He should be the one to contact me.

Right?

What did it say about me that he hadn’t?

That he couldn’t possibly like me as much as I’d started to like him. That I would never be as pretty and interesting as that Sofia girl, while Dash’s handsome face would continue to appear in my daydreams.

Unrequited.

It wasn’t fair that I sort of missed him. Not his presence so much—I barely knew him—but having that red notebook link to him. Knowing he was out there thinking or doing something that would be communicated to me in some surprising way.

I lay on my bed, daydreaming about Dash, and reached down to receive a reassuring lick from Boris, but he was not there. He was out on his walk.

Our apartment doorbell buzzed loudly and I jumped up and ran into the hallway to answer it. “Hello?” I said from the other side of the door.

“It’s your favorite great-aunt. I left my key inside the apartment when I came to walk Boris.”

Boris!

The twenty minutes since he’d been gone had nearly destroyed me. Boris never ignored me like that Dash guy.

I opened the door to let Mrs. Basil E. and Boris back inside.

I looked down at Boris, pawing at my ankles to get my attention.

Boris’s mouth held not a doggy bone or a postman’s jacket. From between his teeth, Boris slobberingly offered me a red-ribbon-wrapped red notebook.

nineteen

–Dash–

December 30th

We retreated to my mother’s apartment after I was released from jail. The adrenaline in all of us was amazing—we alternated between bouncing and floating, as if the excitement of escape had turned the world into a giant trampoline.

As soon as we were in the door, Yohnny and Dov attempted to raid the refrigerator and were unsatisfied with what they found.

“Noodle pudding?” Yohnny asked.

“Yeah, my mom made it,” I told them. “I always save it for last.”

While Priya went to the loo and Boomer checked his email on his phone, Sofia stepped into my bedroom. Not for any lascivious reason—just to check it out.

“It hasn’t changed much,” she observed, staring at the quotes I’d thumbtacked to my walls.

“Little things have,” I said. “There are some new quotes on the wall. Some new books on the shelves. Some of the pencils have lost their erasers. The sheets are changed every week.”

“So even though it doesn’t seem like anything’s changed—”

“—things change all the time, mostly in little ways. That’s how it goes, I guess.”

Sofia nodded. “Funny how we say it goes. That’s the way life goes.”

“That’s the way life comes just sounds so awkward.”

“Well, sometimes you can see the future come, no? Sometimes it even, say, catches a baby.”

I studied her face for any hint of sarcasm or meanness. And sadness—I was also looking for sadness, or regret. But all I found was amusement.

I sat down on my bed and held my head in my hands. Then, realizing this was way too dramatic, I looked up at her.

“I truly don’t understand any of this,” I confessed.

She stayed standing, facing me.

“I wish I could help you there,” she told me. “But I can’t.”

So there we were. Once upon a time, during the storybook version of dating we’d gone through, I’d pretended that it was possible to love her when I only mildly liked her. Now I had no desire to pretend we’d ever be in love, and I liked her madly.

“Can we try to be wise with each other for a very long time?” I asked her.

She laughed. “You mean, can we share our fuckups and see if we can get any wisdom out of them?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be nice.”

I felt we needed to seal our new pact. Kissing was out. Hugging seemed peevish. So I offered her my hand. She shook it. And then we went to join the rest of our friends.

I couldn’t help but wonder about what Lily was doing. How she was feeling. What she was feeling. Yes, it was confusing, but it wasn’t a bad confusion. I wanted to see her again, in a way I’d never wanted to see her before.

I knew the notebook was in my hands. I just wanted to find the right thing to say.

My mother called to see how things were going. There was no Internet access at the spa, and she wasn’t the type who turned on the TV when she wasn’t home. So I didn’t have to explain anything. I just said I had a few people over and we were all behaving ourselves.

My father, I couldn’t help but note, usually checked the news every five minutes on his phone. He’d probably even seen the headline on the Post site, and the photos. He simply didn’t recognize his own son.

Later that night, after a marathon of John Hughes movies, I kept Boomer, Sofia, Priya, Yohnny, and Dov in my mother’s living room and brought out a dry-erase board from her home office.

“Before you leave,” I told them, “I would like to conduct a brief symposium on love.”

I took out a red marker—I mean, why not?—and wrote the word love on the board.

“Here we have it,” I said. “Love.” For good measure, I drew a heart around it. Not the ventricled kind. The made-up kind.

“It exists in this pristine state, upholding its ideals. But then … along come words.”

I wrote words over and over again, all around the dry erase board, including over the word love.

“And feelings.”

I wrote feelings in the same way, crisscrossing it on top of everything I’d already written.

“And expectations. And history. And thoughts. Help me out here, Boomer.”

We wrote each of these three words at least twenty times each.

The result?

Pure illegibility. Not only was love gone, but you couldn’t make out anything else, either.

“This,” I said, holding up the board, “is what we’re up against.”

Priya looked disturbed—more by me than by what I was saying. Sofia still looked amused. Yohnny and Dov were curling closer together. Boomer, pen still in hand, was trying to work something out.

He raised his hand.

“Yes, Boomer?” I asked.

“You’re saying that either you’re in love or you’re not. And if you are, it becomes like this.”

“Something to that effect.”

“But what if it’s not a yes-or-no question?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I mean, what if love isn’t a yes-or-no question? It’s not either you’re in love or you’re not. I mean, aren’t there different levels? And maybe these things, like words and expectations and whatever, don’t go on top of the love. Maybe it’s like a map, and they all have their own place, and then when you see it from the sky—whoa.”

I looked at the board. “I think your map is cleaner than mine,” I said. “But isn’t this what the collision of the right two people at the right time looks like? I mean, it’s a mess.”

Sofia chuckled.

“What?” I asked her.

“Right person, right time is the wrong concept, Dash,” she said.

“Totally,” Boomer agreed.

“What does she mean by that?” I asked him.

“What I mean,” Sofia said, “is that when people say right person, wrong time, or wrong person, right time, it’s usually a cop-out. They think that fate is playing with them. That we’re all just participants in this romantic reality show that God gets a kick out of watching. But the universe doesn’t decide what’s right or not right. You do. Yes, you can theorize until you’re blue in the face whether something might have worked at another time, or with someone else. But you know what that leaves you?”

“Blue in the face?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“You have the notebook, right?” Dov chimed in.

“I really hope you didn’t lose it,” Yohnny added.

“Yes,” I said.

“So what are you waiting for?” Sofia asked.

“You all to leave?” I said.

“Good,” she said. “You now have your writing assignment. Because you know what? It’s up to you, not fate.”

I still didn’t know what to write. I fell asleep with the notebook next to me, both of us staring at the ceiling.

December 31st

The next morning, over breakfast, I had my grand idea.

I called Boomer immediately.

“I need a favor,” I told him.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Is your aunt in town?”

“My aunt.”

I told him my idea.

“You want to go on a date with my aunt?” he asked.

I told him my idea again.

“Oh,” he said. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

I didn’t want to give too much away. All I wrote is the time and the place to meet. When the hour dawned decent, I headed over to Mrs. Basil E.’s. I found her outside, taking Boris around the block.

“Your parents have let you run free?” Mrs. Basil E. inquired.

“So to speak,” I said.

I offered her the notebook.

“Assuming she’s up for the next adventure,” I said.

“You know what they say,” Mrs. Basil E. offered. “Dullness is the spice of life. Which is why we must always use other spices.”

She went to take the notebook, but Boris beat her to it.

“Bad girl!” she chided.

“I’m pretty sure Boris is a boy,” I said.

“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Basil E. assured me. “I just like to keep him confused.”

Then she and Boris headed off with my future.

When Lily arrived at five o’clock, I could tell she was a little bit disappointed.

“Oh, look,” she said, gazing out at the Rockefeller Center ice rink. “Skaters. Millions of them. Wearing sweaters from all fifty states.”

My nerves were whirling to see her. Because, really, this was our first shot at a semi-normal conversation, assuming no dogs or mothers intervened. And I wasn’t as good at semi-normal conversations as I was at ones that were written down, or adrenalized in a surreal moment. I wanted to like her, and I wanted her to like me, and that was more want than I’d saddled myself with in many a moon.

It’s up to you, not fate.

True. But it was also up to Lily.

That was the trickiest part.

I pretended to be hurt by her unenthusiastic reaction to my cliché destination. “You don’t want to hit the ice?” I said, pouting. “I thought it would be so romantic. Like in a movie. With Prometheus watching over us. Because, you know, what’s more fitting than Prometheus over an ice rink? I’m sure that’s why he stole the fire for us in the first place—so we could make ice rinks. And then, when we’re done skating on that traffic jam of an ice rink, we could go to Times Square and be surrounded by two million people without any bathrooms for the next seven hours. C’mon. You know you want to.”

It was funny. She clearly hadn’t known what to dress for, so she’d given up and just dressed for herself. I admired that. As well as the revulsion she couldn’t hide at the thought of us being not-at-all-alone in a crowd.

“Or …,” I said. “We could go with Plan B.”

“Plan B,” she said immediately.

“Do you like to be surprised, or would you rather anticipate?”

“Oh,” she said. “Definitely surprised.”

We started walking away from Prometheus in his ring. After about three steps, Lily stopped.

“You know what,” she said. “That was a total lie. I would much rather anticipate.”

So I told her.

She slapped me on the arm.