Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

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.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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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, sca

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 ski

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

wi

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