When You Reach Me (8 page)

“What did I tell you?” Jimmy said at lunch that same day, happily slapping the counter with both hands. “They never think you’ll actually count the bread. Never in a million years would they think you’d count!” The bread order had come up two rolls short. I’d counted it twice to make sure.

Jimmy swaggered over to the phone with a huge smile on his face.

“You just made his day,” Colin whispered. “Maybe his whole week.” He was folding slices of ham and laying them out neatly on little squares of waxed paper.

I watched Colin’s fingers as they picked up each piece of ham—he didn’t just smack them in half like I saw Jimmy do. Colin sort of bent each slice into a pretty fan shape. Once I started watching, I couldn’t stop. It was hypnotizing, somehow.

“I talked to Annemarie last night,” I said. “I think she’s coming back to school tomorrow.”

Colin nodded. “Good.” It was hard to imagine him sneaking around and leaving a rose on anyone’s doormat, but I guess boys will surprise you sometimes.

“Hey,” he said suddenly, “you know what? I’m sick of cheese-and-lettuce sandwiches.” He glanced guiltily at Jimmy, who was still on the phone talking about his missing rolls. “Want to go get a slice of pizza?”

We acted like everything was normal, making our sandwiches and wrapping them up like we planned to eat them at school. And then we ran to the pizza place down the block. It was crazy, but we felt like we were doing something wrong. We rushed back to school stuffing pizza into our mouths and crouching down low when we passed Jimmy’s window so he couldn’t see us. Somehow we became so completely hysterical that we were still having what Mom calls fits of helpless laughter when we got to school.

We must have sort of burst into the classroom, because everyone looked up from their silent reading to stare at us. Julia rolled her eyes.

“You’re late again,” Mr. Tompkin said. And then the whole feeling dissolved and we went to find our books.

I sat with my book open on my desk, thinking about the note in my coat pocket:
3 p.m. today: Colin’s knapsack
. Your first “proof.” I had to get a look inside Colin’s bag, to find whatever would—or wouldn’t—be waiting for me.

At three on the dot, I went to the coat closet and grabbed my knapsack to go home. Colin’s was just a few hooks away. I could hear him talking to Jay Stringer in the back of the room, near Main Street. Julia was standing with them, trying again to convince Jay about her stupid tinfoil UFO and how it was going to fly up and down the street on a stupid invisible wire. She still hadn’t gotten her project approved.

I reached over and unzipped Colin’s bag. There was his denim-covered binder stuffed with falling-out papers, a paperback, and the cheese sandwich he hadn’t eaten at lunch, soaking through its paper and smelling like pickles. Nothing unusual.

I felt around the bottom of the bag and touched some keys on a ring, resting in a pile of dirt, or maybe crushed leaves. I tipped the bag toward the light and saw that it wasn’t a pile of dirt—it was a pile of crumbs. Bread crumbs.

I patted the back of the bag, felt a lump, reached behind his binder, and pulled out two of Jimmy’s rolls. They were flaking all over the place. Colin must have grabbed them straight out of the delivery bag when nobody was looking.

I dropped the rolls back into Colin’s bag, pulled my coat on, threw my knapsack over one shoulder, and took the stairs two at a time. There was a mob of kids outside like always, pushing and laughing and standing around talking, even though it was still freezing and had started to rain. I took a minute to look for Sal, like I always do. No sign of him. I wound Mom’s scarf around my ears, turned north, and started walking up the hill to Annemarie’s.

It didn’t make sense. Not that Colin had taken the rolls—in fact, that was just the kind of thing I expected from Colin. But my brain was yelling all kinds of other questions at me: How could anyone possibly have
known
that Colin would take the rolls? And when had the note been put in my coat pocket? It didn’t occur to me that you could have left it there the same day you put the first note in my library book about the squirrel village. I didn’t get that at all, until much later.

And why
me?
I jumped a gutter full of rainwater and took the last steps to Annemarie’s building. Why was
I
the one getting notes? Why did
I
have to do something about whatever bad thing was going to happen? I didn’t even understand what I was supposed to do! Write a letter about something that hadn’t happened yet?

“Miranda,” my brain said. “Nothing is going to happen. Someone is playing with you.” But what if my brain was wrong? What if someone’s life really needed saving? What if it wasn’t a game?

Annemarie’s doorman waved me in. Upstairs, her father answered the door with an unlit cigar in his mouth and asked me whether I wanted some cold noodles with sesame sauce.

“Uh, no thanks.”

“Fizzy lemonade, then?” He helped me tug my wet coat off—the lining was all stuck to my sweater.

So I walked into Annemarie’s room balancing my lemonade and an ice water for her, along with a dish of almonds that her father had somehow warmed up. Warm almonds sounds kind of yuck, but in reality they taste pretty good.

Annemarie was still in her nightgown, but she looked normal. “My dad won’t stop feeding me,” she said, taking a handful of nuts. “And he won’t let me get dressed. He says pajamas are good for the soul. Isn’t that so dumb?”

I sat on the edge of her bed. “Is that the rose?” It was on her bedside table in a tiny silver vase, just the kind of thing they would have at Annemarie’s house.

She nodded and looked at it. The rose was perfect—just opening, like a picture in a magazine.

“I tried to draw it,” Annemarie said. She held out a little spiral pad of heavy white paper. She’d sketched the rose in dark pencil, over and over.

“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t know you could draw like that.”

She flipped the pad closed. “My dad shows me tricks sometimes. There are a lot of tricks to drawing. I can show you.”

But I knew I could never draw like that, for the same reason I couldn’t do Jimmy’s V-cut or get my Main Street diagrams to look good.

“Hey,” I said, “maybe your
dad
left you the rose.”

“Maybe.” She frowned, and I felt a little piece of myself light up. “He says he didn’t, though.”

“But it would explain how the person got upstairs, why the doorman didn’t buzz you.” I could feel my lips making a smile. “Your dad is so nice. It has to be him.”

I was miserable, sitting on the edge of her bed in that puddle of meanness. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want Annemarie’s rose to be from Colin. Maybe I couldn’t stand for her to have so many people, and to be able to draw and cut bread on top of that. Maybe I wanted Colin for myself.

Annemarie’s dad stuck his head through the doorway. “Anybody need a refill?”

“No thanks,” I said, even though my glass was empty and my back teeth were packed with chewed nuts. “I have to go.”

“Stay for five more minutes,” he said. “I put your coat in the dryer.”

So I had to sit there, thirsty, and then I had to put on my dry, warm, but still-dirty coat and take the elevator down to Annemarie’s lobby, where the lamps glowed yellow and the doorman remembered my name. It had stopped raining.

It was too cold for the boys to hang around in front of the garage. There was hardly anyone out on the street at all.

The light in Belle’s window looked friendly in the late-afternoon gloom, and I thought of going in. I had been telling Belle the story of my book, a little bit here and a little bit there. I’d told her how Meg helped her father escape, and I’d described the first battle with IT, which is this giant, evil brain that wants to control everyone. I knew Belle would give me some vitamin Cs and maybe a paper cup of hot chocolate, but it was getting late and I didn’t want to have to walk down our block in the complete dark, so I decided to keep going.

At first I thought the laughing man wasn’t on the corner, but then I saw him sitting on the wet curb, leaning against the mailbox and just watching me walk toward him. For one second there was something familiar about him, and I noticed for the first time how old he looked. I thought about what Louisa had said, about how old people can’t get enough heat. Maybe I felt sorry for him. Maybe he reminded me of Mr. Nunzi from upstairs. Or maybe I wanted to do something good, to make up for being kind of a jerk to Annemarie, even if she didn’t really know it. Anyway, I spoke to him.

“Hey,” I said, opening my bag. “You want a sandwich?” I still had the cheese sandwich I hadn’t eaten at lunch. I held it out. “It’s cheese and tomato.”

“Is it on a hard roll?” He sounded tired. “I can’t eat hard bread. Bad teeth.”

“It isn’t hard,” I said. It was one of my best V-cuts ever, probably a little soggy now with the juice from the tomato soaking into the bread all afternoon.

He reached up with one hand, and I put the sandwich in it.

“What was the burn scale today?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said, pretending I knew what he was talking about. “I didn’t have a chance to, um, check.”

“Rain is no protection,” he said, looking at the sandwich in his hand. “They should have had the dome up.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

He looked up at me, and suddenly he seemed familiar again. It was something about the way his eyes took me in. He said, “I’m an old man, and she’s gone now. So don’t worry, okay?”

“I won’t.”

He nodded. “Smart kid.”

“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.

“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 still 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.