cardboard cutout was a picture of the black man playing fat Mama, whose rear end was particularly huge.

I wrote new instructions into the notebook and placed it behind Mama’s behind, where no one would likely see it except for the one who came

looking for it. I left the red Moleskine along with the box of cookies and a tourist postcard that had been stuck to a piece of gum on the oor in

the movie theater. The postcard was from Madame Tussauds, my favorite Times Square tourist trap.

I wrote on the postcard:

What do you want for Christmas?

No, real y, don’t be a smart aleck. What do you real y real y real y supercalifragiwant?

Please leave information about that, along with the notebook, with the security lady watching over Honest Abe.*

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Lily

*PS Don’t worry, I promise the security guard won’t try to feel you up like Uncle Sal at Macy’s might have. I assure you that wasn’t sexual so

much as he’s genuinely just a huggy kind of person.

PPS What is your name?

ve

–Dash–

December 23rd

The doorbel rang at around noon, just when Gramma Got Run Over should have been get ing out. So my rst (admit edly irrational) thought was

that somehow Lily had tracked me down. Her uncle in the CIA had run my ngerprints, and they were here to arrest me for impersonating

someone worthy of Lily’s interest. I took a practice run for the perp walk as I headed over to the peephole. Then I peeped, and instead of nding

a girl or the CIA, I saw Boomer shifting from side to side.

“Boomer,” I said.

“I’m out here!” he cal ed 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 ritual dating 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 pret y 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 Col ation?”

Col ation was, of course, the new Pixar animated movie about a stapler who fal s helplessly in love with a piece of paper, causing al of his

other o ce-supply friends to band together to win her over. Oprah Winfrey was the voice of the tape dispenser, and an animated version of Wil

Ferrel was the janitor who kept get ing in the young lovers’ way.

“Look,” Boomer said, emptying his pockets, “I’ve been get ing Happy Meals for weeks. I have al of them except Lorna the lovable three-hole

punch!”

He actual y 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 le folder, Frederico!”

As fate would have it, Col ation was playing at the same theater to which I’d sent Lily. So I could keep my playdate with Boomer and stil

intercept Lily’s next message before any rascals or rapscal ions 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, put ing my arm around him before he could even take his coat o . “Today, the movie’s on me.”

I wasn’t going to tel Boomer about my other errand, but there was no get ing rid of him when I ducked behind Gramma’s cardboard booty to nd

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 jit ering around. He kept peering over cardboard

Gramma’s shoulder, and I was sure it was only a mat er of time before the minimum-wage popcorn sta 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 con rmed by a Post-it on the top of the notebook that read: The cookies are for you. Merry

Xmas! Lily.)

“Real y?” 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 Col ation if we didn’t move a lit le faster.

I showed him the Post-it. “You see? They’re from 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?”

“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 bet er get a seat or else there won’t be any seats left.”

“Do you like her?”

“I see someone took his persistence pil s this morning. Sure, I like her. But I don’t real y know her yet.”

“I don’t do drugs, Dash.”

“I know that, Boomer. It’s an expression. Like put ing 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 ski hats—his blue, mine green—that we’d used as thinking caps back when we were in

rst 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

forgot en 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 de nitely such things as thinking caps. I stand corrected.”

Once we found our seats (a lit le 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 snow ake. “This puts the sweet in Sweet Jesus.”

Boomer took bites of al six varieties, contemplating each one and guring 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 real y, 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. Hel o, 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 o ended.

“Sorry, sorry.”

The pre-movie commercials started, so while Boomer paid rapt at ention to the “exclusive previews” for basic-cable crime shows featuring stars