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.”