Super in the City Read Free Page A

sweaty, renegade tendrils off my cheeks.
    “What is the point,” Tag gasped, “of having a party in another country if you can recognize everyone there? Did they just fly in everyone she usually hangs out with?”
    Leave it to Tag to find the princess at fault.
    “I mean, we could have been, you know…”
    “Senators’ daughters,” I ventured between breaths.
    “Or soap opera actresses!”
    “Or borough presidents.”
    “Yeah! Or venture capitalists looking to invest heavily in … in … what does Spain make?”
    “Yellow rice?”
    “Yellow rice!” Tag put her hands on her hips defiantly. She looked so convinced that she was a venture capitalist wanting to invest in Spanish rice that I started laughing, which left me so out of breath that I had to sit down on a planter. Tag seemed to remember that she was not a wealthy speculator and sat down beside me.
    “You have to pay more attention at these things, Zeph,” she said sternly. “Not get all googly- eyed over the first bag of tricks to give you visions of villas.”
    I glared at her. “Me? You were supposed to do due diligence! I would have been fine at home with my pizza.”
    “Of course you would’ve.” She licked her finger and rubbed at a sangria stain on her dress. “If it weren’t for me, you’d never go north of Fourteenth Street.”
    “This from the woman who’s allergic to the Upper East Side,” I announced to no one in particular. Tag had spent her childhood shuttling between a mother who boasted that she’d married Tag’s father for the alimony, and a father who was now on his third wife (second trophy). Tag had concluded that their behavior was the result of their neighborhood. Reminding her that people behaved badly on the West Side, and even downtown, did nothing to dissuade her from her theory.
    We were quiet for a moment.
    “Friends of OPEC?” I finally said. “FOOPEC?”
    Tag shrugged, but she started to smile.
    “So what now? It’s only nine- thirty.” Though we both knew we’d be in our beds within the hour, we went through the motions as a nod to our youth and to New York’s reputation for being the center of the universe.
    “Movie?” I said, glancing toward the marquee of the Paris Theatre two blocks away.
    “Kind of late to start a movie.”
    “Drink?”
    “I don’t wanna spend the money.”
    “Jazz at Smoke?”
    “Since when do you like jazz?” Tag asked suspiciously.
    Since spotting the buzz- cut bass player who’d moved into the apartment between my parents’ and mine two months earlier.
    I shrugged. “Just trying to think of something new.”
    But Tag was starting to squint in a way that meant she really wanted to go home and get up early and go into her lab to look at her beautiful tapeworms under a microscope. And I was thinking of the three Netflix DVDs waiting in their inviting red- and- white envelopes at home, an orgy of chick flicks, with Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Aniston receiving equal representation. Plus a fresh bag of Newman’s Own Ginger- O’s. A yawn escaped me.
    Ten minutes later, we were waving to each other across the Columbus Circle subway tracks, as Tag waited for an uptown train and I headed downtown. I paced back and forth to the beat of the steel drum player, who was pinging out the grooviest version of “Hava Nagila” I’d ever heard. The guy was grinning and sweating while two Latino guys alternately danced and sucked face in front of him and a tourist family—towheaded, wide- eyed,clutching
Lion King
programs—took pictures of the whole scene, no doubt deriving better entertainment value from their MetroCards than they had from their orchestra seats.
    Plugging my ears as the express roared past, I grew giddy from a familiar first- world high, a euphoria that suffused my body like an electric current: I had been born into circumstances that allowed me clean running water, heat, and toilets that flushed, where no tanks rolled down Fifth Avenue and I