Rebecca Stead

by When You Reach Me (v5)

You were the heap of something awful.

  You are dead.

  Difficult Things

  That night, Richard stayed with me while Mom kept Louisa company at the hospital. Sal had a broken arm and three broken ribs, and he had to spend the night for observation.

  Richard ordered a pizza. “Do you feel like talking?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  He nodded. “Just let me know.”

  After dinner, I closed my door and sat on my bed with your notes spread out in front of me. “Think,” my brain said. “Think, think, think.” I got out my ropes, tied some knots, and tried to start at the beginning.

  The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you.

  The trip is a difficult one, and I must ask my favors while my mind is sound.

  And then there was the strangest line of all: The trip is a difficult one; I can carry nothing, and a man can only hold so much paper in his mouth.

  I fingered the notes, so small and brittle. Had you carried them in your mouth?

  The trip is a difficult one.

  Difficult enough to scramble a persons mind and leave him raving on a street corner? What kind of a trip did that to someone? Who would deliberately take a trip like that?

  My mind began a little chant: “And why? Why, why, why?”

  To save Sal. That’s why you stood on our corner day after day. That’s why you were always doing those kicks into the street—you were practicing. It was all to save Sal. Because, somehow, you knew.

  Time travel is possible, Marcus said. In theory.

  I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own.

  “Well,” I said out loud to no one, “you saved Sal’s life, but you failed miserably with goal number two.”

  Richard knocked on the door, and I jumped.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you might want to come out and have some grapes.”

  Richard had brought me grapes. We watched some TV and ate a giant bowl of the most perfect tart green grapes in the world. They were definitely not from Belle’s.

  It was nice, just sitting there watching TV together. My brain stopped asking me questions. I saw Richard glance over at me a couple of times, but he didn’t ask me any questions either. And that was nice, too.

  When I fell asleep on the couch, Richard turned the TV off and said I should go to bed. But once everything was quiet, I couldn’t sleep. Your words were swimming in my head.

  Please deliver your letter by hand. You know where to find me.

  Louisa had told me that some of her old people died with nothing and no one. She said they were buried on an island somewhere north of Manhattan. I figured that was where you would be soon.

  I was still worrying and feeling a little frozen when my bedroom door opened and Mom came over and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “Sal is going to be fine,” she whispered, putting one arm around me. “The tests are done. He’ll probably be home in the morning.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was afraid that if I spoke, I would tell her too much—I would tell her about the notes, Richard’s shoes, the two-dollar bills, everything. And I thought that if I did tell her, somehow Sal might not be okay anymore. So instead I just held on to Mom’s arm, and she stayed right there until I fell asleep.

  Things That Heal

  The next night after dinner, Mom and I went to visit Sal and Louisa downstairs. It was strange to be there, in a place I knew so well but hadn’t seen in so long—like how it might feel to look at my own face in the mirror for the first time in months.

  Sal was sitting up in bed with one arm in a cast. Mom gave him a careful hug, and then she and Louisa went to talk in the kitchen. Louisa had dragged a table over to the left side of Sal’s bed so that he could reach it with his good arm, and there was a stack of sports magazines and stuff on it.

  “Wow,” I said, “are those Tootsie Pops? Your mom went all out.”

  He smiled, actually looking me in the eyes. “Yesterday at the hospital she brought me McDonald’s,” he said.

  “McDonalds?” Louisa thought that McDonald’s was a giant conspiracy against the health of all Americans. “Oh, my God. I mean, why aren’t you dead?”

  But that was a little too close to what had actually happened. He laughed, but I felt myself go red.

  With his good hand, Sal shook the bag of Tootsie Pops out onto the table, found a purple one, and held it out to me. “Grape,” he said.

  “Aw, you remember.”

  But somehow that was also too close to the truth. I felt my head kind of buzz and was pretty sure I had gone red again.

  “I remember everything,” he said cheerfully. He seemed to be in a great mood. He also seemed to have forgotten that we weren’t really friends anymore.

  “You do?” I said, unwrapping my Tootsie Pop. “So do you remember why you don’t like me anymore?” I was surprised to hear myself ask, but once I had, I really wanted to know the answer.

  “I still like you! Of course I still like you. I just needed to—I don’t know, take a break for a while. Ha! Break.” He gestured to his sling. “Get it?” He giggled.

  “But why? I wasn’t the one who hit you!”

  He shook his head. “Hit me when? What are you talking about?”

  “What do you think I’m talking about? The day Marcus hit you. The day you bled all over your Yankees jacket—the day you shut me out!”

  “Wait—who’s Marcus?”

  I suddenly got how totally stupid I’d been, never telling Sal that Marcus was an okay kid. I thought of the day I’d seen Sal drop to the ground and pretend to tie his shoe. He probably worried about seeing Marcus on that block every single day. He probably woke up in the morning thinking about it. And I could have done something to fix it, a long time ago.

  “Marcus is the kid who hit you that day on the street. The kid you were running from yester—”

  “Oh!” Sal cut me off. He looked at his feet, which were just a bump under the covers. “Yeah, that kid freaks me out. He has it in for me.”

  “He doesn’t have it in for you,” I said. “He really doesn’t. I think he was trying to apologize yesterday.”

  He shrugged. “If you say so.” He looked at me. “But that has nothing to do with—with you and me. Really.”

  “But the day Marcus hit you—that was the day that you stopped wanting to do stuff together. You stopped—”

  He shook his head. “No. It was before that.”

  And, very quietly, my brain said, “Remember? Remember the times way back in September, when Sal didn’t show up to walk home together after school? Remember how he said he didn’t have money to go out to lunch when you knew he did? Remember the morning you waited for him in the lobby until you were absolutely, positively going to be late, and then you rang his doorbell, and it turned out he’d gone to school without you?”

  And then I remembered something else. I remembered running across Broadway holding my big Mysteries of Science poster, and seeing Sal on the other side, and yelling for him to wait up. And he had. He’d waited. And when I asked him why he wasn’t at our regular spot after school, he’d just mumbled something and looked at his feet, and then we’d walked toward Amsterdam in total silence. Until Marcus hit him.

  Sal had started home without me that day. And it wasn’t the first time.

  But here he was, today, looking right at me. And we still felt like us. “So when can we go back to normal?” I asked.

  “That’s the thing, Mira. It wasn’t normal. I didn’t have any other friends! Not real friends.”

  Neither did I! I wanted to say. And then I realized—that was his whole point. We’d only had each other. It had been that way forever.

  He was still talking. “I mean, remember the second week of school, when you got sick? I spent that whole week alone. The whole week. Alone at lunch every day, alone after school… and don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I w
ant to hang out with boys.” He yawned. “I’m on these pills,” he said. “For my arm. They make me kind of sleepy.”

  “You could have just told me,” I said. “You could have said all this stuff before. I thought we talked about everything.”

  “Not everything.” He looked at me in a groggy way. “Anyway, I gave you hints. You never got them.”

  Mom and Louisa walked in. “I thought you might be getting tired,” Louisa told Sal. “These painkillers!” she said to Mom. “He takes one, talks his heart out for twenty minutes, and then falls asleep, like clockwork.”

  She gave me a tight hug as we were leaving and said, “I’m glad you two had a chance to talk.” And I wondered if she’d saved the twenty minutes for me on purpose.

  Things You Protect

  Wheelie was running late. “I’m still working on the list,” she said, pushing some candy across her desk at me. “Have a seat. I’ll be done in two jigs.”

  That was fine with me. In the two days since the accident, I’d thought about your notes a thousand times and tried at least that many times to push away the memory of your body lying in the street. I wasn’t sleeping much, and I was tired.

  My first Bit-O-Honey was just softening in my mouth when two police officers walked into the office.

  Wheelie looked up from her typewriter. “May I help you?”

  “There a Marcus Heilbroner enrolled here?”

  Her face stayed blank. “I believe there might be. But the principal isn’t in right now, and—”

  “That’s okay. We just need a word with Marcus Heilbroner. Seems he likes to chase kids into the street, and we need to have a word with him about that. What room?”

  She scratched her head. “I’m not—I’m not sure. I’ll have to look him up.”

  That’s when I got scared. Wheelie knew every kid in the school, and she knew what classrooms they were in without having to think about it. She was afraid, I realized. For Marcus.

  I stared at the backs of the two officers and thought about the things Mom had told me about people who go to jail, about how some of them were never the same afterward. I couldn’t let that happen to Marcus. He was barely regular to begin with. I thought of him shaking and crying on the curb after the accident, and how he’d tried to stop Sal from running in front of the truck, and how he’d been too clueless to realize Sal was running away from him in the first place.

  “I need to use the phone,” I said to Wheelie.

  “This phone?” She put one heavy hand down on top of it. “I don’t think so.”

  “Please!” I said.

  “No, ma’am!” From behind her desk, she pulled out a plastic tub full of index cards and started to flip through them while the officers watched.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “Hillerman, right? Any idea what grade he’s in?”

  They looked at each other. “Heilbroner,” one of them said. “Don’t you have an alphabetical list?”

  “Of course!” she said. “But that’s down here somewhere….” Her voice trailed off as she started to roll her chair toward the file cabinets that stood along the back wall.

  I left the office casually, as if I just had to go to the bathroom, and then I sprinted around the corner and down the dead-end hallway. In my mind was a picture of the dentist’s white wall phone.

  The dentist was relaxing in his chair, looking very comfortable with a paper cup of coffee and the newspaper. “Hi, Miranda,” he said, sitting up. “You have the patient list?”

  “Can I use your phone?” I called to him. “It’s an emergency!”

  He looked surprised but said, “Sure, go ahead.”

  I called my mom at work.

  “I need help,” I said. “The police are at school and I think a kid is going to get arrested. A friend.”

  “But—all the lawyers are in court,” she told me.

  I started to cry. “Can you come, Mom? Right now?”

  “Me?” she said. And then, “Yes. I’m coming.”

  By the time I hung up the phone, I had the dentist’s full attention. “What’s up?” he said.

  “Marcus is in trouble,” I said. “The police are here and they might arrest him and he didn’t even do anything wrong! If my mom can get here I think she can help.”

  “Marcus is a good kid,” he said firmly. “A good kid through and through.” He calmly folded his newspaper and took a pen from his pocket. “So, Miranda, are you my runner this morning?”

  I raced up the four flights to Marcus’s classroom, the dentist’s scrawled note in one hand, and burst in, yelling, “I need Marcus!” and waving the piece of paper in Mr. Anderson’s face.

  “Calm down! What’s wrong with you?” Mr. Anderson stared at me, and I tried to stand still. He examined my note. “All right, Marcus, go ahead.”

  Marcus nodded and started rearranging the pile of books on his desk.

  “Leave your books,” I called to him. “The dentist says he needs you right now.”

  Out in the hall I said, “You need to hide. The police are here and I think they want to arrest you!” I started running toward the stairs.

  Marcus called quietly after me, “It would probably be better if we walked.”

  He was right. Five seconds later, we strolled right past the police officers on their way up to Mr. Anderson’s classroom. They didn’t even glance at us.

  The dentist locked the door behind us. Then he looked at me. “Your mom is a lawyer?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Okay. We’ll just sit tight until she gets here.”

  The police didn’t come to the dentist’s office right away—it must have taken them a while to find it. Nobody seemed to be helping them much.

  They knocked, and the dentist called out, “Sorry, I have my hands full here. It’ll be a minute.”

  I was wondering what we would do when a minute was up. The dentist just sat there reading his paper. Marcus looked at his palms. “I wish I’d brought my book,” he said, turning to me accusingly.

  “You’re welcome!” I said. “I’m trying to save you, here.”

  “Does either one of you have a sense of what this is all about?” the dentist asked.

  Marcus and I exchanged looks.

  “I tried to stop him,” Marcus said.

  “I know. He was afraid of you.”

  He pressed his hands to his chest. “Of me?”

  “You punched him! Remember?”

  “I know!” Marcus put his head down on his two fists. “Oh, God,” he mumbled, “and now that man is dead. That old man. He was afraid of me too. Remember how he ran away from me? But I never did anything to him! I swear!” His voice cracked and his shoulders started shaking.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said quickly. “He—” But I didn’t know what to say. Because it was kind of his fault. Marcus didn’t mean for any of it to happen, but if he hadn’t run after Sal, and Sal hadn’t run into the street, wouldn’t you still be alive?

  The dentist was staring at us. “On second thought, it might be better not to talk,” he said, nodding at the door.

  Time crawled. The police waited, knocked, waited again, talked into their walkie-talkies, knocked again, disappeared, came back, knocked again, and then started calling out things like: “He better be in there when this door opens, doc.”

  And the dentist called his own stuff through the door, about anesthesia and paste-drying time, and only having two hands. It didn’t make a lot of sense.

  Marcus stared at the floor, which I’d just noticed was tiled with tiny white hexagons like the ones in our bathroom at home. My brain sorted the hexagons into the usual shapes and flowers. It was weirdly comforting.

  Then, very quietly, Marcus said something. “I have an older brother. Anthony.”

  I looked over at him.

  “I want you to know why I hit your friend that day—”

  “Sal! His name is Sal. God, why don’t you ever remember anyone’s name?”

  The dentist shushed
us.

  Marcus made his voice even lower. “The day before I hit Sal, my brother Anthony said something about another kid’s girl. I think he meant it as a joke. But this guy got Anthony up against this car, and he was hitting him and hitting him….”

  I remembered. Sal and I had crossed the street to avoid that fight. Marcus’s brother was the kid who had been trying to get off the hood of the car. Who kept getting knocked down. “I think I saw that,” I said. “Was your brother wearing a hat?”

  Marcus nodded. “Yeah. He always wears that hat.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. I was leaning in our doorway, watching. Afterward, Anthony said to me, ‘Did you even think about standing up? About helping me?’ He said I was like no brother at all.”

  “Those kids are bigger than you,” I said.

  Marcus shook his head. “It wasn’t that. I wasn’t afraid. I just didn’t see myself as … part of what was happening. Sometimes I’m thinking about stuff and I walk right past my own building. Those guys don’t see me as one of them. Because I’m not one of them.

  “Anthony told me, ‘One day, you’re gonna have to hit someone. And get hit yourself. Then you’ll see. Maybe. Maybe you’ll understand life a little better.’ And I wanted to understand life better. To understand people better. So the next day, I walked over and hit Sal. And then I stood there like an idiot and waited for him to hit me back. But he just bent over and cried, and I didn’t know what to do, so I walked away. And Anthony yelled: ‘What the hell was that?’ And later, at home, he said, ‘What are you hitting short kids for? Don’t you know nothing?’ He said I was hopeless.”

  I was trying to think of what to say when Marcus suddenly looked at me with his eyes all wide. “Hey! You were the one holding the poster.”

  My mouth fell open. “You just figured that out?”

  He nodded. “Interesting poster,” he said. “I’ve always wondered about yawns. I read an article once—”

  Then there was a fast clicking sound that I knew: Mom’s heels on a hard floor. I shushed Marcus and pressed my ear to the closed door even though the dentist kept waving me back.