Dash & Lily's Book of Dares Read Online Free Page A

alone. What else could I do? When in doubt, ingest carbs.
    I went to the Two Boots location on the delivery menu, on Avenue A just above Houston. I asked the person at the counter, “Do you know a snarly boy who likes The Godfather ?”
    “I wish I did,” the counter person said. “Plain or pepperoni?”
    “Calzone, please,” I said. Two Boots makes weird Cajun-flavored pizzas. Not for me and my sensitive digestive system.
    I sat at a corner booth and flipped through the book Snarl had left for me but could find no viable clues. Well , I thought, I guess this game is over as soon as it’s started . I was too Lily white to figure it out.
    But then the menu that had been tucked inside the book dropped to the ground, and out of it peeked a Post-it note I hadn’t noticed before. I picked up the Post-it note. It was definitely a boy’s scrawl: moody, foreign, and barely legible.
    Here’s the scary part. I could decipher this message. It contained a poem by Marie Howe, a personal favorite of my mother’s. Mom is an English professor specializing in twentieth-century American lit, and she regularly tortured Langston and me with poetry passages instead of bedtime stories when we were kids. My brother and I are frighteningly well-versed in modern American poetry.
    The note was a passage from my mother’s favorite of Marie Howe’s poems, too, and it was a poem I had alwaysliked because it contained a passage about the poet seeing herself in the window glass of a corner video store, which never failed to strike me as funny, imagining some mad poet wandering the streets and spying herself in a video store window reflected next to, perhaps, posters of Jackie Chan or Sandra Bullock or someone super-famous and probably not at all poet-y. I liked Moody Boy even more when I saw that he’d underlined my favorite part of the poem:
    I am living. I remember you .
    I had no idea how Marie Howe and Two Boots Pizza and The Godfather could possibly be connected. I tried calling Langston again. Still no answer.
    I read and re-read the passage. I am living. I remember you . I don’t really get poetry, but I had to give the poetess credit: nice.
    Two people sat in the booth next to me, setting down some rental videos on their table. That’s when I realized the connection: say the window of the corner video store . This particular Two Boots location also had a video store attached to it.
    I dashed over to the video section like it was the bathroom after I’d accidentally ingested some Louisiana hot sauce on top of my calzone. I immediately went to where The Godfather was. The movie wasn’t there. I asked the clerk where I’d find it. “Checked out,” she said.
    I returned to the G section anyway and found, mis-shelved, The Godfather III . I opened up the case and— yes!— another Post-it note, in Snarl’s scrawl:
    Nobody ever checks out Godfather III. Especially when it’s misfiled. Do you want another clue? If so, find Clueless. Also misfiled, where sorrow meets pity .
    I returned to the clerk’s counter. “Where does sorrow meet pity?” I asked, fully expecting an existential answer.
    The clerk didn’t look up from the comic book she was reading under the counter. “Foreign documentaries.”
    Oh.
    I went to the foreign documentaries section. And yes, next to a film called The Sorrow and the Pity was a copy of Clueless ! Inside the case for Clueless was another note:
    I didn’t expect you to make it this far. Are you also a fan of depressing French films about mass murder? If so, I like you already. If not, why not? Do you also despise les films de Woody Allen? If you want your red Moleskine notebook back, I suggest you leave instructions in the film of your choice with Amanda at the front desk. Please, no Christmas movies .
    I returned to the front desk. “Are you Amanda?” I asked the clerk girl.
    She looked up, raising an eyebrow. “I am.”
    “May I leave something for someone with you?” I asked. I almost added,