The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily(36)

“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.