Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by David Levithan, Rachel Cohn Read Free Book Online Page A

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 ritualdating 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