First published in the United States in 2016

by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,

a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York,

New York 10019, USA

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Electric Monkey,

part of Egmont Books

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

This edition published in 2020 by Electric Monkey

Text copyright © 2016 by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

ISBN 978 0 7555 0006 2

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1753 3

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

www.egmontbooks.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To E.L. Konigsburg

(for sending us on our first big fictional adventure in NYC)

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15  Acknowledgements

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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Acknowledgements

Saturday, December 13th

I had been dating Lily for almost a year, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get her brother to like me, trust me, or think I was remotely good enough for his sister. So it was a shock when he told me he wanted to meet for lunch, just the two of us.

Are you sure you have the right number? I texted back to him.

Don’t be a dick. Just show up, he replied.

The scary thing was, as much as I was trying to deny it, I knew why he wanted to meet, and what he wanted to talk about.

He wasn’t right about me, but he was right that there was a problem.

It had been a hard year.

Not at the start. The start had me clutching for such plebeian terms as awesome! and super! Because Christmas and the new year brought me something other than the usual consumerism and post-consumerism depression. The start of this year brought me Lily – bright, believing Lily. She was enough to get me to give credence to the notion of a benevolent fat guy in a red suit and a turbo-jacked sled. She was enough to make me feel cheer when Father Time turned over the keys to a newborn and said, Here, drive this. She was enough to turn me a little cynical about my own cynicism. We started the year making out in the rare-book room of the Strand, our favorite bookstore. It appeared to be an augury of good things to come.

And it was. For a time.

She met my friends. It went well.

I met many members of her seemingly infinite family. It went passably.

She met my parents and stepparents. They were confused by how their dark cloud of a son could have brought home such a sunbeam. But they weren’t complaining. They were, in fact, a little in awe, to a degree that New Yorkers usually reserve for the perfect bagel, a fifty-block cab ride with no red light, and the one movie out of every five that Woody Allen aces.

I met her beloved Grandpa. He liked my handshake, and said that was all he really needed to know about me in order to approve. I sought more approval anyway, because this was a man whose eyes sparkled when he recounted a ball game played fifty years ago.

Langston, Lily’s brother, needed more convincing. Mostly, he left us alone. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t dating Lily to be with her brother. I was dating Lily to be with Lily.

And I was with Lily. We didn’t go to the same school or live in the same neighborhood, so we made Manhattan our playground, gamboling through the frostbitten parks and taking refuge in Think coffee shops and every available screen at the IFC. I showed her my favorite corners of the New York Public Library. She showed me her favorite dessert at Levain . . . which was basically all of them.

Manhattan didn’t mind our wanderings one bit.

January turned to February. The cold started to seep into the city’s bones. Smiles were harder to come by. The snow that dazzled as it fell grew less and less welcome as it stayed. We wandered around in layers, unable to feel anything firsthand.

But Lily – Lily didn’t mind. Lily was mittens and hot chocolate and snow angels that lifted from the ground and danced in the air. She said she loved winter, and I wondered if there was any season she didn’t love. I worked hard to accept her enthusiasm as genuine. My mental furnace was built for immolation, not warmth. I didn’t understand how she could be so happy. But such was the love I had fallen into that I decided not to question it, and to live within it.

Then.

Two days before her birthday, in May, I was asking my best friend, Boomer, for help in knitting her a red sweater. I was discovering that no matter how many YouTube videos you watch, there is no way to knit a red sweater in a single afternoon. The phone rang and I didn’t hear it. Then the phone rang and my hands were occupied. It wasn’t until two hours later that I saw how many messages I had.

Only when I listened did I learn that her beloved Grandpa had suffered a minor heart attack with particularly bad timing, striking as it did while he was walking up the stairs to their apartment. He fell. And fell. And lay there for at least a half hour, barely conscious, until Lily got home and found him. The ambulance took a decade of minutes to get there. As she watched, he slipped under. As she watched, they revived him. As she waited, unable to watch, he teetered, until he barely landed on the right side of living.

Her parents were in a foreign country. Langston was in class, where he wasn’t allowed to look at his phone. I was too busy knitting her surprise present to notice she was calling. She was alone in the waiting room of New York-Presbyterian, about to lose something she’d never even begun to consider that she’d one day lose.

Grandpa lived, but it took him a very long time to recover. He lived, but many of the steps were painful. He lived because she helped him live, and that helping took its toll. To have him die would have been awful, but to see him continually suffer, continually frustrated, was almost as bad.

Her parents came home. Langston offered to take time off from college. I tried to be there. But this was hers. Grandpa was her responsibility; she wouldn’t have it any other way. And he was in too much pain to argue. I couldn’t even say I blamed him – of any of us, she’s the one I’d want to be the one to help me walk again. She’s the one I’d want to lead me back into life. Even if life did not feel, to her, as full of splendor as it had before.

It’s always the ones who believe who are hurt the most when things go wrong. She didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t have the vocabulary to make her see it differently. She said she wanted me to be the place she escaped to, and I was flattered by that. I was supportive, but it was the passive support of a chair or a pillar, not the active support of a human being holding another human being upright. As her grandfather was in and out of hospitals for operations and complications from operations, in and out of physical therapy, she and I spent less time with each other – less time wandering the city, less time wandering the corners of each other’s thoughts.

Exam time passed in a blink – then came summer. She got a job as a volunteer at the rehabilitation clinic her grandfather was going to, just to be with him more, and to help other people who needed it like he did. I felt guilty because I spent the same period shuttling between vacations with my respective parents, my father trying to outdo my mother’s Montreal trip with an ill-begotten jaunt to Paris. I wanted to yell at my father for taking me to Paris, then realized what a brat I sounded like, yelling at my father for taking me to Paris. Mostly, I wanted to be away from him, and home with Lily.

Things were better with the new school year. Grandpa was walking again, was starting to shoo Lily away for her own good. I thought she’d be relieved. She acted like she was relieved, but there was still a part of her that was afraid. But instead of questioning it, I went along, thinking if we pretended all was well, there would come a moment when it would switch the groove from being a half lie to being a more-than-half truth, and then ultimately it would be the whole truth.

It was easy to think that we were back to normal, with school in full swing and all of our friends around. We had plenty of good times, able to wander the city and forget the city at the same time. There were places within her I wasn’t reaching, but there were plenty of other places I could reach. The part of her that laughed at the way certain dog owners looked like their dogs. The part of her that cried at TV shows where restaurants were brought back from the brink of being condemned. The part of her that kept a bag of vegan marshmallows in her room for whenever I came over, just because I once told her how much I liked them.

It was only when Christmas came closer that the cracks began to show.

It used to be that the Christmas season would shrink my heart to the size and substance of a gift card. I hated the way the streets would clog with a thrombosis of tourists, and how the normal thrum of the city would be drowned out by tinny cliché sentiments. Most people counted down the days till Christmas in order to get their shopping done; I counted them down in order to get Christmas over with, and for the bleaker, more genuine winter to begin.

There’d been no room in my toy-soldier heart for Lily, but she’d forced herself in anyway. And she’d brought Christmas with her.

Now, don’t get me wrong – it still struck me as pretty bogus to pay lip service to generosity at the end of every year only to go all generosity-amnesiac once the calendar page turned. The reason Lily wore it well was because she wore her kindness all year round. And now I was able to see it in other people too – as I sat waiting for Langston at Le Pain Quotidien, I saw this perpetual generosity in the way some of the couples looked at each other, and a lot in the way that most of the parents (even the exasperated ones) looked at their children. I saw pieces of Lily everywhere now. I’d just seen fewer of them in Lily lately.

Clearly I wasn’t the only one, because the moment Langston sat down, he said, “Look, the last thing I particularly want to do is break bread with you, but we’ve got to do something, and we’ve got to do something right away.”

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“There are twelve days left until Christmas, right?”

I nodded. It was, indeed, the thirteenth of December.

“Well, with twelve days left until Christmas, there is a big gaping hole in our apartment. You know why?”

“Termites?”

“Shut up. The reason there’s a big gaping hole in our apartment is because we don’t have a Christmas tree. Lily usually can’t wait until Thanksgiving leftovers are through before running out and getting a tree – she feels that in this city, all the good ones are taken early, and the longer you wait, the more likely you are to get a tree that isn’t worthy of Christmas. So the tree is up before the first of December, and then she spends the next two weeks decorating. On the fourteenth, our family has a big tree-lighting ceremony – Lily acts like it’s an age-old family tradition, but the truth is, she started it when she was seven years old, and now it just feels like an age-old family tradition. Only this year – nothing. No tree. All the decorations are still in boxes. And the tree lighting is supposed to be tomorrow. Mrs Basil E. has already ordered the catering – and I don’t know how to tell her that there isn’t a tree to light.”

I understood his fear. The minute their great-aunt – who we all called Mrs Basil E. – opened the door to their apartment, she’d be able to smell the lack of a tree, and would not hide her displeasure at the breach.

“So why don’t you just get a tree?” I asked.

Langston actually smacked his forehead in amazement at my daftness. “Because that’s Lily’s job! That’s what Lily loves to do! And if we get it without her, it’s like we’re pointing out that she hasn’t done it, and that will only make her feel worse.”

“True true true,” I said.

The waitress came, and we ordered pastries – I think we both knew we didn’t have enough conversation within us to sustain a proper meal.

Once we’d ordered, I continued. “Have you asked her about the tree? I mean, about getting one?”

“I tried,” Langston said. “Point blank – ‘Hey, why don’t we get a tree?’ And do you know what her response was? ‘I’m just not feeling it right now.’”

“That doesn’t sound like Lily at all.”

“I know! So I figured desperate times called for desperate measures. Which is why I texted you.”

“But what can I do?”

“Has she talked to you about it at all?”

Even in our conversational détente, I didn’t want Langston to know the whole truth – that Lily and I hadn’t talked about very much in the weeks since Thanksgiving. Every now and then we’d go to a museum or get dinner. Every now and then we’d kiss, or lightly make out – but nothing that would be out of place on CBS. Ostensibly, we were still dating. But the dating was feeling rather ostensible.

I didn’t tell this to Langston because I was embarrassed that I’d let it happen. And I didn’t tell this to Langston because I was worried it would alarm him. My own alarms were the ones that should’ve been going off.

So instead of getting into it, I said, “No, we haven’t talked about the tree.”

“And she didn’t invite you to the tree-lighting ceremony?”

I shook my head. “This is the first I’m hearing of it.”

“I thought so. I think the only people who are planning to come are the family members who come every year. Usually Lily hands out invitations. But I guess she just wasn’t feeling that either.”

“Clearly we have to do something.”

“Yes, but what? It really feels like it would be a betrayal if I went out and bought a tree.”

I thought about it for a moment, and something came to me.

“But what if there’s a loophole?” I asked.

Langston cocked his head, looked at me. “I’m listening.”

“What if I got her the tree? As a present. Part of my Christmas present to her. She doesn’t know that I know about your family tradition. I could just bluster and bluff my way into it.”

Langston didn’t want to like the idea, because it would mean liking me, at least for a minute. But his eyes kicked in with a gleam that, for a moment, countered his doubt.

“We could tell her it’s for the twelve days of Christmas,” he said. “To celebrate the kickoff.”

“Don’t the twelve days of Christmas come after Christmas?”

Langston brushed this away. “Technicality.”

I wasn’t sure it was that simple, but it was worth a shot.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bring the tree. You act surprised. This conversation never happened. Right?”

“Right.” Our pastries arrived and we dug in. About seventy seconds later, we were done. Langston reached for his wallet – I figured to pay the bill. But then he was trying to slide a few twenties my way.

“I don’t want your filthy lucre!” I exclaimed. Perhaps too loudly for a restaurant of such quotidian pain.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ll take care of it,” I translated, sliding his money back to him.

“But you do understand – it has to be a nice tree. The best tree.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, and then employed a sentence that has been the coin and currency of New York since the days of yore: “I know a guy.”

It was nearly impossible for New Yorkers to get to trees, so every December, the trees came to the New Yorkers. Bodegas that were normally fronted by buckets of flowers were suddenly overrun by groves of leaning pines. Empty lots were planted with rootless trees; some establishments stayed open until the wee hours of the morning, just in case two a.m. was the time you were struck with the need to find the Xmas to mark your spot.

Some of these pop-up firriers were manned by guys who looked like they’d taken a break from drug dealing to try another kind of needle exchange. Others were staffed by guys in flannel who looked like it was the first time they’d ever left upstate and, gosh, was it big in the big city! Often they were helped out by students in need of the most temporary of temporary jobs. This year, one of those students was my best friend, Boomer.

There was, to be sure, a learning curve for him once he started this employment. Too many viewings of A Charlie Brown Christmas had led him to believe that it was the most wan and wayward of shrubs that was the most desirable one, because tending to it was much more in the Christmas spirit than bringing home a self-sufficient, virulent pine. He also thought Christmas trees could be replanted once Christmas was over. That was a hard conversation to have.

Luckily, what Boomer lacked in clarity he made up for in sincerity, so the stand he was working at, on Twenty-Second Street, had become word-of-mouth popular, with Boomer as the foremost tree elf. I think this recognition was enough to make him happy he’d forsaken boarding school in his senior year to be in Manhattan. He’d already helped me pick out trees for my mother’s and my father’s apartments. (My mother got the much nicer tree.) I was sure he’d love the assignment of picking out the best tree for Lily. And yet I was hesitant as I got closer. Not because of Boomer . . . but because of Sofia.

Along with Boomer’s jumping off board his boarding school, the new school year had brought a few surprises with it. Somewhat surprising was that my ex-girlfriend Sofia’s family had moved back to New York after swearing they’d never leave Barcelona again. Not at all surprising was the fact that while I was happy to see her, it was not in a my-ex-is-back-and-there’s-gonna-be-trouble way – we’d pretty much sorted that out the last time she’d visited. But it was SUPER SURPRISING when she started hanging out with Boomer . . . and hanging out with Boomer some more . . . and hanging out with him even more, so that before I could even wrap my head around the possibility, they were a thing. This was, in my mind, like taking the most expensive, finest cheese in the world and then melting it on a burger. I loved them both, in different ways, and seeing them together made my head hurt.

The last thing I wanted was to pop by Boomer’s workplace and find that Sofia was stopping by at the same time, so they could radiate their dating vibes throughout the greater metropolitan area. They were in their honeymoon period, and that made it awkward for those of us who’d left the honeymoon behind and had entered the part of the relationship where the moon waxes and wanes.

So it was with some relief that I found Boomer not with Sofia but with a family of seven, or eight, or nine – it was hard to tell, since the kids were running around so fast.

“This is the tree that was meant just for you,” he was telling the parents, as if he were some amazing tree whisperer and this tree had told him itself that their dining room was where it had always wanted to be.

“It’s so big,” the mom said. Probably imagining the pine-needle fallout all over her floor.

“It’s a big-hearted tree, yes,” Boomer replied. “But that’s why you’re feeling such a connection to it.”

“It’s strange,” the dad said, “because I really am.”

The sale was completed. As he was swiping their credit card, Boomer spotted me and waved me over. I waited until the family was gone, mostly because I was afraid of stepping on one of the children.

“Man, you really got them pining,” I observed once I got to him.

Boomer looked confused. “Is that a Chris Pine reference? He is a handsome man, for sure, but I don’t think any of them looked like him.”

“Pine. Like tree.”

“Oh! Like Chris Pine playing a tree! That would be cool. He’s already so wooden! But not in a bad way!”

To Boomer, this thought process didn’t seem circuitous at all. Which was partly why I wondered how someone as direct as Sofia could be spending so much time with him.

“I need a tree for Lily. A really special tree.”

“You’re getting Lily a tree?”

“Yup. As a present.”

“I love that! Where are you getting it?”

“I was thinking here?”

“Oh yeah! Good idea!”

He started to look around, and as he did, he muttered something that sounded suspiciously like Oscar Oscar Oscar.

“Is Oscar one of your co-workers?” I asked.

“Do trees count as co-workers? I mean, they are with me all day long . . . and we have the most interesting conversations . . .”

“Oscar is one of the trees?”

“He’s the perfect tree.”

“Do all the trees have names?”

“Only the ones that share them with me. I mean, you can’t just ask. That would be invasive.”

He shoved aside at least a dozen trees to get to Oscar. And when he pulled Oscar out, he – it – looked like any other tree to me.

“This is it?” I asked.

“Wait for it, wait for it . . .”

Boomer lugged the tree away from its cohorts, toward the curb. The tree was easily a few feet taller than he was, but he carried it like it was no heavier than a magic wand. With a strange delicacy, he set it into a tree stand, and as soon as it was settled in, something happened – Oscar opened his arms and beckoned me under the streetlamp light.

Boomer was right. This was the tree.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

“Cool,” Boomer replied. “Do you want me to wrap it? Since it’s a gift?”

I assured him that a ribbon would suffice.

Catching a cab when you’re a teenage boy is hard enough. Catching a cab with a Christmas tree in tow is nigh impossible. So I ran some errands until Boomer’s shift was done, and together we wheeled Oscar over to Lily’s apartment in the East Village.

I hadn’t been there all that often in the past year. Lily said it was so her grandfather wouldn’t be bothered, but I thought it was more because I’d be adding one more element to the chaos. Her parents had been around more than they’d been in years – which should have helped her out immeasurably, but instead seemed to have given her two more people to take care of.

It was Langston who opened the door, and the minute he saw me and Boomer with the tree, he said, “Whoa! Whoa! WHOA!” so loudly that I thought Lily had to be home and within hearing distance. But then he told me she and Grandpa were out at a checkup. His parents were out because it was a Saturday, and why would such social people be home on a Saturday? So it was just the three of us . . . and Oscar.

As we set him up on his perch in the living room, I tried not to notice how under the weather the apartment appeared, as if it had spent the last month or so coughing up dust and discolor. I knew the way this family worked, and I knew this meant Grandpa had been out of commission and Lily had been distracted. They’d always been the true guardians of the place.

Once Oscar was standing proudly, I reached into my backpack for the pièce de résistance that would, I hoped, not be resisted.

“What are you doing?” Langston asked as I looped things around Oscar’s branches.

“Are those tiny turkeys?” Boomer chimed in. “Is this going to be like the tree they had at Plymouth Rock?”

“They’re partridges,” I explained, holding up a piece of wood carved in the shape of the bird, with a big hole in the center. “Partridge napkin rings, specifically. There weren’t any partridge ornaments at that store whose name I can’t make myself utter.” (The store was called Christmas Memories, which was enough to make me want to drink Pop Rocks with Coke. I had to think of it as Christmas Mammaries in order to go inside.) “If we’re doing twelve days of Christmas, we’ve gotta do twelve days of Christmas. Lily can decorate the rest of the tree. But this is going to be a partridge tree. And on top, we’re going to have . . . a pear!”

I pulled said fruit out of my bag, expecting admiration. But the reaction went more pear-shaped.

“You can’t put a pear at the top of a tree,” Langston said. “It will look dumb. And it will rot after a day or two.”

“But it’s a pear! In a partridge tree!” I argued.

“I get it,” Langston said. Meanwhile, Boomer guffawed. He hadn’t gotten it.

“Do you have a better idea?” I challenged.

Langston thought for a moment, and then said, “Yes.” He walked over to a small photograph hanging on the wall and took it down. “This.”

He showed me the picture. Even though it had to be over half a century old, I instantly recognized Grandpa.

“Is that your grandmother with him?”

“Yup. Love of his life. They were quite a pair. ”

A pair on a partridge tree. Perfect.

It took us a few tries to get it placed – me and Langston trying out various branches, Boomer telling Oscar to stay still. But we got the pair perched near the crown of the tree as birds peeked out below.

Five minutes later, the front door opened and Lily and Grandpa returned. Even though I’d only known him a few months before he had his fall, it was still surprising to me to see how small Lily’s grandfather had become – like instead of going off to hospitals and rehabilitation centers, he’d really been put in the wash for way too long, coming back even more shrunk each time.

Still, there was the handshake. The minute he saw me, he extended his hand and asked, “How’s the life, Dash?” And when he shook, he shook hard.

Lily didn’t ask me what I was doing there, but the question was certainly in her tired eyes.

“How was the doctor?” Langston asked.

“Much better company than the undertaker!” Grandpa replied. Not the first time I’d heard him use this joke, which meant it was probably the two hundredth time Lily had endured it.

“Does the undertaker have bad breath?” Boomer barged into the hallway and asked.

“Boomer!” Lily said. Now she was definitely confused. “What are you doing here?”

It was Langston who cut in. “Much to my surprise, your Romeo here has brought us a rather early Christmas gift.”

“Here,” I said, taking Lily’s hand. “Close your eyes. Let me show you.”

Lily’s grip was not like her grandfather’s. Before, our hands used to pulse electric together. Now it was more like static. Pleasant, but light.

She closed her eyes, though. And when we got into the living room and I told her to open them, she did.

“Meet Oscar,” I said. “He’s your present for the first day of Christmas.”

“It’s a pair in a partridge tree!” Boomer yelled out.

Lily took it in. She looked surprised. Or maybe the stillness of her reaction was further tiredness. Then something kicked in, and she smiled.

“You really didn’t have to . . .” she began.

“I wanted to!” I said quickly. “I really, really wanted to!”

“But where’s the pair?” Grandpa asked. Then he saw the photograph. His eyes welled up. “Oh. I see. There we are.”

Lily saw it, too, and if her eyes welled up, they welled inward. I honestly had no idea what was going on in her head. I shot a look at Langston, who was studying her just as hard, without getting any ready answers.

“Happy first day of Christmas,” I said.

She shook her head. “The first day of Christmas is Christmas,” she whispered.

“Not this year,” I said. “Not for us.”

Langston said it was time to retrieve the ornaments. Boomer volunteered at the same time Grandpa made a move to get some of the boxes. This snapped Lily back to attention – she shuffled him over to the couch in the living room, and said he could oversee them this year. I could tell Grandpa didn’t like this, but that he also knew it would hurt Lily’s feelings if he put up too much of a fight. So he sat down. For her.

As soon as the boxes were brought in, I knew it was time for me to leave. This was a family tradition, and if I stayed and pretended I was family, I would feel every ounce of the pretending, in the same way that I could feel the weight of Lily pretending to be happy, pretending to want to do what we were encouraging her to do. She would do this for Langston and her Grandpa and her parents whenever they got back. If I stayed, she would even do it for me. But I wanted her to want to do it for herself. I wanted her to feel all that Christmas wonder she felt last year at this time. But that was going to take more than a perfect tree. It might just take a miracle.

Twelve days.

We had twelve days.

I’d spent my whole life avoiding Christmas. But not this year. No, this year what I wanted most this season was for Lily to be happy again.

Saturday, December 13th

I’m mad at global warming for all the obvious reasons, but mostly I’m mad at it for ruining Christmas. This time of year is supposed to be about teeth-chattering, cold weather that necessitates coats, scarves, and mittens. Outside, there should be see-your-breath air that offers the promise of sidewalks covered in snow, while inside, families drink hot chocolate by a roaring fire, huddled close together with their pets to keep warm. There is no better precursor to Christmas than a quality goose bump chill. It’s what I count on to usher in the good cheer, happy songs, excessive cookie baking, favorite-people togetherness, and the all-important presents of the season. The days before Christmas are not supposed to be like this one was, a balmy seventy degrees, with holiday shoppers wearing shorts and drinking iced peppermint lattes (yuck), and tank-top-wearing Frisbee players nearly giving concussions to dogwalkers in Tompkins Square Park with their carefree spring-day bad aim. This year the cold couldn’t be bothered to bring in Christmas, so until it could, I wouldn’t bother getting too excited about the best time of the year.

There wasn’t enough cold outside, so instead I brought it inside and turned it on Dash, who didn’t deserve it.

“If you have to go, then go,” I said brusquely. Brusque. It was such a Dash word – obscure, unknowable, distant – that it felt strange I even knew it. Along with the other million obligations overwhelming me at the moment, there was SAT study time, which left an amaroidal taste in my mouth. (How could an SAT taker possibly be more prepared for university by knowing such a word? Right – not at all. Complete waste of word, complete waste of time, complete certainty I will still not achieve my parents’ hopes for my college admissions prospects by the addition of the word amaroidal to my vocabulary.)

“You don’t want me to stay, do you?” asked Dash, as if he was pleading for me not to demand his spending any additional time with my beleaguered Grandpa and my brother, who at best tolerates my boyfriend and at worst is downright rude to him. I’d feel bad about Langston and Dash’s animosity except it seems to be an enjoyable sport between them. If Lily was the subject on Jeopardy!, the answer would be, “She does not understand it at all,” and the question would be, “What is the human male species?”

“I want you to do what you want to do,” I responded, but what I meant was: Stay, Dash. Please. This Christmas tree gift is so lovely and exactly what I didn’t know I needed – for the season, and from you. And even though I have a ton of other things I need to do right now, there’s nothing I want more than for you to decorate the tree with me. Or for you to sit on the sofa and watch me bedazzle it while you make snarky comments about pagan traditions misappropriated by Christianity. Just to have you near.

“Do you like the tree?” Dash asked, but he was already buttoning his pea coat, which was too heavy for such a warm day, and looking at his phone like there were text messages on it beckoning him to better places than at home with me.

“Why wouldn’t I?” I said, not willing to further profess my profuse thanks. I had only just started sorting through the decorations when Dash announced his intention to leave, and he did it at the exact moment that I opened the gift box from the Strand that Dash had given me last January 19, to celebrate author Patricia Highsmith’s birthday. Inside the box was a red and gold ornament with a sketch in black picturing Matt Damon as the Talented Mr Ripley. Who else but Dash would delight in a Christmas decoration displaying the face of a celebrated literary serial killer and give it to his girlfriend as a present? The present only made me adore Dash more. (The literary hero part, not the serial killer part.)

In February, I had placed the gift box in the Christmas decorations storage box with a sigh of great hope – that Dash and I would still be together when it was time to put the ornament on the tree. And we were. But our relationship was ephemeral (finally an SAT word that applied to my life). It didn’t feel real anymore. It felt more like an obligation that somehow had survived till now so we should at least see it through the holidays, because that’s where it started. Then we could stop pretending that what had initially felt so right and true now felt . . . still true, but definitely not right.

“Be good to Oscar,” said Boomer. He gave the tree a military salute.

“Who’s Oscar?” I asked.

“The tree!” Boomer said, like it was obvious and I had maybe offended Oscar by not knowing his name. “Come on, Dash, we don’t want to miss previews.”

“Where are you fellas going? How far’s the walk?” Grandpa asked them with a touch of desperation in his voice. Grandpa’s been mostly housebound since the heart attack and the fall. He doesn’t have much stamina for walking more than a block or two anymore, so he practically interrogates visitors about their outside activities. Grandpa’s not a guy used to having his wings clipped.

Really what Grandpa should have been asking Boomer and Dash was, How can you be so rude as to deliver this beautiful tree and then just leave before the tree – I mean, Oscar – is properly decorated? What kind of uncouth urchins are you kids nowadays?

“We’re seeing a movie that starts in twenty minutes,” said Dash. His face didn’t look remotely guilty, despite the fact that he hadn’t invited me.

“What movie?” I asked. If Dash was going to see the one movie I was dying to see without me, then that would be the last sign I needed that he and I really were not connecting anymore and maybe we needed an official break. I’d been counting the days till holiday vacation so I could see Corgi & Bess, and I’d probably see it at least five times in the theater if I could find the time. Helen Mirren as a centenarian Queen Elizabeth with a supposedly fantastic animatronic corgi at the side of her walker at all times until an unfortunate fireworks display causes the corgi to run off, and frail old Bess and her walker have to find the corgi somewhere on the grounds of the enchanted Balmoral Castle, with countless adventures along the way for both queen and pup? Yes, please! Count me in, repeated viewings, IMAX and 3D! I’d seen the trailer enough times to already know it was my favorite movie of the year, but I’d been holding out hope that Dash would give me a date night first-time viewing of it as my Christmas present. Not just the movie – but the time with him.

“We’re seeing The Naughty and the Mice !” Boomer told Grandpa in the way Boomer had of delivering even the most basic information with an exclamation mark.

To me, Dash said, “I didn’t think you’d want to come, so I didn’t ask if you wanted a ticket.” Dash was right. I didn’t want to see the movie because I’d already seen it. I thought The Naughty and the Mice was derivative, but Edgar Thibaud loved the Pixar movie about speed demon attic mice who drag-race Matchbox cars when the house’s family is asleep.

I didn’t tell Dash I’d already seen The Naughty and the Mice, because I had gone to the movie with Edgar Thibaud. It wasn’t like me hanging out with Edgar was a big secret – Dash knew that Edgar also volunteered (court-ordered) at Grandpa’s rehabilitation center – but I’d neglected to mention that occasionally he and I hung out after hours. Usually just for a coffee, but this was the first time he and I had gone anywhere beyond a café. I didn’t know why I went. I didn’t even like Edgar Thibaud that much. Well, I liked him fine enough for a scoundrel who was responsible for the death of my pet gerbil in kindergarten. I just didn’t trust him. Maybe Edgar was my stealth side-rehabilitation project, Grandpa being my primary and only truly important one. I wanted to help mold Edgar into a good guy, despite the odds, and if seeing a movie with a girl with the full knowledge that she had nothing beyond a platonic interest in him might evolve Edgar, I could make the effort. I told myself that I’d been so busy the last several months, I needed the relief of a dark time-out in a movie theater, even if it was a movie I didn’t care about with a person I barely cared about. If I’d seen the movie with Dash, I would have been preoccupied the whole time, wondering, Is he going to kiss me now? If not, why not? With Edgar, all I wondered was, Is he going to ask me to pay for his popcorn?

“Have fun,” I said, and I managed to sound chipper, trying to be a good sport. I could never stay cold to Dash for long. But Dash’s leaving stung, like he’d given me the most fabulous gift only to prematurely snatch it away.

“Oh, we will!” Boomer promised, so anxious to leave he was hurriedly walking backward toward the door, which caused him to bump into a side table with enough force that the lamp on the table crashed to the floor. It was a minor crash – only the lightbulb broke – but the noise was enough to wake the beast that had been napping in my room. Boris, my dog, came racing into the living room and immediately pinned Boomer to the floor.

“Heel!” I commanded Boris. As a breed, bullmastiffs are surprisingly good apartment dwellers for their size because they’re not very active. But they are essentially guard dogs, if compassionate ones – they pin intruders down instead of trying to hurt them. Boomer probably didn’t know that. I’d look as terrified as Boomer, too, if I had a 130-pound dog pinning me to the ground. “Heel!” I repeated.

Boris got off Boomer and came and sat at my feet, satisfied that I was safe. But the commotion had also coaxed the smallest fur member of the family out of his own sleep and, typically lazy, he arrived late into the living room to assess the situation and secure the area. Grandpa lives with us now that he can’t live on his own anymore, and his cat, Grunt, came along with him. True to his name, the cat grunted at Boris, who standing upright is the size of an adult woman but is abjectly terrified of Grandpa’s twelve-pound cat. Poor Boris went from a heeling posture to standing up and draping his front paws over my shoulders, whimpering, his dear, wrinkled face looking into mine like, Protect me, Mama! I gave Boris’s wet nose a kiss and said, “Down, boy. You’re fine.”

Our apartment is really too small for all these people and animals. It’s a bloody zoo at my home. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, maybe I’d like for Grandpa, who used to be so robust and such a man-about-town, not to be so confined to our third-floor apartment because he can’t do the stairs more than once per day, and some days not at all. But if having a stream of family members and healthcare workers come in and out to help him and visit with him averts Grandpa’s worst fear – being moved to a nursing home – I’m all for the zoo situation. The alternative scenario is bleak. Grandpa often proclaims that the only way he’ll allow himself to be moved out of his home is lying flat, in a box.

Langston came into the living room from the kitchen and asked, “What happened in here?” and that was Dash’s cue to finally leave.

Dash told Langston, “Thanks for the tea and cookies you didn’t offer.”

Langston said, “You’re welcome. Leaving so soon? Wonderful!” Langston stepped to the front door in the foyer to open it. Bewildered Boomer stood up to step out while Dash hesitated for a moment. He looked like he was about to kiss me goodbye, then thought better of it, and instead he patted Boris’s head. Boris the traitor licked Dash’s hand.

I was sore, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t melt when this impossibly handsome guy in the pea coat was sweet to my dog. “We’ll have a tree lighting tomorrow night,” I said to Dash. “Will you come?” Tomorrow was the fourteenth of December! Tree-lighting day! How had I managed to completely ignore this most important date until Dash literally plopped a tree into my living room? Was it that maybe this year the ceremony felt more like a chore than a reason for cheer?

“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Dash. Grunt couldn’t have cared less about Dash’s acceptance of my invitation. Grunt took chase of Boris again, causing Boris to run – directly into a tall pile of books propped up against the living room wall.

This caused Grandpa to yell, “Grunt, come back here!” and Boris to start barking, and Langston to admonish Dash, “Go, already!”

Boomer and Dash left.

I knew Dash was relieved to leave.

My house is always busy. Loud. Boisterous. Pet hairy. Lots of people around.

Dash likes quiet, and order, and would prefer to be alone with his books than hang out with his own family. He’s allergic to cats. Sometimes I wonder if he is to me, too.

Sunday, December 14th

A year ago my life was so different. My Grandpa was in such good shape that he went back and forth to Florida, where he had a girlfriend in his senior-citizen apartment complex. I had no pets and no boyfriend. I didn’t really understand sadness.

Grandpa’s girlfriend died from cancer this past spring, and soon after that, his heart gave out. I knew Grandpa’s fall was serious, but in the panic of the moment I didn’t take it all in, because I was too preoccupied with the interminable wait for the ambulance, then the ride to the hospital, then calling all the family to let them know what had happened. It wasn’t until the next day, when he was stabilized, that I understood how bad it really had been. I’d gone to the hospital cafeteria to pick up some lunch, and when I returned, I saw through the window to his room that Mrs Basil E., Grandpa’s sister and my favorite aunt, had arrived. She’s a tall lady and normally a larger-than-life presence, wearing impeccably tailored suits with expensive jewelry, and perfect makeup on her face. But in that moment before she saw me, she was sitting at sleeping Grandpa’s bedside, holding his hand, heavy tears causing mascara to streak down into her lipstick.

I’ve never, ever seen Mrs Basil E. cry. She looked so small. I felt a sharp gnawing in my stomach and a choking of my heart. I am a glass-half-full kind of gal – I try to always look on the bright side of things – but I couldn’t deny the sharp crest of sadness invading my body and soul at the sight of her grief and worry. Suddenly Grandpa’s mortality was too real, and how it would feel when he did eventually die felt too alive with possibility.

Mrs Basil E. placed Grandpa’s hand against her face and wept harder, and for a second, I feared Grandpa was dead. Then his hand came to life and gave her a gentle slap, and she laughed. I knew then everything would be okay, for now – but never the same.

That was my entry into sadness, stage one.

Stage two came the next day, and it was so much worse.

How can such a simple kindness change everything?

Dash came to visit me at the hospital. I had bought food at the cafeteria, but wasn’t really eating it – I was too distracted by the situation and didn’t have an appetite for stale cheese sandwiches or kale chips, what the hospital offered in lieu of potato chips in a mean attempt at being health conscious. Dash must have heard the fatigue – and hunger – in my voice over the phone, because he arrived carrying a pizza from my favorite place, John’s. (The John’s location in the Village, not the one in midtown. Come on !) A John’s pizza is my ultimate comfort food, and even if the pie had gone cold during its trek from the restaurant to the hospital, my heart could not have been warmer at the sight of it – and of Dash carrying it to me.

Impulsively, I blurted out, “I love you so much.” I wrapped my arms around his back and buried my head in his neck, covering it in kisses. He laughed, and said, “If I’d known a pizza would get this response, I’d have brought it a lot earlier.”

He didn’t say I love you back.

I hadn’t realized I felt it until I said it. I hadn’t been talking just about him bringing me the pizza.

When I told Dash I love you so much, I meant: I love you for your kindness and your snarliness. I love you for grossly over-tipping waitstaff when using your dad’s credit card to “pay it forward.” I love the way you look when reading a book – content and dreamy, off in another world. I love how you suggested I never read a Nicholas Sparks book, and when I did read one because I was curious, and then read some more, I love you for how confused and offended and downright angry you were. Not that I’d read them, but that I adored them. I love debating literary snobbery with you, and that you can at least recognize that even if you don’t like “pandering, insincere, faux romantic garbage,” that lots of other people – including your girlfriend – do. I love you for loving my great-aunt almost as much as I do. I love how much brighter and sweeter and more interesting my life has been since you’ve been a part of it. I love you for answering the call of a red notebook once upon a time.

Grandpa lived, but a piece of me felt like it died that day, for having the joy of realizing I truly loved somebody so quickly deflated by experiencing the feeling alone.

Dash still hasn’t said it back.

I never said it to Dash again.

I don’t hold it against him – really, I don’t. He’s lovely and attentive to me, and I know he likes me. A lot. Sometimes I wish he wouldn’t seem so surprised about that.

I said I love you so much, and in that instant I meant it with every fiber of my being, but since the moment passed unreciprocated, I’ve tried to have a little more distance from Dash. I can’t make him feel something he doesn’t feel, and I don’t want to get hurt trying, so I decided to let my love for him simmer on the back burner of my heart, to allow me to be more casual and undemanding of him up front.

It’s helped that I’ve been so busy. I’ve spent so little time with Dash lately that it’s almost stopped hurting. I haven’t been actively trying to fall out of love; it’s just happened by default. When I’m not in school, I have schoolwork or SAT-prep classes, soccer practice and soccer games, taking Grandpa to physical therapy and doctor’s appointments and to visit with his friends. There’s the grocery shopping and cooking that Mom and Dad are too busy to do lately because they have new academic jobs. They’re not working in another country anymore, but they might as well be; the closest job Mom could get on such short notice was a part-time English teacher gig at a community college in Way Outsville, Long Island, and Dad commutes to a headmaster job at a boarding school in God Only Knows Where, Connecticut. Langston shares the Grandpa responsibilities, but when it comes to housework, he helps only in the half-assed way dudes do. (Obviously that peeves me if I feel compelled to curse.) There’s my dog-walking business. My services have become so in demand that Mrs Basil E. calls me Lily Mogul instead of Lily Bear now. With everything else going on, trying to find time with Dash can feel more like an obligation than a joy.

I’m overwhelmed.

Childish Lily Bear is a distant memory. I feel like in the last year I went from a very young sixteen to a very old seventeen.

I’ve been so busy, I royally screwed up the hasty present I made to give Dash at my small tree-lighting party. I’d been working on it since the beginning of the year but set it aside when Grandpa’s troubles began. I sighed, looking at its resurrection so many months later. My brother laughed.

“It’s not that bad, is it, Langston?” I said.

“It’s . . .” He hesitated too long. “Sweet.” Langston pulled the emerald green sweater over his head and then tugged on its looseness. “But Dash is probably close to the same size as me, and this sweater is way too big. Should we presume you’ll be resuming your annual holiday cookie drive to fatten Dash up?”

The sweater had been a Christmas gift to our dad several years ago, from the Big & Tall store. Never worn, still in the box. I was repurposing the sweater, but the snowflake-patterned red fabric insert I’d sewn onto the front was original artwork. On it, I’d needlepointed two turtledoves perched together on a tree branch. The left turtledove’s belly had DASH sewn on it, and the right’s said LILY.

I couldn’t deny the visual once my brother was wearing the sweater. I needed to remove the turtledoves insert and sew it on something else, like a hat or scarf. They don’t really deserve a sweater, even if you call them something fake adorable like turtledoves. It had been a big disappointment to me to learn that turtledoves are basically pigeons who emit gentle purring sounds. I want to think that’s cute because I love all animals, but I am a New Yorker and I know: Pigeons are not cute. They’re nuisances.

I’m really not feeling Christmas if I’m taking my grump out on noisy birds who symbolize the season. I told Langston, “You’re right, it looks awful. I can’t give it to Dash.”

“Please give it to Dash,” Langston said.

The doorbell rang. I said, “Take off the sweater, Langston. Our guests are arriving.”

I checked myself in the foyer mirror and smoothed down my hair, hoping I looked presentable. I was wearing my favorite Christmas outfit, a green felt skirt with reindeer figures sewn on the front, and a red T-shirt with the words DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’ circling a picture of Santa Claus. The food was here, the lights had been strung around Oscar’s ample branches, the animals were confined to my bedroom as a courtesy to our guests. Christmas could begin. Magic could happen.

I wondered if it would be Dash’s father at the door. I really thought that if Dash and his dad spent more time together, they’d like each other more, and a small, unassuming party to launch Christmas could be just the occasion to help them along. I’d sent an invite last night to his mom first, but she declined, saying she had a client meeting at the same time. So this morning I had the thought to invite Dash’s dad instead.

It was a surprise, then, to open the door and see Dash standing between his mother and father. “Guess who I ran into?” he said.

I don’t think his parents have been in the same room together since Dash was a child and had to testify in court during their divorce.

Dash did not have a party face. Neither did his parents.

Finally, cold had arrived for Christmas.

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