Read When You Reach Me for Free Online

possible, you know,” Marcus mumbled.
    “What?”
    He pointed at my book. “Time travel. Some people think it’s possible. Except those ladies lied, at the beginning of the book.”
    “What?”
    “Those ladies in the book—Mrs. What, Mrs. Where, and Mrs. Who.”
    “Mrs. What sit , Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which ,” I corrected him.
    He shrugged.
    “What do you mean, they lied? They never lied.” 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.
    “Don’t you remember?” He leaned forward in his chair. “They’re traveling through time, right? All over the universe, right? And they promise that girl that they’ll have her back home five minutes before she left. But they don’t.”
    “How do you know they don’t get her home five minutes before she left? I mean, there’s no clock or anything. They leave at night and they get back the same night. Maybe they left at eight-thirty and got home at eight-twenty-five.”
    He laughed. “You don’t need a clock . Think. At the beginning of the book, that girl walks through the vegetable garden—”
    “Meg.”
    “Huh?”
    “You keep saying ‘that girl.’ Her name is Meg.”
    “—so she walks to the far side of the vegetable garden and sits on this stone wall, right? So, she can see the garden from where she’s sitting and talking with that boy right? And then those ladies show up and take them away.”
    “His name is Calvin. And so what if they can see the garden?”
    “So the garden is where they appear when they get back home at the end of the book. Remember? They land in the broccoli. So if they had gotten home five minutes before they left, like those ladies promised they would, then they would have seen themselves get back. Before they left.”
    I put my book down and shook my head. “Think about it. They hadn’t even left yet. How could they have gotten back already? They didn’t even know for sure whether they would get back.”
    “It doesn’t matter whether they knew it. That’s got nothing to do with it.” He leaned back and shoved his hands in his pockets. “If they land in the broccoli at eight-twenty-five, they should be in the broccoli at eight-twenty-five. Period.”
    “That makes no sense,” I said. “What if they couldn’t do it—save Meg’s father and get back in one piece?”
    “Then they wouldn’t have landed in the broccoli at all. But they did do it, right?”
    “Yes, but—the end can’t happen before the middle!”
    He smiled. “Why can’t it?”
    “I don’t know—it’s common sense!”
    “Common sense! Have you read Relativity? You know—by Einstein?”
    I glared at him.
    “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.”
    “In the way of what?”
    “In the way of what’s true. I mean, it used to be common sense that the world was flat and the sun revolved around it. But at some point, someone had to reject that assumption, or at least question it.”
    “Well, obviously somebody did.”
    “Well, duh . Copernicus did! Look, all I’m saying is that at the end of the book, they don’t get back five minutes before they left. Or they would have seen themselves get back—before they left.”
    I gave up. “It was dark in the garden,” I said. “Maybe they just couldn’t see themselves from where they were sitting.”
    “I thought of that,” he said. “But they would have heard all the yelling, and the dog—”
    “My God, what does it matter? It’s a story —someone made it up! You do realize that, don’t you?”
    He shrugged. “The story is made up. But time travel is possible. In theory. I’ve read some articles about it.”
    “Wow. You really do like math, don’t you?”
    He smiled again. With his supershort hair, his head looked like a perfectly round ball