When You Reach Me

Things You Protect

Wheelie was running late. “I’m still working on the list,” she said, pushing some candy across her desk at me. “Have a seat. I’ll be done in two jigs.”

That was fine with me. In the two days since the accident, I’d thought about your notes a thousand times and tried at least that many times to push away the memory of your body lying in the street. I wasn’t sleeping much, and I was tired.

My first Bit-O-Honey was just softening in my mouth when two police officers walked into the office.

Wheelie looked up from her typewriter. “May I help you?”

“There a Marcus Heilbroner enrolled here?”

Her face stayed blank. “I believe there might be. But the principal isn’t in right now, and—”

“That’s okay. We just need a word with Marcus Heilbroner. Seems he likes to chase kids into the street, and we need to have a word with him about that. What room?”

She scratched her head. “I’m not—I’m not sure. I’ll have to look him up.”

That’s when I got scared. Wheelie knew every kid in the school, and she knew what classrooms they were in without having to think about it. She was afraid, I realized. For Marcus.

I stared at the backs of the two officers and thought about the things Mom had told me about people who go to jail, about how some of them were never the same afterward. I couldn’t let that happen to Marcus. He was barely regular to begin with. I thought of him shaking and crying on the curb after the accident, and how he’d tried to stop Sal from running in front of the truck, and how he’d been too clueless to realize Sal was running away from him in the first place.

“I need to use the phone,” I said to Wheelie.

“This phone?” She put one heavy hand down on top of it. “I don’t think so.”

“Please!” I said.

“No, ma’am!” From behind her desk, she pulled out a plastic tub full of index cards and started to flip through them while the officers watched.

“Let’s see,” she said. “Hillerman, right? Any idea what grade he’s in?”

They looked at each other. “Heilbroner,” one of them said. “Don’t you have an alphabetical list?”

“Of course!” she said. “But that’s down here somewhere….” Her voice trailed off as she started to roll her chair toward the file cabinets that stood along the back wall.

I left the office casually, as if I just had to go to the bathroom, and then I sprinted around the corner and down the dead-end hallway. In my mind was a picture of the dentist’s white wall phone.

The dentist was relaxing in his chair, looking very comfortable with a paper cup of coffee and the newspaper. “Hi, Miranda,” he said, sitting up. “You have the patient list?”

“Can I use your phone?” I called to him. “It’s an emergency!”

He looked surprised but said, “Sure, go ahead.”

I called my mom at work.

“I need help,” I said. “The police are at school and I think a kid is going to get arrested. A friend.”

“But—all the lawyers are in court,” she told me.

I started to cry. “Can you come, Mom? Right now?”

“Me?” she said. And then, “Yes. I’m coming.”

By the time I hung up the phone, I had the dentist’s full attention. “What’s up?” he said.

“Marcus is in trouble,” I said. “The police are here and they might arrest him and he didn’t even do anything wrong! If my mom can get here I think she can help.”

“Marcus is a good kid,” he said firmly. “A good kid through and through.” He calmly folded his newspaper and took a pen from his pocket. “So, Miranda, are you my runner this morning?”

I raced up the four flights to Marcus’s classroom, the dentist’s scrawled note in one hand, and burst in, yelling, “I need Marcus!” and waving the piece of paper in Mr. Anderson’s face.

“Calm down! What’s wrong with you?” Mr. Anderson stared at me, and I tried to stand still. He examined my note. “All right, Marcus, go ahead.”

Marcus nodded and started rearranging the pile of books on his desk.

“Leave your books,” I called to him. “The dentist says he needs you right now.”

Out in the hall I said, “You need to hide. The police are here and I think they want to arrest you!” I started running toward the stairs.

Marcus called quietly after me, “It would probably be better if we walked.”

He was right. Five seconds later, we strolled right past the police officers on their way up to Mr. Anderson’s classroom. They didn’t even glance at us.

The dentist locked the door behind us. Then he looked at me. “Your mom is a lawyer?”

“Sort of.”

“Okay. We’ll just sit tight until she gets here.”

The police didn’t come to the dentist’s office right away—it must have taken them a while to find it. Nobody seemed to be helping them much.

They knocked, and the dentist called out, “Sorry, I have my hands full here. It’ll be a minute.”

I was wondering what we would do when a minute was up. The dentist just sat there reading his paper. Marcus looked at his palms. “I wish I’d brought my book,” he said, turning to me accusingly.

“You’re welcome!” I said. “I’m trying to save you, here.”

“Does either one of you have a sense of what this is all about?” the dentist asked.

Marcus and I exchanged looks.

“I tried to stop him,” Marcus said.

“I know. He was afraid of you.”

He pressed his hands to his chest. “Of me?”

“You punched him! Remember?”

“I know!” Marcus put his head down on his two fists. “Oh, God,” he mumbled, “and now that man is dead. That old man. He was afraid of me too. Remember how he ran away from me? But I never did anything to him! I swear!” His voice cracked and his shoulders started shaking.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said quickly. “He—” But I didn’t know what to say. Because it was kind of his fault. Marcus didn’t mean for any of it to happen, but if he hadn’t run after Sal, and Sal hadn’t run into the street, wouldn’t you still be alive?

The dentist was staring at us. “On second thought, it might be better not to talk,” he said, nodding at the door.

Time crawled. The police waited, knocked, waited again, talked into their walkie-talkies, knocked again, disappeared, came back, knocked again, and then started calling out things like: “He better be in there when this door opens, doc.”

And the dentist called his own stuff through the door, about anesthesia and paste-drying time, and only having two hands. It didn’t make a lot of sense.

Marcus stared at the floor, which I’d just noticed was tiled with tiny white hexagons like the ones in our bathroom at home. My brain sorted the hexagons into the usual shapes and flowers. It was weirdly comforting.

Then, very quietly, Marcus said something. “I have an older brother. Anthony.”

I looked over at him.

“I want you to know why I hit your friend that day—”

“Sal! His name is Sal. God, why don’t you ever remember anyone’s name?”

The dentist shushed us.

Marcus made his voice even lower. “The day before I hit Sal, my brother Anthony said something about another kid’s girl. I think he meant it as a joke. But this guy got Anthony up against this car, and he was hitting him and hitting him….”

I remembered. Sal and I had crossed the street to avoid that fight. Marcus’s brother was the kid who had been trying to get off the hood of the car. Who kept getting knocked down. “I think I saw that,” I said. “Was your brother wearing a hat?”

Marcus nodded. “Yeah. He always wears that hat.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I was leaning in our doorway, watching. Afterward, Anthony said to me, ‘Did you even think about standing up? About helping me?’ He said I was like no brother at all.”

“Those kids are bigger than you,” I said.

Marcus shook his head. “It wasn’t that. I wasn’t afraid. I just didn’t see myself as … part of what was happening. Sometimes I’m thinking about stuff and I walk right past my own building. Those guys don’t see me as one of them. Because I’m not one of them.

“Anthony told me, ‘One day, you’re gonna have to hit someone. And get hit yourself. Then you’ll see. Maybe. Maybe you’ll understand life a little better.’ And I wanted to understand life better. To understand people better. So the next day, I walked over and hit Sal. And then I stood there like an idiot and waited for him to hit me back. But he just bent over and cried, and I didn’t know what to do, so I walked away. And Anthony yelled: ‘What the hell was that?’ And later, at home, he said, ‘What are you hitting short kids for? Don’t you know nothing?’ He said I was hopeless.”

I was trying to think of what to say when Marcus suddenly looked at me with his eyes all wide. “Hey! You were the one holding the poster.”

My mouth fell open. “You just figured that out?”

He nodded. “Interesting poster,” he said. “I’ve always wondered about yawns. I read an article once—”

Then there was a fast clicking sound that I knew: Mom’s heels on a hard floor. I shushed Marcus and pressed my ear to the closed door even though the dentist kept waving me back.

“I’m from the law firm of Able and Stone,” I heard her say. “Can I help you gentlemen?”

“Only if you have the key to this door,” one of the police officers growled.

She kept going. “I’ve spoken with the school secretary. I understand you want to talk to a student by the name of Marcus Heilbroner.”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Heilbroner, as you certainly know, is a minor. We can use the principal’s office for a few minutes so that you can brief me about whatever allegations have been made. But of course you can’t speak with Mr. Heilbroner himself until his parents have been notified. Would you follow me, please?”

One of the police officers swore, but the other one said, “Might as well. We aren’t getting anything done standing in this hallway.” And they all walked away.

“Thank God.” The dentist let out a long breath. Marcus stood up, but the dentist said, “Sit down. She hasn’t gotten rid of them yet.”

Another fifteen minutes went by while Marcus looked at the floor, the dentist paced, and I stared out the window. Finally we heard Mom coming back down the hall.

“They’re gone,” she called, “open up.” I yanked the door open, and there she was with her hair pulled back, wearing a gray wool skirt and a matching blazer.

I flew at her and grabbed her around her tiny middle, almost knocking her down.

I felt her hand on my head. “Let’s try to figure this mess out. Who wants to talk first?”