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Chapter 13: The Winner’s Circle
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When You Reach Me, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Friendship
Coming of Age
Nonjudgment
Second Chances
Survival and Support
Summary
Analysis
Miranda thinks back to the previous fall, not long after she and Sal stopped talking. She is working on her playground proposal for the Main Street Project, a model city block Mr. Tompkins has his sixth-graders design each year when Wheelie, the school secretary, needs a volunteer to run errands for her. Miranda raises her hand; Wheelie always keeps good candy on hand as a reward for help. Miranda is surprised to learn that the school has an on-site dentist to serve kids whose families are too poor to afford it otherwise. She fetches and escorts these kids to and from the dentist’s office in pairs, reading A Wrinkle in Time while she waits for their cleanings to be finished.
As limited as Mom’s and Miranda’s finances are, it’s clear that Miranda is far from the poorest kid in school. As she notices and learns more about the world around her, her perceptions of herself and her own life necessarily begin to shift too, which is part of the process of growing up.
Active
Themes
The last person on Miranda’s list is a sixth-grader named Marcus Heilbroner. She is shocked when he turns out to be the kid who hit Sal. Marcus doesn’t recognize her, however. In the dentist’s waiting room, he into a chair starts reading a thick book titled Concepts in Mathematics. From its dense text, Miranda surmises he must be some sort of genius.
In the previous chapter, readers saw Mom working to figure out the connection between seemingly unrelated objects as she practiced the Speed Round. Miranda discovers that things in her life are connected in unexpected ways, too, when she realizes that the kid who punched Sal is actually a fellow student at her school. Moreover, the book that Marcus is reading suggests that he may be more interesting than Miranda assumed when she just thought of him as a bully.
Active
Themes
Marcus still has his nose in his book when he strikes up a conversation with Miranda about A Wrinkle in Time. He tells her that some people think time travel is possible. And he criticizes Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which for lying to Meg. At the beginning of the book, she’s talking with a friend in the garden. Then, the three women promise that they’ll help her rescue her father and get her home five minutes before she left. When Meg gets home at the end of the book, she lands in the broccoli. If she came back five minutes before she left, she should have seen herself waiting in the garden.
Active
Themes
Miranda is confused by some of what Marcus is saying and annoyed that he likes her favorite book. Who cares about the broccoli? It’s just a story, she says. True, he replies, but the physics theories it draws on are real. He wrote a book report about it, back in second grade when he lived in Detroit. Now, he says, he usually doesn’t talk about this kind of stuff because people can’t understand it. Miranda has done better than most, though, and he compliments her for being a “pretty smart kid.” The dentist calls Marcus to his chair and excuses Miranda to go back to her classroom. He’s going to be a while, he says, and Marcus knows the way back to class.
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