When You Reach Me Chapter 13: The Winner’s Circle Summary & Analysis

In the present, Mom starts practicing the Winner’s Circle round for her appearance on The $20,000 Pyramid. In this round, the celebrities have to get the contestants to guess a general category by giving them a list of words. Some categories, like “types of flowers,” are easy. But most are much harder. Miranda ties Richard’s hands to the chair so he can’t gesture. Then, doing her best impression of the gameshow’s host, Dick Clark, she sets the egg timer for 60 seconds and starts holding up category cards behind Mom’s head. Mom correctly guesses four categories—“things you climb,” “French things,” “Fluffy things,” and “things you push”—before the timer goes off. It’s a good start, but to beat the Winner’s Circle, she’ll have to correctly guess six categories in 60 seconds.

Even the gameshow that Mom is preparing to go on carries a kind of symbolic resonance to the events unfolding in Miranda’s life, even if she doesn’t see the connection yet. The first round is simple because it only requires the contestant to name individual words. But to really win, the contestant must grasp the connection between things that may not seem to be connected, just as Miranda is trying to do as she drafts bits and pieces of her potential letter. She’s trying to find the threads that are connected to the central incident of the story (which she has yet to describe). And sometimes it’s hard to understand how one thing is connected to another.

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When You Reach Me: Chapter 13: The Winner’s Circle Summary & Analysis