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

isn’t even a pole at the North Pole, and if global warming continues, there won’t be any ice, either.”
    “Why don’t you just fuck off?” the woman replied. Then she took her mittens and got out of there.
    This was the miracle of the season, the way it put the fuck off so loud in our hearts. You could snap at strangers, or snap at the people closest to you. It could be a fuck off for a slight reason— You took my parking space or You questioned my choice of mittens or I spent sixteen hours tracking down the golf club you wanted and you gave me a McDonald’s gift certificate in return . Or it could bring out the fuck off that’d been lying in wait for years. You always insist on cutting the turkey even though I’m the one who spent hours cooking it or I can’t spend one more holiday pretending to be in love with you or You want me to inherit your love for booze and women, in that order, but you’re more of a role anti-model than a father .
    This was why I shouldn’t have been allowed in Macy’s. Because when you turn a short span of time into a “season,” you create an echo chamber for all of its associations. Once you step in, it’s hard to escape.
    I started shaking hands with all the reindeer mittens, certain that Lily had hidden something inside one of them. Sure enough, the fifth shake brought a crumple. I pulled out the slip of paper.
6. I left something under the pillow for you .
    Next stop: bedding. Personally, I preferred the word bedding when it was a verb, not a noun. Can you show me the bedding section? could not compare to Are you bedding me? Seriously, are we going to bed each other? In truth, I knew these sentences worked better in my head than anywhere else—Sofia never really understood what I was saying, although I usually chalked that up to her not being a native speaker. I even encouraged her to throw some obscure Spanish wordplay my way, but shenever knew what I was talking about when I talked about that, either.
    She was pretty, though. Like a flower. I missed that.
    When I got to the bedding section, I wondered if Lily appreciated how many beds there were for me to probe. They could house a whole orphanage in here, with a few extra beds for the nuns to fool around in. ( Pull my wimple! PULL MY WIMPLE! ) The only way I was going to be able to do this was to divide the floor into quadrants and move clockwise from north.
    The first bed was a paisley print with four pillows propped up on it. I immediately launched my hand underneath them, looking for the next note.
    “Sir? Can I help you?”
    I turned and saw a bed salesman, his look half amused and half alarmed. He looked a lot like Barney Rubble, only with the remnants of a spray tan that would have been unavailable in the prehistoric age. I sympathized. Not because of the spray tan—I’d never do shit like that—but because I figured being a bed salesman was a job of biblically bad paradox. I mean, here he was, forced to stand for eight or nine hours a day, and the whole time he’s surrounded by beds. And not only that, he’s surrounded by shoppers who see the beds and can’t help but think, Man, I’d love to lie down on that bed for a second . So not only does he have to stop himself from lying down, but he has to stop everyone else from doing it, too. I knew if I were him, I would be desperate for human company. So I decided to take him into my confidence.
    “I’m looking for something,” I said. I glanced at his ring finger. Bingo. “You’re a married man, right?”
    He nodded.
    “Well, here’s the thing,” I said. “My mother? She was looking at bedding and she totally dropped her shopping list under one of the pillows. So now she’s upstairs in cutlery, upset that she can’t remember what to get anyone, and my dad is about to blow his last fuse, because he likes shopping about as much as he likes terrorism and the estate tax. So he sent me down here to find the list, and if I don’t find it quick, there’s