When (v5): Rebecca Stead

Annemarie was busy with her pebbles and her extra-strength glue, working on a stone wall for the park that Jay Stringer had approved the week before. Julia was making a tinfoil UFO that she said would fly up and down the street on an invisible wire. The UFO hadn’t been approved yet, but Julia was going ahead with it anyway. She had written Proposal Pending on a piece of paper and taped it to the end of a shoe box full of foil and fishing line. Alice Evans was trying to make fire hydrants out of clay, which so far just looked like pathetic lumps. Having to pee so badly all the time must have made it hard for her to concentrate.

I worked on the diagrams for my playground proposal. My slide looked too steep, and then too flat, and then too messy, because I had erased so much. I would have to ask for another sheet of graph paper, which always made Jay Stringer sigh and roll his eyes, because he brought it from home.

The classroom phone rang, and after he answered it, Mr. Tompkin asked if anyone wanted to go be an office monitor for a while. I raised my hand. The school secretary usually gives office monitors a few Bit-O-Honeys or Hershey’s Kisses.

I grabbed my book and rode the banisters down to the first floor, where I found Wheelie at her desk in the main office. She’s called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school. And she tries to do it without getting out of her desk chair, which has wheels, which is why everyone calls her Wheelie. She rolls herself around the office all day by pushing off the floor with her feet. It’s like pinball in slow motion.

“The dentist needs a runner,” she said to me, kicking herself over to a desk, where she picked up a sheet of paper.

It’s weird to go to a school for almost seven years and then one day discover that there’s a dentist’s office inside it. But that is exactly what happened. Wheelie stood up, and I followed her out of the office and around the corner to a short dead-end hallway I had never thought about before. There was one open door, and on the other side of it was a real dentist’s office.

We walked into a waiting area, and I could see into another room with a regular dentist’s chair. It had a little white sink attached, and one of those big silver lights over it. The walls were covered with posters about eating apples and plaque and brushing your teeth.

Wheelie called out “Bruce?” and a guy with a short gray beard popped his head into the waiting room. He was wearing one of those green doctor tops and he gave me a big perfect smile.

“Hey there. Are you my first appointment?”

“No, this is Miranda,” Wheelie said. “She’s your runner. I have the patient list right here.” And she handed me the piece of paper.

I saw a bunch of names and classroom numbers. “They go to the dentist at school?” I said. “That’s so weird.”

Wheelie snatched back the paper and said, “There are ninety-eight sixth graders in this school. Eighty-nine of them are in attendance today, so if you can’t do this politely, you can go straight back to your classroom and I’ll find another one for the job.”

I felt my face go hot and actually thought I might cry. Sometimes when I’m caught off guard I cry at almost nothing.

The dentist put a hand on my shoulder and smiled again. He was like a professional smiler, which makes sense for a dentist, I guess. “My services don’t cost anything, Miranda. Some families don’t have the money to pay a dentist. Or they could really use the money for something else.”

“Oh.” I was thinking I shouldn’t let my mother find out about this. She’s always complaining about how health care should be free for everyone. I bet she would have me signed up for the dentist at school in no time.

The dentist looked at Wheelie, and she forced a little smile and handed me the list again. Then she fished a warm Bit-O-Honey out of her pocket and gave it to me right there in front of the dentist, even though Louisa had once told me that you might as well whack your own teeth with a wrench as eat Bit-O-Honeys.

I set out with my list. “Don’t get the kids all at once,” the dentist called after me. “Bring them in twos.”

I decided to get the little kids first. I knocked on their classroom doors and their teachers came hurrying to see my note, and the kids were handed over to me. I walked the two kindergartners to the dentist’s office, read my book in the waiting room for a while, and then went back for a second grader and a fourth grader. It was a lot of climbing up and down stairs. Not in a million years could I imagine Wheelie doing this.

When I got back to the dentist with my second drop, one of the kindergartners was already waiting to go back to class. She had this big smiley-tooth sticker on her shirt. I brought her back to her classroom and then went for the last kid on my list, a sixth grader like me: Marcus Heilbroner, in class 6-506. I’d never heard of him.

I knocked on the little window in the classroom door, waving my paper. The teacher, Mr. Anderson, came over, and I showed him my list.

“Marcus,” he called, and a boy stood up.

It was the boy who hit Sal. He’d gotten a very short haircut, but he was definitely the same person. My brain started yelling at me: “It’s the kid who hit Sal! He goes to your school? The kid who hit Sal goes to your school?” And meanwhile, the kid had walked over to where I was standing with Mr. Anderson.

“Dentist appointment,” Mr. Anderson whispered. Marcus nodded, went back to his desk, picked up a book, and then walked right past me and out the door. I followed a few steps behind him. He knew the way.

* * *

“Welcome back, Marcus,” the dentist called from the exam room. “Nice haircut.”

The fourth grader was in the big chair, spitting into the little white sink. The other two kids were all stickered up and waiting to go back to class. Marcus sat down heavily and opened his book, which was called Concepts in Mathematics .

Mr. Tompkin acted like everyone in our class was part of one big happy math group, but it didn’t take much to figure out there was a system: red math books for genius kids like Jay Stringer, orange ones for kids like me who did okay, and yellow ones for kids who left the room twice a week to meet with Ms. Dudley, who did “math support.” Marcus’s book was different—thick, with a hard cover and small type. So I guessed that even though it was blue—even farther down the rainbow than yellow—it was at least the equivalent of a red.

“You like math, huh?” I said.

He looked up, and I got the strong feeling he didn’t know he had ever seen me before, that he didn’t remember punching Sal or talking to me about the sun.

“Yeah,” he said slowly, like I might be stupid or something. “I like math.” And he went back to reading.

I delivered the two waiting kids back to their classes. One of them was holding a shiny paper card shaped like an apple that said she needed a follow-up visit. There was a line for her mom to sign. “Cavity,” I thought grimly.

When I got back to the dentist’s office, the fourth grader was still in the chair and Marcus was still reading his math book. That was fine with me—I grabbed my book from the table where I’d left it and settled back to read.

“Some people think it’s possible, you know,” Marcus mumbled.

“What?”

He pointed at my book. “Time travel. Some people think it’s possible. Except those ladies lied, at the beginning of the book.”

“What?”

“Those ladies in the book—Mrs. What, Mrs. Where, and Mrs. Who.”

“Mrs. What sit , Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which ,” I corrected him.

He shrugged.

“What do you mean, they lied? They never lied.” I was getting annoyed. The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my book. It’s like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.