by Lisa Graff
Erlan came to the door lickety-split and tugged me down the hall toward the room he shared with his brothers. The Kasteevs’ apartment was bigger than ours, but that day it was crowded—stuffed full of people I didn’t recognize, and giant bright lights on stands everywhere, and big black camera equipment.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“They started filming already,” Erlan whispered, shutting his bedroom door. “Quick, over here.” He tugged me to a sort of fort he’d made with an old patchy quilt tied to his and Karim’s bunk bed.
“I thought you said they weren’t supposed to come till next week.”
“Shh!” Erlan hissed, tugging the quilt door closed around us. He poked his head out, to make sure no one had followed us, I guess, and then leaned back against the wall. “I made a deal with Mom that no one’s allowed to record inside the fort. This is my one secret space. They wrote it on a form and everything. Here, and the bathroom when someone’s peeing. Those are the only places they can’t go.”
Erlan looked very upset. I could tell because his eyes were bugged out huge, which is exactly how they were all the other times he was upset, like when he lost the finals of the regional chess championships last year. I wanted to feel bad for him, but actually I thought the whole TV thing was kind of cool.
“Maybe it will be fun,” I told him, “having your own show.”
This year, a network was filming a reality show about Erlan’s family. It was going to be on the television and the Internet and everything. People were going to follow them around with cameras, everywhere they went, and then other people would watch all the episodes. The whole family would probably have their faces all huge on a billboard, right off the FDR Drive, and everywhere they went, people would know everything about them. I thought it sounded amazing. I asked my parents why we couldn’t have a reality show about us, and Dad said, “Because your mother and I didn’t have the foresight to have two sets of triplets. Now eat your spinach.”
Erlan wrinkled his nose at me, and I watched his face while he thought hard. Sometimes people at school—well, my old school, Mountford—thought me and Erlan were related because we were both Asian, and because we spent so much time together, I guess. Once some kid at lunch even asked if we were twins, which made Erlan snort milk up his nose, and I laughed so hard I got a stomachache, because Erlan’s brother Erik was sitting right across from us. But anyway, we’re not. Related, I mean. Erlan’s family is Kazakh, from Kazakhstan, and I’m half Korean, half Swiss, so we’re not even from the same sort of place. But sometimes people have trouble figuring that stuff out.
“I don’t think it will be fun,” Erlan told me. “I don’t want everybody in the world to watch me pooping!”
“I thought you said they couldn’t film you in the bathroom.”
“You know what I mean,” Erlan said, even though I wasn’t sure I did. “I just want to be left alone.”
“Oh,” I told him. I guessed that made sense. But still. I couldn’t help thinking that it would be awfully nice to have people think you were interesting enough to put on TV.
We spent the morning hanging out in Erlan’s quilt fort, playing board games. Erlan’s favorite game is chess. He’s really good at it—he has trophies and everything. But he knows I don’t like that one, so he doesn’t try to make me play it anymore. Instead we play Operation, and Chutes and Ladders, and sometimes Monopoly or cards. Erlan’s sister Roza made fun of us one time (I think it was Roza), and asked how come we only ever played little-kid games, but Erlan told her to just shut up, that she was being a snob. Then he decided he was going to teach me poker, which I sort of liked.
“It’s going to be weird at school this year without you there,” Erlan said. I was deciding which cards from my hand to trade in. We were playing poker for seashells, and Erlan had more shells than me, but not a lot more. “It’s gonna stink, I bet.”
“Yeah,” I said. But it was hard to feel bad for Erlan when I was feeling so bad for me. He’d still have his brothers, and his sisters too, plus all our other friends. And once his show was on TV, everyone in the world practically would know who he was and love him and think he was cool. And I wasn’t going to know anybody at my new school. “I bet.”
“It’s not like Albie’s going to Turkey,” came a voice from outside the fort. Alma, maybe. “He lives right down the hall.”
“Ainyr!” Erlan screeched, pulling back the quilt. So I guess it was Ainyr. “What are you doing? Get out of here!”
Ainyr did not get out of there. She kept standing in the doorway, with her hands on her hips. Behind her in the living room, there were two cameramen and a lady with a clipboard shouting.
“Mom says it’s time for you to do your pre-interview. I’m supposed to come get you.”
“I’m not doing it.”
“You have to,” Ainyr told him. “Mom and Dad said. And”—her eyes lit up a little bit—“they want to put makeup on you.”
Erlan hollered so loudly at that, my ears almost fell off. It was so loud that I couldn’t really hear the words he was saying, but I’d bet probably it was something about not wanting to wear makeup.
I took my hands off my ears just in time to hear Ainyr say, “I don’t care if you want to look like a washed-out ghost on national TV. But you have to do the interview. Mom and Dad said.” And then she stormed out of the room, and left the door wide open.
“Come on,” I told Erlan when she was gone. He looked upset again, and I didn’t like when he was upset. He was my best friend, so it was my job to make him happy. “I’ll go with you.” And I gave him the Vulcan salute, which was just the four fingers on my right hand making a V. It was from an old TV show that Erlan’s dad liked. He tried to make us watch a couple times, and me and Erlan didn’t really get it, but we liked the pointy-ear stuff and the Vulcan salute.
Erlan Vulcan-saluted me back, and together we left the tent.
Erlan did the interview, because Karim and Erik refused to pretend to be him, even after he said he’d give them ten dollars. But he didn’t let the makeup lady put makeup on him. He told that lady if she even tried to brush his hair, he’d put an ancient Kazakh curse on her. Which I did not know Erlan knew how to do before that, but like my mom says, you learn something new every day. Erlan sat on the couch with Erik and Karim, who answered questions about what it was like to be a triplet, and how they liked living in New York City, all sorts of things. Erik and Karim were the only ones who answered. Erlan scowled at the wall the whole time. I only knew that’s what he was doing because his mom kept hissing, “Erlan, stop scowling!” and the woman with the clipboard shook her head at the man with the earpiece and said, “It’s fine, we’ll edit, keep rolling,” and four different people asked, “Erlan, did you have anything you wanted to add?”
He did not.
With all the bright lights on them, Erik and Karim did look a lot less like washed-out ghosts than Erlan did.
I was a good best friend the whole time they were recording the interview. It took a long time, and not just because of the scowling and the hissing. It also took a long time because the lady with the clipboard decided she wanted to move the couch twice, and every time, Erlan and his brothers had to get up, and then all the people with the headsets had to move all the camera equipment and the lights and everything, and then after that, they’d ask the same exact interview questions all over again, and there would be more hissing and more scowling. But the whole time, I stood by the camera and made funny faces at Erlan to cheer him up, which I think was working until the woman with the clipboard pointed at me and said, “Who is this kid? Can we get him out of here? He’s in my light.” And I had to go home.
• • •
That night, when I checked through my kitchen window to see if Erlan’s bedroom light was on, just before I went to bed, he spied me checking, and he smiled a tiny smile and gave me the Vulcan salute. I Vulcanned back.
>
It was good to know that even if Erlan was about to be a big-time TV star, he was still my best friend.
a perfect
summer day.
Calista really was from California. And she didn’t know anything about New York.
“How do you know which way is uptown?” she asked me when we were on our way to the Met. Mom said it was such a lovely day, we should walk the twenty blocks. I was thinking if it was such a lovely day, we probably shouldn’t spend it in a boring old museum, but I didn’t say that. “Why doesn’t the subway always stop at every stop? Where do you buy a bus pass? Which way is Brooklyn?” She really didn’t know anything.
And so, on our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I taught Calista everything there was to know about New York—the streets and the avenues, express subways, bus stops. It was easy stuff, but maybe not for her, I guess, being from somewhere else. I even told her about all the different boroughs. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. I could name them all without even counting.
Calista nodded after I named each one, like she was plugging them into her brain for keeps. Then she squinted one eye. “What’s a borough?” she asked.
I just shrugged. “Like, a part of the city?” I said. I wondered why I never wondered that before.
“It sounds like a place where moles live,” Calista told me. And after that I couldn’t stop picturing moles all over New York City, digging tunnels between Manhattan and Queens. I smiled to myself.
“So what’s in the Met, anyway?” Calista asked while she made us wait for the light to change before we crossed at 70th Street. I told her we didn’t have to do that, but she said even if she lived in New York now she wasn’t a daredevil, whatever that meant. She made us wait at every single block for the light.
Getting anywhere in California must take forever.
Calista was good at asking questions, though, so I didn’t mind too much how slow we were going.
“It’s mostly boring stuff,” I told Calista, about the Met. We were walking up Park Avenue, halfway to the museum. Park Avenue was my favorite in the spring because of the million zillion tulips in the huge flower beds in the middle of the street—yellow, pink, orange. A giant garden with traffic zooming all around it. In the summer it wasn’t anything special, just a regular avenue. “The Temple of Dandruff is pretty cool, though.”
“Temple of Dandruff?”
I frowned. “Maybe it’s called something else. I don’t remember. Anyway, that one’s pretty cool, and the armor stuff”—Calista made us wait at another light, while everyone in the entire universe crossed in front of us and did not get hit by any cars—“but all the rest of it is more boring than anything.” I didn’t even mention the forty-two thousand old oil paintings of stuffy dead guys with fur collars no one cared about. Looking at all of those could make a person keel over, just from how boring they were. Plus, there were, like, six whole rooms filled with chairs.
Chairs.
The Natural History Museum was way better. The Sea, Air, and Space Museum was even better than that. It was my favorite of all. I’d only been there once, with my dad a year and a half ago, but I still had my model airplane I got in the gift shop. A real A-10 Thunderbolt. Me and Dad were even almost done putting it together.
The walk signal came on, and after checking both ways twice, Calista let us cross. At least she didn’t make me hold her hand like I was some kind of baby that had never crossed a street before.
“So why are we going to this museum,” Calista asked, “if you think it’s so boring?”
I shrugged. “Mom said you’d never been there.”
“I’ve never been anywhere,” Calista said. “At least not in New York. So why would I want to go somewhere boring?”
I thought about that. She had a pretty good point, actually.
“What do you like to do?” she asked me.
“Me?”
She laughed. “Yes, you. What do you like to do in New York City? You can be my tour guide. We can do anything you want.”
“Anything?”
And that’s how we spent the perfect summer day in New York City, doing all the best things I like to do. We went to the pet store on 81st and Madison and looked at the puppies. We even got to go to the back to play with them, because Calista said we were thinking of buying one, which was a lie, but Calista said it was okay. We went to Duane Reade and had a contest to see who could find the ugliest sunglasses (I won), then we bought two squirt guns and had a water fight in the park (she won). We got soft-serve cones at Tasti D-Lite and then new ones from the Mr. Softee truck, to see which ones we liked better. (I liked Mr. Softee, which I already knew, but Calista picked Tasti D-Lite because she said they had better sprinkles.) We bought soft pretzels from the cart in the park, even though I told Calista they tasted like the soggy cardboard from the bottom of the pizza box. We fed leftover pretzels to the ducks. We got chased by a goose.
And then, at the end of the perfect day, I taught Calista how to hail a cab.
“You gotta look at the number on the top,” I told her, “to see if it’s lit up. Otherwise there’s a person in it already. And if it says ‘off duty’ you can’t get that one either.”
Calista nodded. “And I just stick my hand out, like this?”
“Yeah, but maybe go further out, because no one’s going to see you there.”
“You want me to stand in the street?” Calista shrieked.
“That’s how my dad always does it.”
Calista hailed six cabs, all by herself. When they stopped to pick us up, Calista told them, “Thank you very much, but I changed my mind.” They growled and pulled back onto the street. One man said a not very nice word.
We took the bus home, and I showed Calista the cord to pull when she wanted the driver to stop. It had only been a couple hours, but I was already hoping that Calista would last longer than any of my other nannies (even if she wasn’t really a nanny, or a babysitter either), because I’d already figured out that she was way more fun than any of them. Nannies didn’t last long, though, I knew that. They either moved or had their own kids or got other jobs that paid more money. Mom said that was just how it worked with nannies.
“Thanks for showing me around, Albie,” Calista told me as we walked past Thom at the front desk of our building and into the elevator. “You’re a very good tour guide.”
“I am?”
“Yeah.” Calista punched the button for the eighth floor, and the elevator doors closed. “You’re real smart, you know that?”
Smart.
That’s what she said.
• • •
“How was the Met?” Mom asked when we came inside. She was sitting at her laptop at the table. I didn’t see Dad anywhere.
I opened up my mouth to tell her about the park and the ice cream and the goose, but Calista answered before me.
“It was great,” she told my mom. “Not boring at all.”
And my mom didn’t see, but Calista winked at me.
“Well, that’s nice,” my mom said, and she turned back to her computer. “You enjoyed yourself, Albie?”
I looked from my mom, staring at her computer screen, back to Calista.
“Yeah,” I said, and I put a big grin across my face, to match Calista’s. “I had a great time.”
noticing.
I’m good at noticing things. I’ve always been good at noticing. Mrs. Lancaster back at Mountford told me. She said that was one of my “strengths,” that I always picked up on tiny details that no one else ever saw. She said, “Albie, if you had any skill at language, you might’ve made a very fine writer.” That’s what she said.
Here are some things I notice.
I notice that even though my best friend, Erlan, is the same exact age as me (which is ten), I’m two whole inches taller. My arms reach way far
ther when I stretch too.
That’s a thing anybody could notice, though. That one’s easy.
I notice that I can fill a water balloon at the drinking fountain in the park almost twice as fast as Erlan. He always gets the knot twisted around his finger and spills water all down his shirt and has to start over, and I can always tie mine no problem.
That’s an easy one to notice too.
But I bet that no one else but me ever notices that when Erlan’s mom says to count out ten peanut butter crackers for a snack, Erlan always gets his on his plate just a little bit faster than me.
Just a little bit.
And I bet that no one ever noticed either that when me and Holly Martin would do library helpers every other Monday, she always finished her stack of books to put back on the shelf a couple minutes before me. Just a couple minutes. It was the same amount of books, but it was always a couple minutes. Every time. I think I figured out why Holly was faster. Because I watched her when she was putting the books away, and her mouth didn’t move at all the way mine does when I’m saying the alphabet in my head. I think maybe Holly didn’t have to say the alphabet in her head. I think maybe she just knew the order somehow, without even saying it.
I bet no one noticed either that when Mr. Onorato came in for science last year and asked who thought the tall, skinny glass could hold more water than the short fat one, I was the only kid who raised my hand wrong. I bet no one noticed, because I raised it really quick, and then I noticed nobody else had their hand up, so I put mine down. And I sit in the back anyway.
(It was a trick question besides, because both glasses held the same exact amount of water. Somehow everyone else knew that already.)
I bet no one even noticed I stopped raising my hand in class.
I don’t think anyone but me notices any of those things. I’m really good at noticing.
I hope I’ll always be a better noticer than everybody else.
