She nodded at this, then asked, “What’s your name, young man?”

“Dash,” I told her.

“Dash?”

“It’s short for Dashiell,” I explained.

“I never said it wasn’t,” she replied flatly.

She led me into a room that could only be called a parlor. The drapery was so thick and the furniture so cloaked that I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb-wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner. It wasn’t as dusty or smoky as one expects a parlor to be, but all the wood had the weight of card catalogs and the fabric seemed soaked in wine. Knee-high sculptures perched in corners and by the fireplace, while jacketless books crowded on shelves, peering down like old professors too tired to speak to one another.

I felt very much at home.

Following a gesture from the old woman, I settled on a settee. When I breathed in, the air smelled like old money.

“Is Lily home?” I asked.

The woman settled down across from me and laughed.

“Who’s to say I’m not Lily?” she asked back.

“Well,” I said, “a few of my friends have actually met Lily, and I like to think they would’ve mentioned if she were eighty.”

“Eighty!” The old woman feigned shock. “I’ll have you know I’m not a year over forty-three.”

“With all due respect,” I said, “if you’re forty-three, then I’m a fetus.”

She leaned back in her chair and examined me like she was contemplating a purchase. Her hair was fastened tightly in a bun, and I felt fastened just as tightly into her scrutiny.

“Seriously,” I said. “Where’s Lily?”

“I need to gauge your intentions,” she said, “before I can allow you to dillydally with my niece.”

“I assure you I have neither dillying nor dallying on my mind,” I replied. “I simply want to meet her. In person. You see, we’ve been—”

She raised her hand to cut me off. “I am aware of your epistolary flirtation. Which is all well and good—as long as it’s well and good. Before I ask you some questions, perhaps you would like some tea?”

“That would depend on what kind of tea you were offering.”

“So diffident! Suppose it was Earl Grey.”

I shook my head. “Tastes like pencil shavings.”

“Lady Grey.”

“I don’t drink beverages named after beheaded monarchs. It seems so tacky.”

“Chamomile?”

“Might as well sip butterfly wings.”

“Green tea?”

“You can’t be serious.”

The old woman nodded her approval. “I wasn’t.”

“Because you know when a cow chews grass? And he or she chews and chews and chews? Well, green tea tastes like French-kissing that cow after it’s done chewing all that grass.”

“Would you like some mint tea?”

“Only under duress.”

“English breakfast.”

I clapped my hands. “Now you’re talking!”

The old woman made no move to get the tea.

“I’m afraid I’m out,” she said.

“No worries,” I replied. “Do you want your boot back in the meantime?”

I handed it her way and she took it for a moment before handing it back to me.

“This was from my majorette days,” she said.

“You were in the army?”

“An army of cheer, Dash. I was in an army of cheer.”

There was a series of urns on the bookshelf behind her. I wondered if they were decorative or if they contained some of her relatives’ remains.

“So what else can I tell you?” I asked. “I mean, to get you to reveal Lily to me.”

She triangled her fingers under her chin. “Let’s see. Are you a bed wetter?”

“Am I a …?”

“Bed wetter. I am asking if you are a bed wetter.”

I knew she was trying to get me to blink. But I wouldn’t.

“No, ma’am. I leave my beds dry.”

“Not even a little drip every now and then?”

“I’m trying hard to see how this is germane.”

“I’m gauging your honesty. What is the last periodical you read methodically?”

“Vogue. Although, in the interest of full disclosure, that’s mostly because I was in my mother’s bathroom, enduring a rather long bowel movement. You know, the kind that requires Lamaze?”

“What adjective do you feel the most longing for?”

That was easy. “I will admit I have a soft spot for fanciful.”

“Let’s say I have a hundred million dollars and offer it to you. The only condition is that if you take it, a man in China will fall off his bicycle and die. What do you do?”

“I don’t understand why it matters whether he’s in China or not. And of course I wouldn’t take the money.”

The old woman nodded.

“Do you think Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual?”

“All I can say for sure is that he never made a pass at me.”

“Are you a museumgoer?”

“Is the pope a churchgoer?”

“When you see a flower painted by Georgia O’Keeffe, what comes to mind?”

“That’s just a transparent ploy to get me to say the word vagina, isn’t it? There. I’ve said it. Vagina.”

“When you leave a public bus, is there anything special that you do?”

“I thank the driver.”

“Good, good,” she said. “Now—tell me your intentions regarding Lily.”

There was a pause. Perhaps too long a pause. Because, to be forthright, I hadn’t really thought about my intentions. Which meant I had to think aloud while answering.

“Well,” I said, “it’s not as if I’ve come to take her to the sock hop, or ask her to go double-spooning in some tapioca, if that’s what you mean. We’ve already established my position on dillying and dallying, which right now is chaste with a chance for inveterate lust, depending on the ripeness of our first interactions. I have been told by a source of surprising trustworthiness that I must not paint her too much with my ideas of her, and my intention is to follow that advice. But really? Completely uncharted territory here. Terra enigma. It could be a future or it could be a folly. If she’s cut from your cloth, I have a sense we might get along.”

“I think she’s still figuring out her pattern,” the woman told me. “So I won’t comment on the cloth. I find her to be a delight. And while sometimes delights can be tiresome, mostly they are …”

“Delightful?” I offered.

“Pure. They’re burnished by their own hopes.”

I sighed.

“What is it?” the old woman asked.

“I’m persnickety,” I confessed. “Not, incidentally, to the point of being snarly. But still. Delightful and persnickety are not a common blend.”

“Do you want to know why I never married?”

“The question wasn’t at the top of my list,” I admitted.

The old woman made me meet her eye. “Listen to me: I never married because I was too easily bored. It’s an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It’s much better to be too easily interested.”

“I see,” I said. But I didn’t. Not then. Not yet.

Instead, I was looking around the room and thinking: Of all the places I’ve been, this is the one that seems the most like a place that a red notebook would take me.

“Dash,” the old woman said. A simple statement, like she was holding my name in her hand, holding it out to me like I’d held out her boot.

“Yes?” I said.

“Yes?” she echoed.

“Do you think it’s time?” I asked.

She got up from her chair and said, “Let me make a phone call.”

twelve

(Lily)

December 26th

“Do you still kill gerbils?” I asked Edgar Thibaud.

We were standing outside the brownstone apartment building of some girl he goes to school with who was having a party that night.

From the street, we could see the party through the living room window. The scene looked very polite. No wild noises that one would expect to come from a teenager’s party boomed down to the street. We could see two parental types wandering through the living room, offering juice boxes and Mountain Dews on silver trays, which may have explained the lack of noise, and the open curtains.

“This party’s gonna suck,” Edgar Thibaud said. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Do you still kill gerbils, Edgar Thibaud?”

If he gave me a sarcastic answer back, our newly discovered truce would end as abruptly as it had started.

“Lily,” Edgar Thibaud said, oozing sincerity. He took my hand in his. My hand, now oozing sweat, quivered from his touch. “I’m so sorry about your gerbil. Truly. I would never knowingly harm a sentient being.” His lips placed a contrite peck on my knuckles.

I happen to know that Edgar Thibaud graduated from killing gerbils in first grade to becoming one of those fourth-grade boys who use magnifying glasses to direct the sun to fry worms and other random insects in alleyways.

It is possibly true what Grandpa’s buddies have repeatedly told me: Teenage boys cannot be trusted. Their intentions are not pure.

This must be part of Mother Nature’s master plan—making these boys so irresistibly cute, in such a naughty way, that the purity of their intentions becomes irrelevant.

“Where would you rather go instead?” I asked Edgar. “I have to be home by nine or my grandpa will freak.”

I’d lied to Grandpa a second time. I’d told him an emergency holiday soccer practice had been convened because our team was on a massive losing streak. Only because he was moping over that Mabel lady did he fall for it.

Edgar Thibaud answered in a baby voice. “Gwanpaah won’t wet wittle Wily stay up wate?”

“Are you being mean?”

“No,” he said, his face turning serious. “I salute you and your curfews, Lily. With apologies for the brief and unnecessary foray into baby talk. If you have to be home by nine, that probably only leaves us enough time for a movie. Have you seen Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer?”

“No,” I said.

I’m getting good at this lying.

*

I am trying to embrace danger.

Once again, I found myself locked in a bathroom, communing with Snarl. The movie theater’s bathroom was a bit cleaner than the previous night’s music club’s, and the evening show meant the cinema wasn’t brimming with toddlers. But once again, life and action brimmed all around me, yet all I wanted to do was write in a red notebook.

Danger comes in many forms, I suppose. For some people, it might be jumping off a bridge or climbing impossible mountains. For others, it could be a tawdry love affair or telling off a mean-looking bus driver because he doesn’t like to stop for noisy teenagers. It could be cheating at cards or eating a peanut even though you’re allergic.

For me, danger might be getting out from under the protective cloak of my family and venturing into the world more on my own, even though I don’t know what—or who—awaits me. I wish you were part of this plan. But are you dangerous? Somehow I doubt it. I’m scared you’re just a figment of my imagination.

I think it’s time to experience life outside the notebook.

Edgar Thibaud whooped with laughter at fat Gramma on the screen as I returned to my seat. The movie was so stupid I had no choice but to fixate my stare away from the screen and onto Edgar Thibaud’s biceps. He has some kind of magical muscle arms—not too bulky, not too skimpy. They’re cut just right. I was rather mesmerized.