She looked me right in the eye. “Yes. She died.”

Then I didn’t feel like talking anymore. We played six games of Connect Four instead.

—

After that first visit, I told Mom and Dad that I was never going back to Miriam’s office. I took out my green notebook and, under Things That Will Not Change, I wrote: I am not going to Miriyems!

I underlined not three times. It’s still there in my notebook. Number 14.

Mom and Dad bribed me with sour gummy bears. Every time I went to Miriam’s office without complaining (Dad said lucky for me facial expressions didn’t count), I got a sticker on a chart on the back of the door at Mom’s (because I saw Miriam after school on Thursdays, and Thursday is a Mom day). When I had three stickers, I got a bag of sour gummy bears. Movie-theater size.

At first, I thought Miriam didn’t know anything about the gummy bears, but then I found out the whole thing had actually been her idea. One Thursday, after I had started to like Miriam just a little bit, a jar filled with gummy bears showed up on her coffee table between the two couches.

“I hear we both like gummy bears,” she said, taking the lid off and pushing the jar toward me.

I said, “Are these even sour?”

Miriam said, “Super sour.” And she gave me a little wink. After that, the sticker chart at Mom’s disappeared. But Miriam kept the jar of gummy bears on the coffee table. She always opened it when we had five minutes left.

A Different Way

You might think that if you were walking down Broadway with a big plastic bag wrapped around your foot inside your (bloody) sandal, people would stare, but I watched all the way to Miriam’s and didn’t catch one person looking. Mom says that’s one of the things she loves about New York City.

Miriam’s office is in a regular apartment building that people live in, only she has a special door that leads right from the sidewalk into her waiting room. When we got there, Mom sat on her favorite waiting chair, the one with a little table next to it, and took a folder out of her big bag. It was full of her students’ papers to grade, same as usual. I sat across from her and looked at the clock. At 3:30 on the dot, the office door opened and Miriam stuck her head out.

“Bea!” She always said it like that, like she was surprised to see me there.

“Dad and Jesse are getting married,” I said, sitting down on my couch. “We’re having a wedding.”

“What happened to your foot?” She pointed.

“Did you hear me?”

“Oh, yes! How do you feel about it, Bea?”

“You knew, didn’t you?”