When (v5): Rebecca Stead

“But that’s impossible!” my brain squawked. “You’re saying the laughing man read a letter that you haven’t even written yet! It makes no sense!”

Common sense is just a name for the way we’re used to thinking.

Time travel is possible.

You came to save Sal. And finally—finally!—I understood.

Dick Clark never ages . I thought of what Marcus had said about going to the movies in my time machine, that if I didn’t leave until I was sixty-two, the ticket guy wouldn’t recognize me.

I might not even recognize myself.

Maybe Dick Clark never ages. But the rest of us will. I will. Sal will, thanks to you. And Marcus will, too.

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

I thought of the beat-up metal door next to the garage, and I thought, “Yes, I do.” Because you are still here after all, to read my letter. Marcus is here. And when he reads the letter, he’ll realize that he has seen himself arrive, before he left. That’s what my letter is for.

And then, in who-knows-what year—the year of the burn scale, the year of the dome—Marcus will come back. You will come back. You will come back with a mouth full of paper. You won’t be yourself when you reach me but you will get the job done. You will save Sal. You already have.

Marcus is the magic thread. You are the laughing man. You are Marcus. Marcus is the laughing man. Or he will be, when he’s old.

“None of it makes sense!” my brain yelled.

“But all of it is true,” I answered.

Like I said, it lasted just under a minute. It lasted fifty-five seconds, to be precise. Which is how long it took Mom to guess six categories and win ten thousand dollars.

And then Mom and I are on the stage together, jumping up and down until they make us get off.

Things That Open

We take the bus home because we think it’ll be so much fun to take the bus home, knowing that we are rich now and can take a cab anytime we want. And it is fun. Sal and I don’t talk much, but we lean into the turns the way we used to when we were little and actually believed that we could make the bus tip over.

After Mom won her ten thousand dollars, she played another speed round. But this time she had to be partners with the other celebrity.

“He wasn’t as dumb as a bag of hair,” Mom says on the bus, “but he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer either.” They lost. But Mom gets to keep her ten thousand dollars, and her twenty-one-hundred-dollar cash bonus. “Not bad for a day’s work,” she says, smiling at me. “Not bad at all.”

When we get to the lobby, Louisa has to change into her uniform for work.

“Want to watch some TV?” Sal asks me.

I tell him I would love to. Another time.

Upstairs, Mom puts on a record, and she and Richard dance for a while in the living room while I sit on the couch and grin, just watching them.

Then I go to my room, shut my door, and pull the box out from under my bed. Right on top of everything is a big envelope for Mom—Richard gave it to me a week ago for safekeeping. And underneath it is Richard’s birthday present.

Mom is in the kitchen, making birthday tacos and a box cake. Every once in a while she yells, “Whoo-hoo! We’re rich!”

I write on Mom’s envelope with a marker: I personally do not care about wall-to-wall carpeting. Louisa says carpets are full of dust mites anyway .

I make an origami frog for Richard and put it on top of his box.

I make an origami frog for Mom and put it on top of her envelope.

I can’t get enough of these origami frogs.

It’s time for dinner. We eat the tacos. We sing. We cut the cake.

I give Mom her envelope. “What’s this?” she says. “It’s not my birthday!”

She admires her frog. She reads my note about the carpeting and the dust mites and gives me a funny look. She opens the envelope, which is full of applications for law school.

She looks at them. “But—I can’t…” Then she sits back in her chair and says, “Wow.”

This was our secret plan all along. Mine and Richard’s.

I give Richard his present. He admires his frog and puts it on the table next to Moms frog so that their little frog feet are touching. He opens the box. Inside are two keys, one for the lobby door and one for the apartment. I made a key ring for them—it’s a sailor’s knot, two strands, pulled tight. He knows how to untie it, of course, but I don’t think he will.

Things That Blow Away

The next morning, I wake up early, cut myself a big piece of Richard’s birthday cake for breakfast, and start writing the letter. I’m writing it in the journal with the clouds on the cover that Mom gave me for Christmas. I’m at the top of the second page when it dawns on me that this letter I’m writing is kind of a horrible burden. And I start feeling really sorry for Marcus.

It’s not a letter that most people would want to get. I know it will be a big relief to know that he didn’t accidentally cause the laughing man’s death—your death—after all. That’s a good thing. But at the same time, he’ll understand that he saw his own death, which I have to think is a very hard thing. And he’ll also realize that he’s going to discover the secret of traveling through time, which is a thing so incredible that most people would consider it a miracle. Of course, he’s the total hero of the story. But there isn’t a happy ending for him.

I start at the very beginning, when you first showed up in the fall, and I’m thinking about everything you did—the spot on the corner where you stood, your kicking practice, the way you muttered to yourself. “Book, bag, pocket, shoe.” There was a reason for all of it.

Except for one thing. I don’t understand why you used to lie on the ground with your head under the mailbox. Why? It must have been annoying the way kids were always banging on it.

I raise my head slowly from the journal. Then I get dressed in a hurry, pulling a sweater on over my pajama top. I leave a note on the kitchen table, grab my keys, and slip out of the apartment before Mom and Richard wake up.

It’s an almost-warm morning. No one is on the corner, which is good, because I probably look pretty strange lying faceup on the sidewalk and inching myself under the mailbox. It isn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

The underside of a mailbox is really ugly—a bunch of paint-splattered metal joints and bolts. I see the square of paper right away. It’s small, about the same size as the notes you left me, and it’s wedged under a metal seam so that it stays flat against the bottom of the box. I realize that it’s held there with a key—our old key, the one we hid in the fire hose. I adjust my head so that I’m looking straight up at the paper, the way you must have.

A woman’s face stares down at me, drawn in pencil. She’s old, like you were. Her white hair is pulled back behind her head, her dark eyes are looking to the side a little, and she has this playful smile. It’s really kind of a beautiful drawing.

People can get old all different ways, I guess. Some people change a lot, like you. I could have stared at your face for a week and I never would have guessed that you were Marcus. You were so much thinner than he is, and the bones above your eyes stuck out. Maybe that was because of what you put yourself through—all the diamond-jumping. But the old woman’s face in the drawing still holds some youth. It’s the dark eyes, maybe, or the smile. It’s hard to say exactly how we recognize other people. But I know without a shadow of a doubt that this woman is Julia.