When You Reach Me

Things That Turn Pink

It snowed a little on the second-to-last day before Christmas vacation. Snow always puts me in a good mood. Mr. Tompkin let us skip the math workbooks and spend the whole morning on our Main Street projects. Annemarie helped me start my swings. So far, the perfect day.

By the time we walked to Jimmy’s, the snow had stopped and the sidewalk was just slushy enough to make my sneakers uncomfortably wet. Mom had slept through the weather report, so I was the only one without boots.

Colin started to push open Jimmy’s door, but Jimmy jumped out from behind the counter and leaned against the door so it slammed in our faces.

“Hey!” Colin smiled, thinking it was a joke, and shoved back. But I could see Jimmy’s face better than Colin could. It wasn’t a joke.

“Get out!” Jimmy called through the glass. “Don’t come back here anymore! You’re lucky I don’t call the police!”

Annemarie put her hand on Colin’s shoulder. “I think he’s serious.”

“What?” Colin saw our faces and then looked up at Jimmy through the door. “What’s going on?” he yelled.

Jimmy had one foot up against the bottom of the door. He glared at us. Some people on the street looked over, but nobody stopped.

“Somebody stole my bank,” he said finally, his voice sounding far away. “One of you.”

Of course we told him, through the door, that we didn’t, that we wouldn’t. But there was no way he was letting us in.

We went to the pizza place and talked about who could have taken Jimmy’s two-dollar bills. He ran the place alone, aside from the forty minutes a day that we were there. Maybe someone had run in while he was in the bathroom, we thought. He usually put his Back in Five Minutes sign in the window and locked the door, but not every time. Sometimes he just ran into the back for a minute and if someone came in, they waited. Someone could have taken the bank then. But who in the world would have known to take it in the first place? It was a faded plastic bank in the shape of a cartoon character. It didn’t look remotely valuable.

“Let’s write him a letter,” Annemarie said. “Or no—we’ll get him a card!” She used her spoon to scrape up the last of her lunch, which her dad packed for her every day in a cleaned-out yogurt container. “Come on,” she said, standing up. “It’ll be my treat.”

So we went into Gold’s Stationery and bought Jimmy a greeting card. I wanted to get one that said With Sympathy, for Jimmy’s lost bank, but Annemarie said we should pick something that was blank inside. She picked a card with roses on it, which I thought was kind of strange, considering it was for Jimmy and roses are supposed to symbolize love. She said the card looked sincere, but I guessed that she liked it because it reminded her of her mystery rose.

“What do you think?” she asked Colin. She held up the card in front of him.

Colin raised his shoulders and dropped them. “I guess.”

Annemarie said nothing, but she looked like she’d been hoping for a more revealing answer. “Can you put this on my dad’s account?” she asked the cashier.

“Sure thing, Annemarie. Hey, where’s your pal Julia? Home sick today?”

Annemarie turned pink. “No, she’s around.”

The cashier smiled and handed Annemarie a spiral notebook with a beaten-up cover. Annemarie flipped it open and wrote her name and the date.

A charge account at Gold’s. I thought of the fat smelly markers that cost two-fifty each, the leather diaries that locked with little keys, the battery-operated fans that you could wear on a string around your neck on hot days.

“Hey, Annemarie,” Colin said. “Wanna buy me a pack of baseball cards?”

She turned pink again. “I can’t. I mean, I’m not allowed. Sorry.”

He shrugged and smiled. “No big deal.”

Sometimes I wanted to squeeze Colin’s cheeks until his teeth fell out.

After school, Annemarie and I went to her house. Her dad brought us some weird kind of thin ham rolled up so we could eat it with our fingers. We wrote on Jimmy’s card:

Dear Jimmy,

We did not take your Fred Flintstone bank. We don’t know who could have taken it (maybe someone came in when you went to the bathroom?).

Can we come back to work?

Signed,

Your employees,

Annemarie, Miranda, and Colin

I put the card in my knapsack so that I could slip it under Jimmy’s door the next morning on my way to school. Then we lay on Annemarie’s rug and planned all the stuff we were going to do over Christmas vacation: Annemarie wanted to start teaching me how to draw, even though I told her I was probably hopeless, and we were going to go to the movies, and her dad even said he would take us ice-skating in Central Park.

I tried not to wonder what Sal would be doing. I figured he’d be playing basketball right up until the first big snow.