40.

IT WASN’T SERIOUS, AT FIRST. The three of them started getting media requests, then a PR manager from their hometown signed on to help them keep track of everything coming in, and produced three two-sided sheets of media requests. It was too much to do; how could one person do all of them, do even three or four or five of them? So Anthony went down the list eliminating the ones he knew he didn’t want to do. Not many were easy to pass up—when fame finally comes knocking, you don’t shut the door in its face—but one was an obvious “no thanks.” Dancing with the Stars.

And then one morning a week after Anthony got home from Paris, while he (he thought) was the only one of the three back in the States, his dad told him there was an announcement on Good Morning America he should watch, so Anthony pulled it up. After a clip of Gary Busey riding a horse, the host teed up the ageless Dancing with the Stars host, Tom Bergeron.

All the final cast members had been announced but one. “Tom,” one of the hosts said, “will you do us the honors and reveal the suuupersecret star?”

“Yes, indeed,” Tom said, sitting in a director’s chair in the middle of Times Square. “I found out about this late addition to our cast last night. I’m thrilled to introduce him. He was one of three Americans who took down a terrorist on board a packed train in Paris.”

Holy shit, is that Alek! In Times Square!

Or rather, Alek’s shadow behind a sheer pink screen, but unmistakably him; even in monochrome silhouette, Alek had a trademark slouch. Hands in pockets, Johnny Bravo hair whipped off center. Out he walked through a beaded curtain onto national television, smiling ear to ear, then turning because the beads were clinging like tentacles to his shirt, and he had to undo himself. He broke free, walked out with a hitch in his step, and asked the sixty-five-year-old celebrity chef Paula Deen for a high five en route to his chair. Alek didn’t seem shy or quiet at all. He seemed to be right in his element, sitting in Times Square in his standard jeans and running shoes, next to a handful of suits and designer T-shirts with aggressive necklines.

Anthony couldn’t believe he was watching the same Alek. Was that really his friend sitting next to the Crocodile Hunter’s daughter? Sitting in front of a mop-headed social media star? They beamed in a Backstreet Boy from a set where he was filming a movie. Anthony was watching his friend becoming a pop idol before his eyes.

He and Spencer would go about their more mature media requests, Anthony deciding it’d be cool to go on the shows he watched faithfully. Jimmy Fallon (which was a mistake; Jimmy Kimmel treated Spencer better); and Lester Holt for evening news, while they waited for Alek to make a fool of himself on national television.

But a crazy thing happened on the way to Alek’s national embarrassment. He didn’t fail.

He kept advancing.

He survived the elimination rounds.

He made it past the first half of the season.

He made it to the two-night finale, so Spencer and Anthony flew down to see him on the first night, since he’d obviously be eliminated before it got to the final three stars.

He wasn’t. He made it to the final night. Alek seemed natural in the makeup, under the lights. And sure, he was the one “star” whose professional dancing partner fielded most of the questions, the producers apparently catching on quickly that Alek wasn’t the most verbose contestant they’d ever had, not the best choice for a passionate anecdote, but he seemed to like the performing; he actually seemed to have this in him. Anthony had never seen that side of him, but it seemed like something that had always been there. Alek wasn’t pretending; Alek never pretended. So Alek actually liked to perform. It was like he’d been hiding an artistic side all along, and it took the train to bring it out.

FOR HIS PART, Anthony chose to do his first big interview with Lester Holt. Not just because Holt anchored the highest-rated evening news broadcast, reaching almost ten million people every night. Anthony chose him because Holt was a Sacramento State alum, and he went to high school down the street from where Anthony grew up. The more globally known Anthony became, the more those local connections began to mean. It was funny, then, that though they grew up spitting distance from one another, Anthony had to go all the way to New York to meet him. Farther even, all the way to France to win the invitation.

But this was Anthony’s first time in New York City, and he was without the other two. He hadn’t talked to Spencer much, hardly at all except for the one call, when Spencer told him about the girl and the body shot, and the kid who made him cry.

He taped his interview in a big open room that seemed to be a swanky, modernist, minimalist loft, like the whole floor was that one room and all it had in it was a table and two glasses of water. And Lester.

By that point he’d gotten pretty good at telling the story, but there was one part that he still hadn’t accepted. A question he was dodging, whenever it came up, without even realizing that’s what he was doing.

“You must have played in your mind,” Holt said, after they’d dispensed with pleasantries and a few minutes of small talk, “how easily this could have gone the other way.”

Anthony responded by using Holt’s own words as a life raft. “I’ve kind of laid down and thought, just how easily things could have gone . . . ” but he wasn’t actually thinking of how it all could have gone the other way. He was thinking about that tiny world he and Spencer and Alek had inhabited, that single train car. “He did fire at Spencer,” Anthony said, “but it never went off.”

When he thought about things turning out differently, he was only thinking about what could have happened to the people on the car he was on. Those memories were so powerful he hadn’t yet lifted up, zoomed around the train, counted up all the souls on board. It felt like they’d saved Mark’s life, and saved themselves, and that was it, and that was enough.

It turned out he was in the right place for the whole entire size of it to hit him.