even got the same black-rimmed glasses like you wore in elementary school.”

“I heard you got kicked out of high school for some conspiracy plot.”

“Just suspended. It was like a vacation, actual y. And check you out, keeping tabs on me al this time.” Edgar Thibaud leaned into my ear.

“Anyone tel you that you grew up to be sort of cute? In, like, a mis t type of way?”

I didn’t know whether to be at ered or outraged.

I did know his breath in my ear sent very unfamiliar shivers through my body.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him, needing trivial conversation to distract me from the sordid thoughts my mind was starting to spin about

Edgar Thibaud … with his shirt o . I could feel my face turning hot, blushing. And yet my dialogue was no racier than: “You didn’t go away for

Christmas like everybody else?”

“My parents went ski ng in Colorado without me. I annoyed them too much.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“No, I did it on purpose. A week without their bourgeois hypocrisy is a week of paradise.”

Was Edgar Thibaud even speaking? I couldn’t stop staring at his face. Just how exactly had it turned so handsome in the intervening years?

I said, “I think that’s a girl’s beret you’re wearing.”

“Is it?” Edgar asked. “Cool.” He cocked his head to the side, pleased. “I like girls. And their hats.” He reached to grab my hat from my head.

“May I?”

Edgar Thibaud had obviously evolved over the last few years if he had the decency to ask for my hat, rather than snatch it o my head and then

probably throw it to the dogs to play with, as the old Edgar on the school yard would have done.

I moved my head down so he could take my hat. He placed my red pom-pom hat on his head, then put his beret on mine.

His beret on my head felt so warm and … forbidden. I liked it.

“Want to go to a party with me tonight?” Edgar asked.

“Grandpa probably won’t let me go!” I blurted out.

“So?” Edgar said.

Exactly!

Clearly, it was time for Lily to have the kind of boy adventures that would al ow her to give legitimate love advice, later in the future.

I might have arrived in Tompkins Square Park with my heart stil intent on a Snarl, but right in front of me, I had a real, live Edgar Thibaud.

The secret tactic of a good hard bargainer is to know when to compromise.

For instance.

I wil demand a puppy if I am forced to move to Fiji.

But I wil set le for a bunny.

eleven

–Dash–

December 27th

So I found myself once again at the Strand.

It hadn’t been a late night—Priya’s parties tended to zzle before the Cinderel a hour, and this was no exception. So a and I stayed together most

of the evening, but once we emerged from the bedroom and started to mingle with everyone else, we stopped talking to each other and instead

talked as two parts of the larger group. Yohnny and Dov left to see their friend Mat hue slam some poetry, and Thibaud never showed. I might

have lingered until So a and I were almost alone again, but Boomer had consumed about thirteen too many cups of Mountain Dew and was

threatening to make holes in the ceiling with his head. So a was going to be around until New Year’s, so I said we had to get together, and she said

yeah, that’d be good. We left it at that.

Now it was eleven the next morning and I was back in the bookstore, resisting the siren cal of the stacks in order to nd and, if necessary,

interrogate Mark. I was walking with a lady’s boot under my arm, like some pal bearer for the post-melt Wicked Witch of the West.

The guy at the information desk was thin and blond, bespectacled and tweeded. In other words, not the guy I was looking for.

“Hey,” I said. “Is Mark here?”

The guy barely looked up from the Saramago novel in his lap.

“Oh,” he said, “are you the stalker?”

“I have a question to ask him, that’s al . That hardly makes me a stalker.”

Now the guy looked at me. “It depends on the question, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m sure stalkers have questions, too.”

“Yes,” I conceded, “but their questions usual y run along the lines of ‘Why won’t you love me?’ and ‘Why can’t I die by your side?’ I’m more

along the lines of ‘What can you tel me about this boot?’ ”

“I’m not sure I can help you.”

“This is the information desk, isn’t it? Aren’t you obligated to give me information?”

The guy sighed. “Fine. He’s shelving. Now let me nish this chapter, okay?”

I thanked him, though not profusely.

The Strand proudly proclaims itself as home to eighteen miles of books. I have no idea how this is calculated. Does one stack al the books on

top of each other to get the eighteen miles? Or do you put them end to end, to create a bridge between Manhat an and, say, Short Hil s, New

Jersey, eighteen miles away? Were there eighteen miles of shelves? No one knew. We al just took the bookstore at its word, because if you

couldn’t trust a bookstore, what could you trust?

Whatever the measurement, the applicable fact was that the Strand had lots of aisles to shelve. Which meant that I had to weave in and out of

dozens of narrow spaces—dodging disgruntled and pregruntled patrons, ladders, and haphazardly placed book cairns in order to nd Mark in the

Military History section. He was buckling a lit le under the weight of an il ustrated history of the Civil War, but otherwise his appearance and

demeanor were similar to that of when we rst met.

“Mark!” I said in a tone of holiday camaraderie, as if we were members of the same eating club who had somehow found ourselves in the lobby

of the same brothel.

He looked at me for a second, then turned back to the shelf.

“Did you have yourself a merry lit le Christmas?” I continued. “Did you make the yuletide gay?”

He brandished a volume of Winston Churchil ’s memoirs and pointed it accusingly at me. The jowly prime minister stared from the jacket

impassively, as if he were the judge of this sudden contest.

“What do you want?” Mark asked. “I’m not going to tel you anything.”

I took the boot from under my arm and placed it on Churchil ’s face.

“Tel me whose boot this is.”

He (Mark, not Churchil ) was surprised by the appearance of footwear—I could tel . And I could also glean from the knowledge he was trying to

hide that he knew the identity of its owner.

Stil , he was obstinate, in the way that only truly miserable people can be obstinate.

“Why should I tel you?” he asked, with no smal amount of petulance.

“If you tel me, I wil leave you alone,” I said. “And if you don’t tel me, I am going to grab the nearest ghostwrit en James Pat erson romance

novel and I am going to fol ow you through this store reading it out loud until you relent. Would you prefer me to read from Daphne’s Three

Tender Months with Harold or Cindy and John’s House of Everlasting Love? I guarantee, your sanity and your indie street cred won’t last a chapter.

And they are very, very short chapters.”

Now I could see the fright beneath the de ance.

“You’re evil,” he said. “You know that?”

I nodded, even though I usual y saved the word evil for perpetrators of genocide.

He continued, “And if I tel you, you’l stop cal ing and coming by. Even if you don’t like what you nd?”

That seemed uncharitable to Lily, but I would not let my pique peak.

“I wil stop cal ing,” I said calmly. “And while I wil never al ow myself to be banned from the Strand, I promise not to seek information when

you are sit ing at that particular desk, and if you are ever working the cash register, I wil make sure to maneuver so that you are not the clerk who

rings me up. Wil that su ce?”

“There’s no need to snarl,” Mark said.

“There’s no need to snarl,” Mark said.