Dash And Lily's Book Of Dares: the sparkling prequel to Twelves Days of Dash and Lily

Dash And Lily's Book Of Dares: the sparkling prequel to Twelves Days of Dash and Lily David Levithan Rachel Cohn I’ve left some clues for you. If you want them, turn the page. If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.At the urge of her lucky-in-love brother, sixteen-year-old Lily has left a red notebook full of dares on her favourite bookshop shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept. Curious, snarky Dash isn’t one to back down from a challenge – and the Book of Dares is the perfect distraction he’s been looking for.As they send each other on a scavenger hunt across Manhattan, they’re falling for each other on paper. But finding out if their real selves share their on-page chemistry could be their biggest dare yet….‘One of the best books I’ve ever read’ –The Guardian on Every Day.‘It was impossible not to have a huge, satisfied smile on my face at the end.’ - YA Crush There wasn’t any writing on the spine of this particular journal I had to take it off the shelf to see the front, where there was a piece of masking tape with the words DO YOU DARE? written in black Sharpie. When I opened the cover, I found a note on the first page. I’ve left some clues for you. If you want them, turn the page. If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please. The handwriting was a girl’s. I mean, you can tell. That enchanted cursive. Either way, I would’ve endeavoured to turn the page. So here we are. 1. Let’s start with French Pianism. I don’t really know what it is, but I’m guessingnobody’s going to take it off the shelf. Charles Timbrell’s your man. 88/7/288/4/8 Do not turn the pageuntil you fill in the blanks(just don’t write in the notebook, please). About the Author RACHEL COHN & DAVID LEVITHAN have written three books together. Their first, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, was made into a movie starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, directed by Peter Sollett. Their second, Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List, was named a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. For their third book, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, David wrote Dash’s chapters and Rachel wrote Lily’s. Although they did not pass the chapters back and forth in a red Moleskine notebook, they did email them to each other without planning anything out beforehand. That’s the way they work. Rachel’s previous books include Gingerbread, Shrimp, Cupcake, You Know Where to Find Me, and Very LeFreak. David’s previous books include Boy Meets Boy, The Realm of Possibility, Are We There Yet?, Wide Awake, Love Is the Higher Law, and How They Met, and Other Stories. For more information about Rachel and David, you can find them at rachelcohn.com and davidlevithan.com, respectively. You may also catch them in the aisles at the Strand. Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares Rachel Cohn & David Levithan www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk) To Real Dash’s Mum one -Dash- December 21st Imagine this: You’re in your favorite bookstore, scanning the shelves. You get to the section where a favorite author’s books reside, and there, nestled in comfortably between the incredibly familiar spines, sits a red notebook. What do you do? The choice, I think, is obvious: You take down the red notebook and open it. And then you do whatever it tells you to do. It was Christmastime in New York City, the most detestable time of the year. The moo-like crowds, the endless visits from hapless relatives, the ersatz cheer, the joyless attempts at joyfulness—my natural aversion to human contact could only intensify in this context. Wherever I went, I was on the wrong end of the stampede. I was not willing to grant “salvation” through any “army.” I would never care about the whiteness of Christmas. I was a Decemberist, a Bolshevik, a career criminal, a philatelist trapped by unknowable anguish—whatever everyone else was not, I was willing to be. I walked as invisibly as I could through the Pavlovian spend-drunk hordes, the broken winter breakers, the foreigners who had flown halfway across the world to see the lighting of a tree without realizing how completely pagan such a ritual was. The only bright side of this dim season was that school was shuttered (presumably so everyone could shop ad nauseam and discover that family, like arsenic, works best in small doses … unless you prefer to die). This year I had managed to become a voluntary orphan for Christmas, telling my mother that I was spending it with my father, and my father that I was spending it with my mother, so that each of them booked nonrefundable vacations with their post-divorce paramours. My parents hadn’t spoken to each other in eight years, which gave me a lot of leeway in the determination of factual accuracy, and therefore a lot of time to myself. I was popping back and forth between their apartments while they were away—but mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition, not so much a bookstore as the collision of a hundred different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over eighteen miles of shelves. All the clerks there saunter-slouch around distractedly in their skinny jeans and their thrift-store button-downs, like older siblings who will never, ever be bothered to talk to you or care about you or even acknowledge your existence if their friends are around … which they always are. Some bookstores want you to believe they’re a community center, like they need to host a cookie-making class in order to sell you some Proust. But the Strand leaves you completely on your own, caught between the warring forces of organization and idiosyncrasy, with idiosyncrasy winning every time. In other words, it was my kind of graveyard. I was usually in the mood to look for nothing in particular when I went to the Strand. Some days, I would decide that the afternoon was sponsored by a particular letter, and would visit each and every section to check out the authors whose last names began with that letter. Other days, I would decide to tackle a single section, or would investigate the recently unloaded tomes, thrown in bins that never really conformed to alphabetization. Or maybe I’d only look at books with green covers, because it had been too long since I’d read a book with a green cover. I could have been hanging out with my friends, but most of them were hanging out with their families or their Wiis. (Wiis?Wiii? What is the plural?) I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books—used we call them, in a way that we’d never call a person, unless we meant it cruelly. (“Look at Clarissa … she’s such a used girl.”) I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable. I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler. On this particular day, I decided to check out a few of my favorite authors to see if any irregular editions had emerged from a newly deceased person’s library sale. I was perusing a particular favorite (he shall remain nameless, because I might turn against him someday) when I saw a peek of red. It was a red Moleskine—made of neither mole nor skin, but nonetheless the preferred journal of my associates who felt the need to journal in non-electronic form. You can tell a lot about a person from the pages he or she chooses to journal on—I was strictly a college-ruled man myself, having no talent for illustration and a microscopic scrawl that made wide-ruled seem roomy. The blank pages were usually the most popular—I only had one friend, Thibaud, who went for the grid. Or at least he did until the guidance counselors confiscated his journals to prove that he had been plotting to kill our history teacher. (This is a true story.) There wasn’t any writing on the spine of this particular journal—I had to take it off the shelf to see the front, where there was a piece of masking tape with the words DO YOU DARE? written in black Sharpie. When I opened the cover, I found a note on the first page. I’ve left some clues for you. If you want them, turn the page. If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please. The handwriting was a girl’s. I mean, you can tell. That enchanted cursive. Either way, I would’ve endeavored to turn the page. So here we are. 1. Let’s start with French Pianism. I don’t really know what it is, but I’m guessingnobody’s going to take it off the shelf. Charles Timbrell’s your man. 88/7/288/4/8 Do not turn the pageuntil you fill in the blanks(just don’t write in the notebook, please). I can’t say I’d ever heard of French pianism, although if a man on the street (wearing a bowler, no doubt) had asked me if I believed the French were a pianistic sort, I would have easily given an affirmative reply. Because the bookstore byways of the Strand were more familiar to me than my own family home(s), I knew exactly where to start—the music section. It even seemed a cheat that she had given me the name of the author. Did she think me a simpleton, a slacker, a numbskull? I wanted a little credit, even before I’d earned it. The book was found easily enough—easily enough, that is, for someone who had fourteen minutes to spare—and was exactly as I pictured it would be, the kind of book that can sit on the shelves for years. The publisher hadn’t even bothered to put an illustration on the cover. Just the words French Pianism: An Historical Perspective, Charles Timbrell, then (new line) Foreword by Gaby Casadesus. I figured the numbers in the Moleskine were dates—1988 must have been a quicksilver year for French pianism—but I couldn’t find any references to 1988 … or 1888 … or 1788 … or any other ‘88, for that matter. I was stymied … until I realized that my clue giver had resorted to the age-old bookish mantra—page/line/word. I went to page 88 and checked out line 7, word 2, then line 4, word 8. Are you Was I what? I had to find out. I filled in the blanks (mentally, respecting the virgin spaces as she’d asked) and turned the page of the journal. Okay. No cheating. What bugged you about the cover of this book(besides the lack of art)? Think about it, then turn the page. Well, that was easy. I hated that they’d used the construction An Historical, when it clearly should have been A Historical, since the H in Historical is a hard H. I turned the page. If you said it was the misbegotten phrase“An Historical,”please continue. If not, please put this journalback on its shelf. Once more, I turned. 2. Fat Hoochie Prom Queen64/4/9119/3/8 No author this time. Not helpful. I took French Pianism with me (we’d grown close; I couldn’t leave her) and went to the information desk, where the guy sitting there looked like someone had slipped a few lithium into his Coke Zero. “I’m looking for Fat Hoochie Prom Queen,” I declared. He did not respond. “It’s a book,” I said. “Not a person.” Nope. Nothing. “At the very least, can you tell me the author?” He looked at his computer, as if it had some way to speak to me without any typing on his part. “Are you wearing headphones that I can’t see?” I asked. He scratched at the inside of his elbow. “Do you know me?” I persisted. “Did I grind you to a pulp in kindergarten, and are you now getting sadistic pleasure from this petty revenge? Stephen Little, is that you? Is it? I was much younger then, and foolish to have nearly drowned you in that water fountain. In my defense, your prior destruction of my book report was a completely unwarranted act of aggression.” Finally, a response. The information desk clerk shook his shaggy head. “No?” I said. “I am not allowed to disclose the location of Fat Hoochie Prom Queen,” he explained. “Not to you. Not to anyone. And while I am not Stephen Little, you should be ashamed of what you did to him. Ashamed.” Okay, this was going to be harder than I’d thought. I tried to load Amazon onto my phone for a quick check—but there was no service anywhere in the store. I figured Fat Hoochie PromQueen was unlikely to be nonfiction (would that it were!), so I went to the literature section and began to scan the shelves. This proving fruitless, I remembered the teen literature section upstairs and went there straightaway. I skipped over any spine that didn’t possess an inkling of pink. All my instincts told me Fat Hoochie Prom Queen would at the very least be dappled by pink. And lo and behold—I got to the M section, and there it was. I turned to pages 64 and 119 and found: going to I turned the page of the Moleskine. Very resourceful. Now that you’ve found this in the teen section, I must ask you:Are you a teenage boy? If yes, please turn the page. If no, please return this to where you found it. I was sixteen and equipped with the appropriate genitalia, so I cleared that hurdle nicely. Next page. 3. The Joy of Gay Sex (third edition!)66/12/5181/18/7 Well, there wasn’t any doubt which section that would be in. So it was down to the Sex & Sexuality shelves, where the glances were alternately furtive and defiant. Personally, the notion of buying a used sex manual (of any sexuality) was a bit sketchy to me. Perhaps that was why there were four copies of The Joy of Gay Sex on the shelves. I turned to page 66, scanned down to line 12, word 5, and found: cock I recounted. Rechecked. Are you going to cock? Perhaps, I thought, cock was being used as a verb (e.g., Please cock that pistol for me before you leave the vestibule). I moved to page 181, not without some trepidation. Making love without noise is like playing a muted piano—fine for practice, but you cheat yourself out of hearing the glorious results. I’d never thought a single sentence could turn me off so decisively from both making love and playing the piano, but there it was. No illustration accompanied the text, mercifully. And I had my seventh word: playing Which left me with: Are you going to cock playing That didn’t seem right. Fundamentally, as a matter of grammar, it didn’t seem right. I looked back at the page in the journal and resisted the urge to turn forward. Scrutinizing the girlish scrawl, I realized I had mistaken a 5 for a 6. It was page 66 (the junior version of the devil’s number) that I was after. be Much more sensical. Are you going to be playing— “Dash?” I turned to find Priya, this girl from my school, somewhere between a friend and acquaintance—a frequaintance, as it were. She had been friends with my ex-girlfriend, Sofia, who was now in Spain. (Not because of me.) Priya had no personality traits that I could discern, although in all fairness, I had never looked very hard. “Hi, Priya,” I said. She looked at the books I was holding—a red Moleskine, French Pianism, Fat Hoochie Prom Queen, and, open to a rather graphic drawing of two men doing something I had heretofore not known to be possible, The Joy of Gay Sex (third edition). Apprising the situation, I figured some explanation was in order. “It’s for a paper I’m doing,” I said, my voice rife with fake intellectual assurance. “On French pianism and its effects. You’d be amazed at how far-reaching French pianism is.” Priya, bless her, looked like she regretted ever saying my name. “Are you around for break?” she asked. If I’d admitted I was, she might have been forthcoming with an invitation to an eggnog party or a group excursion to the holiday film Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, featuring a black comedian playing all of the roles, except for that of a female Rudolph, who was, one assumed, the love interest. Because I withered under the glare of an actual invitation, I was a firm believer in preventative prevarication—in other words, lying early in order to free myself later on. “I leave tomorrow for Sweden,” I replied. “Sweden?” I did not (and do not) look in any way Swedish, so a family holiday was out of the question. By way of explanation, I simply said, “I love Sweden in December. The days are short … the nights are long … and the design completely lacks ornament.” Priya nodded. “Sounds fun.” We stood there. I knew that according to the rules of conversation, it was now my turn. But I also knew that refusal to conform to these rules might result in Priya’s departure, which I very much wanted. After thirty seconds, she could stand it no longer. “Well, I gotta go,” she said. “Happy Hanukkah,” I said. Because I always liked to say the wrong holiday, just to see how the other person would react. Priya took it in stride. “Have fun in Sweden,” she said. And was gone. I rearranged my books so the red journal was on top again. I turned to the next page. The fact that you are willing to stand there in the Strand with The Joy of Gay Sex bodes well for our future. However, if you already own this book or would find it useful in your life, I am afraid our time together must end here. This girl can only go boy-girl, so if you’re intoboy-boy, I completely support that, but don’t see where I’d fit into the picture. Now, one last book. 4. What the Living Do, by Marie Howe23/1/824/5/9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 I headed immediately to the poetry section, completely intrigued. Who was this strange reader of Marie Howe who’d summoned me? It seemed too convenient that we should both know about the same poet. Really, most people in my circle didn’t know any poets at all. I tried to remember talking about Marie Howe with someone—anyone—but came up blank. Only Sofia, probably, and this wasn’t Sofia’s handwriting. (Plus, she was in Spain.) I checked the Hs. Nothing. I went through the whole poetry section. Nothing. I was about to scream in frustration when I saw it—at the very top of the bookshelf, at least twelve feet from the floor. A slight corner peeking out—but I knew from its slimness and dark plum color that it was the book I was looking for. I pulled over a ladder and made the perilous climb. It was a dusty ascent, the out-of-reach heights clouded with disinterest, making the air harder to breathe. Finally, I had the volume in my hand. I couldn’t wait—I quickly turned to pages 23 and 24 and found the seven words I needed. for the pure thrill of unreluctant desire I nearly fell off the ladder. Are you going to be playing for the pure thrill of unreluctant desire? I was, to put it mildly, aroused by the phrasing. Carefully, I stepped back down. When I hit the floor again, I retrieved the red Moleskine and turned the page. So here we are. Now it’s up to you, what we do (or don’t) do. If you are interested in continuing this conversation, please choose a book, any book, and leave a slip of paper with your email address inside of it. Give it to Mark, at the information desk. If you ask Mark any questions about me, he will not pass on your book. So no questions. Once you have given your book to Mark, please return this book to the shelf where you found it. If you do all these things, you very well might hear from me. Thank you. Lily Suddenly, for the first time that I could recall, I was looking forward to winter break, and I was relieved that I was not, in fact, being shipped out to Sweden the next morning. I didn’t want to think too hard about which book to leave—if I started to second-guess, it would only lead to third-guessing and fourth-guessing, and I would never leave the Strand. So I chose a book rather impulsively, and instead of leaving my email address inside, I decided to leave something else. I figured it would take a little time for Mark (my new friend at the information desk) to give the book to Lily, so I would have a slight head start. I handed it to him without a word; he nodded and put it in a drawer. I knew the next step was for me to return the red notebook, to give someone else a chance of finding it. Instead, I kept it. And, furthermore, I moved to the register to buy the copies of French Pianism and Fat Hoochie Prom Queen currently in my hands. Two, I decided, could play this game. two (Lily) December 21st I love Christmas. I love everything about it: the lights, the cheer, the big family gatherings, the cookies, the presents piled high around the tree, the goodwill to all. I know it’s technically goodwill to all men, but in my mind, I drop the men because that feels segregationist/elitist/sexist/generally bad ist. Goodwill shouldn’t be just for men. It should also apply to women and children, and all animals, even the yucky ones like subway rats. I’d even extend the goodwill not just to living creatures but to the dearly departed, and if we include them, we might as well include the undead, those supposedly mythic beings like vampires, and if they’re in, then so are elves, fairies, and gnomes. Heck, since we’re already being so generous in our big group hug, why not also embrace those supposedly inanimate objects like dolls and stuffed animals (special shout-out to my Ariel mermaid, who presides over the shabby chic flower power pillow on my bed—love you, girl!). I’m sure Santa would agree. Goodwill to all. I love Christmas so much that this year I’ve organized my own caroling society. Just because I live in the gentrified bohemia of the East Village does not mean I consider myself too cool and sophisticated for caroling. To the contrary. I feel so strongly about it that when my own family members chose to disband our caroling group this year because everyone was “traveling” or was “too busy” or “has a life” or “thought you would have grown out of it by now, Lily,” I did some old-fashioned problem solving. I made my own flyer and put it up in caf?s around my street. Hark!You there, closet caroler! Care to herald some holiday song? Really? Me too! Let’s talk.* Yours sincerely, Lily *No creeps need apply; my grandpa knows everyone in the neighborhood and you will incur much shunning should you be anything less than sincere in your response.** Thx again, yours most truly, Lily **Sorry to be so cynical, but this is New York. That flyer was how I formed my Christmas caroling troupe this year. There’s me, Melvin (computer guy), Roberta (retired high school choir teacher), Shee’nah (cross-dressing part-time choreographer/part-time waiter) and his boi Antwon (assistant manager at Home Depot), angry Aryn (vegan riot grrrl NYU film student), and Mark (my cousin—because he owes Grandpa a favor and that’s the one Grandpa called in). The carolers call me Third-Verse Lily because I’m the only one who remembers past the second verse of any Christmas song. Besides Aryn (who doesn’t care), I’m also the only one not of legal drinking age, so with the amount of hot chocolate laced with peppermint liquor that my merry caroling troupe passes round from Roberta’s flask, it’s no surprise I’m the only one who remembers the third verse. Truly He taught us to love one another. His law is love and His gospel is peace. Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother. And in His name all oppression shall cease. Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, With all our hearts we praise His holy name. Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we, His power and glory ever more proclaim! Hallelujah, third verse! In all honesty, I should admit I have researched much of the scientific evidence refuting G-d’s existence, as a result of which I suspect I am a true believer in him the way I am in Santa. But I will unhesitatingly, and joyfully, O-Holy-Night his name between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, with the mutual understanding that as of Christmas Day, once the presents are opened, my relationship with him goes on hiatus until I camp out for best viewing of the Macy’s parade the following year. I would like to be the person who stands outside Macy’s during the holiday season wearing a cute red outfit and ringing a bell to chime in donations for the Salvation Army, but Mom said no. She said those bell people are possibly religious freaks, and we are holiday-only lapsed Catholics who support homosexuality and a woman’s right to choose. We do not stand outside Macy’s begging for money. We don’t even shop at Macy’s. I may go begging for change at Macy’s simply as a form of protest. For the first time in, like, the history of ever—that is, all of my sixteen years—our family is spending Christmas apart. My parents abandoned me and my brother for Fiji, where they’re celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. When they got married, my parents were poor graduate students who couldn’t afford a proper honeymoon vacation, so they’ve gone all out for their silver anniversary. It seems to me that wedding anniversaries are meant for their children to celebrate with them, but apparently I am the minority opinion on this one. According to everyone besides me, if my brother and I tag along on their vacation, it won’t be as “romantic.” I don’t see what’s so “romantic” about spending a week in a tropical paradise with your spouse whom you’ve already seen almost every day for the past quarter century. I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to be alone with me that much. My brother, Langston, said, “Lily, you don’t understand because you’ve never been in love. If you had a boyfriend, you’d understand.” Langston has a new boyfriend and all I understand from that is a sorry state of co-dependence. And it’s not entirely true that I’ve never been in love. I had a pet gerbil in first grade, Spazzy, whom I loved passionately. I will never stop blaming myself for bringing Spazzy to show-and-tell at school, where Edgar Thibaud let open his cage when I wasn’t looking, and Spazzy met Jessica Rodriguez’s cat Tiger and, well, the rest is history. Goodwill to Spazzy up in gerbil heaven. Sorry sorry sorry. I stopped eating meat the day of the massacre, as penance for Spazzy. I’ve been a vegetarian since age six, all for the love of a gerbil. Since I was eight, I have been in literary love with the character Sport from Harriet the Spy. I’ve kept my own Harriet-style journal—red Moleskine notebooks that Grandpa buys me at the Strand—since I first read that book, only I don’t write mean observations about people in my journals like Harriet sometimes did. Mostly I draw pictures in it and write memorable quotes or passages from books I’ve read, or recipe ideas, or little stories I make up when I’m bored. I want to be able to show grown-up Sport that I’ve tried my darnedest not to make sport out of writing mean gossip and stuff. Langston has been in love. Twice. His first big romance ended so badly that he had to leave Boston after his freshman year of college and move back home till his heart could heal; the breakup was that bad. I hope I never love someone so much that they could hurt me the way Langston was hurt, so wounded all he could do was cry and mope around the house and ask me to make him peanut butter and banana sandwiches with the crusts cut off, then play Boggle with him, which of course I always did, because I usually do whatever Langston wants me to do. Langston eventually recovered and now he’s in love again. I think this new one’s okay. Their first date was at the symphony. How mean can a guy be who likes Mozart? I hope, at least. Unfortunately, now that Langston has a boyfriend again, he has forgotten all about me. He has to be with Benny all thetime. To Langston, our parents and Grandpa being gone for Christmas is a gift, and not the outrage it is to me. I protested to Langston about him basically granting Benny a permanent state of residence in our house over the holidays. I reminded him that if Mom and Dad were going to be away at Christmas, and Grandpa would be at his winter apartment in Florida, then it was Langston’s responsibility to keep me company. I was there for him in his time of need, after all. But Langston repeated, “Lily, you just don’t understand. What you need is someone to keep you occupied. You need a boyfriend.” Well sure, who doesn’t need a boyfriend? But realistically, those exotic creatures are hard to come by. At least a quality one. I go to an all-girls school, and meaning no disrespect to my sapphic sisters, but I have no interest in finding a romantic companion there. The rare boy creatures I do meet who aren’t either related to me or who aren’t gay are usually too attached to their Xboxes to notice me, or their idea of how a teenage girl should look and act comes directly from the pages of Maxim magazine or from the tarty look of a video game character. There’s also the problem of Grandpa. Many years ago, he owned a neighborhood family grocery store on Avenue A in the East Village. He sold the business but kept the corner block building, where he had raised his family. My family lives in that building now, along with Grandpa in the fourth-floor “penthouse” apartment, as he calls the converted space that was once an attic studio. There’s a sushi restaurant on the ground floor where the grocery store once was. Grandpa has presided over the neighborhood as it went from low-income haven for immigrant families to yuppie enclave. Everybody knows him. Every morning he joins his buddies at the local Italian bakery, where these huge, burly guys drink espresso from dainty little cups. The scene is very Sopranos meets Rent. It means that because everyone looks affectionately upon Grandpa, they’re all looking out for Grandpa’s pet—me, the baby of the family, the youngest of his ten grandchildren. The few local boys so far who’ve expressed an interest in me have all been quickly “persuaded” that I’m too young to date, according to Langston. It’s like I wear an invisible cloak of unavailability to cute boys when I walk around the neighborhood. It’s a problem. So Langston decided to make it his project to (1) give me a project to keep me occupied so he could have Benny all to himself over Christmas and (2) move that project to west of First Avenue, away from Grandpa’s protection shield. Langston took the latest red Moleskine notebook that Grandpa bought me and, together with Benny, mapped out a series of clues to find a companion just right for me. Or so they said. But the clues could not have been further removed from who I am. I mean, French pianism? Sounds possibly naughty. The Joy of Gay Sex? I’m blushing even thinking about that. Definitely naughty. Fat Hoochie Prom Queen? Please. I’d include hoochie as a most un-goodwill type of curse word. You’d never hear me utter the word, much less read a book with that word in its title. I thought the notebook was seriously Langston’s stupidest idea ever until Langston mentioned where he was going to leave it—at the Strand, the bookstore where our parents used to take us on Sundays and let us roam the aisles like it was our personal playground. Furthermore, he’d placed it next to my personal anthem book, Franny and Zooey. “If there’s a perfect guy for you anywhere,” Langston said, “he’ll be found hunting for old Salinger editions. We’ll start there.” If it had been a regular Christmas season, where my folks were around and our normal traditions carried on, I never would have agreed to Langston’s red notebook idea. But there was something so empty about the prospect of a Christmas Day without opening presents and other, less important forms of merrymaking. Truthfully, I’m not exactly a popularity magnet at school, so it wasn’t like I had alternate choices of companionship over the holidays. I needed something to look forward to. But I never thought anyone—much less a prospect from that highly coveted but extremely elusive Teenage Boy Who Actually Reads and Hangs Out at the Strand species—would actually find the notebook and respond to its dares. And just as I never thought my newly formed Christmas caroling society would abandon me after only two nights of street caroling to take up Irish drinking songs at a pub on Avenue B, I never thought someone would actually figure out Langston’s cryptic clues and return the favor. Yet there it was on my phone, a text from my cousin Mark confirming such a person might exist. Lily, you have a taker at the Strand. He left you something in return. I left it there for you in a brown envelope. I couldn’t believe it. I texted back: WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?!?!? Mark answered: Snarly. Hipster wannabe. I tried to imagine myself befriending a snarly hipster wannabe boy, and I couldn’t see it. I am a nice girl. A quiet girl (except for the caroling). I get good grades. I am the captain of my school’s soccer team. I love my family. I don’t know anything about what’s supposed to be “cool” in the downtown scene. I’m pretty boring and nerdy, actually, and not in the ironic hipster way. It’s like if you picture Harriet the Spy, eleven-year-old tomboy wunderkind spy, and then picture her a few years later, with boobs she hides under a school oxford uniform shirt that she wears even on non-school days, along with her brother’s discarded jeans, and add to her ensemble some animal pendant necklaces for jewelry, worn-out Chucks on her feet, and black-rimmed nerd glasses, then you’ve pictured me. Lily of the Field, Grandpa calls me sometimes, because everyone thinks I am so sweet and delicate. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to venture to the darker side of the lily-white spectrum. Maybe. I sprinted over to the Strand to retrieve whatever the mysterious notebook taker had left behind for me. Mark was gone, but he’d scrawled a message on the envelope he’d left behind for me: Seriously, Lily. Dude snarls a lot. I ripped open the package, and … what?!?! Snarl had left me a copy of The Godfather, along with a delivery menu for Two Boots Pizza. The menu had dirty footprints embedded on it, indicating perhaps it had been on the floor at the Strand. To go along with the unsanitary theme, the book wasn’t even a new copy of The Godfather, but a tattered used copy that smelled like cigarette smoke and had pages that were crinkled and a binding that was at death’s door. I called Langston to decipher this nonsense. No answer. Now that our parents had messaged us that they’d arrived in Fiji paradise safely, Benny was probably officially moved in, the door to Langston’s room locked, his phone off. I had no choice but to go grab a slice and ponder the red notebook alone. What else could I do? When in doubt, ingest carbs. I went to the Two Boots location on the delivery menu, on Avenue A just above Houston. I asked the person at the counter, “Do you know a snarly boy who likes The Godfather?” “I wish I did,” the counter person said. “Plain or pepperoni?” “Calzone, please,” I said. Two Boots makes weird Cajun-flavored pizzas. Not for me and my sensitive digestive system. I sat at a corner booth and flipped through the book Snarl had left for me but could find no viable clues. Well, I thought, I guess this game is over as soon as it’s started. I was too Lily white to figure it out. But then the menu that had been tucked inside the book dropped to the ground, and out of it peeked a Post-it note I hadn’t noticed before. I picked it up. Definitely a boy’s scrawl: moody, foreign, and barely legible. Here’s the scary part. I could decipher this message. It contained a poem by Marie Howe, a personal favorite of my mother’s. Mom is an English professor specializing in twentieth-century American lit, and she regularly tortured Langston and me with poetry passages instead of bedtime stories when we were kids. My brother and I are frighteningly well-versed in modern American poetry. The note was a passage from my mother’s favorite of Marie Howe’s poems, too, and it was a poem I had always liked because it contained a passage about the poet seeing herself in the window glass of a corner video store, which never failed to strike me as funny, imagining some mad poet wandering the streets and spying herself in a video store window reflected next to, perhaps, posters of Jackie Chan or Sandra Bullock or someone super-famous and probably not at all poet-y. I liked Moody Boy even more when I saw that he’d underlined my favorite part of the poem: I am living. I remember you. I had no idea how Marie Howe and Two Boots Pizza and The Godfather could possibly be connected. I tried calling Langston again. Still no answer. I read and re-read the passage. I am living. I remember you. I don’t really get poetry, but I had to give the poetess credit: nice. Two people sat in the booth next to me, setting down some rental videos on their table. That’s when I realized the connection: say the window of the corner video store. This particular Two Boots location also had a video store attached to it. I dashed over to the video section like it was the bathroom after I’d accidentally ingested some Louisiana hot sauce on top of my calzone. I immediately went to where The Godfather was. The movie wasn’t there. I asked the clerk where I’d find it. “Checked out,” she said. I returned to the G section anyway and found, mis-shelved, The Godfather III. I opened up the case and—yes!—another Post-it note, in Snarl’s scrawl: Nobody ever checks out Godfather III. Especially when it’s misfiled. Do you want another clue? If so, find Clueless. Also misfiled, where sorrow meets pity. I returned to the clerk’s counter. “Where does sorrow meet pity?” I asked, fully expecting an existential answer. The clerk didn’t look up from the comic book she was reading under the counter. “Foreign documentaries.” Oh. I went to the foreign documentaries section. And yes, next to a film called The Sorrow and the Pity was a copy of Clueless! Inside the case for Clueless was another note: I didn’t expect you to make it this far. Are you also a fan of depressing French films about mass murder? If so, I like you already. If not, why not? Do you also despise les films de Woody Allen? If you want your red Moleskine notebook back, I suggest you leave instructions in the film of your choice with Amanda at the front desk. Please, no Christmas movies. I returned to the front desk. “Are you Amanda?” I asked the clerk girl. She looked up, raising an eyebrow. “I am.” “May I leave something for someone with you?” I asked. I almost added, Wink wink, but I couldn’t bring myself to be that obvious. “You may,” she said. “Do you have a copy of Miracle on 34th Street?” I asked her. three -Dash- December 22nd “Is this a joke?” I asked Amanda. And the way she looked at me, I knew that I was the joke. Oh, the impertinence! I should have known better than to mention Christmas movies. Clearly, no invitation was too small for Lily’s sarcasm. And the note: 5. Look for the warm woolen mittens with the reindeer on them, please. Could there be any doubt what my next destination was supposed to be? Macy’s. Two days before Christmas Eve. She might as well have gift-wrapped my face and pumped the carbon dioxide in. Or hung me on a noose of credit card receipts. A department store two days before Christmas Eve is like a city in a state of siege—wild-eyed consumers battling in the aisles over who gets the last sea horse snow globe to give to their respective great-aunt Marys. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I had to. I tried to distract myself by debating the difference between wool and woolen, then expanding it to include wood vs. wooden and gold vs. golden. But this distraction only lasted the time it took to walk the stairs from the subway, since when I emerged on Herald Square, I was nearly capsized by the throngs and their shopping bags. The knell of a Salvation Army bell ringer added to the grimness, and I had no doubt that if I didn’t escape soon, a children’s choir would pop up and carol me to death. I walked inside Macy’s and faced the pathetic spectacle of a department store full of shoppers, none of whom were shopping for themselves. Without the instant gratification of a self-aimed purchase, everyone walked around in the tactical stupor of the financially obligated. At this late date in the season, all the fallbacks were being used. Dad was getting a tie, Mom was getting a scarf, and the kids were getting sweaters, whether they liked it or not. I had done all of my shopping online from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. on the morning of December 3; the gifts now sat at their respective houses, to be opened in the new year. My mother had left me gifts to open in her house, while my father had slipped me a hundred-dollar bill and told me to go to town with it. In fact, his exact words were, “Don’t spend it all on booze and women”—the implication being, of course, that I should spend at least some of it on booze and women. Had there been a way to get a gift certificate for booze and women, I was sure he would have made his secretary run out and get me one over her lunch break. The salespeople were so shell-shocked that a question like “Where do I find the warm woolen mittens with reindeer on them?” didn’t seem the least bit strange. Eventually, I found myself in Outer Garments, wondering what, short of an earplug, would count as an Inner Garment. I had always felt that mittens were a few steps back on the evolutionary scale—why, I wondered, would we want to make ourselves into a less agile version of a lobster? But my disdain for mittens took on a new depth when looking at Macy’s (Macy’s’s?) holiday offerings. There were mittens shaped like gingerbread men and mittens decorated in tinsel. One pair of mittens simulated the thumb of a hitchhiker; the destination was, apparently, the North Pole. In front of my very eyes, a middle-aged woman took a pair off the rack and placed them in the pile she’d grown in her arms. “Really?” I found myself saying aloud. “Excuse me?” she said, irritated. “Aesthetic and utilitarian considerations aside,” I said, “those mittens don’t particularly make sense. Why would you want to hitchhike to the North Pole? Isn’t the whole gimmick of Christmas that there’s home delivery? You get up there, all you’re going to find is a bunch of exhausted, grumpy elves. Assuming, of course, that you accept the mythical presence of a workshop up there, when we all know there isn’t even a pole at the North Pole, and if global warming continues, there won’t be any ice, either.” “Why don’t you just fuck off?” the woman replied. Then she took her mittens and got out of there. This was the miracle of the season, the way it put the fuck off so loud in our hearts. You could snap at strangers, or snap at the people closest to you. It could be a fuck off for a slight reason—You took my parking space or You questioned my choice of mittens or I spent sixteen hours tracking down the golf club you wanted and you gave me a McDonald’s gift certificate in return. Or it could bring out the fuck off that’d been lying in wait for years. You always insist on cutting the turkey even though I’m the one who spent hours cooking it or I can’t spend one more holiday pretending to be in love with you or You want me to inherit your love for booze and women, in that order, but you’re more of a role anti-model than a father. This was why I shouldn’t have been allowed in Macy’s. Because when you turn a short span of time into a “season,” you create an echo chamber for all of its associations. Once you step in, it’s hard to escape. I started shaking hands with all the reindeer mittens, certain that Lily had hidden something inside one of them. Sure enough, the fifth shake brought a crumple. I pulled out the slip of paper. 6. I left something under the pillow for you. Next stop: bedding. Personally, I preferred the word bedding when it was a verb, not a noun. Can you show me the bedding section? could not compare to Are you bedding me? Seriously, are we going to bed each other? In truth, I knew these sentences worked better in my head than anywhere else—Sofia never really understood what I was saying, although I usually chalked that up to her not being a native speaker. I even encouraged her to throw some obscure Spanish wordplay my way, but she never knew what I was talking about when I talked about that, either. She was pretty, though. Like a flower. I missed that. When I got to the bedding section, I wondered if Lily appreciated how many beds there were for me to probe. They could house a whole orphanage in here, with a few extra beds for the nuns to fool around in. (Pull my wimple! PULL MY WIMPLE!) The only way I was going to be able to do this was to divide the floor into quadrants and move clockwise from north. The first bed was a paisley print with four pillows propped up on it. I immediately launched my hand underneath them, looking for the next note. “Sir? Can I help you?” I turned and saw a bed salesman, his look half amused and half alarmed. He looked a lot like Barney Rubble, only with the remnants of a spray tan that would have been unavailable in the prehistoric age. I sympathized. Not because of the spray tan—I’d never do shit like that—but because I figured being a bed salesman was a job of biblically bad paradox. I mean, here he was, forced to stand for eight or nine hours a day, and the whole time he’s surrounded by beds. And not only that, he’s surrounded by shoppers who see the beds and can’t help but think, Man, I’d love to lie down on that bed for a second. So not only does he have to stop himself from lying down, but he has to stop everyone else from doing it, too. I knew if I were him, I would be desperate for human company. So I decided to take him into my confidence. “I’m looking for something,” I said. I glanced at his ring finger. Bingo. “You’re a married man, right?” He nodded. “Well, here’s the thing,” I said. “My mother? She was looking at bedding and she totally dropped her shopping list under one of the pillows. So now she’s upstairs in cutlery, upset that she can’t remember what to get anyone, and my dad is about to blow his last fuse, because he likes shopping about as much as he likes terrorism and the estate tax. So he sent me down here to find the list, and if I don’t find it quick, there’s going to be a major meltdown on floor five.” Super-tan Barney Rubble actually put his finger on his temple to help him think. “I might remember her,” he said. “I’ll go look under those pillows if you want to look under these. Just please be careful to put the pillows back in their place and avoid mussing the sheets.” “Oh, I will!” I assured him. I decided if I were ever to get into booze and women, my line would be Excuse me, madam, but I would really love to bed and muss you…. Are you perchance free this evening? Now, at the risk of saying something legally actionable, I have to remark: It was amazing the things I found underneath the pillows at Macy’s. Half-eaten candy bars. Baby chew toys. Business cards. There was one thing that could have been either a dead jellyfish or a condom, but I pulled my fingers back before I found out for sure. Poor Barney actually let out a little scream when he found a decomposed rodent; it was only after he ran away for a quick burial and thorough disinfecting that I found the slip of paper I was looking for. 7. I dare you to ask Santa for your next message. No. No fucking no no no. If I hadn’t appreciated her sadism, I would’ve headed straight for the hills. But instead, I headed straight for Santa. It wasn’t as easy as that, though. I got down to the main floor and Santa’s Wonderland, and the line was at least ten classrooms long. Children lolled and fidgeted while parents talked on cell phones or fussed with strollers or teetered like the living dead. Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience. More than a few of the parents—especially the dads—gave me strange looks. I could see them doing the mental math—I was way too old to believe in Santa, but I was too young to be after their children. So I was safe, if suspicious. It took me forty-five minutes to get to the front of the line. Kids were whipping out lists and cookies and digital cameras, while I just had Vile Bodies. Finally, it was my turn. I saw the girl in front of me wrapping up, and I started to move forward. “One second!” a dictatorial rasp commanded. I looked down to find the least satisfying clich? in Christmas history: a power-mad elf. “HOW OLD ARE YOU?” he barked. “Thirteen,” I lied. His eyes were as pointy as his stupid green hat. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice not sorry at all, “but twelve is the limit.” “I promise I won’t take long,” I said. “TWELVE IS THE LIMIT!” The girl had finished her stint with Santa. It was my turn. By all rights, it was my turn. “I just have to ask Santa one thing,” I said. “That’s all.” The elf body-blocked me. “Get out of the line now,” he demanded. “Make me,” I replied. The whole line was paying attention now. Kids’ eyes were wide with fear. Most of the dads and some of the moms were getting ready to jump me if I tried anything. “I need security,” the elf said, but I couldn’t tell who he was talking to. I walked forward, knocking his shoulder with my thigh. I was almost at Santa when I felt a tug on my ass—the elf had grabbed the back pocket of my jeans and was trying to pull me back. “Get. Off. Of. Me,” I said, kicking back. “You’re NAUGHTY!” the elf screamed. “Very NAUGHTY!” We’d caught Santa’s attention. He gave me the once-over, then chuckled out, “Ho ho ho! What seems to be the problem?” “Lily sent me,” I said. From somewhere behind the beard, he figured it out. Meanwhile, the elf was about to pull down my pants. “Ho! Ho! Ho! Get off of him, Desmond!” The elf let go. “I’m calling security,” he insisted. “If you do,” Santa murmured, “you’ll be back to folding hand towels so fast you won’t even have time to take the bells off your boots or your balls out of your elfy boxer briefs.” It was a very good thing that the elf wasn’t packing any of his toy-carving tools at that point, because it might have been a very different day at Macy’s if he had. “Well, well, well,” Santa said once the elf had retreated. “Come and sit on my lap, little boy.” This Santa’s beard was real, and so was his hair. He wasn’t fucking around. “I’m not really a little boy,” I pointed out. “Get on my lap, then, big boy.” I walked up to him. There wasn’t much lap under his belly. And even though he tried to disguise it, as I went up there, I swear he adjusted his crotch. “Ho ho ho!” he chortled. I sat gingerly on his knee, like it was a subway seat with gum on it. “Have you been a good little boy this year?” he asked. I didn’t feel that I was the right person to determine my own goodness or badness, but in the interest of speeding along this encounter, I said yes. He actually wobbled with joy. “Good! Good! Then what can I bring you this Christmas?” I thought it was obvious. “A message from Lily,” I said. “That’s what I want for Christmas. But I want it right now.” “So impatient!” Santa lowered his voice and whispered in my ear. “But Santa does have a little something for you”—he shifted a little in his seat—”right under his coat. If you want to have your present, you’ll have to rub Santa’s belly.” “What?” I asked. He gestured with his eyes down to his stomach. “Go ahead.” I looked closely and saw the faint outline of an envelope beneath his red velvet coat. “You know you want it,” he whispered. The only way I could survive this was to think of it as the dare it was. Fuck off, Lily. You can’t intimidate me. I reached right under Santa’s coat. To my horror, I found he wasn’t wearing anything underneath. It was hot, sweaty, fleshy, hairy … and his belly was this massive obstacle, blocking me from the envelope. I had to lean over to angle my arm in order to reach it, the whole time having Santa laugh, “Oh ho ho, ho ho oh ho!” in my ear. I heard the elf scream, “What the hell!” and various parents start to shriek. Yes, I was feeling up Santa. And now the corner of the envelope was in my hand. He tried to jiggle it away from me, but I held tight and yanked it out, pulling some of his white belly hair with me. “OW ho ho!” he cried. I jumped off his lap. “Security’s here!” the elf proclaimed. The letter was in my hand, damp but intact. “He touched Santa!” a young child squealed. I ran. I bobbed. I weaved. I propelled myself through the tourists until I was safe in menswear, sheltered in a changing room. I dried my hand and the envelope on a purple velour tracksuit that someone had left behind, then opened it to reveal Lily’s next words. 8. That’s the spirit!Now, all I want for Christmas(or December 22nd)is your best Christmas memory. I also want my red notebook back, so leave it, with your memory included, in my stocking on the second floor. I opened to the first available blank page in the Moleskine and started to write. My best Christmas was when I was eight. My parents had just split up, and they told me I was really lucky, because this year I was going to get two Christmases instead of one. They called it Australian Christmas, because I would get presents at my mom’s place one evening and at my dad’s place the next morning, and it would be okay because they would both be Christmas Day in Australia. This sounded great to me, and I honestly felt lucky. Two Christmases! They went all out, too. Full dinners, all the relatives from each side at each Christmas. They must have split my Christmas list down the middle, because I got everything I wanted, and no duplication. Then my father, on the second night, made the big mistake. I was up late, way too late, and everyone else had gone home. He was drinking something brown-gold—probably brandy—and he pulled me to his side and asked me if I liked having two Christmases. I told him yes, and he told me again how lucky I was. Then he asked me if there was anything else I wanted. I told him I wanted Mom to be with us, too. And he didn’t blink. He said he’d see what he could do. And I believed him. I believed I was lucky, and I believed two Christmases were better than one, and I believed even though Santa wasn’t real, my parents could still perform magic. So that’s why it was my best Christmas. Because it was the last one when I really believed. Ask a question, get the answer. I figured if Lily couldn’t understand that, there wasn’t any reason to continue. I found the spot on the second floor where they were selling the personalized Christmas stockings, making a wide berth around the Santa stand and all of the security guards. Sure enough, there was a hook of Lily stockings, right between LINAS and LIVINIA. I’d leave the red notebook there … … but first I had to go to the AMC to buy Lily a ticket to the next day’s 10 a.m. showing of Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. four (Lily) December 23rd I have never gone to a movie by myself. Usually when I see a movie, it’s with my grandpa, or my brother and parents, or lots of cousins. The best is when we all go at once, like an army of interrelated popcorn zombies who laugh the same laughs and gasp the same gasps and aren’t so germ-phobic with each other that we won’t share a ginormous Coke with one straw. Family is useful like that. I planned to insist that Langston and Benny accompany me to the 10 a.m. showing of Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. I figured it was their responsibility to take me, since they started this whole thing. I woke them up promptly at 8 a.m. to let them know and to give them enough time to figure out their ironic T-shirts and tousled I-don’t-care-but-actually-I-care-too-much hairstyles before we headed out for the day. Only Langston threw his pillow at me when I tried to get him up. He didn’t budge from bed. “Get out of my room, Lily!” he grumbled. “Go to the movies by yourself!” Benny rolled over and looked at the clock next to Langston’s bed. “Ay, mamacita, it’s what o’clock in the morning? Eight? Merde merde merde, and during Christmas break, when it’s like the law to sleep in till noon? Ay, mamacita … GO BACK TO SLEEP!” Benny rolled over onto his stomach and placed his pillow over his head to get started right away, I guess, on dreaming in Spanglish. I was pretty tired myself, since I’d gotten up at 4 a.m. to make my mystery snarly friend a special present. I wouldn’t have minded taking a nap on the floor next to Langston like when we were kids, but I suspected if I suggested such a thing on this particular morning, in this particular company, Langston would repeat his standby refrain: “Did you hear me, Lily? GET OUT OF MY ROOM!” He actually did say that. I wasn’t imagining he might say it. “But I’m not allowed to go to the movies by myself,” I reminded Langston. At least, that was the rule when I was eight. Mom and Dad had never clarified whether the rule had been amended as I’d aged. “Of course you’re allowed to go to the movies by yourself. And even if you’re not, I’m in charge while Mom and Dad are gone, and I hereby authorize you. And the sooner you leave my room, the sooner your curfew gets bumped from eleven p.m. to midnight.” “My curfew is ten p.m. and I’m not allowed to be outside alone late at night.” “Guess what? Your new curfew is no curfew, and you can stay out as long as you want, with whomever you want, or be alone, I don’t care, just make sure your phone is turned on so I can call you to make sure you’re still alive. And feel free to get wasted drunk and fool around with boys and—” “LA LA LA LA LA,” I said, my hands over my ears to block out Langston’s dirty talk. I turned around to step out of his room but leaned back in to ask, “What are we making for pre–Christmas Eve dinner? I was thinking we could roast some chestnuts and—” “GET OUT!” Langston and Benny both yelled. So much for day before the day before Christmas Eve cheer. When we were little, the Christmas countdown began a week in advance and always started with either Langston or me greeting each other at breakfast by saying, “Good morning! And happy day before the day before the day before the day before Christmas!” And so on until the real day. I wondered what kind of monsters lurked in theaters to prey on people sitting by themselves because their brothers wouldn’t get out of bed to take them to the movies. I figured I’d better get mean real fast so I could be prepared for any dangerous scenario. I got dressed, wrapped my special present, then stood in front of the bathroom mirror, where I practiced making scary faces that would ward off any movie monsters preying upon single-seated persons. As I practiced my meanest face—tongue wagging out, nose crinkled, eyes at a most hateful glare—I saw Benny standing behind me in the bathroom hallway. “Why are you making kitten faces in the mirror?” he asked, yawning. “They’re mean faces!” I said. Benny said, “Look, that outfit you’re wearing is gonna scare papi off more than your mean kitten face. What are you wearing, Little Miss Quincea?era Gone Batshit?” I looked down at my outfit: oxford uniform school shirt tucked into a knee-length lime-green felt material skirt with a reindeer embroidered on it, candy-cane-colored swirled stockings, and beat-up Chucks on my feet. “What’s the matter with my outfit?” I asked, smiling upside down into a … *shudder* … frown. “I think my outfit is very festive for the day before the day before Christmas. And for a movie about a reindeer. Anyway, I thought you went back to sleep.” “Bathroom break.” Benny inspected me head to toe. “No,” he said. “The shoes don’t work. If you’re gonna go with that outfit, you might as well go all out. C’mon.” He took my hand and dragged me to the closet in my room. He perused through the heaps of Converse sneakers. “You don’t got no other types of shoes?” he said. “Only in our old dress-up-clothes trunk,” I said, joking. “Perfect,” he said. Benny darted over to the old trunk in the corner of my room, pulling out tulle tutus, yards of muumuus, #1 FAN baseball caps, fireman hats, princess slippers, platform shoes, and an alarming number of Crocs, until finally he grabbed for our Great-aunt Ida’s retired tasseled majorette boots, with taps still on the toes and heels. “These fit you?” Benny asked. I tried them on. “A little big, but I guess.” The boots spiced up my candy-cane-colored stockings nicely. I liked. “Awesome. They’ll go great with your winter hat.” My winter head-warming accessory of choice is a vintage red knit hat with pom-poms dangling down from the ears. It’s “vintage” in the sense of being a hat I made for my fourth-grade school Christmas pageant production of A ChristmasCarol(ing) A-go-go, the Dickens-inspired disco musical I had to heavily lobby our school principal to allow to be staged. Some people are so rigidly secular. My outfit complete, I walked outside toward the subway. I almost returned inside to change my shoes from the majorette boots to my old familiar Chucks, but the tapping noises from my feet hitting the pavement were comfortingly festive, so I didn’t, even though the boots were too big and my feet kept almost walking right out of them. (These boots were made for … slipping out of … la la la … ha ha ha.) I had to acknowledge that despite my excitement to follow the trail of mystery snarl, any boy who left me a ticket to see Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer would unlikely turn out to be a keeper. The title, quite simply, offended me. Langston says I should have a better sense of humor about these things, but I don’t see what’s so funny about the idea of a reindeer going after one of our senior friends. It is a known fact that reindeers are herbivores who subsist on plant life and shun meat, so I hardly think they’d be gunning for someone’s gramma. It upset me to think about a reindeer harming Gramma, because we all know that if that happened in the real world and not in the movies, then the Wildlife Service would go hunting for that reindeer and do away with the poor antlered guy when it was probably Gramma’s fault getting in his way like that! She always forgets to wear her glasses and osteoporosis hunches her walk and slows her down. She’s like a walking bull’s-eye for dear ol’ Bambi! I figured the whole point of bothering going to the movie at all would be to possibly get a look at mystery boy. But the dares he’d left inside my stocking with the Moleskine notebook, on a Post-it note placed onto the movie ticket, had said: DON’T read what I wrote in the notebook until you’re at the theater. DO write down your worst Christmas memory in the notebook. DON’T leave out the most horrific details. DO leave the notebook behind for me, behind Mama’s behind. Thank you. I believe in honor. I didn’t read the notebook ahead of time, which would be like peeking in your parents’ closet to see your Christmas present stash, and I vowed to hold off reading it until after the movie. As prepared as I’d been to dislike Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, I was completely unprepared for what I’d find at the cinema. Outside the theater showing this particular movie, there were rows of strollers in uniform formation against the wall. Inside was complete pandemonium. The 10 a.m. show, apparently, was the Mommy and Me viewing, where moms could bring their babies and toddlers to watch really inappropriate movies while the little ones babbled and burped and cried to their hearts’ content. The theater was a cacophony of “Wah wah” and “Mommy, I want …” and “No!” and “Mine!” I barely had a chance to pay attention to the movie, what with having Goldfish crackers and Cheerios thrown in my hair from the aisles behind me, watching Legos hurl through the air, and unsticking Great-aunt Ida’s taps from the sippy cup liquid spillage on the floor. Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they’re very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny. I can’t believe I ever was one. Hard to believe, but I was more put off by the movie theater than the movie. I only made it through twenty minutes of watching the black comedian man playing a fat mama on the screen while rows of mommies tried to negotiate with their toddlers in the seats before I couldn’t take it any longer. I got up from my seat and went outside the movie theater to get some peace and quiet in the lobby so I could finally read the notebook. But two mommies returning from taking their toddlers to the potty accosted me before I could dig in. “I just love your boots. They’re adorable!” “Where did you get that hat? Adorable!” “I AM NOT ADORABLE!” I shrieked. “I’M JUST A LILY!” The mommies stepped back. One of them said, “Lily, please tell your mommy to get you an Adderall prescription,” as the other tsk-tsk’d. They quickly hustled their tykes back into the cinema and away from the Shrieking Lily. I found a hiding place behind a huge, standing cardboard cutout advertisement for Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. I sat down cross-legged behind the cutout and opened the notebook. Finally. His words made me so sad. But they made me especially glad I’d gotten up at four that morning to make him cookies. Mom and I had been making the dough all month and storing it in the freezer, so all I’d had to do was thaw out the various flavors, place them in the cookie press, and bake. Voil?! I made a cornucopia tin of spritz cookies in all the available flavors (a strong affirmation of faith that Snarl would be worthy of such efforts): chocolate snowflake, eggnog, gingerbread, lebkuchen spice, mint kiss, and pumpkin. I’d decorated the spritz cookies with appropriate sprinkles and candies according to each one’s flavor and wrapped a bow around the cookie tin. I took out my headphones and tuned my iPod to Handel’s Messiah so I could concentrate on writing. I resisted the urge to mock-conduct with the pen in my hand. Instead, I answered Mystery Boy’s question. My only bad Christmas was the year I was six. That was the year that my pet gerbil died in a horrible incident at show-and-tell at school about a week before Christmas break. I know, I know, it sounds funny. It wasn’t. It was actually a gruesome massacre. I’m sorry, but despite your DON’T request, I must leave out the horrific details. The memory is still that vivid and upsetting to me. The part that really scarred me—separate from the guilt and loss of my pet, of course—was that I earned a nickname after the incident. I had screamed like heck when it happened, but my rage, and grief, were so big, and real, even to such a little person, that I couldn’t make myself STOP screaming. Anyone at school who tried to touch or talk to me, I just screamed. It was like basic instinct. I couldn’t help myself. That was the week I became known at school as Shrilly. That name would stay with me through elementary and middle school, until my parents finally moved me to a private school for high school. But that particular Christmas was my first week as Shrilly. That holiday, I mourned not only the loss of my gerbil but also thatbizarre kind of innocence that kids have, believing they can always fit in. That was the Christmas I finally understood what I’d heard family members whisper in worry about me: that I was too sensitive, too delicate. Different. It was the Christmas I realized Shrilly was the reason I didn’t get invited to birthday parties, or why I always got picked last for teams. It was the Christmas I realized I was the weird girl. When I finished writing my answer, I stood up. I realized I had no idea what Mystery Boy had meant by telling me to leave the notebook behind Mama’s behind. Was I supposed to leave it on the stage in front of the screen showing the movie? I looked over to the concession stand, wondering if I should ask for help. The popcorn looked especially yummy, so I went to get some, nearly knocking over the cardboard cutout in my hungry stomach’s sudden urgency. That’s when I saw it: Mama’s behind. I was already behind it. The cardboard cutout was a picture of the black man playing fat Mama, whose rear end was particularly huge. I wrote new instructions into the notebook and placed it behind Mama’s behind, where no one would likely see it except for the one who came looking for it. I left the red Moleskine along with the box of cookies and a tourist postcard that had been stuck to a piece of gum on the floor in the movie theater. The postcard was from Madame Tussauds, my favorite Times Square tourist trap. I wrote on the postcard: What do you want for Christmas? No, really, don’t be a smart aleck. What do you really really really supercalifragiwant? Please leave information about that, along with the notebook, with the security lady watching over Honest Abe.* Thank you. Yours sincerely, Lily *PS Don’t worry, I promise the security guard won’t try to feel you up like Uncle Sal at Macy’s might have. I assure you that wasn’t sexual so much as he’s genuinely just a huggy kind of person. PPS What is your name? five -Dash- December 23rd The doorbell rang at around noon, just when Gramma Got Run Over should have been getting out. So my first (admittedly irrational) thought was that somehow Lily had tracked me down. Her uncle in the CIA had run my fingerprints, and they were here to arrest me for impersonating someone worthy of Lily’s interest. I took a practice run for the perp walk as I headed over to the peephole. Then I peeped, and instead of finding a girl or the CIA, I saw Boomer shifting from side to side. “Boomer,” I said. “I’m out here!” he called back. Boomer. Short for Boomerang. A nickname given to him not for his propensity to rebound after being thrown, but for his temperamental resemblance to the kind of dog who chases after said boomerang, time after time after time. He also happened to be my oldest friend—old in terms of how long we’d known each other, certainly not in maturity. We had a pre-Christmas ritual dating back to when we were seven of going to the movies together on the twenty-third. Boomer’s tastes hadn’t changed much since then, so I was pretty sure which movie he was going to choose. Sure enough, as soon as he bounded through the door, he cried, “Hey! You ready to go see Collation?” Collation was, of course, the new Pixar animated movie about a stapler who falls helplessly in love with a piece of paper, causing all of his other office-supply friends to band together to win her over. Oprah Winfrey was the voice of the tape dispenser, and an animated version of Will Ferrell was the janitor who kept getting in the young lovers’ way. “Look,” Boomer said, emptying his pockets, “I’ve been getting Happy Meals for weeks. I have all of them except Lorna the lovable three-hole punch!” He actually put the plastic toys in my hands so I could examine them. “Isn’t this the three-hole punch?” I asked. He slapped his forehead. “Dude, I thought that was the expandable file folder, Frederico!” As fate would have it, Collation was playing at the same theater to which I’d sent Lily. So I could keep my playdate with Boomer and still intercept Lily’s next message before any rascals or rapscallions got to it. “Where’s your mom?” Boomer asked. “At her dance class,” I lied. If he’d had any inkling that my parents were out of town, he would’ve been on the horn to his mom so fast that I would’ve been guaranteeing myself a Very Boomer Christmas. “Did she leave you money? If not, I can probably pay.” “Don’t you worry, my guileless pal,” I said, putting my arm around him before he could even take his coat off. “Today, the movie’s on me.” I wasn’t going to tell Boomer about my other errand, but there was no getting rid of him when I ducked behind Gramma’s cardboard booty to find the loot. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Did you lose your contact lens?” “No. Someone left something for me here.” “Ooh!” Boomer was not a big guy, but he tended to take up a lot of space, because he was always jittering around. He kept peering over cardboard Gramma’s shoulder, and I was sure it was only a matter of time before the minimum-wage popcorn staff would evict us. The red Moleskine was right where I’d left it. There was also a tin at its side. “This is what I was looking for,” I told Boomer, holding up the journal. He grabbed for the tin. “Wow,” he said, opening the lid and looking inside. “This must be a special hiding place. How funny is it that someone would leave cookies in the same place that your friend left the notebook?” “I think the cookies are from her, too.” (This was confirmed by a Post-it on the top of the notebook that read: The cookies are for you. Merry Xmas! Lily.) “Really?” he said, picking a cookie out of the tin. “How do you know?” “I’m just guessing.” Boomer hesitated. “Shouldn’t your name be on it?” he asked. “I mean, if it’s yours.” “She doesn’t know my name.” Boomer immediately put the cookie back in the tin and closed the lid. “You can’t eat cookies from someone who doesn’t know your name!” he said. “What if there are, like, razor blades inside?” Kids and parents were streaming into the theater, and I knew we’d have front-row seats to Collation if we didn’t move a little faster. I showed him the Post-it. “You see? They’re from Lily.” “Who’s Lily?” “Some girl.” “Ooh … a girl!” “Boomer, we’re not in third grade anymore. You don’t say, ‘Ooh … a girl!’” “What? You fucking her?” “Okay, Boomer, you’re right. I liked ‘Ooh … a girl!’ much more than that. Let’s stick with ‘Ooh … a girl!’” “She go to your school?” “I don’t think so.” “You don’t think so?” “Look, we’d better get a seat or else there won’t be any seats left.” “Do you like her?” “I see someone took his persistence pills this morning. Sure, I like her. But I don’t really know her yet.” “I don’t do drugs, Dash.” “I know that, Boomer. It’s an expression. Like putting on your thinking cap. There isn’t an actual thinking cap.” “Of course there is,” Boomer said. “Don’t you remember?” And yes, suddenly I did remember. There were two old ski hats—his blue, mine green—that we’d used as thinking caps back when we were in first grade. This was the strange thing about Boomer—if I asked him about his teachers up at boarding school this past semester, he’d have already forgotten their names. But he could remember the exact make and color of every single Matchbox car with which we’d ever played. “Bad example,” I said. “There are definitely such things as thinking caps. I stand corrected.” Once we found our seats (a little too much toward the front, but with a nice coat barrier between me and the snot-nosed tyke on my left), we dove into the cookie tin. “Wow,” I said after eating a chocolate snowflake. “This puts the sweet in Sweet Jesus.” Boomer took bites of all six varieties, contemplating each one and figuring out the order in which he would then eat them. “I like the brown one and the lighter brown one and the almost-brown one. I’m not so sure about the minty one. But really, I think the lebkuchen spice one is the best.” “The what?” “The lebkuchen spice one.” He held it up for me. “This one.” “You’re making that up. What’s a lebkuchen spice? It sounds like a cross between a Keebler elf and a stripper. Hello, my name ees Lebkuchen Spice, and I vant to show you my cooooookies….” “Don’t be rude!” Boomer protested. As if the cookie might be offended. “Sorry, sorry.” The pre-movie commercials started, so while Boomer paid rapt attention to the “exclusive previews” for basic-cable crime shows featuring stars who’d peaked (not too high) in the eighties, I had a chance to read what Lily had written in the journal. I thought even Boomer would like the Shrilly story, although he’d probably feel really bad for her, when I knew the truth: It was so much cooler to be the weird girl. I was getting such a sense of Lily and her twisted, perverse sense of humor, right down to that classic supercalifragiwant. In my mind, she was Lebkuchen Spice—ironic, Germanic, sexy, and offbeat. And, mein Gott, the girl could bake a damn fine cookie … to the point that I wanted to answer her What do you want for Christmas? with a simple More cookies, please! But no. She warned me not to be a smart-ass, and while that answer was totally sincere, I was afraid she would think I was joking or, worse, kissing up. It was a hard question, especially if I had to batten down the sarcasm. I mean, there was the beauty pageant answer of world peace, although I’d probably have to render it in the beauty pageant spelling of world peas. I could play the boo-hoo orphan card and wish for my whole family to be together, but that was the last thing I wanted, especially at this late date. Soon Collation was upon us. Parts of it were funny, and I certainly appreciated the irony of a film distributed by Disney bemoaning corporate culture. But the love story was lacking. After all the marginally feminist Disney heroines of the early to mid-nineties, this heroine was literally a blank piece of paper. Granted, she could fold herself into a paper airplane in order to take her stapler boyfriend on a romantic glide around a magical conference room, and her final rock-paper-scissors showdown with the hapless janitor showed brio of a sort … but I couldn’t fall for her the way that Boomer and the stapler and most of the kids and parents in the audience were falling for her. I wondered if what I really wanted for Christmas was to find someone who’d be the piece of paper to my stapler. Or, wait, why couldn’t I be the piece of paper? Maybe it was a stapler I was after. Or the poor mouse pad, who was clearly in love with the stapler but couldn’t get him to give her a second look. All I’d managed to date so far was a series of pencil sharpeners, with the exception of Sofia, who was more like a pleasant eraser. I figured the only way for me to really find the meaning of my own personal Christmas needs was to leg on over to Madame Tussauds. Because what better barometer could there be than a throng of tourists taking photos of wax statues of public figures? I knew Boomer would be game for a field trip, so after the stapler and the piece of paper were safely frolicking over the end credits (to the dulcet tones of Celine Dion piping “You Supply My Love”), I shanghaied him from the lobby to Forty-second Street. “Why are there so many people out here?” Boomer asked as we bobbed and weaved roughly forward. “Christmas shopping,” I explained. “Already? Isn’t it early to be returning things?” I really had no sense of how his mind worked. The only time I had ever been in Madame Tussauds was the previous year, when three friends and I had tried to collect the world record for most suggestive posings with wax statues of B-list celebrities and historical figures. To be honest, it gave me the heebie-jeebies to go down on so many wax figures—especially Nicholas Cage, who already gave me the heebie-jeebies in real life. But my friend Mona wanted it to be a part of her senior project. The guards didn’t seem to mind, as long as there was no physical contact. Which made me expound upon one of my earlier theories, that Madame Tussaud had been a true madam, and had started her whole operation with a waxwork whorehouse somewhere near Paris, Texas. Mona loved this theory, but we could find no proof, and thus it did not transform into true scholarship. A wax replica of Morgan Freeman was guarding the entrance, and I wondered if this was some kind of cosmic payback—that every time an actor with a modicum of talent sold his soul to be in a big Hollywood action picture of no redeeming social value, his sellout visage was struck in wax and placed outside Madame Tussauds. Or maybe the people at Madame Tussauds figured that everyone loved Morgan Freeman, so who wouldn’t want to pose with him for a quick snapshot before stepping inside? Weirdly, the next two wax figures were Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, confirming my sellout theory, and also making me wonder whether Madame Tussauds was deliberately keeping all the black statues in the lobby. Very strange. Boomer didn’t seem to notice this. Instead, he was acting as if he were having real celebrity sightings, exclaiming with glee every time he saw someone—”Wow, it’s Halle Berry!” I wanted to scream bloody murder over the price of admission—I made a note to tell Lily that the next time she wanted me to fork over twenty-five bucks to see a wax statue of Honest Abe, she should slip some cash into the journal to cover my expenses. Inside, it was a total freak show. When I’d visited before, it had been nearly empty. But clearly the holidays had caused a lot of family-time desperation, so there were all sorts of crowds around the unlikeliest of figures. I mean, was Uma Thurman really worth jostling for? Jon Bon Jovi? To be honest, the whole place depressed me. The wax figures were lifelike, for sure. But, hell, you say wax and I think melt. There’s some kind of permanence to a real statue. Not here. And not only because of the wax. You had to know that in some corner of this building, there was a closet full of discarded statues, the people whose spotlight had come and gone. Like the members of *NSYNC whose initials weren’t JT; or all the Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls. Were people really buddying up to the Seinfeld sculpture anymore? Did Keanu Reeves ever stop by his own statue, just to remember when people cared? “Look, Miley Cyrus!” Boomer called, and at least a dozen preteen girls followed him over to gawk at this poor girl frozen in an awkward (if lucrative) adolescence. It didn’t even look like Miley Cyrus—there was something a little off, so it looked like Miley Cyrus’s backwater cousin Riley, dressing up and trying to pretend to be Miley. Behind her, the Jonas Brothers were frozen mid-jam. Didn’t they have to know that the Closet of Forgotten Statues would call to them someday? Of course, before I found Honest Abe, I needed to figure out what I wanted for Christmas. A pony. An unlimited MetroCard. A promise that Lily’s uncle Sal would never be allowed to work around children again. A swank lime-green couch. A new thinking cap. It seemed I was incapable of coming up with a serious answer. What I really wanted for Christmas was for Christmas to go away. Maybe Lily would understand this … but maybe she wouldn’t. I’d seen even the hardest-edge girls go soft for Santa. I couldn’t fault her for believing, because I had to imagine it was nice to have that illusion still intact. Not the belief in Santa, but the believe that a single holiday could usher in goodwill toward man. “Dash?” I looked up, and there was Priya, with at least two younger brothers in tow. “Hey, Priya.” “Is this her?” Boomer asked, somehow diverting his attention long enough from the Jackie Chan display to make it awkward for me. “No, this is Priya,” I said. “Priya, this is my friend Boomer.” “I thought you were in Sweden,” Priya said. I couldn’t tell if she was irritated at me or irritated at the way one of her brothers was stretching out her sleeve. “You were in Sweden?” Boomer asked. “No,” I said. “The trip got called off at the last minute. Because of the political unrest.” “In Sweden?” Priya seemed skeptical. “Yeah—isn’t it strange how the Times isn’t covering it? Half the country’s on strike because of that thing the crown prince said about Pippi Longstocking. Which means no meatballs for Christmas, if you know what I mean.” “That’s so sad!” Boomer said. “Well, if you’re around,” Priya said, “I’m having people over the day after Christmas. Sofia will be there.” “Sofia?” “You know she’s back in town, right? For the holidays.” I swear, it looked like Priya was enjoying this. Even her pipsqueak brothers seemed to be enjoying this. “Of course I knew,” I lied. “I just—well, I thought I was going to be in Sweden. You know how it is.” “It starts at six. Feel free to bring your friend here.” The brothers started to tug on her again. “I’ll see you then, I hope.” “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Sofia.” I hadn’t meant to say that last word aloud. I wasn’t even sure Priya heard it, she was whisked away so fast by the running tugs on her clothing. “I liked Sofia,” Boomer said. “Yeah,” I told him. “So did I.” It seemed a little strange to have two run-ins with Priya while on my Lily chase—but I had to dismiss it as coincidence. I didn’t see how she or Sofia could possibly fit into what Lily was doing. Sure, it could be one big practical joke, but the thing about Sofia and her friends was that while they were always practical, they were never jokers. Naturally, the next consideration was: Did I want Sofia for Christmas? Wrapped in a bow. Under the tree. Telling me how frickin’ great I was. No. Not really. I’d liked her, sure. We’d been a good couple, insofar as that our friends—well, her friends more than mine—had created this mold of what a couple should be, and we fit into it just fine. We were the fourth couple tacked onto the quadruple date. We were good board game partners. We could text each other to sleep at night. She’d only been in New York for three years, so I got to explain all kinds of pop cultural references to her, while she’d tell me stories about Spain. We’d made it to third base, but got stuck there. Like we knew the catcher would tag us out if we tried to head home. I’d been relieved (a little) when she’d told me she had to move back to Spain. We’d pledged we’d keep in touch, and that had worked for about a month. Now I read the updates on her online profile and she read mine, and that’s what we were to each other. I wanted to want something more than Sofia for Christmas. And was that Lily? I couldn’t really tell. For sure, the last thing I was going to write to her was All I want for Christmas is you. “What do I want for Christmas?” I asked Angelina Jolie. Her full lips didn’t part with an answer. “What do I want for Christmas?” I asked Charlize Theron. I even added, “Hey, nice dress,” but she still didn’t reply. I leaned over her cleavage and asked, “Are they real?” She didn’t make a move to slap me. Finally, I turned to Boomer. “What do I want for Christmas?” He looked thoughtful for a second, then said, “World peace?” “Not helpful!” “Well, what’s in your Amazonian hope chest?” Boomer asked. “My WHAT?” “You know, on Amazon. Your hope chest.” “You mean my wish list?” “Yeah, that.” And just like that, I knew what I wanted. Something I had always wanted. But it was so unrealistic it hadn’t even made it to my wish list. I needed a bench to sit down on, but the only one I could see already had Elizabeth Taylor, Hugh Jackman, and Clark Gable perched atop it, waiting for a bus. “I just need a sec,” I told Boomer before I ducked behind Ozzy Osbourne and his whole family (circa 2003) to write in the Moleskine. No smart-assness (assy-smartness?) here. The truth? What I want for Christmas is an OED. Unabridged. Just in case you are not a word nerd like myself: O = Oxford Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/david-levithan/dash-and-lily-s-book-of-dares-the-sparkling-prequel-to-twel/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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