When You Reach Me

When Miranda’s mother needs to focus for The $20,000 Pyramid, she “has to get herself into a certain frame of mind” that is “sort of like lifting one little corner of her veil” (72). Miranda’s mother does not actually wear a physical veil over her eyes. Lifting her veil is a metaphor for blocking out the distracting details and seeing “the world as it really is” (71). Every person “has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world” Miranda’s mother explains, and most of the time people “walk around happily with these invisible veils” that keep the world blurry because “we like it that way” (71). The “beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love” of the world are too much for most people to take in, so “mostly we are happy not to” (71).

Miranda’s mother can focus and control the information she takes in, allowing her to sort through details to see the threads connecting them to bigger ideas. It’s this skill that makes her successful as a contestant on The $20,000 Pyramid. Miranda thinks about this veil frequently and wonders whether perhaps “every once in a while, someone is born without one” (72). Someone without any veil at all, she figures, “sees the big stuff all the time” (72). Her mother explains that “most of the time, people get distracted by little stuff and ignore the big stuff” (72). By lifting her veil just enough to take in some details, Miranda’s mother is able to see threads connecting ideas in ways that others don’t.

Marcus is someone who sees the big stuff all the time, so much so that he often overlooks or misses small details. For example, he can debate the notion of time travel—a complex concept—but he doesn’t remember the names of his own classmates or characters in books. This frustrates Miranda who is the opposite. She remembers the names of people and characters but focuses too much on details to wrap her head around bigger ideas like time travel. Miranda’s veil lifts at the resolution of the story as she puts together the details that confirm the solution to the plot’s mystery: Marcus and the laughing man are the same person. She experiences a distortion of time as “an invisible hand reached out and snatched away my veil. And for almost a minute, I understood everything” (188). The moment is fleeting—“fifty-five seconds, to be precise” (189)—but when a person’s veil is lifted, “a minute is long enough to realize a lot of things” (188). The clues to the mystery have been in front of Miranda and readers all along, but a moment of clarity and greater perspective is necessary to connect the threads.