SEND.
I waited to see if Lily would respond.
She did not.
“I really hope this works,” I said.
Mrs. Basil E. looked up at me from her settee, and it was clear she did not want me to be a regrettee.
“You must give it your all. But please note where I put emphasis in that sentence. For your benefit, I shall repeat: You must give it your all.”
“But didn’t we just establish that she’s impossible to please?”
“People who want things to be perfect are always impossible to please. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Even if their expectations aren’t correct, their instincts are. You won’t get everything right, Dash. Even Lily knows that. The trying is what matters.”
“It’s the thought that counts, then.”
“Ah, but have you ever tried counting thoughts? They are extraordinarily hard to wrangle.”
I would have sat back and sighed, but I was perched on a glorified footstool, so sitting back was not an option, and sighing only would have been labeled a melodramatic self-indulgence by my interlocutor.
Instead, I said, “I just feel like this is my last chance.” Which, once it was out of my mouth, also sounded like melodramatic self-indulgence…but also happened to be a bona fide truth.
“Here’s the thing about love,” Mrs. Basil E. replied. “You get a last chance. And then, when that doesn’t work, you make yourself another last chance. Then another. Then another. You keep going until your last chances run out.”
“But if there are many of them, doesn’t that mean that only the last one is actually—”
“I am not trying to make a grammatical point here,” Mrs. Basil E. hushed. “I am trying to make an emotional point. I don’t expect you to understand me on that level—you are but a romantic sapling. I am a sequoia, so you’d be well advised to listen to what I have to say.”
“Your experience runs rings around mine.”
“Precisely.”
I stood up from my ottomanopoeic perch. “I appreciate your help.”
Mrs. Basil E. stood as well. “And I appreciate your appreciation. Now, let us get to work. We have a lot of logistics to contend with. Twenty-three hours seems like a long time, but it’s nothing, Dash. It’s the time it takes a book to fall off a shelf.”
I looked at my phone. Still no response.
Mrs. Basil E. put her hand on my arm. A light but definitive touch.
“She’ll come,” she assured me. “She doesn’t realize, either, that this isn’t a last, last chance. She’s also a sapling. But that’s the beauty of your young love—you can learn to be trees together.”
“If this works.”
“Yes, if this works.”
Sunday, December 21st
I met Langston in front of the Strand. Not only is the Strand the site of the start of my and Lily’s origin story, but it also happens to be the best bookstore in the world, a wonderland for the literate and the literary. If this was going to be a last chance, I wanted to go back to the first chance, and to have all the possibility of that first chance come alive a year later.
Langston held a box in his hand. Lifting it to show me, he said, “Are you sure this is necessary?”
I knew this was hard for him. I knew the contents of the box were deeply precious to him.
“Mark has promised he’ll watch over it,” I told him. “The only hands it will fall into are Lily’s.”
“But why does it have to be Joey? He was a vintage boy-band relic when my friend Elizabeth gave him to me back in fifth grade. Now he’s, like, super vintage.”
“The whole point is that Lily will know it’s yours. She’ll know we’re all in this together.”
Langston knew this, but it was still hard for him. He didn’t hand over the prize until we were up in the YA section, with his cousin Mark glowering at our side.
“I have no idea why I’m helping you,” Mark coughed up. “But here I am, helping you. It’s an affront to every strain of my insouciance.”
Still, even Mark was reverent when Langston pulled the Joey McIntyre doll from its packaging.
“Take care,” Langston whispered in Joey’s ear. “Remember, this is for Lily.”
I took a copy of Baby Be-Bop out of my bag, removed the dust jacket, then wrapped the dust jacket around a red Moleskine notebook. From there, we put everything in place.
“You are not to let Joey out of your sight,” Langston instructed Mark.
“You’re treating him like he’s Timberlake,” Mark grumbled. “But fine.”
“And you’re to send word the minute she shows,” I reminded him.
“If she shows,” Mark corrected, enjoying his italics.
“If,” I agreed.
I couldn’t stop to worry about it. There were too many other things to do, in too short a time.
—
Twenty-two hours and fifty-seven minutes after my previous text, I sent Lily a new one: Forget the elf on the shelf.
Go to where it all began and look for a New Kid on the Block.