When You Reach Me

Things That Heal

The next night after dinner, Mom and I went to visit Sal and Louisa downstairs. It was strange to be there, in a place I knew so well but hadn’t seen in so long—like how it might feel to look at my own face in the mirror for the first time in months.

Sal was sitting up in bed with one arm in a cast. Mom gave him a careful hug, and then she and Louisa went to talk in the kitchen. Louisa had dragged a table over to the left side of Sal’s bed so that he could reach it with his good arm, and there was a stack of sports magazines and stuff on it.

“Wow,” I said, “are those Tootsie Pops? Your mom went all out.”

He smiled, actually looking me in the eyes. “Yesterday at the hospital she brought me McDonald’s,” he said.

“McDonalds?” Louisa thought that McDonald’s was a giant conspiracy against the health of all Americans. “Oh, my God. I mean, why aren’t you dead?”

But that was a little too close to what had actually happened. He laughed, but I felt myself go red.

With his good hand, Sal shook the bag of Tootsie Pops out onto the table, found a purple one, and held it out to me. “Grape,” he said.

“Aw, you remember.”

But somehow that was also too close to the truth. I felt my head kind of buzz and was pretty sure I had gone red again.

“I remember everything,” he said cheerfully. He seemed to be in a great mood. He also seemed to have forgotten that we weren’t really friends anymore.

“You do?” I said, unwrapping my Tootsie Pop. “So do you remember why you don’t like me anymore?” I was surprised to hear myself ask, but once I had, I really wanted to know the answer.

“I still like you! Of course I still like you. I just needed to—I don’t know, take a break for a while. Ha! Break.” He gestured to his sling. “Get it?” He giggled.

“But why? I wasn’t the one who hit you!”

He shook his head. “Hit me when? What are you talking about?”

“What do you think I’m talking about? The day Marcus hit you. The day you bled all over your Yankees jacket—the day you shut me out!”

“Wait—who’s Marcus?”

I suddenly got how totally stupid I’d been, never telling Sal that Marcus was an okay kid. I thought of the day I’d seen Sal drop to the ground and pretend to tie his shoe. He probably worried about seeing Marcus on that block every single day. He probably woke up in the morning thinking about it. And I could have done something to fix it, a long time ago.

“Marcus is the kid who hit you that day on the street. The kid you were running from yester—”

“Oh!” Sal cut me off. He looked at his feet, which were just a bump under the covers. “Yeah, that kid freaks me out. He has it in for me.”

“He doesn’t have it in for you,” I said. “He really doesn’t. I think he was trying to apologize yesterday.”

He shrugged. “If you say so.” He looked at me. “But that has nothing to do with—with you and me. Really.”

“But the day Marcus hit you—that was the day that you stopped wanting to do stuff together. You stopped—”

He shook his head. “No. It was before that.”

And, very quietly, my brain said, “Remember? Remember the times way back in September, when Sal didn’t show up to walk home together after school? Remember how he said he didn’t have money to go out to lunch when you knew he did? Remember the morning you waited for him in the lobby until you were absolutely, positively going to be late, and then you rang his doorbell, and it turned out he’d gone to school without you?”

And then I remembered something else. I remembered running across Broadway holding my big Mysteries of Science poster, and seeing Sal on the other side, and yelling for him to wait up. And he had. He’d waited. And when I asked him why he wasn’t at our regular spot after school, he’d just mumbled something and looked at his feet, and then we’d walked toward Amsterdam in total silence. Until Marcus hit him.

Sal had started home without me that day. And it wasn’t the first time.

But here he was, today, looking right at me. And we still felt like us. “So when can we go back to normal?” I asked.

“That’s the thing, Mira. It wasn’t normal. I didn’t have any other friends! Not real friends.”

Neither did I! I wanted to say. And then I realized—that was his whole point. We’d only had each other. It had been that way forever.

He was still talking. “I mean, remember the second week of school, when you got sick? I spent that whole week alone. The whole week. Alone at lunch every day, alone after school… and don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I want to hang out with boys.” He yawned. “I’m on these pills,” he said. “For my arm. They make me kind of sleepy.”

“You could have just told me,” I said. “You could have said all this stuff before. I thought we talked about everything.”

“Not everything.” He looked at me in a groggy way. “Anyway, I gave you hints. You never got them.”

Mom and Louisa walked in. “I thought you might be getting tired,” Louisa told Sal. “These painkillers!” she said to Mom. “He takes one, talks his heart out for twenty minutes, and then falls asleep, like clockwork.”

She gave me a tight hug as we were leaving and said, “I’m glad you two had a chance to talk.” And I wondered if she’d saved the twenty minutes for me on purpose.