“But here’s the thing,” Jimmy said after Colin had taken a victory lap behind the counter and through the back room. “Your friend, little Swiss Miss. Don’t let me find her in here again. Ever.”
“Who?” Annemarie said.
“I think he means Julia,” I said.
“You think Julia took the money?” Colin laughed. “Julia needs money like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Jimmy shook his head. “Some things are in the blood. All the money in the world can’t change a person’s blood.”
“What do you mean, ‘blood’?” Annemarie had her hands on her hips. “What blood?”
Jimmy pointed his big finger right at me. “Like you call her, Swiss Miss: hot chocolate.”
“Huh?” Colin looked at me and back to Jimmy. I was just getting it. Annemarie was way ahead of me.
“You … you pig,” she said. “You racist pig.” I had never seen Annemarie angry. She was scary and also obviously about to cry.
Jimmy shrugged. “It’s your life. I’m not having that little thief back in here. You don’t have to come back either.”
“I won’t!” Annemarie shouted, and she banged out the door.
“And that’s not why I call her Swiss Miss!” I said.
Jimmy shrugged again, and I banged out after Annemarie. Colin followed me. We found her crying halfway down the block, walking fast.
She was spitting words: “That. Big. Fat. Jerk. That. Pig. I. Hate. Him.”
Colin looked at me. “I don’t even get what just happened!”
Annemarie whirled around to face us. “He thinks Julia did it because she’s black.”
“No way” Colin said. “He’s crazy.”
Annemarie turned on me then. “Is that your name for her? Swiss Miss?”
“I—no! I said it one time, but I didn’t mean … I meant about how she’s always talking about Switzerland, her watch and the chocolate, and—”
“She is?” Colin asked. “I never heard her talk about Switzerland.”
“If anyone needs the money,” Annemarie said to me coldly, “it’s you, not Julia.”
“Are you serious? I didn’t take the stupid money!”
“Forget it,” she said. “I want to be alone.” And she stomped off toward school.
Colin raised his eyebrows after her and then showed me a rolled-up dollar. “Want to get a slice?”
So we went to the pizza place. But it wasn’t fun. And walking back to school, it occurred to me that Colin might not like me at all. He might just like pizza.
“Tell me something,” I said just before we got to our classroom. “That day the bread count was short by two rolls. Did you take them?”
“Yeah,” Colin said, starting to smile. “I thought it would be … Hey! I didn’t steal Jimmy’s bank, you know!” He looked at me through his bangs with his injured-puppy face.
“I know,” I said quickly. “I know you wouldn’t.”
“The rolls were just for fun,” he said. “But taking the bank would be, you know, stealing.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t get to talk to Annemarie all the rest of that afternoon. After silent reading period, she went to art and music, and I went to gym and science. And then some of the kindergartners came to our classroom to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
And then it was Christmas vacation.
Christmas Vacation
For three days in a row, the sky was like a dingy white sheet. I thought about calling Annemarie but didn’t. I thought about calling Colin but didn’t. I was right about Sal—he was playing basketball every day, and a couple of times there were the voices of other boys, kids from school. On the third day, I opened our living room window very quietly and watched them running up and down the alley in their knit hats with steam blowing out of their mouths.
Then I sat on the couch and closed my eyes. I pictured the world. I pictured the world millions of years ago, with crazy clouds of gas everywhere, and volcanoes, and the continents bumping into each other and then drifting apart. Okay. Now life begins. It starts in the water, with tiny things, microscopic, and then some get bigger. And one day something crawls out of the water onto land. There are animals, then humans, looking almost all alike. There are tiny differences in color, the shape of the face, the tone of the skin. But basically they are the same. They create shelters, grow food, experiment. They talk; they write things down.
Now fast-forward. The earth is still making loops around the sun. There are humans all over the place, driving in cars and flying in airplanes. And then one day one human tells another human that he doesn’t want to walk to school with her anymore.
“Does it really matter?” I asked myself.
It did.
I tried again. I pictured the world, all pretty blue-green and floating out in space, creatures and forests and deserts and cities. I brought North America into focus, the United States, the East Coast, New York City. Kids are walking down the street toward school. One kid has green suede boots. One has a charge account at Gold’s. One has keys in her pocket.
“Does it really matter?” I asked myself.
It did.
I got up, turned on the television, and tried to think about nothing for a change.
The Second Proof
Mom didn’t have to work on Christmas Eve day. We got a tree and strung popcorn for it, and she had some friends from work over. Richard made some eggnog from a German recipe his grandmother gave him, and they all ended up singing a lot while I wrapped presents in my room. I had bought Mom a pair of earrings, a bottle of purple nail polish with glitter in it, and some striped tights, even though I thought, and I still think, that striped tights look dumb. I got Richard an erasable pen from Gold’s.
On Christmas morning, we opened presents first thing after Mom made coffee, like always. I got some good stuff: a beaded bracelet, a portable radio, a fancy journal to write in with clouds on the cover, a sweater, and a tin of these really crispy ginger cookies I love from a bakery near Mom and Richard’s office.
We were just about to move on to pancakes when Richard handed me a hard, rectangular package that had to be a book.
“Let me guess,” I said. “A book?” I wondered if it would be the kind with a spunky girl on the cover.
“Very funny. Open it.”
It was a book. Actually, it was my book. But this was a hardcover one, with a different picture on the front. I read the title out loud: “A Wrinkle in Time.” And then I smiled at Richard.
“It’s a first edition,” Richard said.
“Richard!” Mom burst out. “You shouldn’t have.” This made me guess that first editions are expensive.
“Read what’s inside,” he said. “I had the author sign it for you.”
I opened the front cover. The writing was big and swoopy beautiful. Nothing like yours.
Miranda,
Tesser well.
Madeleine L’Engle
Christmas Day: Tesser well. Your second proof.
It wasn’t a game, I realized. Holding that book in my hands, I finally believed that whoever wrote me those notes actually knew about things before they happened. Somehow.
As soon as Richard and Mom went to make the pancakes, I ran to my room and took all your notes out of the box under my bed.
I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own.
Coming from where? I asked myself. Coming from when? I was beginning to believe that someone I cared about was in real danger, but I still didn’t know who it was, and I still didn’t know how to help.
I looked at the second note: I know you have shared my first note. I ask you not to share the others. Please. I do not ask this for myself.
That was the worst part: I was alone.
Things in an Elevator
New Year’s Day was weirdly warm and sunny Sal’s basketball was going strong by about nine in the morning. I sneaked a look down into the alley and saw him running back and forth in just a T-shirt and a pai
r of sweatpants. He was wearing the watch Louisa had given him for Christmas. She’d come up to show it to us beforehand. It was kind of old-fashioned, with Roman numerals and a leather band, and I hadn’t been sure Sal would like it. But it looked like he did.
Mom was sleeping late. I wrote her a note: I went out. I’ll get you a bagel.
The laughing man wasn’t on the corner—maybe he didn’t work holidays. Belle’s was closed. Everything felt kind of peaceful and sad and deserted.
My feet carried me to school, which was closed, of course. The yard gate was open, and I went in and sat on the jungle gym for a few minutes, letting myself feel how strange it was to be there alone. I was sort of deliberately trying to weird myself out, I think, to get my energy up. To call Annemarie.
Ten days of silence had grown into a question that my brain shouted inside my head: “Is Annemarie even your friend anymore?” There was a pay phone on the corner. I had a dime in my coat.
As I dialed, I noticed someone leaning over the garbage can across the street. When he pulled himself upright I saw it was the laughing man. He stood there with his hands on his hips looking down at the garbage. I quickly turned my back to him, worried that he might recognize me and come over.
The receiver of the pay phone was cold against my ear. Only after it started ringing did it occur to me that if my mother was sleeping, Annemarie’s parents might be sleeping too.
“Yello!” Annemarie’s dad answered the phone. He sounded as if he’d been up for hours, just sitting by the phone and hoping, hoping, hoping it would ring.
“Hi… it’s Miranda—”
“Hi, Miranda! Happy New Year!”
“Hi. I mean, Happy New Year to you too. I was wondering if Annemarie is there.”
“She is! But she’s in the shower. Are you by any chance outside, Miranda? It sounds like you might be at a pay phone.”
“Oh. Yeah, I am, actually.”
“In the neighborhood?”
“Um, yeah. I’m right by school.”
“Well, come on over. I’m pouring you some orange juice right now!”
“Uh, okay.”
“You can surprise Annemarie!”
Would I ever. I walked up the hill, where the sunlight seemed to touch everything like it was a hyper kid running all over a toy store—it bounced off the dirty metal lampposts, the shiny brass awning posts, even the sunglasses of a woman walking her dogs with a cup of coffee in one hand. Everything shined.
“Miss Miranda, Happy New Year!” Annemarie’s doorman was standing just outside the building’s polished doors. He smiled and waved me in.
On the way up, it hit me that it was truly strange to come over here without talking to Annemarie first. But at the exact same time I got nervous about that, I also got this other feeling, which I can only describe as love for Annemarie’s elevator. The wood paneling, the cloth-covered stool in one corner, the little bell that went off every time we passed another floor. It was all so nice and cozy that I thought it would be wonderful to stay inside it forever, or at least to sit down on the little stool and close my eyes for a while. The whole thing was beyond weird. And then the elevator stopped on Annemarie’s floor, and of course I got out, because that’s what people do when the elevator gets to their floor.
Annemarie answered the door in her robe, with wet hair.
“Hi,” I started. “I just called to say Happy New Year, and your dad said—”
She smiled. “Come on in.”
It was the best morning. Annemarie showed me her Christmas presents. She got all kinds of cool art stuff, and we ended up spreading it all over the dining room table and drawing comic strips on this special comic-strip paper that came with stickers for the talking bubbles and the thinking bubbles. And then her mom showed us how to make origami frogs, and I was actually good at it. Meanwhile, her dad kept bringing in these plates of bacon and, for me, French toast strips I could pick up with my hands.
Then Mom called. I had completely forgotten about her. She was frantic, she was angry, and she was coming to get me. Even Annemarie’s dad looked mad.
“Better get your coat on,” he said when I hung up the phone, even though my mom couldn’t possibly get to Annemarie’s apartment that fast. So I waited by the door, overheating in my coat, and Annemarie waited with me.
“So, about what happened at Jimmy’s …,” I said. “You know, I really never meant… what he thought I meant. Not for one second.”
She looked at the floor. “I totally believe you. And I don’t know why I said that thing I said, about… money. It was stupid.”
“It’s okay.” I was so grateful that she had something to apologize for that it didn’t really occur to me to think about how it had actually made me feel. But I have thought about it since then. It didn’t make me feel good.
* * *
We heard the elevator’s ding and I opened Annemarie’s front door before Mom had a chance to ring the bell. I thought I might be able to escape without Annemarie’s parents talking to her.
No such luck. “Jerry?” Mom called out, and Annemarie’s dad came rushing over saying, “Oh, you’re here. I didn’t hear the bell—”
“I’m so sorry about this,” Mom said.
“No, I’m sorry. I had no idea—”
“It’ll never happen again—”
“—always check with you first.”
They cross-talked for a while, then hit one of those natural breaks in the conversation and both turned to look at me.
“Let’s go,” Mom said coldly, and I said, “Thanks for having me,” and Annemarie’s dad smiled at me, but only because he’s the nicest person on earth.
The elevator opened right away, so there was no awkward waiting. On the way down, I knew I should apologize, but I just waited for Mom to jump all over me. Instead she burst into tears.
Which made me cry. So we both cried through the lobby, past the doorman, and out into the sunlight, where we magically stopped. She took a deep breath and looked at me. “I was scared,” she said. “When you didn’t come back, I got really scared. Don’t ever do that again.”
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “What now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe a movie?”
So that’s what we did. We went to the movies, and ate candy and popcorn, and held hands for a few minutes on the way home.
The laughing man was at his regular post, doing his kicks into the street. When he saw us he yelled, “Smart kid!” But having Mom there made it different, like walking down the street with a blanket wrapped tight around me.
Richard was leaning up against our building, reading a newspaper.
“Hey!” he said. “We had a plan. Did you forget about me?”
He made a sad face, and Mom said, “Oh, no! How late am I?” and then she looked at me and we both started laughing.
Richard said, “Seriously. Would it kill you to give me a key?” And Mom shrugged and said it was only three-thirty and she didn’t much feel like going upstairs anyway. So we turned around and went to eat at the diner, which was full of people just waking up and having breakfast.
Things You Realize
It was 1979—a new year, a new decade, almost, but school was still just school. Jay Stringer was still a genius, music assemblies were still boring, and Alice Evans was still too shy to admit when she had to go to the bathroom. The fourth grade’s violin performance had only just started, and already Alice was squirming in her seat next to me. Jay was on my other side, somehow reading a book while listening to the world’s worst music.
I located Sal’s blond head a few rows ahead on my right. I stared at the back of it for a while, trying to see if I could make him turn around with the sheer power of my brain waves, but it was hard to concentrate with Alice doing a Mexican hat dance in her chair. I tried to make a face at Annemarie, who was on the other side of Alice, but Annemarie seemed fully absorbed by the music. She’s extremely non-judgmental that way. So
I went back to looking at Sal.
Directly in front of me was Julia. She was obviously as bored as I was—her head kept bobbing around. And then she turned and looked at Annemarie. I glanced over and saw that Annemarie’s eyes were still on the stage. Julia watched Annemarie. And I watched Julia watching Annemarie. And what I saw were eyes that were sixty-percent-cacao chocolate, a face that was café au lait, and an expression that was so familiar it made my whole body ring like a bell. Julia’s look was my look. My looking at Sal.
And suddenly I knew three things:
First, it was Julia who had left the rose for Annemarie.
Second, Julia cared about Annemarie, but Annemarie didn’t see it. Because I was standing in the way.
Third, Alice Evans was about to pee in her pants.
I turned to Alice. “Hey,” I said, “I have to go to the bathroom. Be my partner?”
Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It’s like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to. It was like that when I asked Alice Evans to be my bathroom partner. I wasn’t one of the girls who tortured her on purpose, but I had never lifted a finger to help her before, or even spent one minute being nice to her.
She stopped squirming and looked at me suspiciously. “You have to go?” she said. “Really?”
“Yeah.” And in that moment, I wanted nothing as much as I wanted Alice to feel safe with me. “Really.”
I leaned forward in my seat and waved my arm up and down so that Mr. Tompkin turned to look at me from his seat at the end of the row, and I spoke over the laps of Jay Stringer and Colin, who were sitting between us.
“I have to go to the bathroom.” These words felt like some kind of sacrifice, a precious offering to the universe. I didn’t know why, but Julia’s look had given me this total determination to get Alice Evans to the bathroom before she wet herself.