London Is the Best City in America Read Online Free PDF Page A

a cigarette, wearing a pair of army pants and a paint-splattered white T-shirt. Blue streaks were covering both cheeks. He kept his eyes down, his long eyelashes steady. He was, without a doubt, my favorite thing I’d ever seen.
    I put the phone down. “What are you supposed to be over there?” I asked. “A painter?”
    This was my great pickup line.
    He looked up at me, caught my eyes, started to smile, his cheek-to-cheek, once-in-a-blue-moon smile. And then he stopped. “What are you supposed to be over there?” he asked back. “A high school prep?”
    As it turned out, Matt wasn’t dressed up either. His parents had just moved to Scarsdale—his mom had just had another kid, a little boy—and he had come out for the day from the city, from NYU, where he was just starting his sophomore year. Where he had just declared a major in architecture. A minor in still drawing. He had spent the day helping his dad paint their new basement. The only reason he accepted my invite to come back with me to my friend’s party was that he had missed his train back to the city and had an hour to kill until the next one. Later, he’d tell me this, not to be mean, but because he found it amazing how far we’d come. Even by the end of that first night. I didn’t care about any of that anyway. All I knew was that he reached for the soda.
    “I’m coming with you,” he said slowly. “Just show me where it is you want to go.”
     
    By the time Josh and I made it out of the front parking lot—past the Welcome to the Municipal Pool sign—it was almost a half hour later. All the happy energy of the fireworks was left somewhere behind: everyone honking at each other and squeezing each other in. One SUV that was holding about seven kids broke down in the parking lot’s main intersection, all of them crying hysterically as the people yelled at them to get out of the way.
    Josh was driving my car. When he finally took the left out of the parking lot, we were less than ten minutes from my parents’ house—Mamaroneck Road opening up all around us: the soccer fields on our right, houses banking up on the left, long silvery driveways locked down behind bushes and gates.
    Things looked so different to me, being back there. They seemed so different than they’d been in the years since I’d left—everything brighter, shinier. More gates. It definitely seemed closer to the Scarsdale that you hear about on television or in the movies than the Scarsdale that I remembered. When I was growing up here, there seemed to be more money problems, more people dressing down. Maybe that wasn’t accurate, or I just wasn’t paying attention then in the way I could now that I lived on the other side of it. And still, I didn’t like seeing the newly minted cars, fluorescent mailboxes. I didn’t remember the professional dog walkers. Like anywhere, I guess, there were so many great things about growing up in my hometown, and some less than great things. I wasn’t a great athlete, to put it mildly, and a lot of the childhood wars in Scarsdale seemed to be fought and won on soccer fields and basketball courts. Even though I participated, I couldn’t get too revved up about it. I couldn’t, for a long time, get too revved up about anything, convinced as I was that my life, in whatever capacity it would one day exist, wouldn’t truly start until sometime after Scarsdale was behind me.
    Maybe what I could say about my hometown, without much hesitation, was that it was more chock-full of signs than any other place I’d ever seen. Don’t walk, Dangerous Curve, Duck Crossing, No Parking Around Corner, Stop Sign Ahead, Yield 100 ft. Every block, every half a block. More instructions on how you are—and aren’t—allowed to live.
    Josh took a left onto our parents’ street, not pulling the wheel tightly enough so that the left blinker stopped its persistent blinking. It was still making its loud clucking noises, happily flashing away.
    “Have you