When (v5) - Rebecca Stead

It was too cold for the boys to hang around in front of the garage. There was hardly anyone out on the street at all.

The light in Belle’s window looked friendly in the late-afternoon gloom, and I thought of going in. I had been telling Belle the story of my book, a little bit here and a little bit there. I’d told her how Meg helped her father escape, and I’d described the first battle with IT, which is this giant, evil brain that wants to control everyone. I knew Belle would give me some vitamin Cs and maybe a paper cup of hot chocolate, but it was getting late and I didn’t want to have to walk down our block in the complete dark, so I decided to keep going.

At first I thought the laughing man wasn’t on the corner, but then I saw him sitting on the wet curb, leaning against the mailbox and just watching me walk toward him. For one second there was something familiar about him, and I noticed for the first time how old he looked. I thought about what Louisa had said, about how old people can’t get enough heat. Maybe I felt sorry for him. Maybe he reminded me of Mr. Nunzi from upstairs. Or maybe I wanted to do something good, to make up for being kind of a jerk to Annemarie, even if she didn’t really know it. Anyway, I spoke to him.

“Hey,” I said, opening my bag. “You want a sandwich?” I still had the cheese sandwich I hadn’t eaten at lunch. I held it out. “It’s cheese and tomato.”

“Is it on a hard roll?” He sounded tired. “I can’t eat hard bread. Bad teeth.”

“It isn’t hard,” I said. It was one of my best V-cuts ever, probably a little soggy now with the juice from the tomato soaking into the bread all afternoon.

He reached up with one hand, and I put the sandwich in it.

“What was the burn scale today?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said, pretending I knew what he was talking about. “I didn’t have a chance to, um, check.”

“Rain is no protection,” he said, looking at the sandwich in his hand. “They should have had the dome up.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

He looked up at me, and suddenly he seemed familiar again. It was something about the way his eyes took me in. He said, “I’m an old man, and she’s gone now. So don’t worry, okay?”

“I won’t.”

He nodded. “Smart kid.”

Things That Get Stuck

“Guess what?” I said to Mom when she got home. “The laughing man isn’t completely crazy. He’s kind of a CSP.”

“CSP?”

“Crazy-shaped person.”

“Don’t say ‘crazy-shaped person.’ And what are you talking about?”

“I gave him a sandwich today. He was sort of normal about it. Almost.”

“You gave him a sandwich?”

“It was a leftover. From Jimmy’s.”

“Mira, why in the world would you give the laughing man a sandwich?”

“What’s wrong with that? I thought you would like it!”

“You thought I would like the fact that you’ve struck up a relationship with a mentally ill person?”

“What relationship? I just gave him a sandwich!”

“We’ve talked about this, Miranda. I thought you knew how to handle yourself. It’s the only reason I let you walk around alone!”

“I just gave a sandwich to a homeless guy! You’re the one who works for criminals and hangs around with pregnant jailbirds.”

“Not everyone accused of a crime is a criminal, you know And besides, I’m not twelve.”

I pointed at her sweatshirt, which had a rainbow on it. “Well, you dress like you’re twelve!” I could feel the tears starting, so I grabbed two bags of the chips Louisa had brought over, went to my room, and slammed the door.

A few minutes later, she knocked and came in. “I’m sorry. You did a nice thing. I shouldn’t have blown up at you like that.”

“Why did you, then?”

She sat down on the bed next to me. “I don’t know. I guess it made me nuts, thinking you were putting yourself in danger. I like to tell myself that you’re always safe, but there’s no such thing, really, is there? I do trust you, Mira. I want you to know that. I just—I don’t want to make any more mistakes. I don’t think I can bear to make one more single mistake.”

“What are you talking about? What mistakes?”

She laughed. “Are you kidding? Where should I start? I’ve made about a million mistakes. Luckily, you outweigh almost all of them.”

“Almost all of them? Like how many?”

She smiled. “I don’t know. Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand?”

“So that just leaves—what? A thousand to go?”

“Richard wants to move in,” she said flatly. “He wants us to get married.”

And my brain said, “He does?” Then I got this feeling of… lightness. I was happy. “That’s great,” I told Mom.

“You think so?” She smiled for a second, and then her mouth dropped. “I don’t know. I just can’t… I can’t figure out if it’s the right thing.”

“Don’t you love him?”

“Of course I do! I don’t know if it’s the right thing for you, I mean.”

“Is that why you won’t give him a key? Because of me?”

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. I just feel stuck, like I’m afraid to take any steps, in case they’re the wrong ones. I need a little more time to think.” She stood up. “The water’s probably boiling by now. Spaghetti in ten minutes.”

Spaghetti again. We were kind of stuck, I realized. In a lot of ways.

Tied-Up Things

“You two have certainly gotten close,” Mom said the following weekend while she helped me tug the roll-away cot from the overstuffed hall closet. “That’s nice, right?”

Annemarie was sleeping over for the first time.

“Don’t you ever vacuum?” I said. “There’s dust bunnies behind all the doors.”

“Give me a break, Mira,” she said sharply.

“I mean it—I saw a roach in the bathroom this morning. This place looks gross.”

Mom glared at me. A whole angry conversation seemed to pass over her face. Then she said, “You know what? Do this yourself,” and walked away.

I pulled the cot into my room and lined it up next to my bed the way Sal and I always had. Then I wondered whether that was the way other girls did it. Was the cot supposed to be against the far wall? Should I make an L-shape with my bed, so that just our heads were together? I decided on the L-shape, stood back, adjusted the angle, and then went to get the sheets out of the bathroom closet.

* * *

Starting when we were really little, Sal and I used to beg to have sleepovers on the weekends, and lots of nights I fell asleep happy with Sal next to me on the roll-away.

But he was never there in the morning. I would wake up and see the empty cot with its tumbled-up striped sheets, and Mom would tell me what had happened—he’d woken up with a stomachache, or a headache, or a bad dream, and wanted to go home.

She’d hand me a tissue and say, “I don’t know why we keep doing this. Sal cries in the middle of the night and then you cry in the morning.”

A couple of weeks later, we would try again. And I always believed that this would be the time Sal would still be there in the morning. Eventually we stopped trying, and then those striped blue sheets made me sad to look at.

But they were the only ones we had that fit the cot. I tucked them in and went to Mom’s room to take one of her pillows. She was still being angry in the living room. I fluffed the pillow, placed it carefully on the cot, and stood back. It looked okay.

I was still standing there when the buzzer rang, and I got this clear mental picture of Annemarie and her dad in our lobby with the cigarette smell and the ugly ceiling light full of dead bugs. It was like a vision, almost.