When You Reach Me (6 page)

“Ready?” Richard asks Mom. We are practicing even more now. He sits in a chair opposite her. I’m the timekeeper. Mom closes her eyes, and I know that she is lifting a corner of her veil. She nods, and we begin.

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 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. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore.

She doesn’t mean that it’s a real veil. And it isn’t about magic, or some idea that maybe God is looking right at you, or an angel is sitting next to you, or anything like that. Mom doesn’t think in those ways. It’s just her way of saying that most of the time, people get distracted by little stuff and ignore the big stuff. To play in the Winner’s Circle, Mom has to get herself in a certain frame of mind. She says it’s sort of like lifting one little corner of her veil, enough to see more than usual but not so much that she gets totally distracted by life, death, and the beauty of it all. She has to open her mind, she says, so that when the clues start coming, she can see the thread that joins them. Of course, if her celebrity is as dumb as a bag of hair, it’s hopeless.

I’ve thought a lot about those veils. I wonder if, every once in a while, someone is born without one. Someone who sees the big stuff all the time. Like maybe you.

Right before Thanksgiving, Colin and Annemarie were behind the counter weighing a slimy heap of sliced turkey into quarter-pound piles separated by pieces of waxed paper. Jimmy said they should do a whole week’s worth.

“Won’t it go bad?” Annemarie asked.

“Nah. Stuff’s full of preservatives.”

Colin licked his lips and said, “Yum, yum. Chemical turkey.”

“Shut it,” Jimmy said.

For once, I was happy to be counting the rolls.

Now that he had us, Jimmy seemed to have nothing to do. He sat on one of the stools bolted to the floor in front of the big front window and watched me with his arms crossed over his chest, his hands tucked under his yellow-stained armpits. He had already rejected my V-cut for the day—it was waiting for me on a tray behind Annemarie, getting dry as usual. Luckily, Jimmy didn’t limit our use of may onnaise.

“Lookie,” Jimmy said, pointing his chin toward the window. “There goes one of your little friends.”

On the other side of the street, Julia was walking alone, wearing her orange suede knapsack and an orange suede headband that matched. Matching suede knapsacks and headbands were probably all the rage in Switzerland, I thought.

“You mean Swiss Miss?” I grabbed two rolls and dropped them into the bag at my feet. “She’s not my friend. Not even close.”

He smiled slowly. “Swiss Miss. That’s a good one.” He stared outside for another minute and then stood up. “You’re funny, you know that?”

I shrugged, still counting, but happy. A compliment from Jimmy was a rare thing. When I finished, I folded the top of the bag and lugged it to its spot behind the counter. Jimmy had disappeared into the back. Annemarie was giggling at something Colin had said.

Ever since our foreheads had touched, looking at Colin made me feel strange. But good-strange, not creepy-strange.

“Eighty!” I called out to Jimmy. Right on the nose.

“Better luck next time!” he yelled back.

Colin looked at me and grinned, causing my stomach to sort of float inside my body. “He’s dying for the bread order to come up short, you know. You should throw a roll in the trash one day, just to make him happy.”

“Don’t listen to him, Miranda,” Annemarie said. “He’s just trying to get you in trouble again.”

But while she was talking to me, she was looking at Colin, and her expression was funny, as if her stomach might be floating too.

Annemarie and I stopped in the fourth-floor bathroom before going back to class after lunch. She said she wanted to wash her hands again after all that turkey.

“Today was fun,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror and combing her hair with her fingers. “I wish we got more than forty minutes for lunch.”

“I hate counting bread,” I said. “It’s boring.”

She laughed. “At least your hands don’t smell like chemical turkey.”

At least you get to goof around behind the counter with Colin, I thought. I’m always running to the store, cleaning up some gunk, or stuck talking to Mr. Yellow Stains.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I’m starving.”

Julia was standing right outside our classroom, almost as if she was waiting for us.

“Oh, no!” She sighed deeply and pointed at Annemarie’s arm. “Oh, Annemarie, your turquoise sweater. It’s your favorite. Poor you!”

And Mom thought
I
was dramatic.

Annemarie looked down at the hem of her sweater, which had some mustard on it. I had no idea it was her favorite.

“It’ll come out,” Annemarie said. “My dad will get it out.”

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”—I made air quotes—“‘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.”

Mr. Tompkin came to the door. “Why aren’t you three inside? Silent reading period started five minutes ago.”

As we walked in behind Julia, I whispered to Annemarie, “No wonder you don’t want to be friends with her anymore. She’s
so
rude to you.”

For a second Annemarie didn’t say anything. Then she mumbled, “Yeah, sometimes,” and we separated to go to our desks.

Mr. Tompkin had left a book on my desk. He was always trying to get me to read something new. This one had a picture of a spunky-looking girl on the cover, and some buildings behind her. I pushed the spunky girl aside, pulled
my
book out of my desk, and opened it randomly to see where I would land.

Meg was on the planet Camazotz where all these little boys are in front of their matching houses, bouncing their matching balls. All the balls hit the ground at exactly the same moment, every time. Then all the boys turn at the same second and go back into their identical houses. Except for this one boy. He’s outside all alone, and his ball rolls into the street, and then his mother comes out looking all nervous and carries him into the house.

I was thinking about how much Mr. Tompkin would hate the idea of a place where all the houses look exactly the same when something stung me hard behind the ear. I jerked my head up and saw Julia laughing silently over her book. I looked down on the floor and saw the rubber band she had shot at me. At my head.

I’d thought we were just irritating each other, but I was wrong. This was war.

The next time I saw Marcus, I was absolutely sure he would remember me. I was in the main office, because Mr. Tompkin had sent me down to pick up some mimeographs.

“Why you kids need diagrams of the water system is beyond me,” Wheelie said as she handed them to me from her chair.

“They’re for Main Street,” I told her. “We’re trying to make working hydrants.”

“Well, that may be the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, waving me away.

I love the smell of new copies. Mom says I have an attraction to dangerous smells, her main example being the fact that I love to stand in a warm cloud of dry-cleaner exhaust and take deep breaths. There is something very food-but-not-food about the smell of dry-cleaner exhaust. She always pulls me away and says that she’s sure in ten years we’ll find out that it causes horrible diseases.

I was walking back toward the stairs, quietly inhaling the smell of the thirty-two freshly copied diagrams of the New York City water system, when Marcus came out of the stairwell reading a book.

“Hey,” I said, but he walked right by me, past the main office, and around the corner to where the dentist’s office is.

Back in class, I passed out the diagrams like Mr. Tompkin asked me to. I accidentally ripped Julia’s before I gave it to her, and accidentally crumpled it a little too. Alice Evans was squirming in her chair like she was doing a hula dance. I rolled my eyes. No wonder she was the only sixth grader who had to bring an extra set of clothes to school.

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

“But people hold on to 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 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 was behind the counter with her apron on, looking happy. Some kids from school had come in—paying customers—and she was writing their names in mayonnaise on their sandwiches before pressing her perfect V-tops down onto them. Colin was next to her, doing the same. Annemarie gestured me over. I noticed that she was either very warm or she was wearing makeup.

“I’m going to ask Jimmy if we can have meatballs for lunch,” she whispered. “Since it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow”

“Great,” I said, even though I didn’t find those meatballs any more appealing than my usual cheese sandwich. They just sat there in the pot, day after day. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I told her. “If anyone orders hot chocolate, tell them to wait for me.”

There were no two-dollar bills at the A&P, and when I got back to Jimmy’s with the lightbulbs, the kids were gone and Julia herself was standing in front of the sandwich counter. Annemarie and Colin had started making their lunches already. Jimmy had said no, I guessed, to the meatballs, because they were picking through the cheese.

Julia, who was pretending I hadn’t just walked in, seemed to be in the middle of a long speech about how American cheese wasn’t even real cheese, strictly speaking. I saw her long fingers gesturing toward the not-cheese, and I knew instantly that her V-cut would be flawless, that by Monday she would be behind that counter with Annemarie and Colin, and that her apron, the same kind that looked gray and baggy on everyone else, would somehow be perfect on her. She would have a way of tucking it up to fit, some trick a waiter in Paris had taught her.

Then Jimmy came out from the back room holding a stack of dripping plastic trays. “You.” He pointed at Julia with an armful of trays. “Out. I already told you once.”

Julia snatched her hand back from the setup tray. Annemarie flushed. “We’re just talking,” Annemarie said. “There’s no customers here now.”

“Actually,
I’m
a customer,” Julia said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I came to buy a sandwich. I have money.” She stuck out one pretty boot so that the green leather tip pointed at the ceiling.

“Out,” Jimmy said, practically growling. “Now.”

After she left, I pretended along with Annemarie that Jimmy was a little bit crazy, but as we walked back to school with our cheese-and-lettuce sandwiches, I carried a new warm feeling inside. Jimmy could be a grouch, but he saw right through Julia, just like I did.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving there was no school, but Mom still had to go to work. I’d been trying hard not to think about them, but I spent a good chunk of that morning worrying about your notes. I held one in each hand and read them over and over. The part about writing a letter wasn’t too scary. The scary parts were “I’m coming to save your friend’s life” and “Oh, by the way, where do you keep your keys?” and “P.S. Don’t ever tell anyone about any of this.” Seeing my name written out on the second note was also pretty creepy, because I was still trying to pretend the notes weren’t really meant for me. And also where you wrote “I won’t be myself when I reach you.” I didn’t like that part at all.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of scary parts.

After a long time, I put the notes away and turned on the television. I had been watching TV for two hours when I heard Louisa’s regular knock.

“Potato-chip drop,” she said when I opened the door. She was in her uniform, holding up a plastic bag.

Louisa is always bringing Mom food from the nursing home where she works. She doesn’t steal—it’s leftovers from lunch, mostly little bags of potato chips or animal cookies. The health department says that once something has been served on a tray, it has to be thrown away even if no one touched it. So Louisa takes all the little bags home and gives them to Mom, who brings them to the pregnant-jailbird “parenting group” she runs downtown.

Once a month, Mom takes the subway down to this actual jail and talks to criminal pregnant women about what to expect after they have their babies. They all think she’s some kind of saint for bringing them potato chips and animal cookies. Mom says that jail is a hard place, and that it can make people hard, too.

“It changes them,” she told me once. “Jail stops them from becoming who they might grow to be.”

“Isn’t that the whole idea?” I asked. “It’s supposed to stop them from being criminals!”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. A lot of people make bad mistakes. But being in jail can make them feel like a mistake is all they are. Like they aren’t even people anymore.”

Her bringing the chips and cookies is supposed to help somehow. It’s not really the cookies, she says. It’s the fact that someone brings them.

I took the plastic bag from Louisa.

She smiled at me. “You know what? You’re getting tall.”

I leaned against the doorway. “You think?”

She nodded. “I miss you, Miranda.” It was the first time either of us had said anything about the fact that I was never at her apartment anymore.

“Yeah.”

Her saying she missed me made me feel sort of hopeless for some reason. When she left, I lay on the couch with the TV off and my eyes closed, and I listened for Sal’s basketball. Hearing it made me feel better, for once. That sound was like the last thread connecting us.

Mom didn’t talk much at dinner that night. She was still in her work clothes, a denim skirt and a T-shirt with a picture of a coffee cup on it and the words
Get Your Own
underneath. Richard had brought strawberries over for dessert.

“Darn it.” Mom threw down a strawberry. “SSO’s again.”

“I bet the grapes are delicious.” I gave her a fake smile.

“Don’t start, Miranda. I had a lousy day.”

“You did?” Richard’s eyebrows went up. “I didn’t know that.”

“How would you know?” Mom asked. “You were in court all day. It isn’t much to you if the copier breaks, is it? Did anyone ask
you
to type three copies of a sixteen-page document?”

Richard shrugged. “But you’re done now. It’s over. Why let it wreck your whole evening?”

“Oh, stuff it, Mr. Perfect!” Mom stomped off to her bedroom without even giving him a chance to tap his right knee.

Richard looked at me. “What did the zero say to the eight?”

I rolled my eyes. “Nice belt.” He’d been telling me that one for at least a year.

Later, Mom stacked the dishes in the sink, turned the faucet on, and went to change her clothes. I stood there and watched as the greasy saucepan overflowed onto the plates underneath. The oily water reflected the light and made the whole thing look like a sparkly fountain. Sometimes I can stare at something like that for a long time.

Mom came back wearing sweatpants and started washing the dishes. I opened my math workbook at the kitchen table. A minute later, Richard came in and said, “Didn’t I leave that extra pair of work shoes here a few months ago? I know they were in the closet, but I can’t find them anywhere.”

Mom’s head snapped up. “I knew it. I just knew it.”

We had been robbed after all.