When You Reach Me, Page 3

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, and I didn’t let myself glance back until I got to the corner. When I did, the kid who punched Sal was gone. That was when I realized that he must live in the apartment over the garage, the one with dead plants on the fire escape and bedsheets hanging over the windows.

  I’d forgotten all about the laughing man. His legs were sticking out from under the mailbox, and I was careful not to wake him.

  Things That Bounce

  After he got punched, Sal started playing basketball in the alley behind our building. Our living room windows face that way, and I heard him dribbling his ball back there from about three-thirty to five every day There was a rusted-out metal hoop with no net that made a clanging sound whenever he hit it.

  Sal and Louisa’s apartment is mostly the same as ours. We have the same rectangular bedrooms, the same pull-chain light in the hallway, the same weird-shaped kitchen with the same unpredictable ovens, theirs right below ours.

  There are differences. Their kitchen floor is yellow and orange linoleum squares instead of the white with gold flakes that we have, and Sal’s bed is up against a different wall in the bedroom. But we have the same bathroom floor—these white hexagonal tiles. If I look at them long enough, I can see all kinds of patterns in those hexagons: lines, arrows, even flowers. They kind of shift into these different pictures. It’s the sort of thing a person would never try to explain to anyone else, but once, when we were little, I told Sal about it, and then we went into his bathroom to stare at the floor together. Sal and Miranda, Miranda and Sal.

  Sal played basketball more and more and talked to me less and less. I asked him four hundred times whether he was okay, or if he was mad at me, or what was wrong, and three hundred and ninety-nine times he answered “Yes,” “No,” and “Nothing.” Then, the last time I asked, he told me, while standing in our lobby and looking at his feet, that he didn’t want to have lunch or walk home together for a while.

  “Do you even want to be friends at all?” I asked him.

  He glared at his feet and said no, he guessed he didn’t for a while.

  I was lucky, I guess, that this was the same week Julia decided to punish Annemarie for something.

  The girls at school had been hurting each other’s feelings for years before Sal left me and I was forced to really notice them. I had watched them trade best friends, start wars, cry, trade back, make treaties, squeal and grab each other’s arms in this fake-excited way, et cetera, et cetera. I had seen which ones tortured Alice Evans, who, even though we’d started sixth grade, still waited too long to pee and never wanted to say out loud that she had to go. These girls would wait until Alice was pretty far gone, jiggling one foot and then the other, and then they would start asking her questions. “Alice,” they’d say, “did you do today’s page in the math workbook yet? Where it says ‘multiply to check your answer’? How did you do that?” And she’d desperately hop around while showing them.

  I knew the way the girls all paired up, and Julia and Annemarie had been paired up for a long time. Julia I hated. Annemarie I had never thought about much.

  My first memory of Julia is from second grade, when we made self-portraits in art. She complained there was no “café au lait”-colored construction paper for her skin, or “sixty-percent-cacao-chocolate” color for her eyes. I remember staring at her while these words came out of her mouth, and thinking, Your skin is light brown. Your eyes are dark brown. Why don’t you just use brown, you idiot? Jay Stringer didn’t complain about the paper, and neither did any of the other ten kids using brown. I didn’t complain about the stupid hot-pink color I’d been given. Did my skin look hot-pink to her?

  But I soon found out that Julia wasn’t like the rest of us. She took trips all over the world with her parents. She would disappear from school and show up two weeks later with satin ribbons worked into her braids, or with a new green velvet scoop-neck dress, or wearing three gold rings on one finger. She learned about sixty-percent-cacao chocolate, she said, in Switzerland, where her parents had bought her a lot of it, along with a little silver watch she was always shoving in people’s faces.

  * * *

  I still don’t know what Annemarie did wrong, but during silent reading period that Tuesday, Julia told her that, as punishment, she wasn’t going to have lunch with Annemarie for “the remainder of the week.” Julia was big on announcing things in a loud voice so that everyone could hear. So on Wednesday, I asked Annemarie if she wanted to go out to lunch with me and she said yes.

  In sixth grade, kids with any money, even just a little, go out for lunch unless something is going on and they won’t let us, like the first week of school, when there was a man running down Broadway stark naked and we all had to eat in the school cafeteria while the police tried to catch him.

  Mostly kids go to the pizza place, or to McDonald’s, or, every once in a while, to the sandwich place, which has a real name but which we called Jimmy’s because there was never anyone working there except one guy called Jimmy.

  Pizza is the best deal—a dollar fifty will buy two slices, a can of soda, and a cherry Blow Pop from the candy bucket next to the register. That first day together, Annemarie and I got lucky and found two stools next to each other at the counter under the flag of Italy.

  I found it slightly gross to eat pizza with Annemarie because she peeled the cheese off her slice like a scab and ate it, leaving everything else on her plate.

  But she laughed at my jokes (which I mostly stole from Richard, who is bad at telling jokes but knows a lot of them), and she invited me over to her house after school, which more than made up for it. I would be spared an afternoon of listening to Sal’s basketball. And the laughing man might be asleep under his mailbox by the time I walked home.

  Things That Burn

  Annemarie’s apartment didn’t involve keys. Instead she had a doorman who slapped her five and a dad who opened the door upstairs.

  “Did your dad take the day off?” I whispered.

  “No,” Annemarie said, “he works from home. He illustrates medical journals.”

  “Is your mom here too?”

  She shook her head. “She’s at work.”

  Annemarie’s bedroom was about the same size as mine, but it had nice curtains and the walls were completely covered with all kinds of pictures and photographs, which I couldn’t stop looking at. There must have been a hundred of them.

  “We’ve known each other for a long time,” Annemarie said, sitting down on her bed, which had some kind of Asian bedspread and about fifty pillows on it.

  “Who?”

  She blushed. “Oh—I thought you were looking at the pictures of Julia.”

  That’s when I noticed that her room was covered with pictures of Julia. Maybe not covered, exactly, but there were a lot of them—the two of them in pajamas, or in the park, or standing together all dressed up outside some theater.

  “Knock, knock!” Annemarie’s dad came in with these tiny sausages on a plate. “I’m on deadline,” he said to me. “When I’m on deadline, I cook. Do you like mustard? Try the dipping sauce. I’ll be right back with some apple cider.”

  He was back in thirty seconds with a glass of cider for me, but he handed Annemarie what looked like plain water. She didn’t seem to notice.

  Annemarie’s rug was spongy and soft, almost like another bed, and I lay down on it. Mustard always makes my lips burn, but I didn’t care. It was worth it.

  The Winner’s Circle

  Mom is getting very good at the speed round. She almost always gets seven words in thirty seconds now, no matter who is giving the clues and who is guessing.

  The second part of The $20,000 Pyramid is called the Winner’s Circle because you have to win the speed round to get there. In the Winner’s Circle, the celebrity partner gives the clues and the contestant has to guess—not words, but categories. So if the celebrity says “tulip, daisy, rose,” the contestant would say “types of flowers.”

  That’s
an easy one. Some of the categories are harder to figure out, like “things you recite” (poetry, the Pledge of Allegiance) or “things you squeeze” (a tube of toothpaste, someone’s hand).

  The last category is always incredibly hard to guess—maybe “things you prolong” or “things that are warped.” The last category is what stands between the contestants and the big money, and Mom says it doesn’t help that some of these celebrity partners are as dumb as a bag of hair.

  If Mom wins her first speed round and correctly guesses all the categories in the Winner’s Circle, she’ll win ten thousand dollars. If she wins a second speed round, the Winner’s Circle is worth fifteen thousand dollars. And if she wins a third time, she’ll go for twenty thousand dollars. That’s what I mean by big money.

  During the speed round, you can point or gesture all you want. If the word is “nose,” you can point to your nose. But the rules change in the Winner’s Circle. No hand movements of any kind are allowed, which is why I’m tying Richard’s arms to my desk chair. I’m using the clove hitch.

  “You’ve got it reversed again,” Richard says, watching me. “That end should go through the loop…. That’s it—right!”

  Mom is looking at us like we’re crazy. “Is this really necessary?”

  “She has to practice,” he tells her. “For when you win the sailboat.”

  Mom rolls her eyes.

  I get my cards ready—I’ve written everything out in fat block letters so Richard can read them from a distance. I’m going to hold them up one at a time behind Mom’s head, where Richard can see them. In the real show, they have these big panels that spin around behind the contestant’s head to reveal the next category, but obviously we don’t have that kind of technology.

  Louisa’s lunchtime notes are good—she’s even written down what Dick Clark says at the beginning of every Winner’s Circle. He always uses the same words: “Here is your first subject…. Go.”

  We set the egg timer for one minute. Mom has to guess the names of six categories before it goes off. “Here is your first subject,” I say, trying to sound like Dick Clark. “Go.” I hold up the first card so Richard can see it.

  The card says “things you climb.” Richard nods and starts giving Mom clues.

  “A jungle gym, a mountain …”

  “High things?” Mom guesses.

  Richard shakes his head. “Um … stairs …”

  “Things that go up!” she yells.

  He shakes his head again. “… a ladder …”

  “Things you climb!”

  “Ding!” I say, and hold up the next card.

  “Okay,” Richard says. “Paris, cheese, wine …”

  “Fancy things!” Mom yells. “Romantic things!” … fries …

  “French things!”

  “Ding!” Next card.

  “A pillow,” Richard says. “A kitten.”

  “Soft things?”

  “… a cotton ball…”

  “Puffy things—fluffy things!”

  “Ding!” Next card.

  “A baby carriage, a shopping cart…”

  “Things that carry things?” Mom guesses. “Things with wheels?”

  Richard shakes his head, thinks, and says, “A button.”

  “Things you push!”

  “Ding!”

  The egg timer goes off. We all look at each other—Mom has only guessed four of the six categories. No one says anything.

  “It’s okay,” Mom says finally. “We still have two more weeks.”

  Things You Keep Secret

  It was a while before I realized that the kid who punched Sal went to our school. We were working on our projects for Main Street, which is a scale model of a city block that we’re constructing in the back of our classroom. Mr. Tompkin’s class studies buildings every year. Mom says he’s a frustrated architect.

  “Why is he frustrated?” I asked.

  “It’s complicated.” She said it had to do with the war. “Teachers didn’t have to go fight in Vietnam. So a lot of young men who didn’t want to fight became teachers.”

  Instead of what they really wanted to be, she meant.

  Jay Stringer, who is a twelve-year-old genius and the head of the Main Street Planning Board, had already built an entire cardboard building, complete with fire escapes and a water tower, and he’d just started two phone booths that he said would have tiny doors that folded open and closed.

  Annemarie was busy with her pebbles and her extra-strength glue, working on a stone wall for the park that Jay Stringer had approved the week before. Julia was making a tinfoil UFO that she said would fly up and down the street on an invisible wire. The UFO hadn’t been approved yet, but Julia was going ahead with it anyway. She had written Proposal Pending on a piece of paper and taped it to the end of a shoe box full of foil and fishing line. Alice Evans was trying to make fire hydrants out of clay, which so far just looked like pathetic lumps. Having to pee so badly all the time must have made it hard for her to concentrate.

  I worked on the diagrams for my playground proposal. My slide looked too steep, and then too flat, and then too messy, because I had erased so much. I would have to ask for another sheet of graph paper, which always made Jay Stringer sigh and roll his eyes, because he brought it from home.

  The classroom phone rang, and after he answered it, Mr. Tompkin asked if anyone wanted to go be an office monitor for a while. I raised my hand. The school secretary usually gives office monitors a few Bit-O-Honeys or Hershey’s Kisses.

  I grabbed my book and rode the banisters down to the first floor, where I found Wheelie at her desk in the main office. She’s called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school. And she tries to do it without getting out of her desk chair, which has wheels, which is why everyone calls her Wheelie. She rolls herself around the office all day by pushing off the floor with her feet. It’s like pinball in slow motion.

  “The dentist needs a runner,” she said to me, kicking herself over to a desk, where she picked up a sheet of paper.

  It’s weird to go to a school for almost seven years and then one day discover that there’s a dentist’s office inside it. But that is exactly what happened. Wheelie stood up, and I followed her out of the office and around the corner to a short dead-end hallway I had never thought about before. There was one open door, and on the other side of it was a real dentist’s office.

  We walked into a waiting area, and I could see into another room with a regular dentist’s chair. It had a little white sink attached, and one of those big silver lights over it. The walls were covered with posters about eating apples and plaque and brushing your teeth.

  Wheelie called out “Bruce?” and a guy with a short gray beard popped his head into the waiting room. He was wearing one of those green doctor tops and he gave me a big perfect smile.

  “Hey there. Are you my first appointment?”

  “No, this is Miranda,” Wheelie said. “She’s your runner. I have the patient list right here.” And she handed me the piece of paper.

  I saw a bunch of names and classroom numbers. “They go to the dentist at school?” I said. “That’s so weird.”

  Wheelie snatched back the paper and said, “There are ninety-eight sixth graders in this school. Eighty-nine of them are in attendance today, so if you can’t do this politely, you can go straight back to your classroom and I’ll find another one for the job.”

  I felt my face go hot and actually thought I might cry. Sometimes when I’m caught off guard I cry at almost nothing.

  The dentist put a hand on my shoulder and smiled again. He was like a professional smiler, which makes sense for a dentist, I guess. “My services don’t cost anything, Miranda. Some families don’t have the money to pay a dentist. Or they could really use the money for something else.”

  “Oh.” I was thinking I shouldn’t let my mother find out about this. She’s always complaining about how health care should be free for everyone. I bet she would ha
ve me signed up for the dentist at school in no time.

  The dentist looked at Wheelie, and she forced a little smile and handed me the list again. Then she fished a warm Bit-O-Honey out of her pocket and gave it to me right there in front of the dentist, even though Louisa had once told me that you might as well whack your own teeth with a wrench as eat Bit-O-Honeys.

  I set out with my list. “Don’t get the kids all at once,” the dentist called after me. “Bring them in twos.”

  I decided to get the little kids first. I knocked on their classroom doors and their teachers came hurrying to see my note, and the kids were handed over to me. I walked the two kindergartners to the dentist’s office, read my book in the waiting room for a while, and then went back for a second grader and a fourth grader. It was a lot of climbing up and down stairs. Not in a million years could I imagine Wheelie doing this.

  When I got back to the dentist with my second drop, one of the kindergartners was already waiting to go back to class. She had this big smiley-tooth sticker on her shirt. I brought her back to her classroom and then went for the last kid on my list, a sixth grader like me: Marcus Heilbroner, in class 6-506. I’d never heard of him.

  I knocked on the little window in the classroom door, waving my paper. The teacher, Mr. Anderson, came over, and I showed him my list.

  “Marcus,” he called, and a boy stood up.

  It was the boy who hit Sal. He’d gotten a very short haircut, but he was definitely the same person. My brain started yelling at me: “It’s the kid who hit Sal! He goes to your school? The kid who hit Sal goes to your school?” And meanwhile, the kid had walked over to where I was standing with Mr. Anderson.

  “Dentist appointment,” Mr. Anderson whispered. Marcus nodded, went back to his desk, picked up a book, and then walked right past me and out the door. I followed a few steps behind him. He knew the way.