When You Reach Me Friendship Quotes

She met Louisa, who didn't have a husband either, in the lobby on that first day. They were both taking garbage to the big cans out front. Louisa was holding Sal. Sal had been crying, but when he saw me, he stopped.

I know all this because I used to ask to hear the story over and over: the story of the day I met Sal. (4.26-27)

I used to think of Sal as being a part of me: Sal and Miranda, Miranda and Sal. I knew he wasn't really, but that's the way it felt. (5.9)

One time, when Sal had a fever and Louisa had called in sick to her job and kept him home, the daycare lady handed me my carpet square at nap time, and then, a second later, she gave me Sal's, too.

"I know how it is, baby," she said.

And then I lay on her floor not sleeping because Sal wasn't there to press his foot against mine. (5.11-13)

Sal played basketball more and more and talked to me less and less. I asked him four hundred times whether he was okay, or if he was mad at me, or what was wrong, and three hundred and ninety-nine times he answered, "Yes," "No," and "Nothing." Then, the last time I asked, he told me, while standing in our lobby and looking at his feet, that he didn't want to have lunch or walk home together for a while.

"Do you even want to be friends at all?" I asked him.

He glared at his feet and said no, he guessed he didn't for a while. (11.4-6)

I knew the way the girls all paired up, and Julia and Annemarie had been paired up for a long time. Julia I hated. Annemarie I had never thought about much. (11.9)

That's when I noticed that her room was covered with pictures of Julia. Maybe not covered, exactly, but there were a lot of them – the two of them in pajamas, or in the park, or standing together all dressed up outside some theater. (12.10)

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 talk to school wit her anymore.

"Does it really matter?" I asked myself.

It did. (38.3-5)

Julia watched Annemarie. And I watched Julia watching Annemarie. And what I saw were eyes that were sixty-percent-cacao chocolate, a face that was café au lait, and an expression that was so familiar it made my whole body ring like a bell. Julia's look was my look. My looking at Sal.

And suddenly I knew three things:

First, it was Julia who had left the rose for Annemarie.

Second, Julia cared about Annemarie, but Annemarie didn't see it. Because I was standing in the way.

Third, Alice Evans was about to pee in her pants. (41.3-7)

"So when can we go back to normal?" I asked.

"That's the thing, Mira. It wasn't normal. I didn't have any other friends! Not real friends."

Neither did I! I wanted to say. And then I realized – that was his whole point. We'd only had each other. It has been that way forever. (47.27-29)

"I mean, remember the second week of school, when you got sick? I spent that whole week alone. The whole week. Alone at lunch every day, alone after school…and don't take this the wrong way, but sometimes I want to hang out with boys." (47.30)

Sal and I don't wait for each other these days. Not purposely. But if we happen to be leaving school at the same time, if he isn't going to a friend's, or to basketball practice, and I'm not going to Annemarie's or Julia's – or Colin's – then Sal and I walk home together. And we are better this way, together because we want to be. He understood that before I did. (54.1)