When You Reach Me

White Things

The first time I brought Annemarie home to our apartment after school, I wished for two things. First, I wished that the boys wouldn’t be in front of the garage. They’d just recently started saying things to me, different things, some of which included the words “sweet” and “baby.” Mom said this happened to girls after a certain age, and that what the boys wanted was a reaction, any kind of reaction.

“Don’t laugh, don’t call them jerks, don’t take off running,” she said. “Do nothing. Act as if they’re invisible.”

My second wish was that the laughing man would be gone, or asleep, or at least distracted by someone or something else when we walked by.

We got to Broadway. “Want to stop for a soda?” I said.

Annemarie shrugged. “No thanks.”

We started toward Amsterdam. I tried to follow Annemarie’s conversation but mostly just squinted to see down the block. By some miracle, the boys weren’t out in front of the garage. I offered up a silent thank you to the universe. And then we started across the street to my corner.

“Angel!” the laughing man called out. He was looking right at Annemarie, and I couldn’t help thinking that, depending on your idea of heaven, Annemarie might appear to be something like an angel. Her coat was pure white and went all the way down to her toes, even though it was only the middle of November and really not all that cold. How her dad kept that coat so clean is still a mystery to me.

“Angel!”

I laughed. I was trying to show Annemarie how absolutely downright funny it was to have a weird homeless guy here on my corner. My very own weird homeless guy!

“Ha. ‘Angel,’” I said. “That’s a new one.”

“Angel!” he called out again. And now he was pointing at her.

“Is he pointing at me?” Annemarie asked, slowing down.

“No,” I said, steering her as far from the laughing man as I could without pushing her into crosstown traffic.

Upstairs, a weird thing happened. 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 burns from Mr. Nunzi’s cigarettes, 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 Moms twenty-year-old jar of Vaseline in the medicine cabinet that’s been painted so many times it won’t close anymore.

“I like your room,” Annemarie called to me when I came out of the bathroom. I turned slowly and looked into my room, wondering what horror I would see in it. But it actually looked okay: no curtains or carpeting, but normal stuff, a normal room with a friend sitting on the bed, which had just one pillow. I stepped in and closed the door behind me.

When Mom got home, we walked Annemarie back to her building. Luckily, the laughing man was under his mailbox by that time. I wanted Mom to be surprised when Annemarie’s doorman called me Miss Miranda, but she just smiled at him.

I could tell that Annemarie’s dad was charmed by Mom—people always like her. He offered us some kind of powdered-sugar dough balls he had in the kitchen, and Mom ate two of them while I said no thank you, that I hadn’t had my dinner yet, which made Mom laugh and cough up powdered sugar, which made Annemarie’s dad laugh. I looked at the sugar on the front of her T-shirt and thought that if she had the slightest idea what she looked like, she wouldn’t be laughing at all.