When You Reach Me

“Latchkey child” is a name for a kid with keys who hangs out alone after school until a grown-up gets home to make dinner. Mom hates that expression. She says it reminds her of dungeons, and must have been invented by someone strict and awful and with an unlimited childcare budget. “Probably some German,” she says, glaring at Richard, who is German but not strict or awful.

It’s possible. In Germany, Richard says, I would be one of the Schlüsselkinder, which means “key children.”

“You’re lucky,” he tells me. “Keys are power. Some of us have to come knocking.” It’s true that he doesn’t have a key. Well, he has a key to his apartment, but not to ours.

“Okay, you win,” Mom said. “I named you after a monster, Mira. I’m sorry. If you don’t like your name, you are welcome to change it.”

That was so Mom. She didn’t understand that a person gets attached to a person’s name, that something like this might come as a shock.

Upstairs, she threw her coat on a kitchen chair, filled the spaghetti pot with water, and put it on to boil. She was wearing an orange turtleneck and a denim skirt with purple and black striped tights.

“Nice tights,” I snorted. Or I tried to snort, anyway. I’m not exactly sure how, though people in books are always doing it.

She leaned against the sink and flipped through the mail.

“You already hassled me about the tights this morning, Mira.”

Losing Sal [meant] that I had to walk home past the crazy guy on our corner.

He showed up around the beginning of the school year, when Sal and I still walked home from school together. A few kids called him Quack, short for Quackers, or they called him Kicker, because he used to do these sudden kicks into the street, like he was trying to punt one of the cars speeding up Amsterdam Avenue. Sometimes he shook his fist at the sky and yelled crazy stuff like “What’s the burn scale? Where’s the dome?” and then he threw his head back and laughed these loud, crazy laughs so everyone could see that he had about thirty fillings in his teeth. And he was always on our corner, sometimes sleeping with his head under the mailbox.

I have my own trick. If I’m afraid of someone on the street, I’ll turn to him (it’s always a boy) and say, “Excuse me, do you happen to know what time it is?” This is my way of saying to the person, “I see you as a friend, and there is no need to hut me or take my stuff. Also I don’t even have a watch and I am probably not worth mugging.”

So far, it’s worked like gangbusters, as Richad would say. And I’ve discovered that most people I’m afraid of are actually very friendly.

“Excuse me, do you happen to know what time it is?” My voice sounded almost normal. That was good.

“Let’s see…” He turned his head away and looked back toward Broadway like maybe there was a giant clock hovering in the air right behind us. “It’s three-sixteen.”

I nodded like I could see the invisible clock too. “Thanks.” He didn’t look like he was about to hit me, but still, my heart was pounding.

He pointed. “See that big brown building? Yesterday the sun started to go behind it at three-twelve. Now it’s about halfway gone.” He glanced at me. “Plus, it’s one day later, and it’s October, so the days are getting shorter.”

I stared at him. He looked down at his hand, which held a key. He pushed the other hand into his pants pocket. “I don’t have a watch,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Me neither.”

My first memory of Julia is from second grade, when we made self-portraits in art. She complained there was no “café au lait”-colored colored construction paper for her skin, or “sixty-percent-cacao-chocolate” color for her eyes. I remember staring at her while these words came out of her mouth, and thinking, Your skin is light brown. Your eyes are dark brown. Why don’t you just use brown you idiot? Jay Stringer didn’t complain about the paper, and neither did any of the other ten kids using brown. I didn’t complain about the stupid hot-pink color I’d been given. Did my skin look hot pink to her?

But I soon found out that Julia wasn’t like the rest of us. She took trips all over the world with her parents. […] She learned about sixty-percent-cacao-chocolate, she said, in Switzerland, where her parents had bought her a lot of 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 a 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, someone 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 getting back—before they left.”

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 Evanst 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 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.

As soon as Colin got his apron on, Jimmy started calling him “lady”—“Hey, lady, get some may 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.

After living there almost every day of my life, I saw our apartment as if it were the first time. I noticed all sorts of things that were usually invisible to me: the stuffing coming out of the sofa in two places, […] the big flakes of paint hanging off the ceiling, and the black spot next to the radiator where dripping water had stained the wood floor.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I’ll be right back.”

In the bathroom, I stared at the white tile hexagons on the floor and saw nothing but the crud in between them. I hid Mom’s twenty-year-old jar of Vaseline in the medicine cabinet […]

“I like you room,” Annemarie called to me when I came out of the bathroom. […It] actually looked okay: no curtains or carpeting, but normal stuff, a normal room with a friend sitting on the bed […]

Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except that this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way.

But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. Btu mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil for themselves. Then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore.

Julia leaned against the wall and adjusted her headband. “What I don’t understand is why you’re working at all. It’s not like you need the money.” Here she stopped to glance at me. “And no offense, but that place is kind of disgusting. I saw a roach there once.”

“I like it there,” Annemarie said. “It’s actually pretty fun.”

“That guy who works there is gross.”

“He’s not gross!” I said. “And he doesn’t […] ‘work there.’ He owns the store.”

“We don’t get paid,” Annemarie said softly. “It’s just the sandwiches.”

“And sodas,” I said, waving my Sprite.

“Right,” Julia said, talking just to Annemarie, as if I didn’t exist. “Like you’re supposed to be eating sandwiches and drinking soda.”

Annemarie’s face folded up a little. “It’s fine.”

“Fine,” Julia said. “Forget it.”

According to Jimy, there’s a two-dollar bill in circulation for every twelve one-dollar bills.

“But people hold onto them,” he said while I was putting on my jacket to go to the store. The lightbulb over the sink in the back room had burned out, and Jimmy didn’t have any extras. “People think two-dollar bills are special. That’s why you don’t see them around so much.”

Yeah, I thought. People like you! But I kept my face blank, because I wasn’t supposed to know what was in his Fred Flintstone bank.

“They hate ’em over at the A&P, though. No space in a cash register for a two-dollar bill. They gotta pull out the tray and store them underneath. And they always forget they’re in there. That’s why you have to ask for them.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask.”

Annemarie noticed her just then. “Hi, Julia,” she said, and a smile came over her face.

Julia smiled back. “Hi.” Then she turned to me.

“So, Miranda, how’s the playground going? For Main Street, I mean.”

[…]

Her eyes held mine. “I heard your proposal was approved. Congratulations.”

Congratulations? “Uh, thanks.”

“Will there be swing? How are you going to make them?”

It was dawning on me that Julia was showing me something, teaching me how to help Annemarie.

“Paper clips,” I told Julia. “I’m using paper clips to make the chains for the swings, and I’m going to cut pieces of rubber tire for the seats.”

Julia was nodding. “That sounds great,” she said. I could almost imagine us being friends, having this conversation for real.

I could have called out to Sal at that moment. It would have been easy. He would have had an excuse to turn around and start walking away from Marcus. And then Marcus might have stopped to talk to me for a minute, and Sal would have seen that it was all okay. He could have dropped his fear of Marcus right then and there. I’ve thought about this a lot, because I realize it would have changed everything that happened later.

Instead I watched. And what Sal did was squat down and pretend to tie his shoe. It was a plea for mercy. Dropping to tie your shoe was an I-can’t-fight, I-can’t-run, I-bow-down-before-you sort of move. Plus, just in case some hitting did occur, it protected important body parts. I kept walking while Sal crouched there on the sidewalk and Marcus walked right by without even noticing him.

“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? 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.

[…]

“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 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.

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 headache, or 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.”

Then I sat on the couch and closed my eyes. […] I pictured the world millions of years ago, with crazy clouds of gas everywhere, and volcanoes, and the continents bumping into each other and then drifting apart. […]

Now fast-forward. […] There are humans all over the place, driving in cars and flying in airplanes. And then one day one human tells another human that he doesn’t want to walk to school with her anymore.

“Does it really matter?” I asked myself.

It did.

I tried again. I pictured the world, all pretty blue-green and floating out in space […] I brought North America into focus, the United States, the East Coast, New York City. Kids are walking down the street toward school. One kid has green suede boots. One has a charge account at Gold’s. One has keys in her pocket.

“Does it really matter?” I asked myself.

It did.

On the way up, it hit me that it was truly strange to come over here without talking to Annemarie first. But at the exact same time I got nervous about that, I also got this other feeling, which I can only describe as love for Annemarie’s elevator. The wood paneling, the cloth-covered stool in one corner, the little bell that went off every time we passed another floor. It was all so nice and cozy that I thought it would be wonderful to stay inside it forever, or at least to sit down on the little stool and close my eyes for a while. The whole thing was beyond weird. And then the elevator stopped on Annemarie’s floor, and of course I got out, because that’s what people do when the elevator gets to their floor.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It’s like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would normally have done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to. It was like that when I asked Alice Evans to be my bathroom partner. I wasn’t one of the girls who tortured her on purpose, but I had never lifted a finger to help her before, or even spent one minute being nice to her.

She stopped squirming and looked at me suspiciously. “You have to go?” she said. “Really?”

“Yeah.” And in that moment, I wanted nothing as much as I wanted Alice to feel safe with me. “Really.”

“So Meg stands there and thinks about how much she loves her brother—her real brother, not the IT-brother who I standing there with his mouth hanging open and his eyes twirling. She starts yelling over and over that she loves him, and poof, he becomes himself again. That’s how she saves him. It turns out to be really simple.”

Belle surprised me. “Well, it’s simple to love someone,” she said. “But it’s had to know when you need to say it out loud.”

For some reason that made me want to cry. “Anyway,” I said. “Then they’re suddenly back home. They land in the vegetable garden outside their house, in the broccoli. That’s the end.”

I tried to think of something nice to say about all the ruffles. “Nice lamp,” I said.

She put her hands on her hips and looked at the lamp. “Really? Because I think it’s kind of ugly. My mom picked it.” She waved one arm across the room. “She picked out all this stuff. And she won’t let me put up my outer-space posters. […]”

Something very familiar caught my eye. It was on the bedside table, under the ugly lamp. It was my book—or maybe it was my book’s twin sister, just as old and beat-up-looking as mine, but with different creases and one corner ripped off the cover. I went over and picked it up.

[…]

That was when I noticed her Mysteries of Science poster leaning up against a wall. Hers was called “Is There Intelligent Life in Outer Space?”

She flopped down on her shaggy pink wall-to-wall carpeting, glanced at her digital clock, and reached out automatically to turn on the TV. And I realized that we probably spent our afternoons the same exact way. Except I can at least get my mother on the phone. Julia’s apartment is a lot nicer than ours, but I’m pretty sure there’s no phone in the closet.

I stretched out on the rug and rested my head on my arm. Julia looked me up and down. “Hey, you know what color your hair is?” she asked.

“My hair?” I touched it and made a face. “It’s brown.”

She looked at it thoughtfully. “No. When you see it in the light, it’s really more of a caramel.”

Caramel.

“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 want to hang out with boys.”

[…]

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

“Not everything. […] Anyway, I gave you hints. You never got them.”

I’m at the top of the second page when it dawns on me that this letter I’m writing is kind of a horrible burden. And I start feeling really sorry for Marcus.

It’s not a letter that most people would want to get. I know it will be a big relief to know he didn’t accidentally cause the laughing man’s death—your death—after all. That’s a good thing. But at the same time, he’ll understand that he saw his own death, which I have to think is a very hard thing. And he’ll also realize that he’s going to discover the secret of traveling through time, which is a thing so incredible that most people would consider it a miracle. Of course, he’s the total hero of the story. But there isn’t a happy ending for him.