When You Reach Me Read online

  * * *

  “Welcome back, Marcus,” the dentist called from the exam room. “Nice haircut.”

  The fourth grader was in the big chair, spitting into the little white sink. The other two kids were all stickered up and waiting to go back to class. Marcus sat down heavily and opened his book, which was called Concepts in Mathematics.

  Mr. Tompkin acted like everyone in our class was part of one big happy math group, but it didn’t take much to figure out there was a system: red math books for genius kids like Jay Stringer, orange ones for kids like me who did okay, and yellow ones for kids who left the room twice a week to meet with Ms. Dudley, who did “math support.” Marcus’s book was different—thick, with a hard cover and small type. So I guessed that even though it was blue—even farther down the rainbow than yellow—it was at least the equivalent of a red.

  “You like math, huh?” I said.

  He looked up, and I got the strong feeling he didn’t know he had ever seen me before, that he didn’t remember punching Sal or talking to me about the sun.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly, like I might be stupid or something. “I like math.” And he went back to reading.

  I delivered the two waiting kids back to their classes. One of them was holding a shiny paper card shaped like an apple that said she needed a follow-up visit. There was a line for her mom to sign. “Cavity,” I thought grimly.

  When I got back to the dentist’s office, the fourth grader was still in the chair and Marcus was still reading his math book. That was fine with me—I grabbed my book from the table where I’d left it and settled back to read.

  “Some people think it’s possible, you know,” Marcus mumbled.

  “What?”

  He pointed at my book. “Time travel. Some people think it’s possible. Except those ladies lied, at the beginning of the book.”

  “What?”

  “Those ladies in the book—Mrs. What, Mrs. Where, and Mrs. Who.”

  “Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which,” I corrected him.

  He shrugged.

  “What do you mean, they lied? They never lied.” I was getting annoyed. The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my book. It’s like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.

  “Don’t you remember?” He leaned forward in his chair. “They’re traveling through time, right? All over the universe, right? And they promise that girl that they’ll have her back home five minutes before she left. But they don’t.”

  “How do you know they don’t get her home five minutes before she left? I mean, there’s no clock or anything. They leave at night and they get back the same night. Maybe they left at eight-thirty and got home at eight-twenty-five.”

  He laughed. “You don’t need a clock. Think. At the beginning of the book, that girl walks through the vegetable garden—”

  “Meg.”

  “Huh?”

  “You keep saying ‘that girl.’ Her name is Meg.”

  “—so she walks to the far side of the vegetable garden and sits on this stone wall, right? So, she can see the garden from where she’s sitting and talking with that boy right? And then those ladies show up and take them away.”

  “His name is Calvin. And so what if they can see the garden?”

  “So the garden is where they appear when they get back home at the end of the book. Remember? They land in the broccoli. So if they had gotten home five minutes before they left, like those ladies promised they would, then they would have seen themselves get back. Before they left.”

  I put my book down and shook my head. “Think about it. They hadn’t even left yet. How could they have gotten back already? They didn’t even know for sure whether they would get back.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether they knew it. That’s got nothing to do with it.” He leaned back and shoved his hands in his pockets. “If they land in the broccoli at eight-twenty-five, they should be in the broccoli at eight-twenty-five. Period.”

  “That makes no sense,” I said. “What if they couldn’t do it—save Meg’s father and get back in one piece?”

  “Then they wouldn’t have landed in the broccoli at all. But they did do it, right?”

  “Yes, but—the end can’t happen before the middle!”

  He smiled. “Why can’t it?”

  “I don’t know—it’s common sense!”

  “Common sense! Have you read Relativity? You know—by Einstein?”

  I glared at him.

  “Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It’s how we’re used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.”

  “In the way of what?”

  “In the way of what’s true. I mean, it used to be common sense that the world was flat and the sun revolved around it. But at some point, someone had to reject that assumption, or at least question it.”

  “Well, obviously somebody did.”

  “Well, duh. Copernicus did! Look, all I’m saying is that at the end of the book, they don’t get back five minutes before they left. Or they would have seen themselves get back—before they left.”

  I gave up. “It was dark in the garden,” I said. “Maybe they just couldn’t see themselves from where they were sitting.”

  “I thought of that,” he said. “But they would have heard all the yelling, and the dog—”

  “My God, what does it matter? It’s a story—someone made it up! You do realize that, don’t you?”

  He shrugged. “The story is made up. But time travel is possible. In theory. I’ve read some articles about it.”

  “Wow. You really do like math, don’t you?”

  He smiled again. With his supershort hair, his head looked like a perfectly round ball when he smiled. “This is more like physics.”

  “Fine. You really like physics, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” He picked up my book from the table and flipped through it. “Actually, I had almost this same conversation with my teacher right after I read this. She didn’t understand me at first either.”

  “She? Mr. Anderson is a he. You really don’t notice much about people, do you?”

  “Not Mr. Anderson. This was in second grade. I wrote a book report about it.”

  “In second grade?”

  He put the book down. “Yeah. Back in Detroit, where we used to live, till last year. But I don’t talk about this kind of stuff anymore. Usually.”

  “Why not?”

  He shot me a look. “People don’t want to think about it.”

  “I can see why,” I said. “It makes my head hurt.”

  “Still, you did better than most people. You’re a pretty smart kid.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Gee, thanks.”

  * * *

  “Okay, Marcus,” the dentist chirped from the other room. “You’re up!”

  I watched Marcus slip into the big chair and begin to read his math book again, holding it up with one hand while the dentist worked from the other side. The fourth grader waited for me by the door with his sticker on.

  “Miranda, you can go on back to your class,” the dentist called. “Marcus is going to be here awhile. He can walk himself upstairs when we’re through.”

  So I picked up my book and hiked back up the stairs with the fourth grader. As we started down the hallway to his classroom, he stopped, and I waited while he peeled the sticker off his shirt, folded it, and stuck it in his pocket.

  Things That Smell

  For a long time, Colin was just this short kid who seemed to end up in my class every year. In third grade, he and I spent about a week convincing Alice Evans that velour was a kind of animal fur, and she refused to wear it for the rest of the year. But aside from that, we had never hung out together. I’d seen him with his skateboard in the park a few times, and he always let me have a turn on it, but that was all.

  And then suddenly he was everywhere. He came downstairs with me and Annemarie at lunch, or yelled
“Hold up” and walked to Broadway with us after school to get drinks at Jimmy’s sandwich shop.

  It was Colin who had the idea to ask Jimmy for a job. I’m pretty sure he was kidding. Colin was always saying weird stuff to people that made you partly proud to know him and partly wish you weren’t standing next to him. Attention-seeking, is what Mom would call him.

  “Hey,” Colin said to Jimmy after school one day in the beginning of November, when we were paying for our Cokes. “You’re always alone in here. How about talking to the owner about giving us jobs?”

  “I’m the owner,” Jimmy said. “And who’s ‘us’?”

  It was me, Annemarie, and Colin standing there. “Us,” Colin said. “We could work after school.”

  Jimmy grabbed a pickle chunk out of the setup tray, which I didn’t know the name of yet, and tossed it into his mouth. “I don’t need help that late. What about when I open up?”

  “We have lunch at ten-forty-five,” Colin said. A stupidly early lunch. At our school, the older you get, the stupider your lunch period.

  Jimmy nodded. “That works.”

  I didn’t think Jimmy was serious, but Colin said we should show up at lunchtime the next day, just in case.

  And it turned out he was serious. The three of us worked during lunch for the rest of that week. We washed a lot of greasy plastic trays, weighed piles of sliced meat (which is as gross as it sounds), stacked up sodas in the refrigerated case, cut tomatoes, and did whatever else Jimmy said to do.

  I guess it’s obvious that Jimmy was kind of weird, because no normal person would have given forty-minute-a-day jobs to three sixth graders. On our first day, Jimmy spent about five entire minutes pointing to a plastic bank shaped like Fred Flintstone that he had up on a shelf in the back room. “Never touch the bank,” he said. “Never.”

  When I pointed Jimmy’s weirdness out to Annemarie, she said, “Yeah, but he’s nice-weird, not creepy-weird.”

  “You think?” I said. “What about the creepy cartoon bank?”

  She shrugged. “My dad collects stuff like that too. Lots of people do.”

  It turned out that Jimmy didn’t intend to pay us any money. Instead, he let us each pick a soda from the refrigerator and make a sandwich from the stuff in the setup tray on the counter. The setup tray was just lettuce, tomato, onions, American cheese, Swiss cheese, and pickles. The other food—sliced turkey, ham, roast beef, and salami, a big tub of tuna salad, and meatballs in a plug-in pot—was off-limits.

  Every day, we took our cheese sandwiches back to school and ate them at our desks during silent reading period. I sat next to Alice Evans, who never complained about anything, and Annemarie sat next to Jay Stringer, who was oblivious to the world when he was reading, but Colin sat next to Julia.

  “Mr. Tompkin!” Julia said on the Friday of our first week at Jimmy’s. “Colin is eating his lunch at his desk again. And I despise the smell of pickles.”

  Mr. Tompkin looked up over the top of his book, adjusted his toothpick, and said, “Try breathing through your mouth.”

  Things You Don’t Forget

  Our apartment door was unlocked when I got home from school that Friday, which was strange. More than strange, actually—it had never happened before. But I figured Mom had probably just forgotten to lock it when she left for work that morning. It sounds stupid now that I say it, but that’s what I thought.

  Once I was inside, though, I had this sudden fear that I wasn’t alone in the apartment. I dropped my knapsack in the hall and ran down to Sal’s. He came to the door but opened it just enough to squeeze his body into the crack.

  “My door was unlocked,” I said. “Doesn’t that seem weird?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you forgot to lock it?” He stayed there wedged into the doorway. Definitely not inviting me in.

  “Yeah, probably.” I could hear the television behind him, blaring a commercial.

  “Okay.” He looked up at the ceiling behind me.

  I felt like an idiot. “Okay. See you later.”

  I went back upstairs, made myself a bowl of Cheerios with an inch of sugar on top, and turned on the television. Mom walked in around six.

  “You forgot to lock the door this morning,” I said.

  “What? No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, it wasn’t locked when I got home today.”

  “It wasn’t?” She started walking from room to room, opening drawers and closet doors, and I followed her.

  “It can’t be,” she said. “I would never forget to lock the door.”

  Nothing seemed out of place. She got to the kitchen and stopped. “I guess I don’t specifically remember locking it, but I know I would never not lock it….”

  She filled the spaghetti pot with water, and we talked about other stuff while she set the table and I peeled some carrots, but every once in a while she would interrupt herself to say, “How could I have forgotten to lock the door?”

  We were halfway through dinner when she suddenly stood up and walked out of the apartment.

  “Mom?”

  I found her standing in the stairwell, peering into the nozzle of the fire hose. “I knew it,” she said. “I would never forget to lock the door. Never.”

  The key was gone. We searched every room all over again but couldn’t find a single thing missing.

  “It makes no sense,” Mom said, standing over her jewelry box and staring down at the gold bracelets that had belonged to her mother. “Why steal the key, unlock the door, and not take anything?”

  That was Friday afternoon. I found your first note Monday morning.

  The First Note

  Your first note was written in tiny words on a little square of stiff paper that felt like it had once gotten wet. I was packing my knapsack for school when I noticed it sticking out of my library book—which was about a village of squirrels, or maybe it was mice. I had not bothered to read it.

  M,

  This is hard. Harder than I expected, even with your help. But I have been practicing, and my preparations go well. I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own.

  I ask two favors.

  First, you must write me a letter.

  Second, please remember to mention the location of your house key.

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

  I was freaked. Mom was freaked. She took the morning off and had the locks changed, even though she said that “M” could be anyone, that this had nothing to do with our missing key, and that the note could have been stuck in that book by anyone, years ago probably, and we’d never know why.

  “Isn’t it weird, though?” I said. “Our key was just stolen on Friday, and now on Monday we find a note asking where our key is?”

  “It is weird,” Mom said. She put her hands on her hips. “But if you think about it, one thing really can’t have anything to do with the other. Someone with the key wouldn’t have to ask where the key is. It makes no sense.”

  She was right, of course. It was backward. But somewhere in my head a tiny bell started ringing. I didn’t even notice it at first.

  Things on a Slant

  Our second week, Jimmy said we could start serving customers.

  “But first you have to learn the V-cut,” he told us. “Very important.” Except he said “Velly important,” stretched his eyelids back with two fingers, and bowed down low—it was the classic fake-Chinese act. I had never seen a grown-up do it before. If Mom had been there, she would have whacked him on the head with a plastic tray.

  “The V-what?” Colin said.

  The V-cut was Jimmy’s special way of cutting the sandwich rolls. “Always a forty-five-degree angle,” he said. He was very serious about it, sawing down one side of the roll and then carefully sliding the knife out and inserting it in the other side.

  The top of the bread was supposed to lift off in a perfect “V,” which was why Jimmy called it a V-cut. He gave us each a roll and watched while we tried it. Anne
marie’s was perfect. Colin’s was passable. Mine was a disaster. When I lifted the top off, flaps of bread guts were hanging down, and Jimmy said it looked “unappealing.”

  “You can use that for your own sandwich,” he said, making a face at my shredded roll. “Try again tomorrow.”

  So Annemarie and Colin got to put on aprons, stand behind the counter, and help customers while I counted the bread order in the back and went to the A&P for napkins. Annemarie said later that Jimmy should talk, that he looked “unappealing” in his stretched-out white T-shirt with yellow underarm stains. That made me feel a little better, but not much.

  As soon as Colin got his apron on, Jimmy started calling him “lady”—“Hey, lady, get some more mayo on there.” “Hey, lady, pass me those trays.” Colin just laughed, which is how Colin is.

  Every day that week, I cut my roll as soon as I got to the store, and every day Jimmy shook his head no. Colin and Annemarie worked together behind the counter—Jimmy had started calling them the counter couple and making disgusting kissing noises at them when he walked by, which made Annemarie turn red, while Colin just smiled like a goofball.

  Jimmy said that while I practiced my V-cut I could be in charge of hot chocolate. He used those Swiss Miss instant hot chocolate packets where you just add water. But no one ever ordered it. And I don’t think he really even looked at my rolls after the first couple of days. Anyway, they were only getting worse.

  White Things

  The first time I brought Annemarie home to our apartment after school, I wished for two things. First, I wished that the boys wouldn’t be in front of the garage. They’d just recently started saying things to me, different things, some of which included the words “sweet” and “baby.” Mom said this happened to girls after a certain age, and that what the boys wanted was a reaction, any kind of reaction.

  “Don’t laugh, don’t call them jerks, don’t take off running,” she said. “Do nothing. Act as if they’re invisible.”