Dash & Lily's Book of Dares (14 page)

I decided to retrace my steps. I knew Macy’s had probably opened early for the day after Christmas, so I called them right away … and was put on hold for fifteen minutes.

Finally, an exasperated voice answered, “Macy’s—how may I help you?”

“Hi,” I said. “I was wondering if Santa was still there.”

“Sir, it’s the day after Christmas.”

“I know—but is there any way to track down Santa?”

“Sir, I don’t have time for this.”

“No, you don’t understand—I really need to have a word with the man who was Santa four days ago.”

“Sir, I appreciate your desire to speak to Santa, but this is our busiest day of the year and I have other calls I must attend to.
Maybe you should just write him a letter—do you need the address?”

“One North Pole?” I guessed.

“Precisely. Have a nice day, sir.”

And then she hung up.

The Strand, of course, didn’t open early for the day after Christmas. I had to wait until nine-thirty to get through to someone there.

“Hi,” I said, “I was wondering if Mark was around?”

“Mark?” a bored male voice asked.

“Yeah. Works at the information desk.”

“There are about twenty of us named Mark. Can you be more specific?”

“Dark hair. Glasses. Ironic detachment. Scruff.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down.”

“He’s a little heavier than the rest of you?”

“Oh, I think I know the Mark you mean. He’s not here today. Let me see—yeah, he’s on tomorrow.”

“Could you tell me his last name?”

“I’m sorry,” the guy said, pleasantly enough, “but we don’t disclose personal information to stalkers. If you want to leave a message, I can get it to him tomorrow.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“I thought so.”

So, not much progress there. But at least I knew he’d be around the next day.

As a last resort, I left Dov and Yohnny asleep in my mom’s bed and ponied up another twenty-five bucks to hang with the waxed-out celebrities. But the woman guard was nowhere to be found, as if she’d been moved into the back room with the statues of the cast of
Baywatch
.

When I got back to the apartment, I decided to write to Lily anyway.

I fear you may have outmatched me, because now I find these words have nowhere to go. It’s hard to answer a question you haven’t been asked. It’s hard to show that you tried unless you end up succeeding
.

I stopped. It wasn’t the same without the notebook. It didn’t feel like a conversation. It felt like I was talking to silence.

I wished I had been there to see her dancing. To witness her there. To get to know her that way.

I could have looked up all the Lilys in Manhattan. I could have shown up on the doorsteps of all the Lilys of Brooklyn. I might have scoured the Lilys of Staten Island, sifted through the Lilys of the Bronx, and treated the Lilys of Queens like royalty. But I had a feeling I wasn’t supposed to find her that way. She was not a needle. This was not a haystack. We were people, and people had ways of finding each other.

I could hear the sounds of sleep coming from my mom’s bedroom—Dov snoring, Yohnny murmuring. I called Boomer to remind him of the party, then reminded myself who was going to be there.

Sofia. It was strange she hadn’t told me she would be in town, but it wasn’t that strange. We’d had the easiest breakup imaginable—it hadn’t even felt like a breakup, just a parting. She had been going back to Spain, and nobody had expected us to stay together through that. Our love had been liking; our feelings had been ordinary, not Shakespearean. I still felt fondness for her—
fondness
, that pleasant, detached mix of admiration and sentiment, appreciation and nostalgia.

I tried to prepare myself for the inevitable conversation. The awkward teetering. The simple smiles. In other words, a return
to our old ways. No sharp shocks of chemistry, just the low hum of knowing our place. We’d had her going-away party at Priya’s, too, and I remembered it now. Even though we’d already had the talk about things ending when she left, I was still put in the boyfriend position; standing next to her for so many goodbyes made me feel the goodbye a little more deeply within myself. By the time most of the people had left, the feelings of fondness were nearly overwhelming me—not just a fondness for her, but a fondness for our friends, our time together, and the future with her that I’d never quite wanted.

“You look sad,” she told me. We were alone in Priya’s bedroom, only a few coats left on the bed.

“You look exhausted,” I told her. “Exhausted from the goodbyes.”

She nodded and said yes—a little redundancy I’d always noticed in her without ever saying something about it. She’d nod and say yes. She’d shake her head and say no.

If it hadn’t been over, I might have hugged her. If it hadn’t been over, I might have kissed her. Instead, I surprised both of us by saying, “I’m going to miss you.”

It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present. Her absence was palpable, even though she was still in the room.

“I’m going to miss you, too,” she said. And then she slipped out of the moment, slipped out of the
us
, by adding, “I’m going to miss everyone.”

We had never lied to each other (at least not to my knowledge). But we had never gone out of our way to reveal ourselves, either. Instead, we’d let the facts speak for themselves.
I think I’m in the mood for Chinese food. I have to go now so I can finish my
homework. I really enjoyed that movie. My family is moving back to Spain, so I guess that means we’re going to be apart
.

We hadn’t vowed to write every day, and we hadn’t written every day. We hadn’t sworn to be true to each other, because there hadn’t been much to be true to. Every now and then I would picture her there, in a country I’d only seen in her photo albums. And every now and then I’d write to say hello, to get the update, to stay in her life for no real reason beyond fondness. I told her things she already knew about our mutual friends and she told me things I didn’t really need to know about her friends in Spain. At first, I’d asked her when she was going to come back to visit. Maybe she’d even said the holidays were a possibility. But I’d forgotten. Not because there was now an ocean between us, but because there had always been something in the way. Lily probably knew more about me in five days of back-and-forth than Sofia had known in our four months of dating.

Maybe
, I thought,
it’s not distance that’s the problem, but how you handle it
.

When Dov, Yohnny, and I arrived at Boomer’s place a little after six-thirty, we found him dressed like a prizefighter.

“I figured this was a good way to celebrate Boxing Day!” he said.

“It’s not a costume party, Boomer,” I pointed out. “You don’t even have to bring boxes.”

“Sometimes, Dash, you take the fun out of fun,” Boomer said with a sigh. “And you know what’s left then?
Nothing
.” He trooped off to his room, came back with a Manta Ray T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and proceeded to put his jeans on right over his prizefighter shorts.

As we headed down the sidewalk, our own rock-bottom Rocky acted out his approximation of a boxer’s moves, punching wildly into the air until he accidentally connected with the side of an old lady’s grocery cart, toppling both of them. While Dov and Yohnny helped them back up, Boomer kept saying, “I’m so sorry! I guess I don’t know my own strength!”

Luckily, Priya didn’t live that much farther away. While we waited to be buzzed in, Dov asked, “Hey, did you bring the boot?”

I had not brought the boot. I figured if I saw some girl limping around the city wearing only one boot, I had enough of a recollection of the item to attempt a mental match.

“What boot?” Boomer asked.

“Lily’s,” Dov explained.

“You met Lily!” Boomer nearly exploded.

“No, I did not meet Lily,” I replied.

“Who’s Lily?” Priya asked. I hadn’t even seen her appear in the doorway.

“A girl!” Boomer answered.

“Well, not really
a girl
,” I corrected.

Priya raised an eyebrow. “A girl who’s not really a girl?”

“She’s a drag queen,” Dov said.

“Lily Pad,” Yohnny chimed in. “She does the most amazing version of ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green.’ It reduces me to tears
every time
.”

“Tears,” Dov said.

“And Dash has her boot!” Boomer said.

“Hi, Dash.”

Here she was. Over Priya’s shoulder. A little hidden in the hallway light.

“Hi, Sofia.”

Now, when I would have loved an interruption from Boomer, he fell silent. Everyone fell silent.

“It’s good to see you.”

“Yeah, it’s good to see you, too.”

It was like the full amount of time we’d been apart was falling between each sentence. There, on the front stoop, it was months of us looking at each other. Her hair was longer, her skin a little darker. And there was something else, too. I just couldn’t figure it out. It was something in her eyes. Something in the way she was looking at me that wasn’t like the way she’d looked at me before.

“Come in,” Priya said. “There are some people here already.”

It was peculiar—I wanted Sofia to hold back, to wait for me, like she would have when we’d been going out. But instead she led us into the party, with Priya, Boomer, Dov, and Yohnny between us.

Inside, it was hardly a rager. Priya’s parents were not the type to leave the apartment while their daughter had a party. And they were of the mind that the strongest beverage offered should be sugared soda, and only that in moderation.

“I’m so glad you could make it,” Priya was saying to me. “And that you’re not in Sweden. I know Sofia would have been disappointed.”

There was no reason for Priya to impart this information to me, so I immediately suspected there was much more to it than was being said.
Sofia would have been disappointed
. Did that mean she really wanted to see me? That she would have been crushed if I hadn’t shown? Was this in fact the reason Priya had thrown the party in the first place?

I knew this was quite a leap to make, but when I looked at Sofia again, I found some footing on the other side. She was laughing at something Dov was saying to her, but she was looking at me, like he was the distraction and I was the conversation. She gestured with her head over to the drinks counter. I moved to meet her there.

“Fanta, Fresca, or Diet Rite?” I asked.

“I’ll have a Fanta,” she said.

“Fan-tastic,” I replied.

As I got some ice and poured some soda, she said, “So how have you been?”

“Good,” I said. “Busy. You know.”

“No, I don’t know,” she said, taking the plastic cup from my hand. “Tell me.”

There was a slight challenge in her voice.

“Well,” I said, pouring myself a Fresca, “I was supposed to go to Sweden, but that had to be canceled at the last minute.”

“Yeah, Priya told me.”

“This soda has a massive amount of carbonation, doesn’t it?” I gestured to where the Fresca was foaming over. “I mean, when this all settles down, I’ll end up with, like, a demitasse of soda. I’m going to be pouring this drink all night.”

I took a sip just as Sofia said, “Priya also told me you were studying the joys of gay sex.”

Fresca. Up. My. Nose.

After I was done coughing, I said, “I’ll bet she didn’t mention the French pianism, did she? I’ll bet she left that out entirely.”

“You are studying French penises?”

“
Pianism
. Good lord, don’t they teach you anything in Europe?”

This was a joke, but it didn’t come out sounding entirely like a joke. As a result, Sofia was miffed. And if American girls make being miffed a sweet-and-sour emotion, European girls always manage to add an undercurrent of murder to it. At least in my limited experience.

“I can assure you,” I told her, “that while I believe gay sex to be a beautiful, joyful thing, I do not think that I myself would find it particularly joyful, and thus my reading about its joys was all a part of a greater pursuit.”

Sofia looked at me archly. “I see.”

“Since when do you have an arch expression?” I asked. “There is a certain feistiness in your voice, too, that heretofore has not been present. It’s extremely attractive, but not really the Sofia I knew before.”

“Let’s go to the bedroom,” she replied.

“WHAT?”

She gestured behind me, where there were at least half a dozen people waiting to get some soda.

“We’re in the way,” she said. “And I have a present for you.”

The path to the bedroom was not a clear one. It felt like every two steps we took, someone stopped Sofia to welcome her back, to ask her how Spain was, to tell her how amazing her hair looked. I hovered on the side, in the boyfriend position once more. And it felt just as awkward now as it had when I’d really been her boyfriend.

After a while, it appeared that Sofia had abandoned the bedroom plan, but when I moved to get myself some more Fresca, she actually took hold of my sleeve and extricated us from the kitchen.

Priya’s door was closed, and when we opened it, we found Dov and Yohnny making out.

“Boys!” I cried.

Dov and Yohnny quickly refastened their jackets and put their hats back on over their yarmulkes.

“Sorry,” Yohnny said.

“It’s just that we haven’t had a chance to …,” Dov continued.

“You spent all day in bed!”

“Yeah, but we were exhausted,” Dov said.

“Completely wiped out,” Yohnny echoed.

“And—”

“—it was
your mom’s
bed.”

They scooted past us, through the doorway.

“That happen a lot in Spain?” I asked Sofia.

“Yes. Only they’re Catholic.”

She went over to what I assumed to be her bag and took out a book.

“Here,” she said. “This is for you.”

“I didn’t really get you anything,” I sputtered. “I mean, I didn’t know that you were going to be here, and—”

“Don’t worry. It’s your embarrassment at not having the thought that counts.”