THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used ctitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “The Story of Our Lives” and “Keeping Things Whole,” from Selected Poems by Mark Strand, copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohn, Rachel.
Dash & Lily’s book of dares / by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Told in the alternating voices of Dash and Lily, two sixteen-year-olds carry on a wintry scavenger hunt at Christmastime in New York, neither knowing quite what—or who—they will nd.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89668-2
[1. Treasure hunt (Game)—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Levithan, David. II. Title. III. Dash and Lily’s book of dares.
PZ7.C6665Das 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009054084
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
Special thanks to the Usual Suspects
Special thanks to the Usual Suspects
To Real Dash’s Mum
Contents
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgment
Dedication
Chapter One: –Dash– December 21st
Chapter Two: (Lily) December 21st
Chapter Three: –Dash– December 22nd
Chapter Four: (Lily) December 23rd
Chapter Five: –Dash– December 23rd
Chapter Six: (Lily) December 24th
Chapter Seven: –Dash– December 24th/December 25th
Chapter Eight: (Lily) December 25th
Chapter Nine: –Dash– December 26th
Chapter Ten: (Lily) December 26th
Chapter Eleven: –Dash– December 27th
Chapter Twelve: (Lily) December 26th
Chapter Thirteen: –Dash– December 27th
Chapter Fourteen: (Lily) December 28th
Chapter Fifteen: –Dash– December 28th
Chapter Sixteen: (Lily) December 29th
Chapter Seventeen: –Dash– December 29th
Chapter Eighteen: (Lily) December 30th
Chapter Nineteen: –Dash– December 30th
Chapter Twenty: (Lily) December 31st
About the Authors
one
–Dash–
December 21st
Imagine this:
You’re in your favorite bookstore, scanning the shelves. You get to the section where a favorite author’s books reside, and there, nestled in
comfortably between the incredibly familiar spines, sits a red notebook.
What do you do?
The choice, I think, is obvious:
You take down the red notebook and open it.
And then you do whatever it tel s you to do.
It was Christmastime in New York City, the most detestable time of the year. The moo-like crowds, the endless visits from hapless relatives, the
ersatz cheer, the joyless at empts at joyfulness—my natural aversion to human contact could only intensify in this context. Wherever I went, I was
on the wrong end of the stampede. I was not wil ing to grant “salvation” through any “army.” I would never care about the whiteness of Christmas.
I was a Decemberist, a Bolshevik, a career criminal, a philatelist trapped by unknowable anguish—whatever everyone else was not, I was wil ing
to be. I walked as invisibly as I could through the Pavlovian spend-drunk hordes, the broken winter breakers, the foreigners who had own
halfway across the world to see the lighting of a tree without realizing how completely pagan such a ritual was.
The only bright side of this dim season was that school was shut ered (presumably so everyone could shop ad nauseam and discover that family,
like arsenic, works best in smal doses … unless you prefer to die). This year I had managed to become a voluntary orphan for Christmas, tel ing
my mother that I was spending it with my father, and my father that I was spending it with my mother, so that each of them booked
nonrefundable vacations with their post-divorce paramours. My parents hadn’t spoken to each other in eight years, which gave me a lot of leeway
in the determination of factual accuracy, and therefore a lot of time to myself.
I was popping back and forth between their apartments while they were away—but mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of
titil ating erudition, not so much a bookstore as the col ision of a hundred di erent bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over eighteen miles
of shelves. Al the clerks there saunter-slouch around distractedly in their skinny jeans and their thrift-store but on-downs, like older siblings who
wil never, ever be bothered to talk to you or care about you or even acknowledge your existence if their friends are around … which they always
are. Some bookstores want you to believe they’re a community center, like they need to host a cookie-making class in order to sel you some
Proust. But the Strand leaves you completely on your own, caught between the warring forces of organization and idiosyncrasy, with idiosyncrasy
winning every time. In other words, it was my kind of graveyard.
I was usual y in the mood to look for nothing in particular when I went to the Strand. Some days, I would decide that the afternoon was
sponsored by a particular let er, and would visit each and every section to check out the authors whose last names began with that let er. Other
days, I would decide to tackle a single section, or would investigate the recently unloaded tomes, thrown in bins that never real y conformed to
alphabetization. Or maybe I’d only look at books with green covers, because it had been too long since I’d read a book with a green cover.
I could have been hanging out with my friends, but most of them were hanging out with their families or their Wi s. (Wi s? Wi i? What is the
plural?) I preferred to hang out with the dead, dying, or desperate books—used we cal them, in a way that we’d never cal a person, unless we
meant it cruel y. (“Look at Clarissa … she’s such a used girl.”)
I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not social y acceptable. I particularly loved the adjective
bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.
On this particular day, I decided to check out a few of my favorite authors to see if any irregular editions had emerged from a newly deceased
person’s library sale. I was perusing a particular favorite (he shal remain nameless, because I might turn against him someday) when I saw a peek
of red. It was a red Moleskine—made of neither mole nor skin, but nonetheless the preferred journal of my associates who felt the need to journal
in non-electronic form. You can tel a lot about a person from the pages he or she chooses to journal on—I was strictly a col ege-ruled man myself,
having no talent for il ustration and a microscopic scrawl that made wide-ruled seem roomy. The blank pages were usual y the most popular—I
only had one friend, Thibaud, who went for the grid. Or at least he did until the guidance counselors con scated his journals to prove that he had