“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.”
noticing.
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.