Absolutely Almost (3 page)

C
alista 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.”

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 farther 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.

E
rlan's sister Ainyr told me that the hardest part of going to a new school would be lunch. “If you don't have anybody to sit with,” she told me, “then everyone will think you're a loser. If you sit with other loser kids, then everyone will think you're a loser too. If you sit with kids who are way cooler than you, and they don't want to sit with you, then they'll think you're a loser. You have to find kids to sit with who are just a
little
bit cooler than you, but not too much. Then everyone will think you're cool too, but not trying too hard.”

When she said all that, it made me really scared. Because it sounded super hard to figure all that out, and what if I messed up?

Lucky for me, at my new school, everybody had to eat lunch with their same class, so I didn't worry too much once I figured that out. Everybody in Mrs. Rouse's class sat at one long table in the middle of the cafeteria. Mostly it was boys on one side, and girls on the other, but it was mixed up a little bit.

I was sitting next to a girl who was tons shorter than me, even sitting down. Her feet didn't quite reach the floor. I looked at her lunch as she pulled it out of her brown paper lunch bag. Turkey sandwich with no crusts, cut at an angle. A box of apple cranberry juice. Carrot sticks. It looked like a healthy lunch, but loads better than mine. I had leftover kimchi and a cold bagel with cream cheese, which is what Mom gives me when she forgets to make my lunch the day before. I have that lunch a lot. I looked around the table. Nobody else had kimchi. Almost everybody had sandwiches. I zipped the kimchi back inside my puffy green lunch sack.

While I chewed my bagel, I looked around the table and tried to figure out who Erlan's sister Ainyr would think was cool, and who she would say was a loser. But I couldn't really tell. Everybody sort of just looked like a fifth-grader. There was a boy with spiky hair and a kid with a skateboarding shirt. One of the girls had a panda lunch box, which at my old school would be lame, but she seemed like she had a lot of friends, so maybe here panda lunch boxes were okay. I wondered who made up the rules about what was lame and what wasn't, and who was cool and who was a loser. If somebody told me what the rules were, I'd be fine.

While I was thinking all that, the girl next to me, the short one with the healthy-but-good lunch, pulled another thing out of her lunch bag.

“Gummy bears?” I said. “Cool.” I love gummy bears.

The girl looked up at me and smiled. It was kind of a funny smile, actually, like she was surprised I was talking to her. But before she could say anything, the boy across from me who was wearing the skateboard shirt—I think Mrs. Rouse called him Darren—said, “Ew, Albie, don't talk to Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy.”

I don't know why he said her name like that—Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy. But when I looked at the girl, it seemed like she definitely didn't like it. Her shoulders were sunk down, and her face was red, and somehow she looked even smaller than before.

“Don't call her that,” I said to the skateboard shirt boy. Darren. “That's mean.” I didn't know
why
it was mean, but sometimes you could tell that a person wasn't being nice, even if you weren't sure how.

“Ew, Albie!” Darren said. “Is Buh-Buh-Buh-Betsy your
girlfriend
?” And then he laughed like that was so funny, and so did all the boys next to him, and practically the whole other side of the lunch table. Then Darren tossed a potato chip toward me, and it stuck to my shirt. And even though it didn't hurt, because it was just a potato chip, I knew that that
definitely
wasn't nice.

The whole other side of the lunch table laughed again.

I think maybe a couple other kids might have almost started to toss potato chips at me too, because I could tell they thought it looked like fun, but just then, one of the lunch duty aides came over and got mad at Darren for throwing food. Darren glared at me the whole time, like it was my fault he threw a potato chip at me and got in trouble, and the whole other side of the lunch table glared too.

That's when I figured out that at P.S. 183, Darren was the one who wrote the rules.

So it turned out that Erlan's sister Ainyr was right. Lunch was the hardest part of the day. But it wasn't all bad.

After Darren and his friends finished glaring at me and went to the playground, I looked back at the table, and there, on a napkin next to my puffy green lunch sack, was a gummy bear. A red one. And everyone knows that red gummy bears are the best ones.

I looked over at the girl next to me. “Thanks,” I told her. And I popped the gummy bear in my mouth.

She smiled. Somehow she didn't look so small when she smiled.