When You Reach Me

by Rebecca Stead

It’s all still there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never.

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.

Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore. She doesn’t mean that it’s a real veil. And it isn’t about magic, or some idea that maybe God is looking right at you, or an angel is sitting next to you, or anything like that. Mom doesn’t think in those ways. It’s just her way of saying that most of the time, people get distracted by little stuff and ignore the big stuff.

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.

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.

“Well, it’s simple to love someone,” she said. “But it’s hard to know when you need to say it out loud.”

There are days when everything changes, and this was one of those days.

I wonder if I should write it anyway, if maybe then I’ll be able to stop thinking about you, once and for all.

Common sense is just a name for the way we’re used to thinking.

“None of it makes sense!” my brain yelled. “But all of it is true,” I answered.

It’s a story about me, but a different me, a person who doesn’t exist anymore, exactly.