When (v5): Rebecca Stead

“A straw!” Mom yells.

Next. “It’s leather and it holds your pants up!”

“A belt!”

“It’s sweet—you drink it in winter, after you go sledding!”

“Hot chocolate!”

It’s good to play, to think of nothing but the next word and to have Mom think of nothing but the next words out of my mouth. We fly through the pack of seven words.

“You’re good at this,” Mom says when we finish with five seconds to spare.

I’m smiling. “I really think you’re going to win,” I tell her.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” she warns. “This is just the speed round. The speed round is the easy part.”

* * *

The truth is that our hopes are already up. Our wish list is stuck to the fridge with a magnet Mom stole from work:

Trip to China

Good camera for trip to China

Wall-to-wall carpeting for Miranda’s room

New TV

And Richard has scribbled Sailboat at the bottom, though it’s hard to imagine where we would park it.

That’s the official list, anyway. Richard and I have our own secret plan for the money, if Mom wins it.

Things That Sneak Up

on You

The day Sal got punched, back in October, Louisa came upstairs after dinner to have a conference with Mom in her bedroom. They decided that Sal needed a mental health day, which meant he was allowed to skip school and watch TV the next day.

So the following afternoon I walked home alone. I was doing a lot of talking in my head so that I would be deep in conversation with myself by the time I got to the laughing man. I was almost to the garage when I realized someone was walking right behind me. I glanced back and saw the kid who punched Sal. He was maybe two feet away, wearing the same green army jacket he had worn the day before.

I was about to panic. I always know when I’m about to panic because my knees and neck both start to tingle. And then, before I had really decided what to do, I turned around to face him.

“Excuse me, do you happen to know what time it is?” My voice sounded almost normal. That was good.

“Let’s see….” He turned his head and looked back toward Broadway like maybe there was a giant clock hovering in the air right behind us. “It’s three-sixteen.”

I nodded like I could see the invisible clock too. “Thanks.” He didn’t look like he was about to hit me, but still, my heart was pounding.

He pointed. “See that big brown building? Yesterday the sun started to go behind it at three-twelve. Now it’s about halfway gone.” He glanced at me. “Plus, it’s one day later, and it’s October, so the days are getting shorter.”

I stared at him. He looked down at his hand, which held a key. He pushed the other hand into his pants pocket. “I don’t have a watch,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Me neither.”

He nodded, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. But as soon as the fear was gone, I filled up with guilt. “Look at you,” my brain said, “chatting with the kid who punched Sal!” My brain has a way of talking to me like that.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, and I didn’t let myself glance back until I got to the corner. When I did, the kid who punched Sal was gone. That was when I realized that he must live in the apartment over the garage, the one with dead plants on the fire escape and bedsheets hanging over the windows.

I’d forgotten all about the laughing man. His legs were sticking out from under the mailbox, and I was careful not to wake him.

Things That Bounce

After he got punched, Sal started playing basketball in the alley behind our building. Our living room windows face that way, and I heard him dribbling his ball back there from about three-thirty to five every day There was a rusted-out metal hoop with no net that made a clanging sound whenever he hit it.

Sal and Louisa’s apartment is mostly the same as ours. We have the same rectangular bedrooms, the same pull-chain light in the hallway, the same weird-shaped kitchen with the same unpredictable ovens, theirs right below ours.

There are differences. Their kitchen floor is yellow and orange linoleum squares instead of the white with gold flakes that we have, and Sal’s bed is up against a different wall in the bedroom. But we have the same bathroom floor—these white hexagonal tiles. If I look at them long enough, I can see all kinds of patterns in those hexagons: lines, arrows, even flowers. They kind of shift into these different pictures. It’s the sort of thing a person would never try to explain to anyone else, but once, when we were little, I told Sal about it, and then we went into his bathroom to stare at the floor together. Sal and Miranda, Miranda and Sal.

Sal played basketball more and more and talked to me less and less. I asked him four hundred times whether he was okay, or if he was mad at me, or what was wrong, and three hundred and ninety-nine times he answered “Yes,” “No,” and “Nothing.” Then, the last time I asked, he told me, while standing in our lobby and looking at his feet, that he didn’t want to have lunch or walk home together for a while.

“Do you even want to be friends at all?” I asked him.

He glared at his feet and said no, he guessed he didn’t for a while.

I was lucky, I guess, that this was the same week Julia decided to punish Annemarie for something.

The girls at school had been hurting each other’s feelings for years before Sal left me and I was forced to really notice them. I had watched them trade best friends, start wars, cry, trade back, make treaties, squeal and grab each other’s arms in this fake-excited way, et cetera, et cetera. I had seen which ones tortured Alice Evans, who, even though we’d started sixth grade , still waited too long to pee and never wanted to say out loud that she had to go. These girls would wait until Alice was pretty far gone, jiggling one foot and then the other, and then they would start asking her questions. “Alice,” they’d say, “did you do today’s page in the math workbook yet? Where it says ‘multiply to check your answer’? How did you do that?” And she’d desperately hop around while showing them.

I knew the way the girls all paired up, and Julia and Annemarie had been paired up for a long time. Julia I hated. Annemarie I had never thought about much.

My first memory of Julia is from second grade, when we made self-portraits in art. She complained there was no “café au lait”-colored construction paper for her skin, or “sixty-percent-cacao-chocolate” color for her eyes. I remember staring at her while these words came out of her mouth, and thinking, Your skin is light brown. Your eyes are dark brown. Why don’t you just use brown, you idiot? Jay Stringer didn’t complain about the paper, and neither did any of the other ten kids using brown. I didn’t complain about the stupid hot-pink color I’d been given. Did my skin look hot-pink to her?

But I soon found out that Julia wasn’t like the rest of us. She took trips all over the world with her parents. She would disappear from school and show up two weeks later with satin ribbons worked into her braids, or with a new green velvet scoop-neck dress, or wearing three gold rings on one finger. She learned about sixty-percent-cacao chocolate, she said, in Switzerland, where her parents had bought her a lot of it, along with a little silver watch she was always shoving in people’s faces.

* * *

I still don’t know what Annemarie did wrong, but during silent reading period that Tuesday, Julia told her that, as punishment, she wasn’t going to have lunch with Annemarie for “the remainder of the week.” Julia was big on announcing things in a loud voice so that everyone could hear. So on Wednesday, I asked Annemarie if she wanted to go out to lunch with me and she said yes.