When (v5) - Rebecca Stead

And then I remembered something else. I remembered running across Broadway holding my big Mysteries of Science poster, and seeing Sal on the other side, and yelling for him to wait up. And he had. He’d waited. And when I asked him why he wasn’t at our regular spot after school, he’d just mumbled something and looked at his feet, and then we’d walked toward Amsterdam in total silence. Until Marcus hit him.

Sal had started home without me that day. And it wasn’t the first time.

But here he was, today, looking right at me. And we still felt like us . “So when can we go back to normal?” I asked.

“That’s the thing, Mira. It wasn’t normal. I didn’t have any other friends! Not real friends.”

Neither did I! I wanted to say. And then I realized—that was his whole point. We’d only had each other. It had been that way forever.

He was still talking. “I mean, remember the second week of school, when you got sick? I spent that whole week alone. The whole week. Alone at lunch every day, alone after school… and don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I want to hang out with boys.” He yawned. “I’m on these pills,” he said. “For my arm. They make me kind of sleepy.”

“You could have just told me,” I said. “You could have said all this stuff before. I thought we talked about everything.”

“Not everything.” He looked at me in a groggy way. “Anyway, I gave you hints. You never got them.”

Mom and Louisa walked in. “I thought you might be getting tired,” Louisa told Sal. “These painkillers!” she said to Mom. “He takes one, talks his heart out for twenty minutes, and then falls asleep, like clockwork.”

She gave me a tight hug as we were leaving and said, “I’m glad you two had a chance to talk.” And I wondered if she’d saved the twenty minutes for me on purpose.

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.