by Rachel Cohn
Focus on an object and keep your attention there.
In order to find this suggestion, I had to focus on my phone. I doubted that counted. My phone responded by telling me I only had 10% of my battery left.
Quickly, I turned off the screen. Then I turned it back on so I could text Lily and Gem:
I’ve gone for a walk. Need some air. Don’t worry about me.
My phone must have been as exhausted as I was, because as soon as the message sent, the screen went black.
I cursed for a moment, then looked up and realized I’d managed to get pretty deep into the park without having any sense of where I was.
I cursed some more.
It wasn’t that late, but the park was dark and there wasn’t anyone else on the paths. The city provided a borealis to outline the uppermost trees with a hint of life outside the tree-shrouds but nothing I could use as a compass point. Instinctively, I took out my phone to check the map—then remembered, put it back in my pocket, and cursed at a near-epic level.
You’re lost, my body told me.
And it meant: You have no idea what you’re doing with your life.
There—there it was. The sentence that had been taunting me the whole semester. The sentence that hummed in the background every time I spoke to Lily back in New York. The sentence that had made me blink and blink and blink when the future tried to look me in the eye.
“I have no idea what I’m doing with my life,” I murmured.
Yes, that was it.
It wasn’t a relief to say it. It was scary as hell.
I said it again. Then I screamed it out into the foliated darkness.
“I have no idea what I’m doing with my life!”
To which a voice I’d never heard before replied:
“Join the club.”
five
December 21st
Dear Father Christmas …
I didn’t know what to say to British Santa. Would he expect proper English grammar, which I’m terrible at? Should I use Ss instead of Zs, like cosy instead of cozy? Should I end sentences with innit?
I hadn’t written a letter to Santa since I was a kid.
My mother said that last letter I’d written was more of a manifesto, good enough to retire my Santa letter campaigns thereafter. I’d criticized—sorry, criticised—him strongly then, so perhaps he wasn’t eager to hear from old Lily again after all these years.
Dear Santa,
My name is Lily and I’m nine years old. I think it’s wrong that you use reindeer to make your sleigh go. Have you ever seen the horse-drawn carriages that give rides to tourists around Central Park? They make me so mad. The horses are forced to wait outside no matter how bad the weather is. They get rained on, and snowed on, and cars and buses cough fumes on them. They get a lot of rude customers who don’t know anything about how to treat horses. Also, the horses don’t get paid. Feeding them carrot treats is not compensation and I know this for a fact because I asked my great-aunt’s lawyer who represents the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission. Neigh, the horses do not get anything!
So, I gathered 28 signatures in Tompkins Square Park for my petition to ban horse carriage riding in Central Park. I’ll let you know if I’m successful. I am considering creating another petition to ban your sleigh rides. I’m already unpopular at school so don’t worry that this new petition will cause me to lose friends.
I’m sure you’re nice to the reindeers who work for you, but I’m also sure that if the reindeer were free to make their own choices, they’d choose to run around the North Pole having fun instead of transporting a fat man around the world.
If you want to know what I want for Christmas, it’s for you to treat animals the same way you’d want them to treat you, whether you’ve been naughty or nice.
Yours sincerely,
Lily
PS—I would also like a unicorn magic glow lamp.
PPS—What kind of cookies do you like?
“I don’t feel like writing a letter to Father Christmas,” I told Mark. He’d said we should compose our letters while we waited for Dash to return to Keats House, since Dash had made it clear that he really, really did not want to participate in the letter-writing part of the game.
“Me neither,” said Gem. “I’m rather concerned about Dash. He left so suddenly. You know him best, Lily. Should I be worried?”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I told her.
I wasn’t so sure.
Dash gets weird when he’s anxious. Had me showing up here unannounced spurred his very rude behavior, or was it also about his state of Oxford unease? I didn’t know whether to be furious or concerned. Mostly, I felt stupid. What I thought had been a romantic gesture in that day’s Advent calendar gift to him had been a complete waste—and apparently me showing up in London was not Dash’s favorite romantic surprise either, based on him abandoning me almost as soon as he’d found me.
Mark said, “Clearly Oxford didn’t improve Dash’s manners. Pretty rude to just walk out with no warning and no explanation.”
Gem said, “He’s not rude. He’s quirky.”
I wanted to know if Gem had noticed quirky-rude Dash having anxiety issues when he visited her in London. I asked her, “What do you guys usually do when he visits you in London? Or is he usually too busy studying when he’s at your house?”
“We have the most marvelous time!” Gem enthused. “We go to museums, bookstores, concerts. He’s a delight. As you know.” Mark scoffed. “Although it was a challenge to get him to leave the house for this adventure, I admit. He seemed so tired. Probably just exhaustion from the end of term.”
“Probably,” I said, starting to feel less furious and more concerned. I wished Dash would share with me whatever he was going through rather than just run away from it. Tired sounded to me like another word for depressed.
My phone rang with a FaceTime call, and while it wasn’t the person I most wanted reassurance from—Dash—it was that other person I wanted reassurance from—my brother, Langston. I stepped outside the museum to take the call on the street.
“How’s my dog?” I asked Langston as his face appeared on my phone, in the living room at our parents’ apartment. Langston lived in Hoboken with his boyfriend, but he was staying at our parents’ while I was away to cover my job. Boris must have heard my voice, because all of a sudden he bounded into the room and then the picture went insane, as Boris charged my brother, and Langston’s phone went flying. Boris in New York barked so loudly that the passersby on the street in Hampstead, London, looked at me with concern, as if wondering where this invisible monster was coming from.
Langston finally grabbed hold of the phone, and he put the picture onto Boris. “Down, Boris. DOWN!” Boris kept barking, looking as if he was about to charge my brother again.
I chimed in. “Down, Boris.” Boris sat down, but his tail wagged furiously.
“He’s going to pummel me again,” said Langston. My brother weighs about 130 pounds, and so does Boris.
“No, he’s not,” I said. “Boris, settle down.”
Boris stood up, and the camera followed him walking to his blanket, where he lay down and whimpered. Langston turned the camera back onto himself.
“I think the brute misses you,” Langston said.
“How are my other dogs?”
“They’re fine.” He paused. “I forgot to give Sadie her medication today. I wanted you to hear it from me. In case the doorman reports back to you. But—”
“Sadie the Pomeranian or Sadie the Chow Chow?”
“Sadie the Pomeranian. But—”
“Her medication is homeopathic and it’s really just for her owner’s anxiety about being away. It’s fine.” I was annoyed. I’d left such specific instructions. If it had been the other Sadie, it would have been a huge problem. “But Sadie the Chow Chow—”
“—is diabetic, I know. I didn’t forget her medication. And what I was trying to say was I remembered about Sadie the Pomeranian before
I returned home, so I went back and made sure she got her CBD.”
He waited for me to respond but I didn’t say anything. “You’re welcome,” Langston finally said.
I was supposed to thank him? Langston was making more money covering for me for one week than he made in a month working part-time at Trader Joe’s. He should be thanking me. This windfall would allow him to take off in January to focus on studying for his master’s degree comp exams.
“Where’s Mom and Dad?” I asked him.
“They’re uptown visiting Grandpa. Then having dinner with Professor Garvey while they’re in Morningside Heights.”
I sighed. Professor Garvey taught in the English department at Barnard. She was an acquaintance of my mother’s, who couldn’t wait for me to be Professor Garvey’s student next year.
“Don’t look so panicked, Lily. I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad haven’t chosen all your freshman courses. Yet. How’s London? How’s Dash? Was he surprised?”
“I guess?” I said. I’d put too much anticipation into the big surprise. The actual moment had been a big nothing. I was an idiot for having invested so much emotional energy in it. “He seems off. Stressed.”
“I worried it was a bad idea to surprise him. Freshman year is hard enough, and Dash had to adjust to a whole new country, too. Now you’re there and he probably feels pressure to entertain you when maybe he just needed to decompress during the holiday.”
“He’s glad I’m here,” I assured Langston, as much as I tried to reassure myself. We just had to realign to these new versions of ourselves, Dash as the going-to-school-abroad, Oxford version of himself, and me as the gap-year, entrepreneur version of myself.
But our coupled version of ourselves was still solid. I didn’t doubt that, and I doubted so much. Whether I was meant to go to college as my parents wanted. Whether Dash really belonged at Oxford. Whether the island of Manhattan could survive the rising sea level caused by climate change. Whether good pizza could be found in London, as Dash insisted. But I never, ever doubted Dash & Lily. And not because I was young and naïve, as my parents sometimes said when I expressed confidence in my relationship with my boyfriend.
What can I say? My heart only wanted Dash. It was that simple.
Mark and Gem emerged from the museum, looking for me. I told my brother to hold on.
“We’re hungry,” Mark said.
“How about that Indian place around the corner,” said Gem. “Join us after your call?”
I said, “Do you mind if I don’t? I’d love to wander around London a little. I’ll meet you back at your flat later, okay, Mark?” If Dash could just sprint off into nowhere, why shouldn’t I? The thought of exploring the city alone at night was intimidating—but so was the thought of hanging out with Dash’s grandmother without him there, and pretending to like whatever undoubtedly terrible restaurant she’d chosen.
Gem asked, “Is this a generational thing? Abandoning your elders on a literary treasure hunt?” She laughed at her own joke. I didn’t.
Mark grimaced at me. “I don’t like leaving you on your own in the dark, in a strange city.”
“That’s when the fun starts,” Gem said.
“Lily will be fine,” Langston called out from my phone. “She’ll probably have a pack of dogs following her and protecting her within minutes.”
“That’s true,” said Mark. He looked at me like he thought he was my dad or Grandpa. “You’ll be okay on your own?”
“Yes,” I sighed.
Mark said, “If you’re not back at the flat by midnight, I’ll be calling Interpol to look for you.”
Gem said, “I spent a marvelous weekend in Mallorca with them a few years ago. They so needed a break from Morrissey by that point in their tour.”
If I’d learned anything from Dash, it was that Interpol was an international police organization as well as the name of a band, and that while Morrissey was a gifted singer and delightfully macabre songwriter, he’d also become an unfortunate right-wing nutter in his later years. No wonder Interpol needed a break from him. As Dash put it about Morrissey, “There’s a light. It went out.”
“Bye, guys,” I said to Gem and Mark. I returned to my call with Langston. “Where should I go?”
“Where are you now?”
“Hampstead Heath.”
“Benny and I went to a great pub in Hampstead last summer. I’ll send you a link. Enjoy a pint for me!”
A pub in a strange country was about the last place I wanted to go. I felt anxious and unsettled. However, a pub might be just the place where everyone else felt the same, only happier, because of the beer. I’d pass on the beer but eagerly seek the jolly.
The pub Langston suggested, the Holly Bush, was about a fifteen-minute walk from Keats House, through the center of Hampstead, then up a steep side street. The pub was a series of oaken rooms with stained-glass windows, colorfully wallpapered walls hung with gold-framed artwork, and dark wood furnishings that looked lifted directly out of a Dickens novel. I immediately loved the place, but it was crowded, and I indeed felt intimidated. Then I heard a voice call to me from a cozy—sorry, cosy—corner with a fireplace. “Lily!”
I walked over. It was Azra Khatun, sitting by the hearth, drinking a hot chocolate and reading a book. She said, “Now you’ve found me in two of my favorite London places—Daunt Books and the Holly Bush. We must be fated to be friends.”
“How can you read here?” I almost shouted. “It’s so noisy!”
“I love the noise. I find it relaxing. So much jolly! Olivier hates it. Please, sit down and join me.” I sat down next to her by the fire. “Olivier left not long ago, but I wanted a hot chocolate, so I stayed.”
“I’m hungry. Is the food here good? Everything here looks so meaty.” Everyone I’d passed in the pub seemed to be eating some sort of game. “I’m vegetarian.”
“I eat only halal foods so I haven’t had most of the things on the dinner menu. But for dessert, I can recommend the sticky toffee pudding.”
I approve of people who skip dinner to go directly to dessert. “I’ve never had that. It sounds both disgusting and amazing. My favorite kind of dessert.”
“You’ll love it. I’ll get us one.” She stepped away to the bar to place our order. When she returned, she settled comfortably into her chair, like she was ready for a long fireside chat. “So how long have you and Dash been together?”
“Two years.”
“Same with me and Olivier. We met at college.”
I was confused. “How could you have met him two years ago at college if you just started at Oxford this year?”
She looked confused for a moment too. Then she said, “I forgot, I had to explain this to my cousin in America too. In England, college is where you go after GCSE exams, which are like the end of our version of high school. After GCSEs, if you want to continue on to university, you go to college for two years to prepare. It’s like Year Eleven and Year Twelve for Americans.”
That made more sense. “Did you and Olivier always plan to go to Oxford together, or did it just work out that way?”
Dash and I hadn’t really made a plan our senior year, other than that we’d both apply to schools in the NYC area. And now neither of us went to school in NYC. Maybe we should have made a better plan.
“It just worked out that way. To be honest …” Her voice trailed off.
I tried to help her out. “Maybe going to university together is a bit much?”
Azra laughed. Because her emerald-green head scarf covered her hair and neck, her pretty face appeared even more vibrant, uninterrupted. “Maybe,” she admitted. “I don’t know … My parents say—”
“You’re too young to be in a committed relationship?”
“Yes!”
“I call it the whisper campaign,” I said. “To my boyfriend’s face, my parents are warm and welcoming. Behind his back, they’re whispering to me that—”
“—You need to see other people.”
�
��That’s the exact whisper campaign slogan!”
Azra said, “Of course, in my parents’ case, they mean they’d prefer me to date someone Muslim.”
“But they’re okay with Olivier?”
“They don’t love me dating someone Anglican. But I think that’s more because they don’t really like Olivier than because he’s not Muslim. What about your Dash? How has it been, living so far apart?”
“Not my favorite,” I admitted. “But I’ve been so busy that in some ways, it’s nice not having the distraction of him around. I don’t think I ever would have gotten my dog crafts site going if he was around.” Then I remembered something Olivier had said at the bookstore. “Did you really not believe Dash had a girlfriend back in New York?”
“I mean …” She paused, like she was trying to think of a nice way to say what she was going to say. “He seems like a loner. Kind of morose? Not that he’s unattractive, of course. He’s quite handsome, actually.” I nodded, like, I know. “I guess we didn’t think of him as someone who wanted a relationship, except with books.”
I didn’t think she meant the observation as an insult and I didn’t take it as one. I couldn’t be sour, anyway, not when the sticky toffee pudding concoction arrived at the table between our fireside chairs. It was a sponge cake moistened with warm toffee sauce, with a heap of vanilla ice cream melting off its side. It was so good I was ready to move to England immediately.
“I want to marry this cake,” I said. “Sorry, Dash.”
“Me too. Sorry, Olivier.” I took out my phone to see if there was a message from Dash. There wasn’t. Azra must have thought I’d reached for my phone to take a photo. She asked, “Are you one of those people who posts everything they eat?”
“No. I only post dogs or dog-related items. And I’m taking a social media break while I’m here.” I felt a little drunk off the smell of everyone else’s beers and cheers and the sweetness of the pudding and the warmth of the fire and of Azra. As if I were revealing a big secret, I leaned in and said, “But I’m not going to be one of those people who announces they’re taking a social media break. I’m just doing it.”
