“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.
lights. camera.
Erlan 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.”