When You Reach Me

“Mom has to win this money.”

There is a sense of urgency early in the novel, leaving readers to understand that a lot weighs on the outcome of the game show. Miranda’s mother wins $12,100 as a contestant on The $20,000 Pyramid, but her winning isn’t the climax of the novel, and her preparation is a subplot throughout the story. The early urgency in the story contributes to the plot’s suspense, which is intensified as the central mystery of who is trying to reach Miranda unfolds.

“He said it like a chant: bookbag, pocketshoe, bookbag, pocketshoe.”

Miranda misunderstands this early hint at where more notes will be located. The laughing man is not referring to a bookbag or a pocketshoe; instead, these are four different locations where notes for Miranda will be found throughout the story. She’ll discover a note in a book, another in a bag, another in a pocket, and a final mysterious note in a shoe.

“‘Pocketshoe,’ he said, looking serious. ‘Noun: An extra shoe you keep in your pocket.’”

Richard is humorous, sharing jokes with Miranda and bringing a lighthearted break to the suspense in the plot. Here, he quickly comes up with a witty explanation for the laughing man’s phrases. This is also an example of over-explaining an otherwise simple concept and making an idea more complicated than it needs to be—There is no mysterious item called a “pocketshoe,” but Miranda is distracted with a definition for a single misunderstood word rather than thinking of a larger puzzle with the simple clues in front of her.

“Yes, but—the end can’t happen before the beginning!”

Miranda and Marcus debate the logic behind time travel as presented in A Wrinkle in Time. Marcus argues that the plot of A Wrinkle in Time is flawed because the main characters would have seen themselves arrive from the future at the end of the story. Miranda focuses on details in the story such as character names, whereas Marcus doesn’t remember the name of the story’s main character but instead looks at the bigger picture of how the characters could have accomplished their mission. Their discussion foreshadows the events in When You Reach Me—Marcus will return from the future, but his trip is much longer than the one in A Wrinkle in Time, so he is an old and unrecognizable man on his return journey.

“You’re a pretty smart kid.”

Miranda rolls her eyes when Marcus tells her she’s a smart kid early in the story. Marcus means this as a compliment because most people can’t keep up with his thoughts on physics and time travel. It’s an important compliment, though, because the laughing man occasionally calls Miranda “Smart kid” when she passes on the street. Miranda doesn’t put this together at first, but Marcus and the laughing man are the same person, and this compliment is a hint as to the laughing man’s real identity.

“The trip is a difficult one. I will not be myself when I reach you.”

The title of the novel is borrowed from the first mysterious note Miranda receives “written in tiny words on a little square of stiff paper that felt like it had once gotten wet” (60). She finds it in her library book, the first word in the laughing man’s “bookbag, pocketshoe” phrase. Readers later learn that the mysterious notes are from the laughing man, who is really an older and unrecognizable version of Marcus, and he will no longer be himself by the time he returns from the future to save Miranda’s friend.

“It was backward. But somewhere in my head a tiny bell started ringing. I didn’t even notice it at first.”

Miranda’s mother is logical in her assertion that whoever has stolen their house key wouldn’t need to ask where it was hidden after the fact. It’s backward, as Miranda admits, but the tiny bells ringing in her head are a signal to readers that this detail is important. Although it seems backward for the laughing man to leave a note asking about the key’s location after he’s already taken it, this series of events makes sense once readers learn that he has had to travel back in time.

“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.”

Miranda’s mother explains her outlook in terms of a person wearing a veil over their eyes. The world is complex, and it’s difficult for people to fully comprehend that complexity, so we are shielded from it by a metaphorical veil. When the veil lifts, we get a glimpse of all that we’ve previously blocked from our vision, intentionally or unintentionally, and this can bring momentary clarity. Miranda’s mother attempts to initiate this moment of clarity in order to see thematic connections while practicing for her game show appearance. Miranda experiences a momentary lifting of this veil when she realizes that Marcus and the laughing man are the same person.

“I’ve thought a lot about those veils. I wonder if, every once in a while, someone is born without one. Someone who sees the big stuff all the time. Like maybe you.”

Miranda is correct that whoever has the insight to write the cryptic letters is someone with a veil unlike her own, someone who sees connections that others don’t. She sees this potential in whoever is writing the notes long before she knows it is the laughing man, and long before she understands that Marcus and the laughing man are one and the same. While most people lift their veils only occasionally, others see bigger connections all the time. Marcus is one of these people who can see the big picture, although at times it gets in the way of noticing the smaller details such as the names of his own schoolmates.

“Jail stops them from becoming who they might grow up to be.”

Miranda’s mother, although not a licensed lawyer, dedicates time regularly to counseling mothers in prison. She believes that jail only punishes people for their mistakes further, stripping them of their opportunity to live to their potential. This foreshadows her role when Marcus faces possible police interrogation after the laughing man’s death. If Marcus goes to jail, then he won’t grow up to be the same person he’s meant to be: the person who saves Sal’s life.

“Okay, so let’s say you’re sixty-two, and you climb into your machine and go back to last Wednesday, December whatever, 1978. You go to the movie theater. The ticket guy would see a sixty-two-year-old woman, right?”

Marcus doesn’t worry about last Wednesday's precise date, but instead focuses on the bigger picture: If someone travels to the present from far enough in the future, the present would see an older version of that person. Marcus theorizes that traveling back in time doesn’t necessarily make a person young again, so it would be an older version of the person returning rather than the person becoming younger. In this theory of time travel, “the trip is a difficult one” (60) that doesn’t make a person younger, but allows them to travel back and forth while still aging. This is exactly what ends up happening in the story when Marcus doesn’t recognize himself in the laughing man.

“I can’t eat hard bread. Bad teeth.”

When Miranda offers the laughing man a sandwich, his concern over how hard the bread may be is another hint that he’s really an older version of Marcus. Marcus visits the school dentist regularly for dental care. It makes sense that his dental struggles carry into adulthood. Taken on its own, the comment doesn’t mean much to Miranda. When considering this small detail alongside other small hints, this becomes a clue as to the laughing man’s identity.

“Not everyone accused of a crime is a criminal, you know.”

Miranda’s mother understands that people make mistakes in life, and sometimes people are accused of things they haven’t done. This becomes important when the police seek Marcus for questioning following the laughing man’s death. Belle assumes that Marcus must be involved in the accident because she sees him chasing Sal, but she doesn’t know the full context of the situation when she shares this detail with the police. Marcus is initially suspected of being involved in the accident, but Miranda’s mother is able to clear his name within a week.

“But I still couldn’t apologize for what I’d said. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even smile at her.”

Miranda’s relationship with her mother becomes strained during the school year. Miranda is judgmental about the state of their apartment building and embarrassed that her new, wealthier friend Annemarie will notice “the peeling paint, the cigarette butts on the stairs” (120). Miranda assumes at first that her mother is oblivious to the imperfections in their apartment, but when her mother changes into a nice sweater and nervously runs her fingers through her hair before Annemarie’s arrival, Miranda realizes that her mother is also aware of the state of their apartment, and that she’s self-conscious about it, too.

“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.”

Miranda spends time alone reflecting on the relationships around her during winter break. She begins to understand that small changes in the bigger picture, such as one human deciding to no longer be friends with another, do have lasting consequences. She’s getting closer to understanding how small things contribute to larger ideas. This developing appreciation is crucial to her later realization that Marcus is the laughing man.

“When I walked by him a minute later, the laughing man was shaking his fist at the sky and kicking his legs out into the traffic rushing up Amsterdam Avenue.”

Miranda mimics this fist-shaking at the corner at the end of the novel as her way of giving tribute to the laughing man for saving Sal’s life. The laughing man’s seemingly random kicking is practice for the way he’ll eventually save Sal by kicking him out of the way of a truck. Without the full context, though, his actions appear somewhat crazy to onlookers like Miranda. After the climax of the story, though, all of the laughing man’s actions prove to have been meticulously planned to save Sal’s life.

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

Miranda’s period of reflection and subsequent change in character offers a break in the story’s suspense. It also contributes to Miranda’s character development as she takes time to think about the relationships she has with classmates and makes an intentional choice to be a new person when school resumes. This contributes to the coming of age theme in the story, as Miranda emerges more mature and better equipped to navigate the complexity of the relationships around her.

“It was my book—or maybe it was my book’s twin sister, just as old and beat-up-looking as mine, but with different creases and one corner ripped off the cover.”

Julia and Miranda share a lot in common. They both enjoy reading A Wrinkle In Time, and they both spend their afternoons alone at home while their mothers are busy. Julia’s interest in space and time travel make her a more complex person than Miranda assumes, and visiting Julia’s bedroom is what brings Miranda to understand that they really aren’t so different from one another after all.

“And then Mom hung up her suit, and I put all your notes in the box under my bed and didn’t look at them anymore.”

After the laughing man dies saving Sal, there is a period of denouement in the plot as characters go back to their normal lives. Miranda knows that the laughing man has been the one leaving the mysterious notes for her, but now that he’s dead, she doesn’t see a point in writing his requested letter back to him. The final resolution occurs on April 27 when Miranda realizes that Marcus is the laughing man, and that it’s Marcus who she needs to deliver the letter to in order to save Sal’s life.

“Isn’t it amazing, she asks, how he never seems to age? He looks just the same today as he did back in 1956.”

Hints at the answer to the story’s mystery are placed for readers throughout the novel. Luisa’s words here are meant to trigger more tiny alarm bells like those Miranda describes at the end of Chapter 17. Marcus will age and become the laughing man; they are the same person, just at different times in his life. Unlike Dick Clark, though, Marcus will age noticeably, so much so that he is unrecognizable as the laughing man.

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

Marcus explains early in the story that “Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It’s how we’re used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way” (51). At the time, Miranda is frustrated because she struggles to understand Marcus; she would rather focus on the details of her favorite book than discuss larger philosophical theories of time and thought. When Miranda realizes that the laughing man is an older Marcus come back from the future, her brain yells at her, “But that’s impossible!” (188). Her common sense tells her that time travel is impossible. Once her metaphorical veil is lifted momentarily, though, she can see the connections that common sense was preventing her from seeing all along.

“Marcus is the magic thread.”

Miranda connects the threads of the puzzle that explain the events leading to the story’s climax. At this point in the novel’s plot, Sal has already been saved and people are generally living their lives normally. Miranda still has to write the letter as instructed in the mysterious notes, but with the laughing man dead, she’s unsure of why to write a letter to a dead person, or how to deliver it even if she does write it. This final moment of clarity not only confirms what readers have at this point possibly figured out, it also gives Miranda the solution necessary to complete the task she was given.

“You won’t be yourself when you reach me but you will get the job done. You will save Sal. You already have.”

Miranda now fully understands that Marcus will travel back from the future as the laughing man to save Sal. She understands that the trip is difficult, that he will undergo challenges she can’t comprehend while trying to reach her, and that he won’t be himself by the time he returns. But she is also confident now that the puzzle makes sense, and that Sal has already been saved because of the letter she will write to Marcus warning him of the potential tragedy.