the counter and scribbled on the little pink square.

“I thought you left me.” Alice was standing in front of the bathroom looking all wounded.

“Me?” I said. “No way.”

She smiled. People seemed to like the new me.

We squeezed back into our row past Colin and Jay Stringer, who whispered and laughed again. Annemarie leaned forward and gave me a where-were-you shrug. I mouthed “Bathroom,” and she nodded and settled back again.

I folded my pink square a couple of times. Then I leaned forward and dropped the note into Julia’s lap. I hadn’t had much time—it was just the one word:
TRUCE
.

And underneath I’d written my phone number.

That afternoon, Sal brought Colin home after school. I saw them up ahead of me, taking turns on Colin’s skateboard. One would ride, and the other would bounce Sal’s basketball—they were circling each other and laughing and racing around and I wanted to be part of it so much that my heart almost broke watching. I decided to stop off at Belle’s.

Belle picked up the economy jug of chewable vitamin C she kept behind the register and shook it at me. I nodded, and she tipped four of them into my hand.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Not much.”

“Got some time for the story?”

“Sure. Where were we?”

“Aunt Beast.”

“Right. Aunt Beast. So Aunt Beast’s planet is perfect—it smells great and the food is wonderful and everything is soft and comfortable. But Meg can’t stay there. She has to go back and save her little brother. They left him behind, with IT, remember?”

Belle nodded. “She has to go back by herself?”

“Yes. She’s the only one who can do it, because she’s closer to her brother than anyone. It has to be her.”

Belle nodded.

“So she goes back there, to Camazotz, and her brother is totally under ITs control, and he’s saying all these awful things to her. And IT is trying to suck her in too, to take over her brain. She’s trying to resist, but it’s hard. And then, at the last second, she figures out that there’s only one thing that can defeat IT: love. IT doesn’t understand love.”

“Ooh,” Belle said. “That’s deep.”

“So Meg stands there and thinks about how much she loves her brother—her
real
brother, not the IT-brother who is standing there with his mouth hanging open and his eyes twirling. She starts yelling over and over that she loves him, and poof, he becomes himself again. That’s how she saves him. It turns out to be really simple.”

Belle surprised me. “Well, it’s simple to love someone,” she said. “But it’s hard to know when you need to say it out loud.”

For some reason that made me want to cry. “Anyway,” I said. “Then they’re suddenly back home. They land in the vegetable garden outside their house, in the broccoli. That’s the end.”

Of course I couldn’t help thinking of what Marcus had said, about how if they’d gotten home five minutes before they left, they would have seen themselves get back home before they even knew they were going. But it was better not to drag Belle into all that.

“What’s the name of this writer again?”

I spelled it out for her.

Belle had to ring up a few kids buying their after-school junk food, so I wandered around the store. I was thinking I would swipe a few grapes, but they looked old and soft. I took a bottle of chocolate milk out of the refrigerator, checked the date on it, and brought it up to the register with a five-dollar bill I had taken from Mom’s coat pocket that morning.

“Weirdest thing,” Belle said, taking my five. “You see that guy out there?” She pointed through her front window and across the street to where the laughing man was pacing back and forth on my corner, doing his kicks.

“Yeah.”

“Well, check this out.” She lifted the plastic tray out of the register drawer, and I looked in. It was full of two-dollar bills. Wavy, bent-looking two-dollar bills.

“A couple weeks ago, that guy out there suddenly starts coming in every day to get a butter-on-white and a banana, and he always pays with these two-dollar bills.”

I was staring into the drawer.

“You want a couple for your change?” Belle asked.

I nodded, and she handed them to me. “Sorry,” she said, smoothing them out, “they’re crumpled. He gives them to me all folded up into triangles, if you can believe it. The first time, I didn’t even think it was real money. I started telling the guy to get lost!”

My brain was doing that thing where it yells at me. It was yelling, “The
laughing man
stole Jimmy’s Fred Flintstone bank? The
laughing man?”

“The guy is looney,” Belle said thoughtfully, “but also generally polite. Polite is always worth something.”

When I walked by him a minute later, the laughing man was shaking his fist at the sky and kicking his legs out into the traffic rushing up Amsterdam Avenue. A few cars honked at him. When he saw me, he pointed and yelled, “Smart kid! Smart kid!”

I popped my last two vitamin Cs and imagined the wrapped-in-a-blanket feeling I’d had when Mom was with me. Then I calmly walked by the laughing man, thinking, Yeah, really polite.

Colin and Sal were in the lobby, making a total racket with the skateboard and the basketball so that any second Mrs. Bindocker would probably come charging out of her apartment, yelling that they were scaring her cat.

“Hey!” Colin said when he saw me. “I
thought
you lived in this building. Want to skate a little?” He picked up his skateboard and held it out to me.

I glanced at Sal, who was concentrating on his basket ball like the whole concept of bouncing had just been invented and was really very amazing and deserving of attention. He had developed a way of waving at me without making eye contact—it was kind of like a no-look pass.

“No thanks,” I said, “I have to go.”

But Colin is Colin. If he can read a vibe, he never lets on. “Can I see your place?” he said. “We’re shooting baskets in the back—have you been back there? It’s cool. Want to come hang out?”

I told Colin that my mother was sick upstairs, and that I was just rushing home from the store.

“You got her chocolate milk?” he asked, pointing at the bottle in my hand.

“Yeah.” I headed for the stairs. “She loves it.” And I sprinted up to the second floor before he could say anything else.

When I unlocked our door, the apartment felt like a warm hug—the refrigerator was humming, the light was streaming through the living room windows, and the voice in my head said “Safe” and then got quiet. I went to the kitchen, opened my chocolate milk, and took the last bag of Lay’s. Those pregnant jailbirds were out of luck.

Then the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Have I reached the Sinclair residence? May I please speak with Miranda?”

I rolled my eyes. “Hi, Julia,” I said. “It’s me.”

That first time, we only talked for five minutes. Julia said her mom had a recipe for a flourless cake we could make for Annemarie’s birthday. Without knowing whether I really wanted to, I agreed to go over and make a practice cake with her after school the next day.

It was dark outside when there was a tap at the door. I sat up on the couch. A tap on the door was a strange thing. Everyone rings our doorbell, except for Louisa, who always knocks her regular knock. I was afraid—your notes had done that to me.

Another tap.

“Hello?” I called.

Silence. I got up and looked through the peephole.

Colin stood there, holding his skateboard in front of him like a shield, looking not exactly like himself.

I opened the door. “What’s wrong?”

He took two steps forward and kind of hovered right in front of me for a second, and then he kissed me. And then he stopped and waited. And then I kissed him back. He smiled and ran down the stairs.

There are days when everything changes, and this was one of those days.