When You Reach Me

Things That Smell

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.”