“Can we try to be wise with each other for a very long time?” I asked her.
She laughed. “You mean, can we share our f**kups and see if we can get any wisdom out of them?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That would be nice.”
I felt we needed to seal our new pact. Kissing was out. Hugging seemed peevish. So I o ered her my hand. She shook it. And then we went to join the rest of our friends.
I couldn’t help but wonder about what Lily was doing. How she was feeling. What she was feeling. Yes, it was confusing, but it wasn’t a bad confusion. I wanted to see her again, in a way I’d never wanted to see her before.
I knew the notebook was in my hands. I just wanted to find the right thing to say.
My mother called to see how things were going. There was no Internet access at the spa, and she wasn’t the type who turned on the TV
when she wasn’t home. So I didn’t have to explain anything. I just said I had a few people over and we were all behaving ourselves.
My father, I couldn’t help but note, usually checked the news every ve minutes on his phone. He’d probably even seen the headline on the Post site, and the photos. He simply didn’t recognize his own son.
Later that night, after a marathon of John Hughes movies, I kept Boomer, So a, Priya, Yohnny, and Dov in my mother’s living room and brought out a dry-erase board from her home of ice.
“Before you leave,” I told them, “I would like to conduct a brief symposium on love.” I took out a red marker—I mean, why not?—and wrote the word love on the board.
“Here we have it,” I said. “Love.” For good measure, I drew a heart around it. Not the ventricled kind. The made-up kind.
“It exists in this pristine state, upholding its ideals. But then … along come words.” I wrote words over and over again, all around the dry erase board, including over the word love.
“And feelings.”
I wrote feelings in the same way, crisscrossing it on top of everything I’d already writ en.
“And expectations. And history. And thoughts. Help me out here, Boomer.”
We wrote each of these three words at least twenty times each.
The result?
The result?
Pure ill egibility. Not only was love gone, but you couldn’t make out anything else, either.
“This,” I said, holding up the board, “is what we’re up against.”
Priya looked disturbed—more by me than by what I was saying. So a still looked amused. Yohnny and Dov were curling closer together.
Boomer, pen still in hand, was trying to work something out.
He raised his hand.
“Yes, Boomer?” I asked.
“You’re saying that either you’re in love or you’re not. And if you are, it becomes like this.”
“Something to that ef ect.”
“But what if it’s not a yes-or-no question?”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I mean, what if love isn’t a yes-or-no question? It’s not either you’re in love or you’re not. I mean, aren’t there di erent levels? And maybe these things, like words and expectations and whatever, don’t go on top of the love. Maybe it’s like a map, and they all have their own place, and then when you see it from the sky—whoa.”
I looked at the board. “I think your map is cleaner than mine,” I said. “But isn’t this what the collision of the right two people at the right time looks like? I mean, it’s a mess.”
Sofia chuckled.
“What?” I asked her.
“Right person, right time is the wrong concept, Dash,” she said.
“Totally,” Boomer agreed.
“What does she mean by that?” I asked him.
“What I mean,” So a said, “is that when people say right person, wrong time, or wrong person, right time, it’s usually a cop-out. They think that fate is playing with them. That we’re all just participants in this romantic reality show that God gets a kick out of watching. But the universe doesn’t decide what’s right or not right. You do. Yes, you can theorize until you’re blue in the face whether something might have worked at another time, or with someone else. But you know what that leaves you?”
“Blue in the face?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“You have the notebook, right?” Dov chimed in.
“I really hope you didn’t lose it,” Yohnny added.
“Yes,” I said.
“So what are you waiting for?” Sofia asked.
“You all to leave?” I said.
“Good,” she said. “You now have your writing assignment. Because you know what? It’s up to you, not fate.” I still didn’t know what to write. I fell asleep with the notebook next to me, both of us staring at the ceiling.
December 31st
The next morning, over breakfast, I had my grand idea.
I called Boomer immediately.
“I need a favor,” I told him.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“Is your aunt in town?”
“My aunt.”
I told him my idea.
“You want to go on a date with my aunt?” he asked.
I told him my idea again.
“Oh,” he said. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
I didn’t want to give too much away. All I wrote is the time and the place to meet. When the hour dawned decent, I headed over to Mrs.