When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Sometimes he just ran into the back for a minute and if someone came in, they waited. Someone could have taken the bank then. But who in the world would have known to take it in the first place? It was a faded plastic bank in the shape of a cartoon character. It didn’t look remotely valuable.
    “Let’s write him a letter,” Annemarie said. “Or no—we’ll get him a card!” She used her spoon to scrape up the last of her lunch, which her dad packed for her every day in a cleaned-out yogurt container. “Come on,” she said, standing up. “It’ll be my treat.”
    So we went into Gold’s Stationery and bought Jimmy a greeting card. I wanted to get one that said With Sympathy , for Jimmy’s lost bank, but Annemarie said we should pick something that was blank inside. She picked a card with roses on it, which I thought was kind of strange, considering it was for Jimmy and roses are supposed to symbolize love. She said the card looked sincere, but I guessed that she liked it because it reminded her of her mystery rose.
    “What do you think?” she asked Colin. She held up the card in front of him.
    Colin raised his shoulders and dropped them. “I guess.”
    Annemarie said nothing, but she looked like she’d been hoping for a more revealing answer. “Can you put this on my dad’s account?” she asked the cashier.
    “Sure thing, Annemarie. Hey, where’s your pal Julia? Home sick today?”
    Annemarie turned pink. “No, she’s around.”
    The cashier smiled and handed Annemarie a spiral notebook with a beaten-up cover. Annemarie flipped it open and wrote her name and the date.
    A charge account at Gold’s. I thought of the fat smelly markers that cost two-fifty each, the leather diaries that locked with little keys, the battery-operated fans that you could wear on a string around your neck on hot days.
    “Hey, Annemarie,” Colin said. “Wanna buy me a pack of baseball cards?”
    She turned pink again. “I can’t. I mean, I’m not allowed. Sorry.”
    He shrugged and smiled. “No big deal.”
    Sometimes I wanted to squeeze Colin’s cheeks until his teeth fell out.
    After school, Annemarie and I went to her house. Her dad brought us some weird kind of thin ham rolled up so we could eat it with our fingers. We wrote on Jimmy’s card:
Dear Jimmy,
We did not take your Fred Flintstone bank. We don’t know who could have taken it (maybe someone came in when you went to the bathroom?).
Can we come back to work?
Signed,
Your employees,
Annemarie, Miranda, and Colin
    I put the card in my knapsack so that I could slip it under Jimmy’s door the next morning on my way to school. Then we lay on Annemarie’s rug and planned all the stuff we were going to do over Christmas vacation: Annemarie wanted to start teaching me how to draw, even though I told her I was probably hopeless, and we were going to go to the movies, and her dad even said he would take us ice-skating in Central Park.
    I tried not to wonder what Sal would be doing. I figured he’d be playing basketball right up until the first big snow.

Things That Fall Apart
    The next morning on my way to school, I pushed our card under Jimmy’s locked door. At lunchtime, Colin, Annemarie, and I walked up to Broadway together. Jimmy was helping a customer, but he saw us through the glass door, made a face, and shook his head no.
    “I guess he means it,” Colin said.
    We stood there in front of the door for a minute, just in case. When the customer left with his sandwich, Jimmy glanced over at us again. Colin put his hands together under his chin like he was praying and made a puppy-dog face, which was a dumb joke but also pretty cute. Jimmy took a rag and started wiping down the counter, and then he raised one arm and waved us in without looking up.
    “So we can come back to work?” Colin asked when we’d all crowded in the door.
    Jimmy looked at us. “You’re good kids,” he said, “but you don’t know what you’re doing half the time.”
    “We