When (v5) - Rebecca Stead

I reached down, picked it up, and slowly turned it over. Inside was a small square of stiff paper just like the first three:

This is the story I need you to tell. This and everything that has led up to it.

Please deliver your letter by hand. You know where to find me.

My apologies for the terse instructions. The trip is a difficult one; I can carry nothing, and a man can only hold so much paper in his mouth.

I heard Sal cry out, and looked up. The truck driver was on his knees next to Sal, saying, “Thank God, thank God, thank God, it’s a miracle.”

On the other side of the street I saw Marcus, still hunched over on the curb and crying hard. I could see him shaking. Behind him stood the boys from the garage, so still and silent that they looked like a picture of themselves.

Sal was not dead. The laughing man saved his life.

You saved Sal’s life.

You were the laughing man.

You were the heap of something awful.

You are dead.

Difficult Things

That night, Richard stayed with me while Mom kept Louisa company at the hospital. Sal had a broken arm and three broken ribs, and he had to spend the night for observation.

Richard ordered a pizza. “Do you feel like talking?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “Maybe later.”

He nodded. “Just let me know.”

After dinner, I closed my door and sat on my bed with your notes spread out in front of me. “Think,” my brain said. “Think, think, think.” I got out my ropes, tied some knots, and tried to start at the beginning.

The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you .

The trip is a difficult one, and I must ask my favors while my mind is sound .

And then there was the strangest line of all: The trip is a difficult one; I can carry nothing, and a man can only hold so much paper in his mouth .

I fingered the notes, so small and brittle. Had you carried them in your mouth?

The trip is a difficult one .

Difficult enough to scramble a persons mind and leave him raving on a street corner? What kind of a trip did that to someone? Who would deliberately take a trip like that?

My mind began a little chant: “And why? Why, why, why?”

To save Sal. That’s why you stood on our corner day after day. That’s why you were always doing those kicks into the street—you were practicing . It was all to save Sal. Because, somehow, you knew.

Time travel is possible, Marcus said. In theory.

I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own .

“Well,” I said out loud to no one, “you saved Sal’s life, but you failed miserably with goal number two.”

Richard knocked on the door, and I jumped.

“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you might want to come out and have some grapes.”

Richard had brought me grapes. We watched some TV and ate a giant bowl of the most perfect tart green grapes in the world. They were definitely not from Belle’s.

It was nice, just sitting there watching TV together. My brain stopped asking me questions. I saw Richard glance over at me a couple of times, but he didn’t ask me any questions either. And that was nice, too.

When I fell asleep on the couch, Richard turned the TV off and said I should go to bed. But once everything was quiet, I couldn’t sleep. Your words were swimming in my head.

Please deliver your letter by hand. You know where to find me .

Louisa had told me that some of her old people died with nothing and no one. She said they were buried on an island somewhere north of Manhattan. I figured that was where you would be soon.

I was still worrying and feeling a little frozen when my bedroom door opened and Mom came over and sat on the edge of my bed.

“Sal is going to be fine,” she whispered, putting one arm around me. “The tests are done. He’ll probably be home in the morning.”

I didn’t say anything. I was afraid that if I spoke, I would tell her too much—I would tell her about the notes, Richard’s shoes, the two-dollar bills, everything. And I thought that if I did tell her, somehow Sal might not be okay anymore. So instead I just held on to Mom’s arm, and she stayed right there until I fell asleep.

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.

“Mc Donalds ?” 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?”