When You Reach Me

Sal spends the night in the hospital with a broken arm and three broken ribs. In her bedroom, Miranda lays out the mysterious notes in front of her and begins trying to understand the connections between them. She begins to realize that the laughing man must have taken a difficult trip through time to be on the corner that day, ready to save Sal from the oncoming truck.

This connection explains most of the cryptic notes, except for the second half of the line, “I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own” (164). Miranda acknowledges that Sal’s life has been saved, “but you failed miserably with goal number two” (164). She begins piecing details together about the laughing man, but she doesn’t say anything about it to her mother.

Miranda visits Sal at his apartment the next evening. Sal explains that he still likes Miranda, he just needed to “take a break for a while” from their friendship (167). Sal mistakenly thinks Marcus “has it in for me” and Miranda insists that Marcus was really just trying to apologize when he was chasing Sal (168). Miranda thinks back to the times when Sal had already been quietly making more space between them even before Marcus punched him.