When You Reach Me (4 page)

It was a while before I realized that the kid who punched Sal went to our school. We were working on our projects for Main Street, which is a scale model of a city block that we’re constructing in the back of our classroom. Mr. Tompkin’s class studies buildings every year. Mom says he’s a frustrated architect.

“Why is he frustrated?” I asked.

“It’s complicated.” She said it had to do with the war. “Teachers didn’t have to go fight in Vietnam. So a lot of young men who didn’t want to fight became teachers.”

Instead of what they really wanted to be, she meant.

Jay Stringer, who is a twelve-year-old genius and the head of the Main Street Planning Board, had already built an entire cardboard building, complete with fire escapes and a water tower, and he’d just started two phone booths that he said would have tiny doors that folded open and closed.

Annemarie was busy with her pebbles and her extra-strength glue, working on a stone wall for the park that Jay Stringer had approved the week before. Julia was making a tinfoil UFO that she said would fly up and down the street on an invisible wire. The UFO hadn’t been approved yet, but Julia was going ahead with it anyway. She had written
Proposal Pending
on a piece of paper and taped it to the end of a shoe box full of foil and fishing line. Alice Evans was trying to make fire hydrants out of clay, which so far just looked like pathetic lumps. Having to pee so badly all the time must have made it hard for her to concentrate.

I worked on the diagrams for my playground proposal. My slide looked too steep, and then too flat, and then too messy, because I had erased so much. I would have to ask for another sheet of graph paper, which always made Jay Stringer sigh and roll his eyes, because he brought it from home.

The classroom phone rang, and after he answered it, Mr. Tompkin asked if anyone wanted to go be an office monitor for a while. I raised my hand. The school secretary usually gives office monitors a few Bit-O-Honeys or Hershey’s Kisses.

I grabbed my book and rode the banisters down to the first floor, where I found Wheelie at her desk in the main office. She’s called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school. And she tries to do it without getting out of her desk chair, which has wheels, which is why everyone calls her Wheelie. She rolls herself around the office all day by pushing off the floor with her feet. It’s like pinball in slow motion.

“The dentist needs a runner,” she said to me, kicking herself over to a desk, where she picked up a sheet of paper.

It’s weird to go to a school for almost seven years and then one day discover that there’s a dentist’s office inside it. But that is exactly what happened. Wheelie stood up, and I followed her out of the office and around the corner to a short dead-end hallway I had never thought about before. There was one open door, and on the other side of it was a real dentist’s office.

We walked into a waiting area, and I could see into another room with a regular dentist’s chair. It had a little white sink attached, and one of those big silver lights over it. The walls were covered with posters about eating apples and plaque and brushing your teeth.

Wheelie called out “Bruce?” and a guy with a short gray beard popped his head into the waiting room. He was wearing one of those green doctor tops and he gave me a big perfect smile.

“Hey there. Are you my first appointment?”

“No, this is Miranda,” Wheelie said. “She’s your runner. I have the patient list right here.” And she handed me the piece of paper.

I saw a bunch of names and classroom numbers. “They go to the dentist at school?” I said. “That’s so weird.”

Wheelie snatched back the paper and said, “There are ninety-eight sixth graders in this school. Eighty-nine of them are in attendance today, so if you can’t do this politely, you can go straight back to your classroom and I’ll find another one for the job.”

I felt my face go hot and actually thought I might cry. Sometimes when I’m caught off guard I cry at almost nothing.

The dentist put a hand on my shoulder and smiled again. He was like a professional smiler, which makes sense for a dentist, I guess. “My services don’t cost anything, Miranda. Some families don’t have the money to pay a dentist. Or they could really use the money for something else.”

“Oh.” I was thinking I shouldn’t let my mother find out about this. She’s always complaining about how health care should be free for everyone. I bet she would have me signed up for the dentist at school in no time.

The dentist looked at Wheelie, and she forced a little smile and handed me the list again. Then she fished a warm Bit-O-Honey out of her pocket and gave it to me right there in front of the dentist, even though Louisa had once told me that you might as well whack your own teeth with a wrench as eat Bit-O-Honeys.

I set out with my list. “Don’t get the kids all at once,” the dentist called after me. “Bring them in twos.”

I decided to get the little kids first. I knocked on their classroom doors and their teachers came hurrying to see my note, and the kids were handed over to me. I walked the two kindergartners to the dentist’s office, read my book in the waiting room for a while, and then went back for a second grader and a fourth grader. It was a lot of climbing up and down stairs. Not in a million years could I imagine Wheelie doing this.

When I got back to the dentist with my second drop, one of the kindergartners was already waiting to go back to class. She had this big smiley-tooth sticker on her shirt. I brought her back to her classroom and then went for the last kid on my list, a sixth grader like me: Marcus Heilbroner, in class 6-506. I’d never heard of him.

I knocked on the little window in the classroom door, waving my paper. The teacher, Mr. Anderson, came over, and I showed him my list.

“Marcus,” he called, and a boy stood up.

It was the boy who hit Sal. He’d gotten a very short haircut, but he was definitely the same person. My brain started yelling at me: “It’s the kid who hit Sal! He goes to your
school?
The kid who hit Sal goes to your
school?”
And meanwhile, the kid had walked over to where I was standing with Mr. Anderson.

“Dentist appointment,” Mr. Anderson whispered. Marcus nodded, went back to his desk, picked up a book, and then walked right past me and out the door. I followed a few steps behind him. He knew the way.

*    *    *

“Welcome back, Marcus,” the dentist called from the exam room. “Nice haircut.”

The fourth grader was in the big chair, spitting into the little white sink. The other two kids were all stickered up and waiting to go back to class. Marcus sat down heavily and opened his book, which was called
Concepts in Mathematics
.

Mr. Tompkin acted like everyone in our class was part of one big happy math group, but it didn’t take much to figure out there was a system: red math books for genius kids like Jay Stringer, orange ones for kids like me who did okay, and yellow ones for kids who left the room twice a week to meet with Ms. Dudley, who did “math support.” Marcus’s book was different—thick, with a hard cover and small type. So I guessed that even though it was blue—even farther down the rainbow than yellow—it was at least the equivalent of a red.

“You like math, huh?” I said.

He looked up, and I got the strong feeling he didn’t know he had ever seen me before, that he didn’t remember punching Sal or talking to me about the sun.

“Yeah,” he said slowly, like I might be stupid or something. “I like math.” And he went back to reading.

I delivered the two waiting kids back to their classes. One of them was holding a shiny paper card shaped like an apple that said she needed a follow-up visit. There was a line for her mom to sign. “Cavity,” I thought grimly.

When I got back to the dentist’s office, the fourth grader was still in the chair and Marcus was still reading his math book. That was fine with me—I grabbed my book from the table where I’d left it and settled back to read.

“Some people think it’s possible, you know,” Marcus mumbled.

“What?”

He pointed at my book. “Time travel. Some people think it’s possible. Except those ladies lied, at the beginning of the book.”

“What?”

“Those ladies in the book—Mrs. What, Mrs. Where, and Mrs. Who.”

“Mrs. What
sit
, Mrs. Who, and Mrs.
Which
,” I corrected him.

He shrugged.

“What do you mean, they lied? They never lied.” I was getting annoyed. The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my book. It’s like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.

“Don’t you remember?” He leaned forward in his chair. “They’re traveling through time, right? All over the universe, right? And they promise that girl that they’ll have her back home five minutes before she left. But they don’t.”

“How do
you
know they don’t get her home five minutes before she left? I mean, there’s no clock or anything. They leave at night and they get back the same night. Maybe they left at eight-thirty and got home at eight-twenty-five.”

He laughed. “You don’t need a
clock
. Think. At the beginning of the book, that girl walks through the vegetable garden—”

“Meg.”

“Huh?”

“You keep saying ‘that girl.’ Her name is Meg.”

“—so she walks to the far side of the vegetable garden and sits on this stone wall, right? So, she can
see
the garden from where she’s sitting and talking with that boy right? And then those ladies show up and take them away.”

“His name is Calvin. And so what if they can see the garden?”

“So the
garden
is where they appear when they get back home at the end of the book. Remember? They land in the broccoli. So if they
had
gotten home five minutes before they left, like those ladies
promised
they would, then they would have seen themselves get back. Before they left.”

I put my book down and shook my head. “Think about it. They hadn’t even left yet. How could they have gotten back already? They didn’t even know for sure whether they
would
get back.”

“It doesn’t matter whether they knew it. That’s got nothing to do with it.” He leaned back and shoved his hands in his pockets. “If they land in the broccoli at eight-twenty-five, they should be in the broccoli at eight-twenty-five. Period.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. “What if they couldn’t do it—save Meg’s father and get back in one piece?”

“Then they wouldn’t have landed in the broccoli at all. But they did do it, right?”

“Yes, but—the end can’t happen before the middle!”

He smiled. “Why can’t 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 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 somebody 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 get back—before they left.”

I gave up. “It was dark in the garden,” I said. “Maybe they just couldn’t see themselves from where they were sitting.”

“I thought of that,” he said. “But they would have heard all the yelling, and the dog—”

“My God, what does it
matter?
It’s a
story
—someone made it up! You do realize that, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “The story is made up. But time travel is possible. In theory. I’ve read some articles about it.”

“Wow. You really
do
like math, don’t you?”

He smiled again. With his supershort hair, his head looked like a perfectly round ball when he smiled. “This is more like physics.”

“Fine. You really like
physics
, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” He picked up my book from the table and flipped through it. “Actually, I had almost this same conversation with my teacher right after I read this. She didn’t understand me at first either.”

“She? Mr. Anderson is a
he
. You really don’t notice much about people, do you?”

“Not Mr. Anderson. This was in second grade. I wrote a book report about it.”

“In second grade?”

He put the book down. “Yeah. Back in Detroit, where we used to live, till last year. But I don’t talk about this kind of stuff anymore. Usually.”

“Why not?”

He shot me a look. “People don’t want to think about it.”

“I can see why,” I said. “It makes my head hurt.”

“Still, you did better than most people. You’re a pretty smart kid.”

I rolled my eyes. “Gee, thanks.”

*    *    *

“Okay, Marcus,” the dentist chirped from the other room. “You’re up!”

I watched Marcus slip into the big chair and begin to read his math book again, holding it up with one hand while the dentist worked from the other side. The fourth grader waited for me by the door with his sticker on.

“Miranda, you can go on back to your class,” the dentist called. “Marcus is going to be here awhile. He can walk himself upstairs when we’re through.”

So I picked up my book and hiked back up the stairs with the fourth grader. As we started down the hallway to his classroom, he stopped, and I waited while he peeled the sticker off his shirt, folded it, and stuck it in his pocket.

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 Evans 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 had 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.

It was Colin who had the idea to ask Jimmy for a job. I’m pretty sure he was kidding. Colin was always saying weird stuff to people that made you partly proud to know him and partly wish you weren’t standing next to him. Attention-seeking, is what Mom would call him.

“Hey,” Colin said to Jimmy after school one day in the beginning of November, when we were paying for our Cokes. “You’re always alone in here. How about talking to the owner about giving us jobs?”

“I’m the owner,” Jimmy said. “And who’s ‘us’?”

It was me, Annemarie, and Colin standing there. “Us,” Colin said. “We could work after school.”

Jimmy grabbed a pickle chunk out of the setup tray, which I didn’t know the name of yet, and tossed it into his mouth. “I don’t need help that late. What about when I open up?”

“We have lunch at ten-forty-five,” Colin said. A stupidly early lunch. At our school, the older you get, the stupider your lunch period.

Jimmy nodded. “That works.”

I didn’t think Jimmy was serious, but Colin said we should show up at lunchtime the next day, just in case.

And it turned out he was serious. The three of us worked during lunch for the rest of that week. We washed a lot of greasy plastic trays, weighed piles of sliced meat (which is as gross as it sounds), stacked up sodas in the refrigerated case, cut tomatoes, and did whatever else Jimmy said to do.

I guess it’s obvious that Jimmy was kind of weird, because no normal person would have given forty-minute-a-day jobs to three sixth graders. On our first day, Jimmy spent about five entire minutes pointing to a plastic bank shaped like Fred Flintstone that he had up on a shelf in the back room. “Never touch the bank,” he said. “Never.”

When I pointed Jimmy’s weirdness out to Annemarie, she said, “Yeah, but he’s nice-weird, not creepy-weird.”

“You think?” I said. “What about the creepy cartoon bank?”

She shrugged. “My dad collects stuff like that too. Lots of people do.”

It turned out that Jimmy didn’t intend to pay us any money. Instead, he let us each pick a soda from the refrigerator and make a sandwich from the stuff in the setup tray on the counter. The setup tray was just lettuce, tomato, onions, American cheese, Swiss cheese, and pickles. The other food—sliced turkey, ham, roast beef, and salami, a big tub of tuna salad, and meatballs in a plug-in pot—was off-limits.

Every day, we took our cheese sandwiches back to school and ate them at our desks during silent reading period. I sat next to Alice Evans, who never complained about anything, and Annemarie sat next to Jay Stringer, who was oblivious to the world when he was reading, but Colin sat next to Julia.

“Mr. Tompkin!” Julia said on the Friday of our first week at Jimmy’s. “Colin is eating his lunch at his desk
again
. And I
despise
the smell of pickles.”

Mr. Tompkin looked up over the top of his book, adjusted his toothpick, and said, “Try breathing through your mouth.”