Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “The Story of Our Lives” and “Keeping Things Whole,” from
Selected Poems
by Mark Strand, copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Visit us on the Web!
www.randomhouse.com/teens

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohn, Rachel.
Dash & Lily’s book of dares / by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Told in the alternating voices of Dash and Lily, two sixteen-year-olds carry on a wintry scavenger hunt at Christmastime in New York, neither knowing quite what—or who—they will find.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89668-2
[1. Treasure hunt (Game)—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Levithan, David. II. Title. III. Dash and Lily’s book of dares.
PZ7.C6665Das 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009054084

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v3.1

Special thanks to the Usual Suspects

To Real Dash’s Mum

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgment

Dedication

Chapter One: –Dash– December 21st

Chapter Two: (Lily) December 21st

Chapter Three: –Dash– December 22nd

Chapter Four: (Lily) December 23rd

Chapter Five: –Dash– December 23rd

Chapter Six: (Lily) December 24th

Chapter Seven: –Dash– December 24th/December 25th

Chapter Eight: (Lily) December 25th

Chapter Nine: –Dash– December 26th

Chapter Ten: (Lily) December 26th

Chapter Eleven: –Dash– December 27th

Chapter Twelve: (Lily) December 26th

Chapter Thirteen: –Dash– December 27th

Chapter Fourteen: (Lily) December 28th

Chapter Fifteen: –Dash– December 28th

Chapter Sixteen: (Lily) December 29th

Chapter Seventeen: –Dash– December 29th

Chapter Eighteen: (Lily) December 30th

Chapter Nineteen: –Dash– December 30th

Chapter Twenty: (Lily) December 31st

About the Authors

one
–Dash–

December 21st

Imagine this:

You’re in your favorite bookstore, scanning the shelves. You get to the section where a favorite author’s books reside, and there, nestled in comfortably between the incredibly familiar spines, sits a red notebook.

What do you do?

The choice, I think, is obvious:

You take down the red notebook and open it.

And then you do whatever it tells you to do.

It was Christmastime in New York City, the most detestable time of the year. The moo-like crowds, the endless visits from hapless relatives, the ersatz cheer, the joyless attempts at joyfulness—my natural aversion to human contact could only intensify in this context. Wherever I went, I was on the wrong end of the stampede. I was not willing to grant “salvation” through any “army.” I would never care about the whiteness of Christmas.
I was a Decemberist, a Bolshevik, a career criminal, a philatelist trapped by unknowable anguish—whatever everyone else was not, I was willing to be. I walked as invisibly as I could through the Pavlovian spend-drunk hordes, the broken winter breakers, the foreigners who had flown halfway across the world to see the lighting of a tree without realizing how completely pagan such a ritual was.

The only bright side of this dim season was that school was shuttered (presumably so everyone could shop ad nauseam and discover that family, like arsenic, works best in small doses … unless you prefer to die). This year I had managed to become a voluntary orphan for Christmas, telling my mother that I was spending it with my father, and my father that I was spending it with my mother, so that each of them booked nonrefundable vacations with their post-divorce paramours. My parents hadn’t spoken to each other in eight years, which gave me a lot of leeway in the determination of factual accuracy, and therefore a lot of time to myself.

I was popping back and forth between their apartments while they were away—but mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition, not so much a bookstore as the collision of a hundred different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over eighteen miles of shelves. All the clerks there saunter-slouch around distractedly in their skinny jeans and their thrift-store button-downs, like older siblings who will never, ever be bothered to talk to you or care about you or even acknowledge your existence if their friends are around … which they always are. Some bookstores want you to believe they’re a community center, like they need to host a cookie-making class in order to sell you some Proust. But the Strand
leaves you completely on your own, caught between the warring forces of organization and idiosyncrasy, with idiosyncrasy winning every time. In other words, it was my kind of graveyard.

I was usually in the mood to look for nothing in particular when I went to the Strand. Some days, I would decide that the afternoon was sponsored by a particular letter, and would visit each and every section to check out the authors whose last names began with that letter. Other days, I would decide to tackle a single section, or would investigate the recently unloaded tomes, thrown in bins that never really conformed to alphabetization. Or maybe I’d only look at books with green covers, because it had been too long since I’d read a book with a green cover.

I could have been hanging out with my friends, but most of them were hanging out with their families or their Wiis. (
Wiis
?
Wiii
? What
is
the plural?) I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books—
used
we call them, in a way that we’d never call a person, unless we meant it cruelly. (“Look at Clarissa … she’s such a
used
girl.”)

I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable. I particularly loved the adjective
bookish
, which I found other people used about as often as
ramrod
or
chum
or
teetotaler
.

On this particular day, I decided to check out a few of my favorite authors to see if any irregular editions had emerged from a newly deceased person’s library sale. I was perusing a particular favorite (he shall remain nameless, because I might turn against him someday) when I saw a peek of red. It was a red Moleskine—made of neither mole nor skin, but nonetheless the preferred journal of my associates who felt the need to journal in
non-electronic form. You can tell a lot about a person from the pages he or she chooses to journal on—I was strictly a college-ruled man myself, having no talent for illustration and a microscopic scrawl that made wide-ruled seem roomy. The blank pages were usually the most popular—I only had one friend, Thibaud, who went for the grid. Or at least he did until the guidance counselors confiscated his journals to prove that he had been plotting to kill our history teacher. (This is a true story.)

There wasn’t any writing on the spine of this particular journal—I had to take it off the shelf to see the front, where there was a piece of masking tape with the words DO YOU DARE? written in black Sharpie. When I opened the cover, I found a note on the first page.

I’ve left some clues for you
.
If you want them, turn the page
.
If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please
.

The handwriting was a girl’s. I mean, you can tell. That enchanted cursive.

Either way, I would’ve endeavored to turn the page.

So here we are
.

1. Let’s start with French Pianism
.
I don’t really know what it is
,
but I’m guessing
nobody’s going to take it off the shelf
.
Charles Timbrell’s your man
.
88/7/2
88/4/8

Do not turn the page
until you fill in the blanks
(just don’t write in the notebook, please)
.

I can’t say I’d ever heard of French pianism, although if a man on the street (wearing a bowler, no doubt) had asked me if I believed the French were a pianistic sort, I would have easily given an affirmative reply.

Because the bookstore byways of the Strand were more familiar to me than my own family home(s), I knew exactly where to start—the music section. It even seemed a cheat that she had given me the name of the author. Did she think me a simpleton, a slacker, a
numbskull
? I wanted a little credit, even before I’d earned it.

The book was found easily enough—easily enough, that is, for someone who had fourteen minutes to spare—and was exactly as I pictured it would be, the kind of book that can sit on the shelves for years. The publisher hadn’t even bothered to put an illustration on the cover. Just the words
French Pianism: An Historical Perspective, Charles Timbrell
, then (new line)
Foreword by Gaby Casadesus
.

I figured the numbers in the Moleskine were dates—1988 must have been a quicksilver year for French pianism—but I couldn’t find any references to 1988 … or 1888 … or 1788 … or any other ’88, for that matter. I was stymied … until I realized that my clue giver had resorted to the age-old bookish mantra—
page/line/word
. I went to page 88 and checked out line 7, word 2, then line 4, word 8.

Are you

Was I what? I had to find out. I filled in the blanks (mentally, respecting the virgin spaces as she’d asked) and turned the page of the journal.

Okay. No cheating
.
What bugged you about the cover of this book

(besides the lack of art)?

Think about it, then turn the page
.

Well, that was easy. I hated that they’d used the construction
An Historical
, when it clearly should have been
A Historical
, since the
H
in
Historical
is a hard
H
.

I turned the page.

If you said it was the misbegotten phrase
“An Historical,”
please continue
.

If not, please put this journal
back on its shelf
.

Once more, I turned.

2. Fat Hoochie Prom Queen
64/4/9
119/3/8