“he’ll be found hunting for old Salinger editions. We’ll start there.”
If it had been a regular Christmas season, where my folks were around and our normal traditions carried on, I never would have agreed to Langston’s red notebook idea. But there was something so empty about the prospect of a Christmas Day without opening presents and other, less important forms of merrymaking. Truthfully, I’m not exactly a popularity magnet at school, so it wasn’t like I had alternate choices of companionship over the holidays. I needed something to look forward to.
But I never thought anyone—much less a prospect from that highly coveted but extremely elusive Teenage Boy Who Actually Reads and Hangs Out at the Strand species—would actually nd the notebook and respond to its dares. And just as I never thought my newly formed Christmas caroling society would abandon me after only two nights of street caroling to take up Irish drinking songs at a pub on Avenue B, I never thought someone would actually figure out Langston’s cryptic clues and return the favor.
Yet there it was on my phone, a text from my cousin Mark confirming such a person might exist.
Mark: Lily, you have a taker at the Strand. He left you something in return. I left it there for you in a brown envelope.
I couldn’t believe it. I texted back: WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?!?!?
Mark answered: Snarly. Hipster wannabe.
I tried to imagine myself befriending a snarly hipster wannabe boy, and I couldn’t see it. I am a nice girl. A quiet girl (except for the caroling). I get good grades. I am the captain of my school’s soccer team. I love my family. I don’t know anything about what’s supposed to caroling). I get good grades. I am the captain of my school’s soccer team. I love my family. I don’t know anything about what’s supposed to be “cool” in the downtown scene. I’m pret y boring and nerdy, actually, and not in the ironic hipster way. It’s like if you picture Harriet the Spy, eleven-year-old tomboy wunderkind spy, and then picture her a few years later, with boobs she hides under a school oxford uniform shirt that she wears even on non-school days, along with her brother’s discarded jeans, and add to her ensemble some animal pendant necklaces for jewelry, worn-out Chucks on her feet, and black-rimmed nerd glasses, then you’ve pictured me. Lily of the Field, Grandpa calls me sometimes, because everyone thinks I am so sweet and delicate.
Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to venture to the darker side of the lily-white spectrum. Maybe.
I sprinted over to the Strand to retrieve whatever the mysterious notebook taker had left behind for me. Mark was gone, but he’d scrawled a message on the envelope he’d left behind for me: Seriously, Lily. Dude snarls a lot.
I ripped open the package, and … what?!?! Snarl had left me a copy of The Godfather, along with a delivery menu for Two Boots Pizza.
The menu had dirty footprints embedded on it, indicating perhaps it had been on the oor at the Strand. To go along with the unsanitary theme, the book wasn’t even a new copy of The Godfather, but a tat ered used copy that smelled like cigaret e smoke and had pages that were crinkled and a binding that was at death’s door.
I called Langston to decipher this nonsense. No answer. Now that our parents had messaged us that they’d arrived in Fiji paradise safely, Benny was probably of icially moved in, the door to Langston’s room locked, his phone of .
I had no choice but to go grab a slice and ponder the red notebook alone. What else could I do? When in doubt, ingest carbs.
I went to the Two Boots location on the delivery menu, on Avenue A just above Houston. I asked the person at the counter, “Do you know a snarly boy who likes The Godfather?”
“I wish I did,” the counter person said. “Plain or pepperoni?”
“Calzone, please,” I said. Two Boots makes weird Cajun-flavored pizzas. Not for me and my sensitive digestive system.
I sat at a corner booth and ipped through the book Snarl had left for me but could nd no viable clues. Well, I thought, I guess this game is over as soon as it’s started. I was too Lily white to figure it out.
But then the menu that had been tucked inside the book dropped to the ground, and out of it peeked a Post-it note I hadn’t noticed before.
I picked up the Post-it note. It was definitely a boy’s scrawl: moody, foreign, and barely legible.
Here’s the scary part. I could decipher this message. It contained a poem by Marie Howe, a personal favorite of my mother’s. Mom is an English professor specializing in twentieth-century American lit, and she regularly tortured Langston and me with poetry passages instead of bedtime stories when we were kids. My brother and I are frighteningly well-versed in modern American poetry.
The note was a passage from my mother’s favorite of Marie Howe’s poems, too, and it was a poem I had always liked because it contained a passage about the poet seeing herself in the window glass of a corner video store, which never failed to strike me as funny, imagining some mad poet wandering the streets and spying herself in a video store window re ected next to, perhaps, posters of Jackie Chan or Sandra Bull ock or someone super-famous and probably not at all poet-y. I liked Moody Boy even more when I saw that he’d underlined my favorite part of the poem:
I am living. I remember you.
I had no idea how Marie Howe and Two Boots Pizza and The Godfather could possibly be connected. I tried calling Langston again. still no answer.
I read and re-read the passage. I am living. I remember you. I don’t really get poetry, but I had to give the poetess credit: nice.