by Rachel Cohn
“I’d hardly call you that.”
“That’s what I feel like! I used to feel sorry for girls who went all stupid when they got boyfriends. Now I’ve become one of those girls! One who needs him to tell her he loves her because she’s so neurotic she has to hear it from him to feel, like, validated in her feelings for him. I hate that!” I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I’d never confided in my mom like this before. Those drunk Santas must have infected me with their lack of restraint. Mom laughed. “There’s nothing funny about this,” I reminded her.
“I know,” she said, down-turning her lips to a neutral, serious position. “It’s just that you’re reminding me of when I was first going out with your dad, and starting to have deep feelings for him. We’d been dating for a few months, and then out of nowhere, I turned brutally cold and broke up with him. I didn’t want to let him in that close.”
“And your family is a lot of baggage to bring to somebody,” I said. My other fear with Dash: My family. His family.
“There’s that,” Mom allowed. “It took a while before I invited him to Christmas, and to meet aunts and uncles and cousin after cousin. He still hasn’t recovered from the shock of the sheer numbers of us.”
“Dash’s family is toxic.”
“That doesn’t mean he is.”
“I know. But it’s unsettling to see how mean his parents are to each other. What if he turns out like his dad?”
“As much as I haven’t been ready for you to have a boyfriend, I’m giving this one to Dash. He’s nothing like his dad. Except for the color of his eyes.”
“But Dash’s eyes are so beautiful!” I was ready to sob again.
“What do you really want from me, Lily? For me to talk you into or out of this relationship?”
“I want Dash to know what to say and what to do! I want him to know to take me to see Corgi & Bess and make it special. I want him to not just bring me a Christmas tree but stay awhile and stop time to be just with me.” It was like I wasn’t even talking to Mom anymore. I ranted, “Don’t just show me you adore me. Tell me you love me, or break up with me and put me out of this misery of wanting to give my whole heart to you and you just being like, ‘Oh, what a cute Lily heart you are so naïvely holding out to me. You don’t mind if I throw it on the ground and stomp all over it, do you?’ ”
Mom paused, and I think she was trying to suppress a laugh, but she at least made a face like she was waiting so she could formulate a thoughtful response. Finally, she said, “First of all, it’s not fair to expect Dash to be psychic about what you really want from him. Second, and this is just a broader piece of advice for you about anyone you might date, but any male who automatically knows how to tick off all the items on your female wish-fulfillment list is too good to be true. It’s not natural to their species, and you should find it highly suspicious if he does. Third, if you feel so strongly about him, I think it’s your responsibility to be honest with him about it and not wait for him to tell you something he has no idea you’re waiting to hear.”
“But what if Dash doesn’t feel the same way?”
“That’s a risk you have to take. This is one of those moments when you get to decide who you want to be. It’s like an awkward, uncomfortable growth spurt, but one that ultimately moves you in a definitive direction. Are you going to be someone who takes charge of her feelings and her actions, even if the outcome might hurt, or someone who lets herself be unhappy simply because she won’t ask for what she wants?”
“They both sound like sucky options.”
Mom no longer looked like she was trying not to laugh. She said, very seriously, “I see now the danger in letting you be so overprotected. It taught you to overprotect your heart.”
“I’m scared.”
“You should be. There’s nothing more frightening than true intimacy.”
“MOM!” I couldn’t be more embarrassed. “That’s not what I meant!”
“That’s not what I meant, either. I’m talking about emotional intimacy, not physical. Acknowledging how you really feel, who you really are. Opening up your soul to another person. There’s nothing scarier. And I’ve been to Woodbury Common outlet mall on Black Friday. I know from scary.”
I had nothing to say while I absorbed what she’d said. To my silence, Mom added, “But since you brought it up—”
“No, we haven’t!” I said, squirming. “I mean, he doesn’t even, like, protest about your rule that my bedroom door has to be open if we’re in there alone together.”
“That’s your dad’s rule, not mine, but I can’t say I blame Dash. I don’t think I’d want to fool around with you in your bedroom, either, if I knew you had a dozen family members outside the door waiting to strangle him if he tried anything beyond holding your hand.”
I honestly wanted to convulse with grossness hearing my mother say the words “fool around” in the context of Dash and me, but I also liked the other part of what she was suggesting. “So Dash can be in my bedroom with the door closed?”
“If he dares. Sure. I overrule Dad on this one. Dash is a good guy, and if you’re ready to have this conversation about intimacy with me, then I trust you to make the best decision when the time is right for both of you, and to handle it responsibly. But I’m guessing there’re other places Dash would rather be alone with you. I wouldn’t take his indifference to the open door to mean his lack of desire for you.”
—
Our hour was up. We could hear the 2:37 Manhattan-bound train approaching in the far-off distance.
“Are you really moving up here?” I asked Mom.
“Still haven’t decided. But I admit I like it more than I expected. It’s hard commuting across Long Island just to be an untenured community college instructor teaching undergrads who need English credits but could care less about the great sonnets. I might like to be an unemployed poet up here instead.”
“But your family is in the city.”
“Dad wants to be here. That’s the risk I have to take. Choose him. Old people like us have these hard growth spurts, too.”
“But Grandpa!”
Mom sighed. “He’s gotten so obstinate. We all know the best place for him would be an assisted-living facility. Better quality of life for him.”
I gasped. “He’d be so mad if he heard you say that!”
“I know. That’s a big part of the problem. Not seeing that what’s best for him is what also would be better for everybody. He’s needing more care than we can reliably give him, despite how much we love him. We all stopped our lives after his fall, but at some point we have to choose to lead our own lives again, as painful as that choice will be.”
“Where will I go?”
“You can move up here and go to Dad’s school. Or you could live at Mrs. Basil E.’s and spend the summer with us. She’s offered. You’re a big girl now. You can figure it out. No one’s abandoning you, and everyone will do everything possible to make the situation work for you. Because that’s how awesome your family is, and why you should never ever again go missing from them.”
There was too much still to discuss, and about one minute left before I had to get out of the car to catch the train. So I focused on the important issue.
“Am I still grounded?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” I made a sad, Lily’s-falling-into-an-emotional-tailspin-again face.
“No. And don’t think I’m not aware of what you’re doing.”
“What’s that?”
“Lilymaid’s a-milking Mom’s sympathies for all she can. Now go home and get your Christmas on, finally. And tell Dash—”
I kissed her cheek. “Bye, Mom. Thank you. I love you.”
I dashed out of the car toward the train, to dash me home to Dash.
—
Once I got on the train, I turned on my phone again. My heart was ready to explode for everything I wanted to tell Dash. I was ungrounded, I had the apartment to myself, and I loved a boy.
The first text message I saw was from Dash. My heart leapt just at the sight of his name, and I thought of how brave I was going to be when I saw him next. Then my heart sank when I read his words. I try so hard to make you happy. But clearly I can’t. I don’t want to say you’re impossible to please. But you’re impossible to please. And since you can’t stop disappearing, I realized you’re right. We need a break.
Saturday, December 20th
I paused my texting, then continued.
That break will last exactly twenty-three hours. No longer. No less.
“Did I get the math right?” I asked Mrs. Basil E., showing her the phone.
“Yes. Now…the final touch.”
“But of course!”
Further instructions to follow, I typed.
SEND.
I waited to see if Lily would respond.
She did not.
“I really hope this works,” I said.
Mrs. Basil E. looked up at me from her settee, and it was clear she did not want me to be a regrettee.
“You must give it your all. But please note where I put emphasis in that sentence. For your benefit, I shall repeat: You must give it your all.”
“But didn’t we just establish that she’s impossible to please?”
“People who want things to be perfect are always impossible to please. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Even if their expectations aren’t correct, their instincts are. You won’t get everything right, Dash. Even Lily knows that. The trying is what matters.”
“It’s the thought that counts, then.”
“Ah, but have you ever tried counting thoughts? They are extraordinarily hard to wrangle.”
I would have sat back and sighed, but I was perched on a glorified footstool, so sitting back was not an option, and sighing only would have been labeled a melodramatic self-indulgence by my interlocutor.
Instead, I said, “I just feel like this is my last chance.” Which, once it was out of my mouth, also sounded like melodramatic self-indulgence…but also happened to be a bona fide truth.
“Here’s the thing about love,” Mrs. Basil E. replied. “You get a last chance. And then, when that doesn’t work, you make yourself another last chance. Then another. Then another. You keep going until your last chances run out.”
“But if there are many of them, doesn’t that mean that only the last one is actually—”
“I am not trying to make a grammatical point here,” Mrs. Basil E. hushed. “I am trying to make an emotional point. I don’t expect you to understand me on that level—you are but a romantic sapling. I am a sequoia, so you’d be well advised to listen to what I have to say.”
“Your experience runs rings around mine.”
“Precisely.”
I stood up from my ottomanopoeic perch. “I appreciate your help.”
Mrs. Basil E. stood as well. “And I appreciate your appreciation. Now, let us get to work. We have a lot of logistics to contend with. Twenty-three hours seems like a long time, but it’s nothing, Dash. It’s the time it takes a book to fall off a shelf.”
I looked at my phone. Still no response.
Mrs. Basil E. put her hand on my arm. A light but definitive touch.
“She’ll come,” she assured me. “She doesn’t realize, either, that this isn’t a last, last chance. She’s also a sapling. But that’s the beauty of your young love—you can learn to be trees together.”
“If this works.”
“Yes, if this works.”
Sunday, December 21st
I met Langston in front of the Strand. Not only is the Strand the site of the start of my and Lily’s origin story, but it also happens to be the best bookstore in the world, a wonderland for the literate and the literary. If this was going to be a last chance, I wanted to go back to the first chance, and to have all the possibility of that first chance come alive a year later.
Langston held a box in his hand. Lifting it to show me, he said, “Are you sure this is necessary?”
I knew this was hard for him. I knew the contents of the box were deeply precious to him.
“Mark has promised he’ll watch over it,” I told him. “The only hands it will fall into are Lily’s.”
“But why does it have to be Joey? He was a vintage boy-band relic when my friend Elizabeth gave him to me back in fifth grade. Now he’s, like, super vintage.”
“The whole point is that Lily will know it’s yours. She’ll know we’re all in this together.”
Langston knew this, but it was still hard for him. He didn’t hand over the prize until we were up in the YA section, with his cousin Mark glowering at our side.
“I have no idea why I’m helping you,” Mark coughed up. “But here I am, helping you. It’s an affront to every strain of my insouciance.”
Still, even Mark was reverent when Langston pulled the Joey McIntyre doll from its packaging.
“Take care,” Langston whispered in Joey’s ear. “Remember, this is for Lily.”
I took a copy of Baby Be-Bop out of my bag, removed the dust jacket, then wrapped the dust jacket around a red Moleskine notebook. From there, we put everything in place.
“You are not to let Joey out of your sight,” Langston instructed Mark.
“You’re treating him like he’s Timberlake,” Mark grumbled. “But fine.”
“And you’re to send word the minute she shows,” I reminded him.
“If she shows,” Mark corrected, enjoying his italics.
“If,” I agreed.
I couldn’t stop to worry about it. There were too many other things to do, in too short a time.
—
Twenty-two hours and fifty-seven minutes after my previous text, I sent Lily a new one:
Forget the elf on the shelf.
Go to where it all began and look for a New Kid on the Block.
I didn’t have time to wait for a reply. I’d pushed over the first domino—now I had to hope that the others would be in the right place to fall.
My next stop was Boomer. He was, perhaps, the riskiest domino of all, as far as a tendency to walk off the path.
The ranks of Oscar’s comrades had thinned considerably, so the streetside forest Boomer had manned a few days ago was now a sub-arbor. Still, his spirit remained undiminished.
“I still have three days to find them all homes!” Boomer whispered to me, as if he were operating a log shelter.
I took a square Tupperware container out of my bag and opened it to show Boomer its contents.
“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Scented woodchips.”
I stared at him for a second.
“Are they not woodchips? Are they petrified reindeer doo?”
I gulped.
“It’s funny, because they look like they’re in the shape of letters!”
“Yes,” I said. “They are in the shape of letters. They’re a clue.”
“But why would you spell a clue out in reindeer poo?”
“It’s not reindeer poo! I made cookies.”
Now Boomer started to crack up. Not a snide snicker. Not an amateur tee-hee-hee. No, Boomer started laughing from his diaphragm, then threw his whole body into it.
“Cookies!” he said when he had enough breath to talk. “Those are…the ugliest cookies…I’ve ever seen!”
“They’re lebkuchen!” I cried out. “Or at least they’re lebkuchenesque! It’s a recipe from Nuremberg! I mean, Nuremberg by way of the Martha Stewart website! According to Martha’s minions, they date back to the fourteenth century!”
Boomer calmed down and took another look inside the Tupperware, this time as if it were a reliquary. “Oh…that explains it,” he said solemnly. “They’re from the fourteenth century!”
“Not these specific cookies!” I looked at them again—and had to concede (to myself, not to Boomer) that they had a Gothic air about them. In my haste to make them the previous night, I’d had to substitute some ingredients (because, unlike Martha, I didn’t happen to
have four Medjool dates sitting around in my kitchen), and I could see how the results looked like a bread lover’s idea of what gluten-free is.
“I can’t let her eat those,” Boomer said. “She might get sick. Or angry.”
“They’re not to eat. They’re to read.” I arranged them in order on the bottom of the Tupperware.
“ ‘WAM MA’AM THANK YOU BAM!’ ” Boomer read. Then he added, “Shouldn’t the ‘wam’ have an h, like ‘where’ or ‘what’ or ‘wherewolf’?”
“I burned the h beyond recognition, okay? Meanwhile, do you remember your line?”
“ ‘Lily, do you need some clarification?’ ”
“No—‘clarafication.’ ”
“ ‘Clarification.’ ”
“ ‘Clar-A-fication.’ ”
“ ‘Clar-A-fication.’ ”
“Perfect. And if she says yes?”
“I say, ‘I’d like to crack that one in the nuts!’ ”
“No. ‘That’s a hard nut to crack!’ ”
“ ‘You crack me up with your nuts!’ ”
“ ‘That’s a hard nut to crack.’ ”
“ ‘Your nuts are so hard right now!’ ”
“Boomer. You are not to say ‘Your nuts are so hard right now!’ to Lily. Do you understand?”
“Maybe you should write it down and I can just hand it over?”
“Good idea.”
As I was writing it down on the back of a receipt from Blick, my phone buzzed.
The Boy Band is Dead, Mark wrote. Long Live the Boy Band.
What do U mean? I typed back.
That’s Bieber, not Boy Band, Mark replied.
Enough pop semantics, Langston interrupted, since this was a group message. Is Joey on the move?
He’s hanging tough with our girl, Mark answered. And they’ve got a red Moleskine to read.
I was amazed at how relieved I felt. Something was happening. Lily and I needed something to happen, and now something was happening.
“Okay, Boomer, I gotta go,” I said.
“Aw, jeez, Dash, I’m sorry—we don’t have a bathroom.”
“Not that kind of ‘gotta go.’ This is more the ‘I have to be somewhere else’ kind.”