Rebecca Stead

by When You Reach Me (v5)

  “I won’t.”

  He nodded. “Smart kid.”

  Things That Get Stuck

  “Guess what?” I said to Mom when she got home. “The laughing man isn’t completely crazy. He’s kind of a CSP.”

  “CSP?”

  “Crazy-shaped person.”

  “Don’t say ‘crazy-shaped person.’ And what are you talking about?”

  “I gave him a sandwich today. He was sort of normal about it. Almost.”

  “You gave him a sandwich?”

  “It was a leftover. From Jimmy’s.”

  “Mira, why in the world would you give the laughing man a sandwich?”

  “What’s wrong with that? I thought you would like it!”

  “You thought I would like the fact that you’ve struck up a relationship with a mentally ill person?”

  “What relationship? I just gave him a sandwich!”

  “We’ve talked about this, Miranda. I thought you knew how to handle yourself. It’s the only reason I let you walk around alone!”

  “I just gave a sandwich to a homeless guy! You’re the one who works for criminals and hangs around with pregnant jailbirds.”

  “Not everyone accused of a crime is a criminal, you know And besides, I’m not twelve.”

  I pointed at her sweatshirt, which had a rainbow on it. “Well, you dress like you’re twelve!” I could feel the tears starting, so I grabbed two bags of the chips Louisa had brought over, went to my room, and slammed the door.

  A few minutes later, she knocked and came in. “I’m sorry. You did a nice thing. I shouldn’t have blown up at you like that.”

  “Why did you, then?”

  She sat down on the bed next to me. “I don’t know. I guess it made me nuts, thinking you were putting yourself in danger. I like to tell myself that you’re always safe, but there’s no such thing, really, is there? I do trust you, Mira. I want you to know that. I just—I don’t want to make any more mistakes. I don’t think I can bear to make one more single mistake.”

  “What are you talking about? What mistakes?”

  She laughed. “Are you kidding? Where should I start? I’ve made about a million mistakes. Luckily, you outweigh almost all of them.”

  “Almost all of them? Like how many?”

  She smiled. “I don’t know. Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand?”

  “So that just leaves—what? A thousand to go?”

  “Richard wants to move in,” she said flatly. “He wants us to get married.”

  And my brain said, “He does?” Then I got this feeling of… lightness. I was happy. “That’s great,” I told Mom.

  “You think so?” She smiled for a second, and then her mouth dropped. “I don’t know. I just can’t… I can’t figure out if it’s the right thing.”

  “Don’t you love him?”

  “Of course I do! I don’t know if it’s the right thing for you, I mean.”

  “Is that why you won’t give him a key? Because of me?”

  She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. I just feel stuck, like I’m afraid to take any steps, in case they’re the wrong ones. I need a little more time to think.” She stood up. “The water’s probably boiling by now. Spaghetti in ten minutes.”

  Spaghetti again. We were kind of stuck, I realized. In a lot of ways.

  Tied-Up Things

  “You two have certainly gotten close,” Mom said the following weekend while she helped me tug the roll-away cot from the overstuffed hall closet. “That’s nice, right?”

  Annemarie was sleeping over for the first time.

  “Don’t you ever vacuum?” I said. “There’s dust bunnies behind all the doors.”

  “Give me a break, Mira,” she said sharply.

  “I mean it—I saw a roach in the bathroom this morning. This place looks gross.”

  Mom glared at me. A whole angry conversation seemed to pass over her face. Then she said, “You know what? Do this yourself,” and walked away.

  I pulled the cot into my room and lined it up next to my bed the way Sal and I always had. Then I wondered whether that was the way other girls did it. Was the cot supposed to be against the far wall? Should I make an L-shape with my bed, so that just our heads were together? I decided on the L-shape, stood back, adjusted the angle, and then went to get the sheets out of the bathroom closet.

  * * *

  Starting when we were really little, Sal and I used to beg to have sleepovers on the weekends, and lots of nights I fell asleep happy with Sal next to me on the roll-away.

  But he was never there in the morning. I would wake up and see the empty cot with its tumbled-up striped sheets, and Mom would tell me what had happened—he’d woken up with a stomachache, or a headache, or a bad dream, and wanted to go home.

  She’d hand me a tissue and say, “I don’t know why we keep doing this. Sal cries in the middle of the night and then you cry in the morning.”

  A couple of weeks later, we would try again. And I always believed that this would be the time Sal would still be there in the morning. Eventually we stopped trying, and then those striped blue sheets made me sad to look at.

  But they were the only ones we had that fit the cot. I tucked them in and went to Mom’s room to take one of her pillows. She was still being angry in the living room. I fluffed the pillow, placed it carefully on the cot, and stood back. It looked okay.

  I was still standing there when the buzzer rang, and I got this clear mental picture of Annemarie and her dad in our lobby with the cigarette smell and the ugly ceiling light full of dead bugs. It was like a vision, almost.

  I went to the intercom and pushed the Talk button.

  “Who is it?”

  Her dad’s voice: “It’s Annemarie and her unshaven father!”

  I buzzed long and hard in a way that was supposed to say “you are extra welcome to be here.” Also, the lobby door is so heavy I wanted to give them time to get it open.

  Mom came and stood next to me by the front door, saying nothing and running her fingers through her hair. She was wearing jeans and had changed her T-shirt for a black turtleneck sweater.

  It was at that moment, standing next to her, that I figured out the truth. The truth was that Mom saw it too: the peeling paint, the cigarette butts on the stairs, everything. It soaked into me like water into sand, fast and heavy-making.

  But I still couldn’t apologize for what I’d said. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even smile at her.

  “Welcome!” Mom sang to Annemarie’s dad. “I’m so glad Annemarie can spend the night with us.”

  Annemarie’s dad had a cardboard box full of stuff, little containers and plastic bags, which he offered to Mom. “I’m sure Miranda’s mentioned that Annemarie eats a special diet,” he started.

  “Oh!” Mom looked at me. “Actually …”

  “Never fear!” He pushed the box at her again. “I’ve brought all sorts of appropriate goodies. Feel free to sample them yourself. They’re not bad, if I do say so myself!”

  Mom smiled and took the box. “That’s wonderful. Thanks. Had I known …”

  “Never fear!” Annemarie’s dad said again. I saw that the things inside were tied up with purple and green curly ribbon, like Christmas presents.

  Annemarie and I played some records in my room, and Mom brought in a special platter with Annemarie’s snacks on it, and a bowl of chips for me, and then we watched TV in the living room for a while before bed. We were watching Love Boat when we heard something hit the kitchen floor, followed by a bunch of cursing from Mom.

  A minute later she popped her head in and looked at Annemarie. “Sorry. You didn’t hear that, okay? I dropped some frozen grape juice on my foot.”

  Annemarie smiled a wide smile. “No problem.”

  “Your mom is so cool,” she said later, when we were in our beds and her face was resting on Moms pillow. “I like her a lot. She’s like a real person, you know? And she treats you like a real person too. My dad stil
l acts like I’m a baby.”

  “I guess.”

  But who wants to be treated like a real person? I thought. I wanted to be treated like Annemarie and have all my snacks tied up with ribbon.

  When I opened my eyes in the morning, Annemarie was still there. I felt this big rush of relief, like I’d been worrying all night that she would disappear. Maybe I had been, without realizing it.

  “Thank God you’re awake!” she said, her head propped up on one arm. “I’ve been poking you for twenty minutes. You sleep like the dead.”

  “What time is it?” I asked, throwing off my blanket.

  “Time to eat,” she said. “I’m starved.”

  “Can you eat cereal?” I asked. “All I know how to make is cereal and toast.”

  “Nope,” she said. “Can’t eat either one. Got any eggs?”

  We went to the kitchen to check.

  “Good morning!” Mom was standing in front of the stove, making bacon. “Annemarie, I called your dad last night, and he told me that you have a thing for bacon omelets.”

  “Yum!” Annemarie said. “That smells great. No wonder I’m so hungry.”

  I was staring. Mom had serious bed head and her eyes were puffy with sleep. But she was up at seven-thirty in the morning, making us bacon omelets. I wanted to hug her. But didn’t.

  Things That Turn Pink

  It snowed a little on the second-to-last day before Christmas vacation. Snow always puts me in a good mood. Mr. Tompkin let us skip the math workbooks and spend the whole morning on our Main Street projects. Annemarie helped me start my swings. So far, the perfect day.

  By the time we walked to Jimmy’s, the snow had stopped and the sidewalk was just slushy enough to make my sneakers uncomfortably wet. Mom had slept through the weather report, so I was the only one without boots.

  Colin started to push open Jimmy’s door, but Jimmy jumped out from behind the counter and leaned against the door so it slammed in our faces.

  “Hey!” Colin smiled, thinking it was a joke, and shoved back. But I could see Jimmy’s face better than Colin could. It wasn’t a joke.

  “Get out!” Jimmy called through the glass. “Don’t come back here anymore! You’re lucky I don’t call the police!”

  Annemarie put her hand on Colin’s shoulder. “I think he’s serious.”

  “What?” Colin saw our faces and then looked up at Jimmy through the door. “What’s going on?” he yelled.

  Jimmy had one foot up against the bottom of the door. He glared at us. Some people on the street looked over, but nobody stopped.

  “Somebody stole my bank,” he said finally, his voice sounding far away. “One of you.”

  Of course we told him, through the door, that we didn’t, that we wouldn’t. But there was no way he was letting us in.

  We went to the pizza place and talked about who could have taken Jimmy’s two-dollar bills. He ran the place alone, aside from the forty minutes a day that we were there. Maybe someone had run in while he was in the bathroom, we thought. He usually put his Back in Five Minutes sign in the window and locked the door, but not every time. Sometimes he just ran into the back for a minute and if someone came in, they waited. Someone could have taken the bank then. But who in the world would have known to take it in the first place? It was a faded plastic bank in the shape of a cartoon character. It didn’t look remotely valuable.

  “Let’s write him a letter,” Annemarie said. “Or no—we’ll get him a card!” She used her spoon to scrape up the last of her lunch, which her dad packed for her every day in a cleaned-out yogurt container. “Come on,” she said, standing up. “It’ll be my treat.”

  So we went into Gold’s Stationery and bought Jimmy a greeting card. I wanted to get one that said With Sympathy, for Jimmy’s lost bank, but Annemarie said we should pick something that was blank inside. She picked a card with roses on it, which I thought was kind of strange, considering it was for Jimmy and roses are supposed to symbolize love. She said the card looked sincere, but I guessed that she liked it because it reminded her of her mystery rose.

  “What do you think?” she asked Colin. She held up the card in front of him.

  Colin raised his shoulders and dropped them. “I guess.”

  Annemarie said nothing, but she looked like she’d been hoping for a more revealing answer. “Can you put this on my dad’s account?” she asked the cashier.

  “Sure thing, Annemarie. Hey, where’s your pal Julia? Home sick today?”

  Annemarie turned pink. “No, she’s around.”

  The cashier smiled and handed Annemarie a spiral notebook with a beaten-up cover. Annemarie flipped it open and wrote her name and the date.

  A charge account at Gold’s. I thought of the fat smelly markers that cost two-fifty each, the leather diaries that locked with little keys, the battery-operated fans that you could wear on a string around your neck on hot days.

  “Hey, Annemarie,” Colin said. “Wanna buy me a pack of baseball cards?”

  She turned pink again. “I can’t. I mean, I’m not allowed. Sorry.”

  He shrugged and smiled. “No big deal.”

  Sometimes I wanted to squeeze Colin’s cheeks until his teeth fell out.

  After school, Annemarie and I went to her house. Her dad brought us some weird kind of thin ham rolled up so we could eat it with our fingers. We wrote on Jimmy’s card:

  Dear Jimmy,

  We did not take your Fred Flintstone bank. We don’t know who could have taken it (maybe someone came in when you went to the bathroom?).

  Can we come back to work?

  Signed,

  Your employees,

  Annemarie, Miranda, and Colin

  I put the card in my knapsack so that I could slip it under Jimmy’s door the next morning on my way to school. Then we lay on Annemarie’s rug and planned all the stuff we were going to do over Christmas vacation: Annemarie wanted to start teaching me how to draw, even though I told her I was probably hopeless, and we were going to go to the movies, and her dad even said he would take us ice-skating in Central Park.

  I tried not to wonder what Sal would be doing. I figured he’d be playing basketball right up until the first big snow.

  Things That Fall Apart

  The next morning on my way to school, I pushed our card under Jimmy’s locked door. At lunchtime, Colin, Annemarie, and I walked up to Broadway together. Jimmy was helping a customer, but he saw us through the glass door, made a face, and shook his head no.

  “I guess he means it,” Colin said.

  We stood there in front of the door for a minute, just in case. When the customer left with his sandwich, Jimmy glanced over at us again. Colin put his hands together under his chin like he was praying and made a puppy-dog face, which was a dumb joke but also pretty cute. Jimmy took a rag and started wiping down the counter, and then he raised one arm and waved us in without looking up.

  “So we can come back to work?” Colin asked when we’d all crowded in the door.

  Jimmy looked at us. “You’re good kids,” he said, “but you don’t know what you’re doing half the time.”

  “We didn’t take the bank!” I started, and he waved at me to be quiet.

  “I know. I been thinking about it. You can come back to work.”

  “Yay!” Annemarie started clapping. Colin ran around slapping everyone five, including Jimmy, who even smiled.

  “But here’s the thing,” Jimmy said after Colin had taken a victory lap behind the counter and through the back room. “Your friend, little Swiss Miss. Don’t let me find her in here again. Ever.”

  “Who?” Annemarie said.

  “I think he means Julia,” I said.

  “You think Julia took the money?” Colin laughed. “Julia needs money like a fish needs a bicycle.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Some things are in the blood. All the money in the world can’t change a person’s blood.”

  “What do you mean, ‘blood’?” Annemarie had her hands on h
er hips. “What blood?”

  Jimmy pointed his big finger right at me. “Like you call her, Swiss Miss: hot chocolate.”

  “Huh?” Colin looked at me and back to Jimmy. I was just getting it. Annemarie was way ahead of me.

  “You … you pig,” she said. “You racist pig.” I had never seen Annemarie angry. She was scary and also obviously about to cry.

  Jimmy shrugged. “It’s your life. I’m not having that little thief back in here. You don’t have to come back either.”

  “I won’t!” Annemarie shouted, and she banged out the door.

  “And that’s not why I call her Swiss Miss!” I said.

  Jimmy shrugged again, and I banged out after Annemarie. Colin followed me. We found her crying halfway down the block, walking fast.

  She was spitting words: “That. Big. Fat. Jerk. That. Pig. I. Hate. Him.”

  Colin looked at me. “I don’t even get what just happened!”

  Annemarie whirled around to face us. “He thinks Julia did it because she’s black.”

  “No way” Colin said. “He’s crazy.”

  Annemarie turned on me then. “Is that your name for her? Swiss Miss?”

  “I—no! I said it one time, but I didn’t mean … I meant about how she’s always talking about Switzerland, her watch and the chocolate, and—”

  “She is?” Colin asked. “I never heard her talk about Switzerland.”

  “If anyone needs the money,” Annemarie said to me coldly, “it’s you, not Julia.”

  “Are you serious? I didn’t take the stupid money!”

  “Forget it,” she said. “I want to be alone.” And she stomped off toward school.

  Colin raised his eyebrows after her and then showed me a rolled-up dollar. “Want to get a slice?”

  So we went to the pizza place. But it wasn’t fun. And walking back to school, it occurred to me that Colin might not like me at all. He might just like pizza.