Children frighten me. I mean, I appreciate them on a cute aesthetic level, but they’re very demanding and unreasonable creatures and often smell funny. I can’t believe I ever was one. Hard to believe, but I was more put off by the movie theater than the movie. I only made it through twenty minutes of watching the black comedian man playing a fat mama on the screen while rows of mommies tried to negotiate with their toddlers in the seats before I couldn’t take it any longer.

I got up from my seat and went outside the movie theater to get some peace and quiet in the lobby so I could finally read the notebook. But two mommies returning from taking their toddlers to the potty accosted me before I could dig in.

“I just love your boots. They’re adorable!”

“Where did you get that hat? Adorable!”

“I AM NOT ADORABLE!” I shrieked. “I’M JUST A LILY!”

The mommies stepped back. One of them said, “Lily, please tell your mommy to get you an Adderall prescription,” as the other tsk-tsk’d. They quickly hustled their tykes back into the cinema and away from the Shrieking Lily.

I found a hiding place behind a huge, standing cardboard cutout advertisement for Gramma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. I sat down cross-legged behind the cutout and opened the notebook. Finally.

His words made me so sad.

But they made me especially glad I’d gotten up at four that morning to make him cookies. Mom and I had been making the dough all month and storing it in the freezer, so all I’d had to do was thaw out the various flavors, place them in the cookie press, and bake. Voilà! I made a cornucopia tin of spritz cookies in all the available flavors (a strong affirmation of faith that Snarl would be worthy of such efforts): chocolate snowflake, eggnog, gingerbread, lebkuchen spice, mint kiss, and pumpkin. I’d decorated the spritz cookies with appropriate sprinkles and candies according to each one’s flavor and wrapped a bow around the cookie tin.

I took out my headphones and tuned my iPod to Handel’s Messiah so I could concentrate on writing. I resisted the urge to mock-conduct with the pen in my hand. Instead, I answered Mystery Boy’s question.

My only bad Christmas was the year I was six.

That was the year that my pet gerbil died in a horrible incident at show-and-tell at school about a week before Christmas break.

I know, I know, it sounds funny. It wasn’t. It was actually a gruesome massacre.

I’m sorry, but despite your DON’T request, I must leave out the horrific details. The memory is still that vivid and upsetting to me.

The part that really scarred me—separate from the guilt and loss of my pet, of course—was that I earned a nickname after the incident. I had screamed like heck when it happened, but my rage, and grief, were so big, and real, even to such a little person, that I couldn’t make myself STOP screaming. Anyone at school who tried to touch or talk to me, I just screamed. It was like basic instinct. I couldn’t help myself.

That was the week I became known at school as Shrilly. That name would stay with me through elementary and middle school, until my parents finally moved me to a private school for high school.

But that particular Christmas was my first week as Shrilly. That holiday, I mourned not only the loss of my gerbil but also that bizarre kind of innocence that kids have, believing they can always fit in.

That was the Christmas I finally understood what I’d heard family members whisper in worry about me: that I was too sensitive, too delicate. Different.

It was the Christmas I realized Shrilly was the reason I didn’t get invited to birthday parties, or why I always got picked last for teams.

It was the Christmas I realized I was the weird girl.

When I finished writing my answer, I stood up. I realized I had no idea what Mystery Boy had meant by telling me to leave the notebook behind Mama’s behind. Was I supposed to leave it on the stage in front of the screen showing the movie?

I looked over to the concession stand, wondering if I should ask for help. The popcorn looked especially yummy, so I went to get some, nearly knocking over the cardboard cutout in my hungry stomach’s sudden urgency. That’s when I saw it: Mama’s behind. I was already behind it. The cardboard cutout was a picture of the black man playing fat Mama, whose rear end was particularly huge.

I wrote new instructions into the notebook and placed it behind Mama’s behind, where no one would likely see it except for the one who came looking for it. I left the red Moleskine along with the box of cookies and a tourist postcard that had been stuck to a piece of gum on the floor in the movie theater. The postcard was from Madame Tussauds, my favorite Times Square tourist trap.

I wrote on the postcard:

What do you want for Christmas?

No, really, don’t be a smart aleck. What do you really really really supercalifragiwant?

Please leave information about that, along with the notebook, with the security lady watching over Honest Abe.*

Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Lily
*PS Don’t worry, I promise the security guard won’t try to feel you up like Uncle Sal at Macy’s might have. I assure you that wasn’t sexual so much as he’s genuinely just a huggy kind of person.

PPS What is your name?

five

–Dash–

December 23rd

The doorbell rang at around noon, just when Gramma Got Run Over should have been getting out. So my first (admittedly irrational) thought was that somehow Lily had tracked me down. Her uncle in the CIA had run my fingerprints, and they were here to arrest me for impersonating someone worthy of Lily’s interest. I took a practice run for the perp walk as I headed over to the peephole. Then I peeped, and instead of finding a girl or the CIA, I saw Boomer shifting from side to side.

“Boomer,” I said.

“I’m out here!” he called back.

Boomer. Short for Boomerang. A nickname given to him not for his propensity to rebound after being thrown, but for his temperamental resemblance to the kind of dog who chases after said boomerang, time after time after time. He also happened to be my oldest friend—old in terms of how long we’d known each other, certainly not in maturity. We had a pre-Christmas ritual dating back to when we were seven of going to the movies together on the twenty-third. Boomer’s tastes hadn’t changed much since then, so I was pretty sure which movie he was going to choose.

Sure enough, as soon as he bounded through the door, he cried, “Hey! You ready to go see Collation?”

Collation was, of course, the new Pixar animated movie about a stapler who falls helplessly in love with a piece of paper, causing all of his other office-supply friends to band together to win her over. Oprah Winfrey was the voice of the tape dispenser, and an animated version of Will Ferrell was the janitor who kept getting in the young lovers’ way.

“Look,” Boomer said, emptying his pockets, “I’ve been getting Happy Meals for weeks. I have all of them except Lorna the lovable three-hole punch!”

He actually put the plastic toys in my hands so I could examine them.

“Isn’t this the three-hole punch?” I asked.

He slapped his forehead. “Dude, I thought that was the expandable file folder, Frederico!”

As fate would have it, Collation was playing at the same theater to which I’d sent Lily. So I could keep my playdate with Boomer and still intercept Lily’s next message before any rascals or rapscallions got to it.

“Where’s your mom?” Boomer asked.

“At her dance class,” I lied. If he’d had any inkling that my parents were out of town, he would’ve been on the horn to his mom so fast that I would’ve been guaranteeing myself a Very Boomer Christmas.

“Did she leave you money? If not, I can probably pay.”

“Don’t you worry, my guileless pal,” I said, putting my arm around him before he could even take his coat off. “Today, the movie’s on me.”

I wasn’t going to tell Boomer about my other errand, but there was no getting rid of him when I ducked behind Gramma’s cardboard booty to find the loot.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Did you lose your contact lens?”

“No. Someone left something for me here.”

“Ooh!”

Boomer was not a big guy, but he tended to take up a lot of space, because he was always jittering around. He kept peering over cardboard Gramma’s shoulder, and I was sure it was only a matter of time before the minimum-wage popcorn staff would evict us.

The red Moleskine was right where I’d left it. There was also a tin at its side.

“This is what I was looking for,” I told Boomer, holding up the journal. He grabbed for the tin.

“Wow,” he said, opening the lid and looking inside. “This must be a special hiding place. How funny is it that someone would leave cookies in the same place that your friend left the notebook?”

“I think the cookies are from her, too.” (This was confirmed by a Post-it on the top of the notebook that read: The cookies are for you. Merry Xmas! Lily.) “Really?” he said, picking a cookie out of the tin. “How do you know?”

“I’m just guessing.”

Boomer hesitated. “Shouldn’t your name be on it?” he asked. “I mean, if it’s yours.”

“She doesn’t know my name.”

Boomer immediately put the cookie back in the tin and closed the lid.

“You can’t eat cookies from someone who doesn’t know your name!” he said. “What if there are, like, razor blades inside?”

Kids and parents were streaming into the theater, and I knew we’d have front-row seats to Collation if we didn’t move a little faster.

I showed him the Post-it. “You see? They’re from Lily.”

“Who’s Lily?”

“Some girl.”

“Ooh … a girl!”

“Boomer, we’re not in third grade anymore. You don’t say, ‘Ooh … a girl!’ ”

“What? You fucking her?”

“Okay, Boomer, you’re right. I liked ‘Ooh … a girl!’ much more than that. Let’s stick with ‘Ooh … a girl!’ ”

“She go to your school?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Look, we’d better get a seat or else there won’t be any seats left.”

“Do you like her?”

“I see someone took his persistence pills this morning. Sure, I like her. But I don’t really know her yet.”

“I don’t do drugs, Dash.”

“I know that, Boomer. It’s an expression. Like putting on your thinking cap. There isn’t an actual thinking cap.”

“Of course there is,” Boomer said. “Don’t you remember?”

And yes, suddenly I did remember. There were two old ski hats—his blue, mine green—that we’d used as thinking caps back when we were in first grade. This was the strange thing about Boomer—if I asked him about his teachers up at boarding school this past semester, he’d have already forgotten their names. But he could remember the exact make and color of every single Matchbox car with which we’d ever played.

“Bad example,” I said. “There are definitely such things as thinking caps. I stand corrected.”

Once we found our seats (a little too much toward the front, but with a nice coat barrier between me and the snot-nosed tyke on my left), we dove into the cookie tin.

“Wow,” I said after eating a chocolate snowflake. “This puts the sweet in Sweet Jesus.”

Boomer took bites of all six varieties, contemplating each one and figuring out the order in which he would then eat them. “I like the brown one and the lighter brown one and the almost-brown one. I’m not so sure about the minty one. But really, I think the lebkuchen spice one is the best.”