The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily (Dash & Lily #2)

by Rachel Cohn

It’s always the ones who believe who are hurt the most when things go wrong.

If Lily was the subject on Jeopardy!, the answer would be “She does not understand it at all,” and the question would be “What is the human male species?”

“I’m not sure I follow….” “And I, sir, am not very sure you lead. But no matter.

I wasn’t missing. I was lost.

This is one of those moments when you get to decide who you want to be. It’s like an awkward, uncomfortable growth spurt, but one that ultimately moves you in a definitive direction. Are you going to be someone who takes charge of her feelings and her actions, even if the outcome might hurt, or someone who lets herself be unhappy simply because she won’t ask for what she wants?”

Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether the story’s true or not. What matters is the care that’s been put into the story. The love. If something is pretend, that usually means someone has taken the time to build a story for you to live in. And building stories takes a lot of work. And, yes, there will come a time when you’ll see the story isn’t true. But the

intentions behind it? Completely true. The love behind it? Also true.”

love you, and it’s driving me crazy to see you so upset. I want to fix it, and I know I can’t. But what I want to do is rewrite the whole world so you can fix it. I want to come up with a story that all the world will choose to celebrate, and in it, the people we love will never get sick, and the people we love will never be sad for long, and there would be unlimited frozen hot chocolate. Maybe if it were up to me I wouldn’t have the whole world collectively believe in Santa Claus, but I would definitely have them collectively believe in something, because there is a messed-up kind of beauty in the way we can all bend over backward to make life seem magical when we want to. In other

words, after giving it some thought, I think that reality has the distinct potential to completely suck, and the way to get around that is to step out of reality from time to time and find something a little more enjoyable with someone you completely, unadulteratedly enjoy. In my life, that’s you. And if it takes dressing up like Santa to get that across to you, then so be it.”

“From the time I was a baby, my mom took me to the library at least once a week. Librarians were like Mary Poppins to me. They always knew how to match a book to my mood or to whatever I was going through at the time. I could always find peace in books.”

“And escape?” “Escape, sure. But it wasn’t so much about getting away, as going to.

You

can go anywhere in a book. Books are adventure. Knowledge. P...