Absolutely Almost (2 page)

E
-mails from school are never about good stuff. The teacher never writes to your parents to say things like “Albie's so wonderful to have in class! Just wanted to let you know!”

Or

“Albie always lets Rick Darby borrow his pencils, even though Rick barely ever gives them back!”

Or

“Today Albie picked Jessa Kwan first for his team in basketball, because Jessa usually gets picked last, and he felt bad!”

(My team lost in basketball that day.)

E-mails from school are always bad, but they try to hide it with big words that are hard to understand.

Potential.

Struggling.

Achievement gap.

Words that make my dad slam his fist on the table and call my teacher to shout about setting up a parent-teacher conference, and my mom to go out and buy fruit. When Mom comes back with strawberries, her face is always crystal clear. Not an almost-crying face at all.

I used to really like strawberries.

E-mails from school are always bad, and they're always about me. But
letters
from school—the kind that are written on real paper and sent in a real envelope, with a stamp and everything—those are even worse.

When the last letter came from Mountford Prep, my old school, Dad didn't yell at my teacher. Mom didn't go out and buy strawberries. They just sat at the table, blinking at me, their shoulders slumped like when our dog, Biscuit, ran away.

“What does it say?” I asked. It was open, in front of my dad across the table, but I couldn't see any of the words. Only the big red letters at the top of the page, spelling out the name of the school.

“It doesn't matter,” Dad said. He looked mad, like his eyes were hurting him. He crunched up the letter and tossed it in the recycling.

“I think a new school will be good for you,” Mom said.

• • •

It's my job to take the trash to the garbage chute every week, or whenever it's full. Recycling too. It's part of my chores. I get five dollars a week allowance.

That day, the letter day, I did my chores. But one tiny piece of recycling never made it down the chute. I smoothed out the letter from Mountford Prep, and folded it back along the creases, and put it in the bottom drawer of my dresser with my swim trunks.

I never read it. I didn't want to. But I didn't want to throw it out either. I don't know why.

Maybe P.S. 183 doesn't believe in sending home letters.

M
om waited two weeks for Dad to free up his schedule so he could help her pick the new nanny, but he kept being busy, so finally she picked by herself. The nanny came over on Tuesday to meet me.

“Hey, Albie,” she said from the doorway. She waved one hand. The other was wrapped around a cup of takeout coffee from the bodega downstairs. I knew it was that bodega because I heard the owner, Hugo, say one time that they're the only ones for fourteen blocks who use the blue cups. “I'm Calista.”

I didn't want to look up to meet her, but finally I did. It was better than the supplemental reading packets Mom had gotten for me, anyway.

She was short, but not too short for a girl, I guess. She was wearing jeans, even though it was too hot outside for jeans, and sandals, and a pink-and-orange plaid short-sleeve button-down shirt. Her hair was braided in two braids on either side of her head—not the regular kind of braids, but the complicated kind the girls do to each other during assemblies, the kind that start all the way above the ears and take forever. I wondered why she would wear her hair like that, because it made her look like a kid. Maybe that was why.

My mom walked to the kitchen and took a glass out of the cupboard. “Calista, would you like some water?” She started filling it before the new nanny even had a chance to answer. “Albie, don't be rude,” Mom told me. “Say hello.”

“I'm too old for a nanny,” I said. Which was true, because I was ten.

“Albie!” Mom squawked. The ice tumbled out of the square in the fridge door and into the glass. “He's not normally like this,” she told the nanny.

“That's all right,” the girl said. But she didn't say it to my mom, she said it to me. She sat down in the chair next to me, still holding tight to her coffee, and smiled. “I'm not really a nanny,” she said.

“More like a babysitter,” Mom piped up from the kitchen.

I was too old for a babysitter too.

“We're just going to hang out together,” the girl told me. “I'll pick you up from school. Maybe we'll go to the park a little bit, I'll help you with your homework.”

“She can help you make flash cards to study,” Mom said as the water poured in around the ice. I scrunched up my nose.

“And when your parents have to work late, we'll do dinner and play games,” the girl went on. “Do you have Monopoly? I love Monopoly.”

“That sounds like a babysitter,” I told her.

My mom walked over and handed the girl the glass. It had little wet speckles of cold on the outside already. “Albie, you should show Calista your chess set. He has a gorgeous chess set, from Guatemala. Maybe you can practice so you can join the chess club at your new school. What do you think of that, hmm, Albie?”

I squinted at the girl.

“Just hanging out,” she promised. She set the glass on the table, and my mom scooped it up to put a coaster underneath it.

I looked back down at my packet of supplemental materials. “I don't need to be picked up from school yet,” I said. “There's still two weeks of summer.”

“We thought Calista could take you to the Met tomorrow,” Mom said. “Albie, you know she's from California? Just moved to the city two weeks ago. You've really never been to the Met before?” she asked the girl.

The girl pushed back the plastic tab on her coffee lid and took a sip. “Maybe you can be my tour guide,” she told me.

I squinted my eyes at her. There was a tiny chunk of hair, woven into the very back of her braid, that was neon pink. It matched the checks in her shirt. I wondered if Mom had seen it. Probably not, or I bet she never would've picked her for my nanny. Dad would hate it.

“Okay,” I told Calista.

E
rlan Kasteev has always been my best friend, since six years ago, which was when we met. Lucky for both of us we live in the same building, on the same floor even. My family is 8A, and his is 8F. Which makes it easy to know if he's home, because I can check for his bedroom light from my kitchen window.

I knocked on Erlan's door, and one of his sisters answered. Alma, I think. I always had trouble telling his sisters apart, because they were triplets and they looked alike. Not identical—that's what Erlan told me, although they looked identical enough to me. Alma, Roza, and Ainyr. They were all two years older than Erlan, with dark straight hair and dark eyes. Erlan was a triplet too, but I could always tell Erlan apart from Karim and Erik. Erlan said he and his brothers tricked their teachers all the time, and the other kids at our old school. He said they even tricked his parents once. But not me. I always knew. That's because Erlan just looked like Erlan.

“Oh,” Alma or whoever said when she saw me at the door. “It's you.” Then she screamed over her shoulder, “Erlan! Your lame friend is here!”

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.