When You Reach Me

Things That

Turn Upside Down

That afternoon, Sal brought Colin home after school. I saw them up ahead of me, taking turns on Colin’s skateboard. One would ride, and the other would bounce Sal’s basketball—they were circling each other and laughing and racing around and I wanted to be part of it so much that my heart almost broke watching. I decided to stop off at Belle’s.

Belle picked up the economy jug of chewable vitamin C she kept behind the register and shook it at me. I nodded, and she tipped four of them into my hand.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Not much.”

“Got some time for the story?”

“Sure. Where were we?”

“Aunt Beast.”

“Right. Aunt Beast. So Aunt Beast’s planet is perfect—it smells great and the food is wonderful and everything is soft and comfortable. But Meg can’t stay there. She has to go back and save her little brother. They left him behind, with IT, remember?”

Belle nodded. “She has to go back by herself?”

“Yes. She’s the only one who can do it, because she’s closer to her brother than anyone. It has to be her.”

Belle nodded.

“So she goes back there, to Camazotz, and her brother is totally under ITs control, and he’s saying all these awful things to her. And IT is trying to suck her in too, to take over her brain. She’s trying to resist, but it’s hard. And then, at the last second, she figures out that there’s only one thing that can defeat IT: love. IT doesn’t understand love.”

“Ooh,” Belle said. “That’s deep.”

“So Meg stands there and thinks about how much she loves her brother—her real brother, not the IT-brother who is standing there with his mouth hanging open and his eyes twirling. She starts yelling over and over that she loves him, and poof, he becomes himself again. That’s how she saves him. It turns out to be really simple.”

Belle surprised me. “Well, it’s simple to love someone,” she said. “But it’s hard to know when you need to say it out loud.”

For some reason that made me want to cry. “Anyway,” I said. “Then they’re suddenly back home. They land in the vegetable garden outside their house, in the broccoli. That’s the end.”

Of course I couldn’t help thinking of what Marcus had said, about how if they’d gotten home five minutes before they left, they would have seen themselves get back home before they even knew they were going. But it was better not to drag Belle into all that.

“What’s the name of this writer again?”

I spelled it out for her.

Belle had to ring up a few kids buying their after-school junk food, so I wandered around the store. I was thinking I would swipe a few grapes, but they looked old and soft. I took a bottle of chocolate milk out of the refrigerator, checked the date on it, and brought it up to the register with a five-dollar bill I had taken from Mom’s coat pocket that morning.

“Weirdest thing,” Belle said, taking my five. “You see that guy out there?” She pointed through her front window and across the street to where the laughing man was pacing back and forth on my corner, doing his kicks.

“Yeah.”

“Well, check this out.” She lifted the plastic tray out of the register drawer, and I looked in. It was full of two-dollar bills. Wavy, bent-looking two-dollar bills.

“A couple weeks ago, that guy out there suddenly starts coming in every day to get a butter-on-white and a banana, and he always pays with these two-dollar bills.”

I was staring into the drawer.

“You want a couple for your change?” Belle asked.

I nodded, and she handed them to me. “Sorry,” she said, smoothing them out, “they’re crumpled. He gives them to me all folded up into triangles, if you can believe it. The first time, I didn’t even think it was real money. I started telling the guy to get lost!”

My brain was doing that thing where it yells at me. It was yelling, “The laughing man stole Jimmy’s Fred Flintstone bank? The laughing man?”

“The guy is looney,” Belle said thoughtfully, “but also generally polite. Polite is always worth something.”

When I walked by him a minute later, the laughing man was shaking his fist at the sky and kicking his legs out into the traffic rushing up Amsterdam Avenue. A few cars honked at him. When he saw me, he pointed and yelled, “Smart kid! Smart kid!”

I popped my last two vitamin Cs and imagined the wrapped-in-a-blanket feeling I’d had when Mom was with me. Then I calmly walked by the laughing man, thinking, Yeah, really polite.

Colin and Sal were in the lobby, making a total racket with the skateboard and the basketball so that any second Mrs. Bindocker would probably come charging out of her apartment, yelling that they were scaring her cat.

“Hey!” Colin said when he saw me. “I thought you lived in this building. Want to skate a little?” He picked up his skateboard and held it out to me.

I glanced at Sal, who was concentrating on his basket ball like the whole concept of bouncing had just been invented and was really very amazing and deserving of attention. He had developed a way of waving at me without making eye contact—it was kind of like a no-look pass.

“No thanks,” I said, “I have to go.”

But Colin is Colin. If he can read a vibe, he never lets on. “Can I see your place?” he said. “We’re shooting baskets in the back—have you been back there? It’s cool. Want to come hang out?”

I told Colin that my mother was sick upstairs, and that I was just rushing home from the store.

“You got her chocolate milk?” he asked, pointing at the bottle in my hand.

“Yeah.” I headed for the stairs. “She loves it.” And I sprinted up to the second floor before he could say anything else.

When I unlocked our door, the apartment felt like a warm hug—the refrigerator was humming, the light was streaming through the living room windows, and the voice in my head said “Safe” and then got quiet. I went to the kitchen, opened my chocolate milk, and took the last bag of Lay’s. Those pregnant jailbirds were out of luck.

Then the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Have I reached the Sinclair residence? May I please speak with Miranda?”

I rolled my eyes. “Hi, Julia,” I said. “It’s me.”

That first time, we only talked for five minutes. Julia said her mom had a recipe for a flourless cake we could make for Annemarie’s birthday. Without knowing whether I really wanted to, I agreed to go over and make a practice cake with her after school the next day.

It was dark outside when there was a tap at the door. I sat up on the couch. A tap on the door was a strange thing. Everyone rings our doorbell, except for Louisa, who always knocks her regular knock. I was afraid—your notes had done that to me.

Another tap.

“Hello?” I called.

Silence. I got up and looked through the peephole.

Colin stood there, holding his skateboard in front of him like a shield, looking not exactly like himself.

I opened the door. “What’s wrong?”

He took two steps forward and kind of hovered right in front of me for a second, and then he kissed me. And then he stopped and waited. And then I kissed him back. He smiled and ran down the stairs.

There are days when everything changes, and this was one of those days.