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.