When You Reach Me Society and Class Quotes

"Latchkey child" is a name for a kid with keys who hangs out alone after school until a grown-up gets home to make dinner. Mom hates that expression. She says it reminds her of dungeons, and must have been invented by someone strict and awful with an unlimited childcare budget. (2.2)

Mom cried the first time she saw our apartment. The whole place was filthy, she says. The wood floors were "practically black," the windows were "caked with dirt," and the walls were smeared with something she "didn't even want to think about." Always in those same words. (4.15)

But I soon found out that Julia wasn't like the rest of us. She took trips all over the world with her parents. She would disappear from school and show up two weeks later with satin ribbons worked into her braids, or with a new green velvet scoop-neck dress, or wearing three gold rings on one finger. She learned about sixty-percent-cacao chocolate, she said, in Switzerland, where her parents had bought her a lot of it, along with a little silver watch she was always shoving in people's faces. (11.11)