Dash & Lily's Book of Dares Read Online Free

include hoochie as a most un-goodwill type of curse word. You’d never hear me utter the word, much less read a book with that word in its title.
    I thought the notebook was seriously Langston’s stupidest idea ever until Langston mentioned where he was going to leave it—at the Strand, the bookstore where our parents used to take us on Sundays and let us roam the aisles like it was our personal playground. Furthermore, he’d placed it next to my personal anthem book, Franny and Zooey . “If there’s a perfectguy for you anywhere,” Langston said, “he’ll be found hunting for old Salinger editions. We’ll start there.”
    If it had been a regular Christmas season, where my folks were around and our normal traditions carried on, I never would have agreed to Langston’s red notebook idea. But there was something so empty about the prospect of a Christmas Day without opening presents and other, less important forms of merrymaking. Truthfully, I’m not exactly a popularity magnet at school, so it wasn’t like I had alternate choices of companionship over the holidays. I needed something to look forward to.
    But I never thought anyone—much less a prospect from that highly coveted but extremely elusive Teenage Boy Who Actually Reads and Hangs Out at the Strand species—would actually find the notebook and respond to its dares. And just as I never thought my newly formed Christmas caroling society would abandon me after only two nights of street caroling to take up Irish drinking songs at a pub on Avenue B, I never thought someone would actually figure out Langston’s cryptic clues and return the favor.
    Yet there it was on my phone, a text from my cousin Mark confirming such a person might exist.
Mark: Lily, you have a taker at the Strand. He left you something in return. I left it there for you in a brown envelope.
    I couldn’t believe it. I texted back: WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?!?!?
    Mark answered: Snarly. Hipster wannabe.
    I tried to imagine myself befriending a snarly hipster wannabe boy, and I couldn’t see it. I am a nice girl. A quiet girl (except for the caroling). I get good grades. I am the captain of my school’s soccer team. I love my family. I don’t know anything about what’s supposed to be “cool” in the downtown scene. I’m pretty boring and nerdy, actually, and not in the ironic hipster way. It’s like if you picture Harriet the Spy, eleven-year-old tomboy wunderkind spy, and then picture her a few years later, with boobs she hides under a school oxford uniform shirt that she wears even on non-school days, along with her brother’s discarded jeans, and add to her ensemble some animal pendant necklaces for jewelry, worn-out Chucks on her feet, and black-rimmed nerd glasses, then you’ve pictured me. Lily of the Field, Grandpa calls me sometimes, because everyone thinks I am so sweet and delicate.
    Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to venture to the darker side of the lily-white spectrum. Maybe.
    I sprinted over to the Strand to retrieve whatever the mysterious notebook taker had left behind for me. Mark was gone, but he’d scrawled a message on the envelope he’d left behind for me: Seriously, Lily. Dude snarls a lot .
    I ripped open the package, and … what?!?! Snarl had left me a copy of The Godfather , along with a delivery menu for Two Boots Pizza. The menu had dirty footprints embedded on it, indicating perhaps it had been on the floor at the Strand. To go along with the unsanitary theme, the book wasn’t even a new copy of The Godfather , but a tattered used copy that smelled like cigarette smoke and had pages that were crinkled and a binding that was at death’s door.
    I called Langston to decipher this nonsense. No answer.Now that our parents had messaged us that they’d arrived in Fiji paradise safely, Benny was probably officially moved in, the door to Langston’s room locked, his phone off.
    I had no choice but to go grab a slice and ponder the red notebook