I let the door fall closed behind us.
“Now open your eyes. This isn’t a gift for keeps. Just a visitation.”
Dash opened his eyes.
He did not notice my new glasses-less look. (Or I may have been too blind to distinguish his reaction.) “No way!” Dash exclaimed. Even with such dim visibility, he didn’t need an explanation of the stacks of bound volumes piled up against the cement wall. He ran over to touch the books. “The complete volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary! Oh wow oh wow oh WOW!” Dash swooned, with the palpable bliss of Homer Simpson exalting, “Mmmm … donuts.”
Happy new year.
Sorry to be so goofy and obvious about the declaration, but there was something just so … dashing about young Dashiell. It wasn’t the fedora hat he was wearing or how nicely his blue shirt complemented his deep blue eyes; it was more the composition of his face, a mixture of handsome and sweet, young but wise, his expression arch yet kind.
I wanted to appear cool and indifferent, like this kind of thing happened to me all the time, but I couldn’t. “Do you like it? Do you like it?” I asked, with all the eagerness of a five-year-old tasting the world’s best cupcake.
“Fucking love it,” Dash said. He took off his hat and tipped it to me in appreciation.
Ouch. Cursing—not so dashing.
I decided to pretend he’d said “frocking love it.”
We sat down on the floor and chose a volume to explore.
“I like the etymology of words,” I said to Dash. “I like to imagine what was happening when the word originated.”
The red notebook was peeking out from my purse. Dash grabbed it, then looked up a word from the R volume of the OED and wrote it inside the red notebook.
“How about this one?” he asked.
He’d written revel. I took the R volume from Dash’s lap and read up on the word. “Hmm,” I said. “Revel. Circa 1300, ‘riotous merry-making.’ What else? As a verb, ‘to feast in a noisy manner,’ circa 1325.”
Next to Dash’s revel in the red notebook, I wrote, Slop that trough, wench. ’Tis New Year’s! We shall revel in slaughtering that there poor innocent pig and have bacon for breakfast! R-E-V-E-L.
Dash read my entry and chuckled. “Now you choose a word.”
I opened the E volume and chose a random word, writing down epigynous.
Only after I’d copied the word into the red notebook did I actually read what it meant. Epigynous (i-pi-jә-nәs): having floral parts attached to or near the summit of the ovary, as in the flower of the apple, cucumber, or daffodil.
Could I have chosen a more suggestive word?
Dash would think I was a trollop now.
I should have chosen the word trollop.
Dash’s cell phone rang.
I think we were both relieved.
“Hi, Dad,” Dash answered. His dashingness seemed to wither for a moment as his shoulders slumped and his voice became measured and … tolerant was the only word I could think of for the tone Dash used with his father. “Oh, it’s my usual New Year’s. Booze and women.” Pause. “Ah, yes, you heard about that? Funny story …” Pause. “No, I don’t want to talk to your lawyer.” Pause. “Yes, I’m aware you’ll be home tomorrow night.” Pause. “Awesome. Nothing I love more than our father-son chats about important matters in my life.”
I don’t know what boldness came over me, but the resolute heaviness of Dash’s demeanor threatened to crush my soul. My pinky finger crept over and nestled against his, for comfort. Like a magnet, his pinky finger latched onto and intertwined with mine.
I like magnets a whole lot.
“Now, about that word,” Dash said after his call with his dad. “Epigynous.”
I immediately jumped to my feet, in search of a new reference book with less embarrassing words. I picked up an edition of something called The Speakeasy Urban Dickshun-yary. I turned to a random page.
“ ‘Running latte,’ ” I said aloud. “ ‘When you’re late because you stopped for a coffee.’ ”
Dash resumed writing in the red notebook.
Sorry I missed your bar mitzvah, I was running latte.
I took the pen and added Sorry I just spilled coffee on your tux, too!
Dash looked at his watch. “Almost midnight.”
My epigynous zone worried. Would Dash think I trapped him in the storage room to trap him into that awful (or wonderful?) midnight ritual of a New Year’s kiss?
If we stayed in this room much longer, Dash might find out how completely inexperienced I was in the matters I was desperately wanting to experience. With him.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said quietly. I don’t know what I’m doing. Please don’t laugh at me. If I’m a disaster, please be kind and let me down gently.
“What?”
I meant to tell him, I really did. But what came out of my mouth was “Snarly Muppet has been returned to me by Uncle Carmine. It has asked to come live in this storage room, surrounded by reference books. It prefers these musty old tomes to suffocating inside a nutcracker.”
“Smart Snarly.”
“Do you promise to visit Snarly?”
“I can’t make that promise. It’s ridiculous.”
“I think you should promise.”
Dash sighed. “I promise to try. If your curmudgeon cousin Mark ever lets me back into the Strand.”
I looked up to a clock on the wall behind Dash’s head.
The midnight hour had passed.
Phew.
January 1st
“This is a rare opportunity we have, Lily. Alone in the Strand like this. I think we should take full advantage of it.”
“How so?” Was it possible my heart was shaking as hard as my hands?
“We should dance around the aisles upstairs. Pore through volumes of books about circus freaks and shipwrecks. Pillage the cookbooks for that ultimate Rice Krispie treat recipe. Oh, and we must track down the fourth edition of The Joy of—”
“Okay!” I screeched. “Let’s go upstairs! I love books about freaks.” Because I am one. You might be, too. Let’s be freaks together?
We walked to the storage room door.
Dash leaned in toward me mysteriously. Flirtatiously. He raised an eyebrow and declared, “The night is young. We have volumes and volumes of the OED to return to.”
I reached for the doorknob and turned it.
The knob did not budge.
I noticed a handwritten sign next to the light switch I hadn’t bothered to turn on when we first entered the room, so intent had I been on effecting a candle glow to our atmosphere. The sign read: BEWARE!
In case you didn’t read the huge sign on the wall
outside the door, please read this one:
DUDE! How many times do you have to be reminded?
The storage door locks from the OUTSIDE.
Be sure to keep the key on you to open it from the inside,
or you won’t be able to get out.
No.
No no no no no no no.
NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I turned to face Dash.
“Um, Dash?”
“Um, yes?”
“I kind of locked us in here.”
I had no choice but to call my cousin Mark for help. “You’ve awakened me, Lily Dogwalker,” he barked into the phone. “You know it’s my tradition to be asleep long before that stupid ball drops in Times Square.”
I explained the predicament.
“Well, well,” Mark said. “Great-aunt Ida can’t save you from this one, now can she?”
“You can, Mark!”
“I might choose not to.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would. For the emotional blackmail you placed upon me that got you and your punk friend into this situation.”
He had a point.
I said, “If you don’t come help us, I’ll call the police to get us out.”
“If you do that, the Post and News reporters will hear it on the police scanner. You’ll be a headliner a second time. Just as Mommy and Daddy arrive home to the newsstands at JFK. I’m going to take a guess here and presume that they and Grandpa think you’re spending the night at a girlfriend’s and not out with a fella, and your cohorts Langston and Mrs. Basil E. are backing you up. This scandal gets out, and your folks will never leave you alone again. To say nothing of the fact that the media incident will ensure I lose my job. And, Lily? The worst part of all? Teenagers the world over will lose access to the secret stash of OEDs in the basement at the Strand, all because of you and your bookish little pervert friend’s reckless desire to peruse the volumes on New Year’s Eve. Can you live with that, Lily? Oh, the horror!”
I paused before answering. Dash, who’d heard the conversation standing next to me, was laughing. That was a relief.
“I had no idea you were this evil, Mark.”
“Sure you did. Now Markypoo wants to finish his sleep. Because he’s such a sport, he’s going to get up at seven a.m. and come rescue you two from your little predicament. But not before the sun rises.”
I tried one last tactic. “Dash is getting very frisky in here with me, Mark.” What I wanted to say was I wish Dash was getting frisky in here with me.
Dash raised an eyebrow at me again.
“No he’s not,” Mark said.
“How do you know?”
“Because if he was, you wouldn’t be calling me to rescue you now, Googly Eyes. So here’s the deal. You wanted to get to know this fellow. Here’s your chance. You’ve got the night to yourselves. I’ll be there after my good night’s sleep. There’s a toilet in a closet in the corner at the back of the storage room if you can’t hold it. Might not be so clean. Probably no toilet paper.”
“I really hate you right now, Mark.”
“You can thank me in the morning, Lily bear.”
Dash and I did what any two teenagers stranded in the Strand would do alone together in a basement storage room.
We sat side by side on the cold floor and played hangman in the red notebook.
S-N-A-R-L.
Q-U-I-E-S-C-E-N-T.
We talked. We laughed.
He made no untoward moves on me.
I thought about the bigger picture of my life, and about the people—and particularly the guys—I would encounter during my lifetime. How would I ever know when that moment was right, when expectation met anticipation and formed … connection?
“Lily?” Dash said at two in the morning. “Do you mind if we go to sleep? Also, I sort of hate your cousin.”
“For imprisoning you here with me?”
“No, for imprisoning me here without any yogurt.”
Food!
I’d forgotten I had some lebkuchen spice cookies inside my purse, along with an obscene amount of Rice Krispie treats. I couldn’t eat another Rice Krispie treat or I’d surely turn into a human snap-crackle-pop, so I reached for the plastic bag of cookies.
As I fumbled inside my purse, I looked up once and saw that most dashing face just looking at me. In that certain way I knew had to mean something.
“You make really good cookies,” Dash said, in that Mmmm … donuts voice.
Should I wait for him to make a move, or dare to make it myself?
As if he were wondering the same thing, he leaned down. And there it was. Our lips finally met—in a full-on head bang that wasn’t anything close to a romantic kiss.
We both pulled back.
“Ouch,” we both said.
Pause.
Dash said, “Try again?”
It had never occurred to me the matter would require conversation first. This lip-maneuvering business was complicated. Who knew?
“Yes, please?”
I closed my eyes and waited. And then I felt him. His mouth found mine, his lips grazing mine softly, playfully. Not knowing what to do, I mimicked his moves, exploring his lips with my own gently, happily. The honest-to-God smooching went on like that for a good minute.