More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer Read Free Book Online Page A

taught him bits of the queen’s English. One day the principal appeared at his classroom door and summoned Ilya to come with him to the office.
    What, Ilya fretted, had he done?
    At the office door, the principal turned to him. “I can’t get into my computer,” he said. “I lost the password. They tell me that you might be able to fix it.”
    Five minutes later, the principal was back on his computer.Ilya was rewarded, to his amazement, with a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate. Still, he managed to run into a bewildering string of trouble with some Americans. The family moved to Boston from New Orleans, and he was not yet sure-footed in English. Another boy from Russia often translated for him. After weeks of this, Ilya realized that the other boy had been entertaining himself by deliberately warping the translation and watching Ilya squirm.
    By junior year in high school, Ilya had full command of English, and the Zhitomirskiys had settled in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. His Russian accent had been sanded down by four years in the United States. He decided to leverage his perennial newcomer act into a social project. Every day, he would meet a new person. Just walk up to someone he didn’t know and, in the easy American way, say, “Hi, I’m Ilya.” The trick was making it seem casual. In truth, before he approached strangers, the anxiety sweated into his palms, and he would have to dry them on his sleeves. He was one of the few kids in school who did not have a Facebook account. Instead, he built his own social network, one handshake at a time. Before the year was out, he was working with the stage crew on the school drama club productions, happy to dry his palms and pretend that climbing the high rails to adjust the lighting was no big deal. In the summer before his senior year, he knocked on the stage door of every theater in Philadelphia, looking for work. Few people had time for him but he kept going.
    At the Academy of Music, which was showing
The Lion King,
the manager said that he had no jobs, that Disney did all the hiring, and that Ilya wouldn’t be hired in any event because he wasn’t a union member.
    Another rejection.
    But then: “Do you want to come in and see how things work?” the manager asked.
    Soon, Ilya was striding along catwalks in the upper reaches of the hall. Eventually, he landed tech jobs at a few small theaters. For college,he wanted a top-ranked math program, and was accepted to one at the University of Maryland, though his seat would not be available until the January after his graduation. That meant he had a term to kill, so he registered at Tulane in New Orleans, where he joined the juggling team and learned to unicycle. Following that semester, he transferred to the University of Maryland in College Park, and after math classes took up competitive swing dancing. He also power-kited, propelling himself over the crests of hills and gliding as far as he could. For meals, he practiced Dumpster diving—salvaging edible sandwiches and even sushi from the bins outside a coffee shop. The Maryland program was strong, but he was drawn to a place he had never lived: the heart of a big city. The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, housed in Greenwich Village, piqued his academic and personal interests. So for the third time in three years, he began at a new college.
    It was as if he had landed in a black-and-white photograph of the mythic, shimmering metropolis. His first dorm was across from the Brooklyn Bridge; his roommate was a jazz musician who came home from gigs at three in the morning and played a keyboard while Ilya worked on math problems. In the lounge of the math department, he would laughingly harangue students who spent time on Facebook; why, he wondered, were they wasting time with such fake relationships, where people just spread themselves out? Where was the joy of