by Rachel Cohn
Quick thinking for a sickie. Sometimes I really love my brother.
Grandpa eyed the two of us suspiciously, not sure whether he’d been caught in a siblings’ web of deceit and got-your-back-yo.
“Go to bed,” Grandpa barked. “Both of you. I’ll deal with you in the morning.”
“Why are you home, Grandpa?” I asked.
“Never mind. Go to bed.”
I couldn’t fall asleep after the klezmer night, so I wrote in the notebook instead.
I’m sorry I didn’t return our notebook to you. It was such a simple task, I mean. Yet I botched it. Why I’m writing to you now even though I have no idea how to return this to you, I don’t know. There’s just something about you—and this notebook—that gives me faith.
Were you even at the club tonight? At first I thought you might have been one of those gumshoe boys, but I quickly realized that was impossible. For one thing, those boys seemed too upbeat. It’s not that I imagine you to be a miserable person, by the way. But I don’t see you as the grinning type, either. Also, I feel like I would have known, like a sensory perception, if you had been standing there near me. For another thing, even though I don’t know how to picture you yet (every time I try, you seem to be holding up a red Moleskine notebook to cover your face), I have a solid feeling you don’t have hair ringlets dangling from your temples. Just a hunch. (But if you do, could I braid them sometime?)
So I left you with a boot and no notebook. Or, rather, I left it with two complete strangers.
You don’t feel like a stranger to me.
I’ll be wearing the spare boot at all times, just in case you happen to be looking for me.
Cinderella was such a dork. She left behind her glass slipper at the ball and then went right back to her stepmonster’s house. It seems to me she should have worn the glass slipper always, to make herself easier to find. I always hoped that after the prince found Cinderella and they rode away in their magnificent carriage, after a few miles she turned to him and said, “Could you drop me off down the road, please? Now that I’ve finally escaped my life of horrific abuse, I’d like to see something of the world, you know? Maybe backpack across Europe or Asia? I’ll catch back up with you later, Prince, once I’ve found my own way. Thanks for finding me, though! Super-sweet of you. And you can keep the slippers. They’ll probably cause bunions if I keep wearing ’em.”
I might have liked to share a dance with you. If I may be so bold to say.
Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of the day after Christmas could keep Grandpa from meeting his buddies for coffee the following afternoon.
I went along, feeling like Grandpa needed the moral support.
While Grandpa was in Florida, where he usually spends the winters, he had indeed proposed on Christmas Day to Mabel, who lives in his complex down there. I have never liked Mabel. Aside from her always telling me and my brother to call her Glamma, her list of step grandmother-to-be infractions is long. Here’s just a sampling: (1) The candies in the bowl in her living room are always stale. (2) She tries to put lipstick or rouge on me even though I don’t like makeup. (3) She’s a terrible cook. (4) Her vegetarian lasagna, which she made sure to mention a million times she made because I’m such a pain that I won’t eat meat, tastes like glue with grated zucchini. (5) She kind of makes me want to barf. (6) So does her lasagna. (7) And the candies in her living room.
Shockingly, Mabel turned down Grandpa’s proposal! I thought my Christmas morning had been sucky—but Grandpa’s had been way worse. When Grandpa presented her with a ring, Mabel told Grandpa she likes the single life and likes having Grandpa as her winter fella, but she’s got other fellas during the rest of the year, just like he has other gals during the non-winter months! She told him to get his money back for the ring and use it to take her on a swell vacation somewhere grand.
Grandpa never imagined she would turn down his proposal, so rather than consider the logic of Mabel’s answer, he typically returned home to New York a few hours later, totally heartbroken! Especially when he came home to find his sweet little Lily bear was out having a wild night on the town. Like, in twenty-four hours, his whole world turned upside down.
It’s good for the old fella, I think.
However, Grandpa seems, like, genuinely depressed. So that afternoon, I stayed close to Grandpa’s side as he met with his buddies, all of them retired business owners from around the neighborhood who’ve been meeting regularly for coffee since my mom was a baby, so they could weigh in with their opinions about Grandpa’s Christmas misadventure. Most of his buddies’ names are complicated and involve many syllables, so Langston and I have always referred to them by the names of their former businesses.
The roundtable discussion of Mabel proceeded like this:
Mr. Cannoli told Grandpa, “Arthur, give her time. She’ll come around.”
Mr. Dumpling said, “You virile man, Arthur! This lady not have you, someone better will!”
Mr. Borscht sighed, “This woman who turns down a marriage proposal on a day that’s sacred to you gentile people is worthy of your heart, Arthur? I think not.”
Mr. Curry exclaimed, “I will find you another lady, my friend!”
“He has plenty of other lady friends here in New York,” I reminded the group. “He just”—this killed me to say, I want to note—“seems to want Mabel for keeps.”
Amazingly, I did not choke on my Lilyccino (foamed milk with shaved chocolate on top, courtesy of Mr. Cannoli’s son-in-law, who now runs Mr. Cannoli’s bakery) when I said this. Grandpa’s face—always so chipper and eager—looked so uncharacteristically downcast. I couldn’t stand it.
“This one!” Grandpa said to his buddies, pointing at me sitting next to him. “Do you know what she did? Went to a party last night! Stayed out past her curfew! As if my Christmas hadn’t been lousy enough, I come home and panic because Lily bear’s nowhere to be found. She strolls in a few minutes later—at four in the morning!—seemingly without a care in the world.”
“Three-thirty,” I stated. Again.
Mr. Dumpling said, “Were there boys at this party?”
Mr. Borscht said, “Arthur, this child should be out so late at night? Where boys might be?”
Mr. Cannoli said, “I’ll kill the kid who …”
Mr. Curry turned to me. “A nice young lady, she does not …”
“Time for me to walk my dogs!” I said. If I spent any more time with these old men in their House of Coffee Woe, they’d conspire to have me locked in my room away from boys till I was thirty years old.
I left the gentlemen to their kvetching so I could play some catching with my favorite dog-walking clients.
I had my two favorite dogs with me in the park—Lola and Dude, a little pug-Chi mix and a giant chocolate Lab. It’s true love between them. You can tell by how eagerly they sniff each other’s butts.
I called Grandpa from my cell phone.
“You need to learn to compromise,” I said.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“Dude used to hate Lola because she was so little and cute and took all the attention. Then he learned to play nice with her so he could have the attention, too. Dude compromised, like you should. Just because Mabel turned down your proposal doesn’t mean you should break up with her over it!”
This concession was very big of me, I agree.
“I’m supposed to take love advice from a sixteen-year-old girl?” Grandpa said.
“Yes.” I hung up before he could point out how completely not qualified I was to dole out such advice.
I’ve got to learn to stop being so Lily sweet and transition myself into a hard bargainer.
For instance.
If I am forced to move to Fiji next September, which is when Langston said Dad’s new job would start if Dad decides to take it, I am going to demand a puppy. I’m realizing there is a lot of parental guilt to be mined from this situation, and I plan to use it to my animal kingdom benefit.
I sa
t down at a bench while Lola chased Dude in the dog park. From the next bench, I noticed a teenage boy wearing an argyle print beret tilted backward, squinting at me like he knew me. “Lily?” he asked.
I stared at him more closely.
“Edgar Thibaud!” I growled.
He came over to my bench. How dare Edgar Thibaud recognize me and have the audacity to approach me, after the living hell he made my elementary school years at PS 41?
Also.
How dare Edgar Thibaud have used the past few years to grow so … tall? And … good-looking?
Edgar Thibaud said, “I wasn’t sure it was you, then I noticed the weird boot on one foot and the beat-up Chuck on the other, and I remembered that red pom-pom hat. I knew it could only be you. ’Sup?”
’Sup? he wanted to know? So casually? Like he hadn’t ruined my life and killed my gerbil?
Edgar Thibaud sat down next to me. His (deep green, and rather beautiful) eyes looked a little hazy, like perhaps he’d been smoking from the peace pipe.
“I’m the captain of my soccer team,” I announced.
I don’t really know how to talk to boys. In person. Which is probably why I’ve become dependent on a notebook for creative expression of a potentially romantic nature.
Edgar laughed at my idiotic response. But it wasn’t a mean laugh. It sounded like an appreciative one. “Of course you are. Same old Lily. You’ve even got the same black-rimmed glasses like you wore in elementary school.”
“I heard you got kicked out of high school for some conspiracy plot.”
“Just suspended. It was like a vacation, actually. And check you out, keeping tabs on me all this time.” Edgar Thibaud leaned into my ear. “Anyone tell you that you grew up to be sort of cute? In, like, a misfit type of way?”
I didn’t know whether to be flattered or outraged.
I did know his breath in my ear sent very unfamiliar shivers through my body.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him, needing trivial conversation to distract me from the sordid thoughts my mind was starting to spin about Edgar Thibaud … with his shirt off. I could feel my face turning hot, blushing. And yet my dialogue was no racier than: “You didn’t go away for Christmas like everybody else?”
“My parents went skiing in Colorado without me. I annoyed them too much.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
“No, I did it on purpose. A week without their bourgeois hypocrisy is a week of paradise.”
Was Edgar Thibaud even speaking? I couldn’t stop staring at his face. Just how exactly had it turned so handsome in the intervening years?
I said, “I think that’s a girl’s beret you’re wearing.”
“Is it?” Edgar asked. “Cool.” He cocked his head to the side, pleased. “I like girls. And their hats.” He reached to grab my hat from my head. “May I?”
Edgar Thibaud had obviously evolved over the last few years if he had the decency to ask for my hat, rather than snatch it off my head and then probably throw it to the dogs to play with, as the old Edgar on the school yard would have done.
I moved my head down so he could take my hat. He placed my red pom-pom hat on his head, then put his beret on mine.
His beret on my head felt so warm and … forbidden. I liked it.
“Want to go to a party with me tonight?” Edgar asked.
“Grandpa probably won’t let me go!” I blurted out.
“So?” Edgar said.
Exactly!
Clearly, it was time for Lily to have the kind of boy adventures that would allow her to give legitimate love advice, later in the future.
I might have arrived in Tompkins Square Park with my heart still intent on a Snarl, but right in front of me, I had a real, live Edgar Thibaud.
The secret tactic of a good hard bargainer is to know when to compromise.
For instance.
I will demand a puppy if I am forced to move to Fiji.
But I will settle for a bunny.
eleven
–Dash–
December 27th
So I found myself once again at the Strand.
It hadn’t been a late night—Priya’s parties tended to fizzle before the Cinderella hour, and this was no exception. Sofia and I stayed together most of the evening, but once we emerged from the bedroom and started to mingle with everyone else, we stopped talking to each other and instead talked as two parts of the larger group. Yohnny and Dov left to see their friend Matthue slam some poetry, and Thibaud never showed. I might have lingered until Sofia and I were almost alone again, but Boomer had consumed about thirteen too many cups of Mountain Dew and was threatening to make holes in the ceiling with his head. Sofia was going to be around until New Year’s, so I said we had to get together, and she said yeah, that’d be good. We left it at that.
Now it was eleven the next morning and I was back in the bookstore, resisting the siren call of the stacks in order to find and, if necessary, interrogate Mark. I was walking with a lady’s boot under my arm, like some pallbearer for the post-melt Wicked Witch of the West.
The guy at the information desk was thin and blond, bespectacled and tweeded. In other words, not the guy I was looking for.
“Hey,” I said. “Is Mark here?”
The guy barely looked up from the Saramago novel in his lap.
“Oh,” he said, “are you the stalker?”
“I have a question to ask him, that’s all. That hardly makes me a stalker.”
Now the guy looked at me. “It depends on the question, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m sure stalkers have questions, too.”
“Yes,” I conceded, “but their questions usually run along the lines of ‘Why won’t you love me?’ and ‘Why can’t I die by your side?’ I’m more along the lines of ‘What can you tell me about this boot?’ ”
“I’m not sure I can help you.”
“This is the information desk, isn’t it? Aren’t you obligated to give me information?”
The guy sighed. “Fine. He’s shelving. Now let me finish this chapter, okay?”
I thanked him, though not profusely.
The Strand proudly proclaims itself as home to eighteen miles of books. I have no idea how this is calculated. Does one stack all the books on top of each other to get the eighteen miles? Or do you put them end to end, to create a bridge between Manhattan and, say, Short Hills, New Jersey, eighteen miles away? Were there eighteen miles of shelves? No one knew. We all just took the bookstore at its word, because if you couldn’t trust a bookstore, what could you trust?
Whatever the measurement, the applicable fact was that the Strand had lots of aisles to shelve. Which meant that I had to weave in and out of dozens of narrow spaces—dodging disgruntled and pregruntled patrons, ladders, and haphazardly placed book cairns in order to find Mark in the Military History section. He was buckling a little under the weight of an illustrated history of the Civil War, but otherwise his appearance and demeanor were similar to that of when we first met.
“Mark!” I said in a tone of holiday camaraderie, as if we were members of the same eating club who had somehow found ourselves in the lobby of the same brothel.
He looked at me for a second, then turned back to the shelf.
“Did you have yourself a merry little Christmas?” I continued. “Did you make the yuletide gay?”
He brandished a volume of Winston Churchill’s memoirs and pointed it accusingly at me. The jowly prime minister stared from the jacket impassively, as if he were the judge of this sudden contest.
“What do you want?” Mark asked. “I’m not going to tell you anything.”
I took the boot from under my arm and placed it on Churchill’s face.
“Tell me whose boot this is.”
He (Mark, not Churchill) was surprised by the appearance of footwear—I could tell. And I could also glean from the knowledge he was trying to hide that he knew the identity of its owner.
Still, he was obstinate, in the way that only truly
miserable people can be obstinate.
“Why should I tell you?” he asked, with no small amount of petulance.
“If you tell me, I will leave you alone,” I said. “And if you don’t tell me, I am going to grab the nearest ghostwritten James Patterson romance novel and I am going to follow you through this store reading it out loud until you relent. Would you prefer me to read from Daphne’s Three Tender Months with Harold or Cindy and John’s House of Everlasting Love? I guarantee, your sanity and your indie street cred won’t last a chapter. And they are very, very short chapters.”
Now I could see the fright beneath the defiance.
“You’re evil,” he said. “You know that?”
I nodded, even though I usually saved the word evil for perpetrators of genocide.
He continued, “And if I tell you, you’ll stop calling and coming by. Even if you don’t like what you find?”
That seemed uncharitable to Lily, but I would not let my pique peak.
“I will stop calling,” I said calmly. “And while I will never allow myself to be banned from the Strand, I promise not to seek information when you are sitting at that particular desk, and if you are ever working the cash register, I will make sure to maneuver so that you are not the clerk who rings me up. Will that suffice?”
“There’s no need to snarl,” Mark said.
“That wasn’t snarling,” I pointed out. “Not even remotely. If you’re planning to make it in the bookselling arena, I would advise you to learn to make the distinction between a snarl and a well-placed bon mot. They are not one and the same.”
I took out a pen and offered him the inside of my arm.
“Just write down the address and we’ll be squared away.”
He took the pen and wrote down an address on East Twenty-second Street, pressing down a little too hard on my skin.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, reclaiming the boot. “I’ll be sure to put in a good word with Mr. Strand for you!”
As I exited the aisle, I felt a treatise on American naval misadventure shot-put past my head. I left it on the ground for the shot-putter to reshelve.