Can you come by the store and pick up his keys?
Be there in a few.
The Strand was its usual mix of bustling people and laconic aisle readers. Mark wasn’t at the information desk when I arrived, so I decided to do a little browsing. First I went to the animals section, but I’d read almost every book there, and I could only look at puppy pictures so many times without needing to pet one instead of just coo at its picture. I wandered and found myself in the basement, where a sign on a bookcase in the deepest trenches at the back announced SEX & SEXUALITY BEGINS ON LEFT SHELF. The sign made me think of The Joy of Gay Sex (third edition), which in turn, of course, made me blush, and then think of J. D. Salinger. I returned upstairs to Fiction and there found a most curious male depositing a familiar red notebook in between Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.

“Boomer?” I said.

Startled, and looking guilty, as if he’d been caught shoplifting, Boomer clumsily grabbed the red notebook back from the shelves, causing several hardcover editions of Nine Stories to noisily tumble to the floor. Boomer clutched the red notebook to his chest as if it were a Bible.

“Lily! I didn’t expect to see you here. I mean, I kinda hoped to, but then I didn’t, so I got used to that, but then here you are, just when I’m thinking about not seeing you, and—”

I reached my hands out. “Is that notebook for me?” I asked. I wanted to snatch the notebook from Boomer and read it posthaste, but I tried to sound casual, like, Oh, yeah, that old thing. I’ll read it whenever I get to it. It might be a while. I’m super-busy, not thinking about Dash or the notebook or anything.

“Yes!” Boomer said. But he made no movement to hand it to me.

“Can I have it?” I asked.

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Because! You have to discover it on the shelves! When I’m not here!”

I hadn’t realized there was a rule book for the notebook exchange. “So how about if I leave, and you put the notebook back on the shelves and walk away, and then when you’re gone, I’ll return and pick it up?”

“Okay!”

I started to turn around to execute the plan, but Boomer called after me.

“Lily!”

“Yes?”

“Max Brenner is across the street! I forgot about that!”

Boomer referred to a restaurant a block away from the Strand, a Willy Wonka–esque chocolate-themed eating extravaganza place—a tourist trap for sure, but of the best kind, not unlike Madame Tussauds.

“Want to split a chocolate pizza?” I asked Boomer.

“Yes!”

“I’ll meet you there in ten minutes,” I said, walking away.

“Don’t forget to come back for the notebook when I’m not looking!” Boomer said. It both mystified and intrigued me that such a seemingly dour person as Dash was great friends with an extremely exclamation-pointed person as excitable Boomer. I suspected this spoke well for Dash, that he could appreciate this brand of Boomer dude.

“I won’t,” I called back.

I enlisted my cousin Mark to join us at Max Brenner, since bringing along an adult meant Mark would pick up the check, even if he likely would just bill it back to Grandpa.

Boomer and I ordered the chocolate pizza—a warm, thin pastry shaped like a pizza, with double-melted chocolate as the “sauce,” topped with melted marshmallows and candied hazelnut bits, then carved into triangle slices like a real pizza. Mark ordered the chocolate syringe, which was exactly what it sounded like—a plastic syringe filled with chocolate that you could shoot straight into your mouth.

“But we could share our pizza with you!” Boomer told Mark after Mark ordered the syringe. “It’s more fun when the sugar infusion is a truly communal experience.”

“Thanks, kid, but I’m trying to reduce my carbs,” Mark said. “I’ll stick with shooting up straight chocolate. No need to add more dough to my waistline.” The waitress left us and Mark turned to Boomer in all seriousness. “Now, tell us everything about your little punk friend Dash.”

“He’s not a punk! He’s pretty square, actually!”

“No criminal record?” Mark said.

“Not unless you count the crimson alert!”

“The what?” Mark and I both said.

Boomer took out his phone and displayed a website called WashingtonSquareMommies.

Mark and I read through the crimson alert posting, inspecting the evidence on the site.

“He eats yogurt?” Mark asked. “What kind of teenage boy is he?”

“Lactose tolerant!” Boomer said. “Dash loves yogurt, and anything with cream in it, and he especially likes Spanish cheeses.”

Mark turned to me consolingly. “Lily. Sweetie. You realize this Dash may not be straight?”

“Dash is for sure straight!” Boomer announced. “He has a super-pretty ex-girlfriend named Sofia, who I think he still has a thing for, and also, in seventh grade, there was a game of spin the bottle and it was my turn and I spun and it landed at Dash, but he wouldn’t let me kiss him.”

“Proves nothing,” Mark muttered.

Sofia? Sofia?

I needed a bathroom break.

I don’t think we should ever try to meet again; there’s such freedom in that.

And now, for his final trick, Dash had insulted me.

Postcard 6: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
met past and past part of MEET meet\mēt\1 a : to come into the presence of: FIND b : to come together with esp. at a particular time or place c : to come into contact or conjunction with : JOIN d : to appear to the perception of …

“Are you okay, Lily?” a voice at the bathroom sink next to me asked as I read through Dash’s latest inexplicable (to make no sense; see: BOYS) message.

I shut the red notebook and looked up. In the mirror, I saw Alice Gamble, a girl from my school who was also on my soccer squad.

“Oh, hey, Alice,” I said. “What are you doing here?” I half expected her to turn around and leave me standing there since I was not part of the “cool crowd” at school. Maybe because it was the holidays, she didn’t.

“I live around the corner,” Alice said. “My younger twin sisters love this place, so I get dragged here anytime the grandparents are in town.”

“Boys make no sense,” I told her.

“For sure!” Alice said, looking happy to have a topic on hand more interesting than younger siblings and grandparents. She glanced at the red notebook curiously. “Do you have any particular boy in mind?”

“I have no idea!” And I really didn’t. I couldn’t understand from his last message whether Dash was saying we should meet again or we should just correspond through the notebook. I couldn’t understand why I even cared. Especially if there was some other girl named Sofia in the picture.

“Do you want to go get coffee or something tomorrow and discuss and analyze the situation at length?” Alice asked.

“Are your grandparents really that bad?” I couldn’t imagine Alice wanting to hang out and do girl stuff with me like talk about boys endlessly unless she was really desperate.

Alice said, “My grandparents are pretty cool. But our apartment is small, and cramped with too many people visiting for the holidays. I need to get out of the house. And it would be fun to, you know, finally get to know you.”

“Really?” I asked. I wondered if these kinds of invitations had always been available to me and I just hadn’t noticed before, too shrouded in Shrilly fear?

“Really!” Alice said.

“You too!” I said.

We made a coffee date for the next day.

Who needed Dash?

Not me, for sure.

When I returned to our table, my cousin Mark was shooting up his chocolate directly into his mouth from the large plastic syringe. “Fantastic!” he slurpily exclaimed.

“This is probably not fair-trade chocolate here, though!” Boomer explained.

“Did I ask your opinion?” Mark asked.

“No!” Boomer said. “But I don’t mind that you didn’t!”

There was a matter on which I wanted Boomer’s opinion. “Did Dash like the Snarly Muppet I made him?”

“Not really! He said it looked like the spawn of if Miss Piggy and Animal had sex.”

“My eyes!” Mark said. No, he hadn’t shot chocolate into his eyes by mistake. “What a disgusting thought. You teenagers have such perverted ideas.” Mark set down his chocolate syringe. “You’ve made me lose my appetite, Boomer.”

“My mom tells me that all the time!” Boomer said. He turned to me. “Your family must be just like mine!”

“Doubt that,” Mark said.

My poor Snarly. I silently vowed to rescue my little felt darling and provide it the loving home that Dash never would.

“This Dash kid,” Mark continued. “Sorry, Lily. I just don’t like him.”

“Do you even know him?” Boomer asked.

“I know enough about him to pass judgment,” Mark said.

“Dash is a good guy, really,” Boomer said. “I think the word his mom uses to describe him is finicky, which is kinda true, but trust me, he’s good people. The best! Especially when you consider that his parents had a really nasty divorce and don’t even talk to each other at all anymore. How weird is that? He probably wouldn’t like me telling you this, but Dash got dragged through a terrible custody battle when he was a kid, with his dad trying to get full custody just to spite his mom, and Dash having to go in to have all these talks with lawyers and judges and social workers. It was awful. If you got caught in the middle of that, would you manage to be a super-friendly person after? Dash is the kind of guy who’s always had to figure out everything for himself. But you know what’s so cool about him? He always does! He’s totally the most loyal friend a person could ever have. Takes a lot to earn his trust, but once you do, there’s nothing he won’t do for you. Nothing you can’t depend on him for. He can sometimes act a bit loner-ish, but I think that’s not because he’s some serial killer waiting to happen; he’s just his own best company sometimes. And he’s comfortable with that. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.”

I admit I was moved by Boomer’s heartfelt defense of Dash, even if I was still mad about Snarly, but Mark shrugged. “Pshaw,” he said.

I asked my cousin, “Do you not like Dash because you genuinely think he’s unlikable or because there’s a bit of Grandpa in you, who doesn’t want me to have new friends who are boys?”

“I’m your new friend who’s a boy, Lily,” Boomer stated. “You like me, don’t you, Mark?”

“Pshaw,” Mark repeated. The answer was clear: Mark liked Dash just fine, so long as Dash wasn’t someone I could potentially be interested in. Boomer too.

Boris the dog who needed walking turned out to be more like a pony who needed sprinting. He was a bullmastiff who came up to my waist, a young buck with tons of energy who literally tried to drag me through Washington Square Park. Boris barely gave me time to tape the sign I’d created to the tree. The sign had the crimson alert photo in the middle with a message that said: WANTED—this teenage boy, not a pervert, not a hoodlum, simply a boy who likes yogurt. WANTED—this boy to explain himself.

I need not have posted the sign, however.

Because five minutes after I posted it, Boris started loudly barking at a teenage boy who approached me as I scooped up the biggest piece of dog dung I’d ever seen.

“Lily?”

I looked up from my plastic bag filled with giant poo.

Of course.

It was Dash.

Who else would find me at just this moment? First he found me drunk, now he found me cleaning up poo from a barking pony who was about to go into attack mode.