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

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 skihats—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.”
    “The what?”
    “The lebkuchen spice one.” He held it up for me. “This one.”
    “You’re making that up. What’s a lebkuchen spice? It sounds like a cross between a Keebler elf and a stripper. Hello, my name ees Lebkuchen Spice, and I vant to show you my cooooookies .…”
    “Don’t be rude!” Boomer protested. As if the cookie might be offended.
    “Sorry, sorry.”
    The pre-movie commercials started, so while Boomer paid rapt attention to the “exclusive previews” for basic-cable crime shows featuring stars who’d peaked (not too high) in the eighties,I had a chance to read what Lily had written in the journal. I thought even Boomer would like the Shrilly story, although he’d probably feel really bad for her, when I knew the truth: It was so much cooler to be the weird girl. I was getting such a sense of Lily and her twisted, perverse sense of humor, right down to that classic supercalifragiwant . In my mind, she was Lebkuchen Spice—ironic, Germanic, sexy, and offbeat. And, mein Gott , the girl could bake a damn fine cookie … to the point that I wanted to answer her What do you want for Christmas? with a simple More cookies, please!
    But no. She warned me not to be a smart-ass, and while that answer was totally sincere, I was afraid she would think I was joking or, worse, kissing up.
    It was a hard question, especially if I had to batten down the sarcasm. I mean, there was the beauty pageant answer of world peace, although I’d probably have to render it in the beauty pageant spelling of world peas . I could play the boo-hoo orphan card and wish for my whole family to be together, but that was the last thing I wanted, especially at this late date.
    Soon Collation was upon us. Parts of it were funny, and I certainly appreciated the irony of a film distributed by Disney bemoaning corporate culture. But the love story was lacking. After all the marginally feminist Disney heroines of the early to mid-nineties, this heroine was literally a blank piece of paper. Granted, she could fold herself into a