“So?” Edgar said.

Exactly!

Exactly!

Clearly, it was time for Lily to have the kind of boy adventures that would allow her to give legitimate love advice, later in the future.

I might have arrived in Tompkins Square Park with my heart still intent on a Snarl, but right in front of me, I had a real, live Edgar Thibaud.

The secret tactic of a good hard bargainer is to know when to compromise.

For instance.

I will demand a puppy if I am forced to move to Fiji.

But I will set le for a bunny.

eleven

–Dash–

December 27th

So I found myself once again at the Strand.

It hadn’t been a late night—Priya’s parties tended to zzle before the Cinderel a hour, and this was no exception. So a and I stayed together most of the evening, but once we emerged from the bedroom and started to mingle with everyone else, we stopped talking to each other and instead talked as two parts of the larger group. Yohnny and Dov left to see their friend Mat hue slam some poetry, and Thibaud never showed. I might have lingered until So a and I were almost alone again, but Boomer had consumed about thirteen too many cups of Mountain Dew and was threatening to make holes in the ceiling with his head. So a was going to be around until New Year’s, so I said we had to get together, and she said yeah, that’d be good. We left it at that.

Now it was eleven the next morning and I was back in the bookstore, resisting the siren call of the stacks in order to nd and, if necessary, interrogate Mark. I was walking with a lady’s boot under my arm, like some pall bearer for the post-melt Wicked Witch of the West.

The guy at the information desk was thin and blond, bespectacled and tweeded. In other words, not the guy I was looking for.

“Hey,” I said. “Is Mark here?”

The guy barely looked up from the Saramago novel in his lap.

“Oh,” he said, “are you the stalker?”

“I have a question to ask him, that’s all. That hardly makes me a stalker.” Now the guy looked at me. “It depends on the question, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m sure stalkers have questions, too.”

“Yes,” I conceded, “but their questions usually run along the lines of ‘Why won’t you love me?’ and ‘Why can’t I die by your side?’ I’m more along the lines of ‘What can you tell me about this boot?’ ”

“I’m not sure I can help you.”

“This is the information desk, isn’t it? Aren’t you obligated to give me information?” The guy sighed. “Fine. He’s shelving. Now let me finish this chapter, okay?” I thanked him, though not profusely.

The Strand proudly proclaims itself as home to eighteen miles of books. I have no idea how this is calculated. Does one stack all the books on top of each other to get the eighteen miles? Or do you put them end to end, to create a bridge between Manhat an and, say, Short Hills, New Jersey, eighteen miles away? Were there eighteen miles of shelves? No one knew. We all just took the bookstore at its word, because if you couldn’t trust a bookstore, what could you trust?

Whatever the measurement, the applicable fact was that the Strand had lots of aisles to shelve. Which meant that I had to weave in and out of dozens of narrow spaces—dodging disgruntled and pregruntled patrons, ladders, and haphazardly placed book cairns in order to find Mark in the Military History section. He was buckling a lit le under the weight of an illustrated history of the Civil War, but otherwise his appearance and demeanor were similar to that of when we first met.

“Mark!” I said in a tone of holiday camaraderie, as if we were members of the same eating club who had somehow found ourselves in the lobby of the same brothel.

He looked at me for a second, then turned back to the shelf.

“Did you have yourself a merry lit le Christmas?” I continued. “Did you make the yuletide g*y?” He brandished a volume of Winston Churchil ’s memoirs and pointed it accusingly at me. The jowly prime minister stared from the jacket impassively, as if he were the judge of this sudden contest.

“What do you want?” Mark asked. “I’m not going to tell you anything.”

I took the boot from under my arm and placed it on Churchil ’s face.

“Tell me whose boot this is.”

He (Mark, not Churchil ) was surprised by the appearance of footwear—I could tell. And I could also glean from the knowledge he was trying to hide that he knew the identity of its owner.

Still, he was obstinate, in the way that only truly miserable people can be obstinate.

“Why should I tell you?” he asked, with no small amount of petulance.

“If you tell me, I will leave you alone,” I said. “And if you don’t tell me, I am going to grab the nearest ghostwrit en James Pat erson romance novel and I am going to follow you through this store reading it out loud until you relent. Would you prefer me to read from Daphne’s Three Tender Months with Harold or Cindy and John’s House of Everlasting Love? I guarantee, your sanity and your indie street cred won’t last a chapter. And they are very, very short chapters.”

Now I could see the fright beneath the defiance.

“You’re evil,” he said. “You know that?”

I nodded, even though I usually saved the word evil for perpetrators of genocide.

He continued, “And if I tell you, you’ll stop calling and coming by. Even if you don’t like what you find?” That seemed uncharitable to Lily, but I would not let my pique peak.