When You Reach Me (3 page)

1. Always
   have your key out before you reach the front door.
   

2. If a stranger is hanging out in front of the building, don’t
   ever
   go in—just keep walking around the block until he’s gone.
   

3. Look ahead. If there’s someone acting strange down the block, looking drunk or dangerous, cross to the other side of the street, but
   don’t
   be obvious about it. Make it look like you were planning to cross the street all along.
   

4. Never
   show your money on the street.
   

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 hurt 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 Richard would say. And I’ve discovered that most people I’m afraid of are actually very friendly.

“Miranda?” Mom calls from the kitchen. “We need you to keep time. This egg-timer ticking is driving me crazy.”

So I watch the second hand of the kitchen clock while Richard feeds Mom clues. Then Mom gives the clues while Richard guesses.

“Can I play?” I ask after about five rounds.

“Sure. Richard, you keep time for a while.” Mom stretches and peels off her purple sweatshirt. As it goes over her head, her hair falls free of the collar and bounces down around her shoulders. As usual, this makes me curse my nonexistent dad, who must be to blame for my hair, which is straight, brown, and just kind of
there
. I blame this stupid flat brown hair on my father, but otherwise I don’t hold any grudges against him.

In my book, Meg is looking for her father. When she finally gets to Camazotz, which is a planet somewhere near the Big Dipper where he’s being held prisoner, this evil man with red eyes asks her
why
she wants him, and she says, “Didn’t you ever have a father yourself? You don’t want him for a
reason
. You want him because he’s your
father.”

So I figure it’s because I never
had
a father that I don’t want one now A person can’t miss something she never had.

Richard is looking at the kitchen clock, waiting for the second hand to get to the twelve. “Okay, get ready—go!”

I look down at the first card. “Um, this is something you spread on toast,” I say.

“Butter!” Mom yells.

Next card. “You drink a milk shake with this, you suck through it.”

“A straw!” Mom yells.

Next. “It’s leather and it holds your pants up!”

“A belt!”

“It’s sweet—you drink it in winter, after you go sledding!”

“Hot chocolate!”

It’s good to play, to think of nothing but the next word and to have Mom think of nothing but the next words out of my mouth. We fly through the pack of seven words.

“You’re good at this,” Mom says when we finish with five seconds to spare.

I’m smiling. “I really think you’re going to win,” I tell her.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she warns. “This is just the speed round. The speed round is the easy part.”

*    *    *

The truth is that our hopes are already up. Our wish list is stuck to the fridge with a magnet Mom stole from work:

Trip to China

Good camera for trip to China

Wall-to-wall carpeting for Miranda’s room

New TV

And Richard has scribbled
Sailboat
at the bottom, though it’s hard to imagine where we would park it.

That’s the official list, anyway. Richard and I have our own secret plan for the money, if Mom wins it.

The day Sal got punched, back in October, Louisa came upstairs after dinner to have a conference with Mom in her bedroom. They decided that Sal needed a mental health day, which meant he was allowed to skip school and watch TV the next day.

So the following afternoon I walked home alone. I was doing a lot of talking in my head so that I would be deep in conversation with myself by the time I got to the laughing man. I was almost to the garage when I realized someone was walking right behind me. I glanced back and saw the kid who punched Sal. He was maybe two feet away, wearing the same green army jacket he had worn the day before.

I was about to panic. I always know when I’m about to panic because my knees and neck both start to tingle. And then, before I had really decided what to do, I turned around to face him.

“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 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.”

He nodded, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. But as soon as the fear was gone, I filled up with guilt. “Look at you,” my brain said, “chatting with the kid who punched Sal!” My brain has a way of talking to me like that.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, and I didn’t let myself glance back until I got to the corner. When I did, the kid who punched Sal was gone. That was when I realized that he must live in the apartment over the garage, the one with dead plants on the fire escape and bedsheets hanging over the windows.

I’d forgotten all about the laughing man. His legs were sticking out from under the mailbox, and I was careful not to wake him.

After he got punched, Sal started playing basketball in the alley behind our building. Our living room windows face that way, and I heard him dribbling his ball back there from about three-thirty to five every day There was a rusted-out metal hoop with no net that made a clanging sound whenever he hit it.

Sal and Louisa’s apartment is mostly the same as ours. We have the same rectangular bedrooms, the same pull-chain light in the hallway, the same weird-shaped kitchen with the same unpredictable ovens, theirs right below ours.

There are differences. Their kitchen floor is yellow and orange linoleum squares instead of the white with gold flakes that we have, and Sal’s bed is up against a different wall in the bedroom. But we have the same bathroom floor—these white hexagonal tiles. If I look at them long enough, I can see all kinds of patterns in those hexagons: lines, arrows, even flowers. They kind of shift into these different pictures. It’s the sort of thing a person would never try to explain to anyone else, but once, when we were little, I told Sal about it, and then we went into his bathroom to stare at the floor together. Sal and Miranda, Miranda and Sal.

Sal played basketball more and more and talked to me less and less. I asked him four hundred times whether he was okay, or if he was mad at me, or what was wrong, and three hundred and ninety-nine times he answered “Yes,” “No,” and “Nothing.” Then, the last time I asked, he told me, while standing in our lobby and looking at his feet, that he didn’t want to have lunch or walk home together for a while.

“Do you even want to be friends at all?” I asked him.

He glared at his feet and said no, he guessed he didn’t for a while.

I was lucky, I guess, that this was the same week Julia decided to punish Annemarie for something.

The girls at school had been hurting each other’s feelings for years before Sal left me and I was forced to really notice them. I had watched them trade best friends, start wars, cry, trade back, make treaties, squeal and grab each other’s arms in this fake-excited way, et cetera, et cetera. I had seen which ones tortured Alice Evans, who, even though we’d started
sixth grade
, still waited too long to pee and never wanted to say out loud that she had to go. These girls would wait until Alice was pretty far gone, jiggling one foot and then the other, and then they would start asking her questions. “Alice,” they’d say, “did you do today’s page in the math workbook yet? Where it says ‘multiply to check your answer’? How did you do that?” And she’d desperately hop around while showing them.

I knew the way the girls all paired up, and Julia and Annemarie had been paired up for a long time. Julia I hated. Annemarie I had never thought about much.

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 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 would disappear from school and show up two weeks later with satin ribbons worked into her braids, or with a new green velvet scoop-neck dress, or wearing three gold rings on one finger. She learned about sixty-percent-cacao chocolate, she said, in Switzerland, where her parents had bought her a lot of it, along with a little silver watch she was always shoving in people’s faces.

*    *    *

I still don’t know what Annemarie did wrong, but during silent reading period that Tuesday, Julia told her that, as punishment, she wasn’t going to have lunch with Annemarie for “the remainder of the week.” Julia was big on announcing things in a loud voice so that everyone could hear. So on Wednesday, I asked Annemarie if she wanted to go out to lunch with me and she said yes.

In sixth grade, kids with any money, even just a little, go out for lunch unless something is going on and they won’t let us, like the first week of school, when there was a man running down Broadway stark naked and we all had to eat in the school cafeteria while the police tried to catch him.

Mostly kids go to the pizza place, or to McDonald’s, or, every once in a while, to the sandwich place, which has a real name but which we called Jimmy’s because there was never anyone working there except one guy called Jimmy.

Pizza is the best deal—a dollar fifty will buy two slices, a can of soda, and a cherry Blow Pop from the candy bucket next to the register. That first day together, Annemarie and I got lucky and found two stools next to each other at the counter under the flag of Italy.

I found it slightly gross to eat pizza with Annemarie because she peeled the cheese off her slice like a scab and ate it, leaving everything else on her plate.

But she laughed at my jokes (which I mostly stole from Richard, who is bad at telling jokes but knows a lot of them), and she invited me over to her house after school, which more than made up for it. I would be spared an afternoon of listening to Sal’s basketball. And the laughing man might be asleep under his mailbox by the time I walked home.

Annemarie’s apartment didn’t involve keys. Instead she had a doorman who slapped her five and a dad who opened the door upstairs.

“Did your dad take the day off?” I whispered.

“No,” Annemarie said, “he works from home. He illustrates medical journals.”

“Is your mom here too?”

She shook her head. “She’s at work.”

Annemarie’s bedroom was about the same size as mine, but it had nice curtains and the walls were completely covered with all kinds of pictures and photographs, which I couldn’t stop looking at. There must have been a hundred of them.

“We’ve known each other for a long time,” Annemarie said, sitting down on her bed, which had some kind of Asian bedspread and about fifty pillows on it.

“Who?”

She blushed. “Oh—I thought you were looking at the pictures of Julia.”

That’s when I noticed that her room was covered with pictures of Julia. Maybe not covered, exactly, but there were a lot of them—the two of them in pajamas, or in the park, or standing together all dressed up outside some theater.

“Knock, knock!” Annemarie’s dad came in with these tiny sausages on a plate. “I’m on deadline,” he said to me. “When I’m on deadline, I cook. Do you like mustard? Try the dipping sauce. I’ll be right back with some apple cider.”

He was back in thirty seconds with a glass of cider for me, but he handed Annemarie what looked like plain water. She didn’t seem to notice.

Annemarie’s rug was spongy and soft, almost like another bed, and I lay down on it. Mustard always makes my lips burn, but I didn’t care. It was worth it.

Mom is getting very good at the speed round. She almost always gets seven words in thirty seconds now, no matter who is giving the clues and who is guessing.

The second part of
The $20,000 Pyramid
is called the Winner’s Circle because you have to win the speed round to get there. In the Winner’s Circle, the celebrity partner gives the clues and the contestant has to guess—not words, but categories. So if the celebrity says “tulip, daisy, rose,” the contestant would say “types of flowers.”

That’s an easy one. Some of the categories are harder to figure out, like “things you recite” (poetry, the Pledge of Allegiance) or “things you squeeze” (a tube of toothpaste, someone’s hand).

The last category is always incredibly hard to guess—maybe “things you prolong” or “things that are warped.” The last category is what stands between the contestants and the big money, and Mom says it doesn’t help that some of these celebrity partners are as dumb as a bag of hair.

If Mom wins her first speed round and correctly guesses all the categories in the Winner’s Circle, she’ll win ten thousand dollars. If she wins a second speed round, the Winner’s Circle is worth fifteen thousand dollars. And if she wins a third time, she’ll go for twenty thousand dollars. That’s what I mean by big money.

During the speed round, you can point or gesture all you want. If the word is “nose,” you can point to your nose. But the rules change in the Winner’s Circle. No hand movements of any kind are allowed, which is why I’m tying Richard’s arms to my desk chair. I’m using the clove hitch.

“You’ve got it reversed again,” Richard says, watching me. “That end should go
through
the loop….
That’s
it—right!”

Mom is looking at us like we’re crazy. “Is this really necessary?”

“She has to practice,” he tells her. “For when you win the sailboat.”

Mom rolls her eyes.

I get my cards ready—I’ve written everything out in fat block letters so Richard can read them from a distance. I’m going to hold them up one at a time behind Mom’s head, where Richard can see them. In the real show, they have these big panels that spin around behind the contestant’s head to reveal the next category, but obviously we don’t have that kind of technology.

Louisa’s lunchtime notes are good—she’s even written down what Dick Clark says at the beginning of every Winner’s Circle. He always uses the same words: “Here is your first subject…. Go.”

We set the egg timer for one minute. Mom has to guess the names of six categories before it goes off. “Here is your first subject,” I say, trying to sound like Dick Clark. “Go.” I hold up the first card so Richard can see it.

The card says “things you climb.” Richard nods and starts giving Mom clues.

“A jungle gym, a mountain …”

“High things?” Mom guesses.

Richard shakes his head. “Um … stairs …”

“Things that go up!” she yells.

He shakes his head again. “… a ladder …”

“Things you climb!”

“Ding!” I say, and hold up the next card.

“Okay,” Richard says. “Paris, cheese, wine …”

“Fancy things!” Mom yells. “Romantic things!” … fries …

“French things!”

“Ding!” Next card.

“A pillow,” Richard says. “A kitten.”

“Soft things?”

“… a cotton ball…”

“Puffy things—fluffy things!”

“Ding!” Next card.

“A baby carriage, a shopping cart…”

“Things that carry things?” Mom guesses. “Things with wheels?”

Richard shakes his head, thinks, and says, “A button.”

“Things you push!”

“Ding!”

The egg timer goes off. We all look at each other—Mom has only guessed four of the six categories. No one says anything.

“It’s okay,” Mom says finally. “We still have two more weeks.”