“Miranda,” my brain said. “Nothing is going to happen. Someone is playing with you.” But what if my brain was wrong? What if someone’s life really needed saving? What if it wasn’t a game?
Annemarie’s doorman waved me in. Upstairs, her father answered the door with an unlit cigar in his mouth and asked me whether I wanted some cold noodles with sesame sauce.
“Uh, no thanks.”
“Fizzy lemonade, then?” He helped me tug my wet coat off—the lining was all stuck to my sweater.
So I walked into Annemarie’s room balancing my lemonade and an ice water for her, along with a dish of almonds that her father had somehow warmed up. Warm almonds sounds kind of yuck, but in reality they taste pretty good.
Annemarie was still in her nightgown, but she looked normal. “My dad won’t stop feeding me,” she said, taking a handful of nuts. “And he won’t let me get dressed. He says pajamas are good for the soul. Isn’t that so dumb?”
I sat on the edge of her bed. “Is that the rose?” It was on her bedside table in a tiny silver vase, just the kind of thing they would have at Annemarie’s house.
She nodded and looked at it. The rose was perfect—just opening, like a picture in a magazine.
“I tried to draw it,” Annemarie said. She held out a little spiral pad of heavy white paper. She’d sketched the rose in dark pencil, over and over.
“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t know you could draw like that.”
She flipped the pad closed. “My dad shows me tricks sometimes. There are a lot of tricks to drawing. I can show you.”
But I knew I could never draw like that, for the same reason I couldn’t do Jimmy’s V-cut or get my Main Street diagrams to look good.
“Hey,” I said, “maybe your dad left you the rose.”
“Maybe.” She frowned, and I felt a little piece of myself light up. “He says he didn’t, though.”
“But it would explain how the person got upstairs, why the doorman didn’t buzz you.” I could feel my lips making a smile. “Your dad is so nice. It has to be him.”
I was miserable, sitting on the edge of her bed in that puddle of meanness. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want Annemarie’s rose to be from Colin. Maybe I couldn’t stand for her to have so many people, and to be able to draw and cut bread on top of that. Maybe I wanted Colin for myself.
Annemarie’s dad stuck his head through the doorway. “Anybody need a refill?”
“No thanks,” I said, even though my glass was empty and my back teeth were packed with chewed nuts. “I have to go.”
“Stay for five more minutes,” he said. “I put your coat in the dryer.”
So I had to sit there, thirsty, and then I had to put on my dry, warm, but still-dirty coat and take the elevator down to Annemarie’s lobby, where the lamps glowed yellow and the doorman remembered my name. It had stopped raining.
It was too cold for the boys to hang around in front of the garage. There was hardly anyone out on the street at all.
The light in Belle’s window looked friendly in the late-afternoon gloom, and I thought of going in. I had been telling Belle the story of my book, a little bit here and a little bit there. I’d told her how Meg helped her father escape, and I’d described the first battle with IT, which is this giant, evil brain that wants to control everyone. I knew Belle would give me some vitamin Cs and maybe a paper cup of hot chocolate, but it was getting late and I didn’t want to have to walk down our block in the complete dark, so I decided to keep going.
At first I thought the laughing man wasn’t on the corner, but then I saw him sitting on the wet curb, leaning against the mailbox and just watching me walk toward him. For one second there was something familiar about him, and I noticed for the first time how old he looked. I thought about what Louisa had said, about how old people can’t get enough heat. Maybe I felt sorry for him. Maybe he reminded me of Mr. Nunzi from upstairs. Or maybe I wanted to do something good, to make up for being kind of a jerk to Annemarie, even if she didn’t really know it. Anyway, I spoke to him.
“Hey,” I said, opening my bag. “You want a sandwich?” I still had the cheese sandwich I hadn’t eaten at lunch. I held it out. “It’s cheese and tomato.”
“Is it on a hard roll?” He sounded tired. “I can’t eat hard bread. Bad teeth.”
“It isn’t hard,” I said. It was one of my best V-cuts ever, probably a little soggy now with the juice from the tomato soaking into the bread all afternoon.
He reached up with one hand, and I put the sandwich in it.
“What was the burn scale today?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said, pretending I knew what he was talking about. “I didn’t have a chance to, um, check.”
“Rain is no protection,” he said, looking at the sandwich in his hand. “They should have had the dome up.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.
He looked up at me, and suddenly he seemed familiar again. It was something about the way his eyes took me in. He said, “I’m an old man, and she’s gone now. So don’t worry, okay?”
“I won’t.”
He nodded. “Smart kid.”
Things That Get Stuck
“Guess what?” I said to Mom when she got home. “The laughing man isn’t completely crazy. He’s kind of a CSP.”
“CSP?”
“Crazy-shaped person.”
“Don’t say ‘crazy-shaped person.’ And what are you talking about?”
“I gave him a sandwich today. He was sort of normal about it. Almost.”
“You gave him a sandwich?”
“It was a leftover. From Jimmy’s.”
“Mira, why in the world would you give the laughing man a sandwich?”
“What’s wrong with that? I thought you would like it!”
“You thought I would like the fact that you’ve struck up a relationship with a mentally ill person?”
“What relationship? I just gave him a sandwich!”
“We’ve talked about this, Miranda. I thought you knew how to handle yourself. It’s the only reason I let you walk around alone!”
“I just gave a sandwich to a homeless guy! You’re the one who works for criminals and hangs around with pregnant jailbirds.”
“Not everyone accused of a crime is a criminal, you know And besides, I’m not twelve.”
I pointed at her sweatshirt, which had a rainbow on it. “Well, you dress like you’re twelve!” I could feel the tears starting, so I grabbed two bags of the chips Louisa had brought over, went to my room, and slammed the door.
A few minutes later, she knocked and came in. “I’m sorry. You did a nice thing. I shouldn’t have blown up at you like that.”
“Why did you, then?”
She sat down on the bed next to me. “I don’t know. I guess it made me nuts, thinking you were putting yourself in danger. I like to tell myself that you’re always safe, but there’s no such thing, really, is there? I do trust you, Mira. I want you to know that. I just—I don’t want to make any more mistakes. I don’t think I can bear to make one more single mistake.”
“What are you talking about? What mistakes?”
She laughed. “Are you kidding? Where should I start? I’ve made about a million mistakes. Luckily, you outweigh almost all of them.”
“Almost all of them? Like how many?”
She smiled. “I don’t know. Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand?”
“So that just leaves—what? A thousand to go?”
“Richard wants to move in,” she said flatly. “He wants us to get married.”
And my brain said, “He does?” Then I got this feeling of… lightness. I was happy. “That’s great,” I told Mom.
“You think so?” She smiled for a second, and then her mouth dropped. “I don’t know. I just can’t… I can’t figure out if it’s the right thing.”