Chapter Text
- one - lily. dec 21.
Imagine this:
You’re in your favorite bookstore, scanning the shelves. You get to the section where a favorite author’s books reside, and there, nestled in comfortably between the incredibly familiar spines, sits a red notebook.
What do you do?
The choice is obvious:
You take down the red notebook and open it.
And then you do whatever it tells you to do.
It’s Christmastime in Hogsmeade, all charm and white snow and happy, hungover students packing out for their winter breaks, and Lily Evans hates every bit of it.
Everything – the forced, manufactured cheer; the cheap decorations in the windows of the student center; the biting winds and slushy wet covering the campus that permeates even her thickest winter boots; the hole burned through her bank account after purchasing some stupid high-end vacuum that her sister Petunia insisted upon for her gift; the same twenty songs that repeat on a loop; the pitch-black sky at 4pm – all of it is absolute, undeniable misery.
Most of all, what she hates, when she manages to leave her dorm to scavenge for ramen noodles and tea bags, are the happy families clustered together. She sees them finishing their holiday shopping and hugging close to fight off the cold and building snowmen on the athletic fields. Every happy child, begrudging teenager, worrying parent fills her with something like indignance.
(And if she digs down deep enough, something painfully, achingly tender. Needless to say, she doesn’t do too much digging.)
The only respite from the absolute misery around her is the bookstore on Main Street in town, Flourish and Blotts. It’s all too easy to duck past the lingering shoppers into the Fiction shelves in the back, where she can wander for hours in search of cheap secondhand editions of her favorite authors’ works. Luckily, most of the students of Hogsmeade College have cleared out of the dorms this weekend, catching their flights and trains back home to families that eagerly await their arrival, so Lily has the shop nearly to herself. She sent off her roommates Mary and Dorcas just a couple hours ago, insisting that she’d be perfectly fine left alone at campus for a couple of weeks – she has some reading to catch up on for next semester anyway.
She told her mom the same thing, two nights before, and pretty convincingly. She bought it easier than the girls, anyway, since they knew that Lily hadn’t even gotten the syllabi for her new classes yet. But Mary and Dor bit their tongues and demanded a group Facetime on Christmas Day, which Lily could happily grant them.
Faced with the abundance of free time awaiting her the next few weeks, Lily wanders around Flourish and Blotts with a bigger stack in hand than she’d normally have. She walks through the F shelves, on the hunt for an elusive edition of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread that would match his other books in her collection, but when she gets to his name, that particular novel is absent from the selection entirely.
What she does spy, however, is a red Moleskine notebook tucked between A Passage to India and A Room with a View.
She scoffs. Surely a misshelving, one she would delight in pointing out to the grumpy store owner. She plucks it from the shelve and is faced with three words scribbled on the front in black Sharpie:
DO YOU DARE…?
Well. Now that’s interesting.
Lily deposits her stack at her feet and opens the front cover.
I’ve left some clues for you.
If you want them, turn the page.
If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.
The handwriting is compact, but messy, as if the person had to concentrate hard on forming each letter. A boy’s, if she had to guess.
She turns the page.
So here we are.
1. Let’s start with Neuropedia.
I don’t really know what it is,
but I’m guessing no one is going to take it off the shelves.
Eric Chudler’s your guy.
88/7/2
88/4/8
Do not turn the page until you fill in the blanks.
__________ __________
Lily balks. She had no idea what any of these things were supposed to mean. She glances around the store, waiting for someone with cameras or a hint of what was going on to jump out at her, but she was alone in the stacks. What she does see, all the way on the other side of the store, is a red sign displaying the Sciences section. Her fingers dust over the edge of the page, wondering what would be the harm in skipping ahead…
But Lily isn’t a quitter. She earned a scholarship to one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges by putting in the work, damnit. She leaves her stack in the F section and takes off for the Sciences.
It isn’t too hard to find Neuropedia: A Brief Compendium of Brain Phenomenons by Eric T. Chudler, but now that she holds the blue book with a bright pink brain on its cover she has no clue what to do with it. She flicks through the pages, hoping for some kind of note or clue to jump out at her, but all she finds are dense neuroscience terms that make her own lit-major brain have a headache.
But her lit-major brain isn’t totally useless. She realizes she’s seen number patterns like the ones in the notebook before, and with a renewed vigor she turns the page 88, scanning the lines till she reaches the 7th, then the 4th, and finding the second and eighth word in each respective line:
DO YOU
Does she what? She turns the pages in the red Moleskine.
Okay, well done.
No cheating: what bugged you about the cover of this book?
Think about it, then turn the page.
Easy. Lily hates that the author used the incorrect plural form of phenomenon–it should be phenomena. It frankly shocks her that a science writer and his whole team of editors didn’t notice. She turns the page.
Pretty weird that every single person involved in printing this book
doesn’t know the word “phenomena”, right?
Lily grins.
If you managed to catch it, please continue.
If not, put the journal back on the shelf
and move on with your grammatically incorrect life.
With an eagerness that surprises her, she turns the page.
2. Café Con Lychee
64/4/9
119/3/8
__________ __________
No author this time. Not helpful.
She takes Neuropedia with her (they’ve grown close; she can’t leave him) and saunters towards the cookbook section. Nothing she can find bears the title Café Con Lychee. In a huff, she walks over to the information desk, where a sandy-haired guy around her age is typing rapidly on a laptop and sipping a Diet Coke through a straw.
“I’m looking for Café Con Lychee ,” she says to him.
He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even look up from the laptop.
“It’s a book. Not a food item.”
Nope. Nothing.
“At the very least, can you tell me the author? Or what section it’s in?”
The boy slurps his Diet Coke loudly. Performatively.
“Are you wearing headphones I can’t see?”
He coughs, and maybe he’s about to say something – no. He’s back to typing on his laptop.
“Do you know me?” Lily persists. “Do we have some long standing beef that I’m unaware of and you’re choosing this moment to enact your sadistic revenge? Edward Mulciber, is that you? You may hate me for dumping my yogurt on you in the second grade, but you were an obnoxious bully who pulled on my hair and flung mud on my face during recess to match my freckles. For little dickheads like you, retribution is fully deserved – ”
“I’m not allowed to disclose the location of Café Con Lychee,” the boy finally says, lifting his eyes to meet hers. “Not to you. Not to anyone. And I’m not Edward Mulciber, but he does sound like he warranted a yogurt to the head.”
“So you know what the deal with this is, then?” Lily says, and holds up the red Moleskine to show him. The boy drops his head and goes back to typing. Lily sighs.
“O-kay,” Lily admits defeat.
She tries googling the title, but Flourish and Blotts has notoriously bad service. The next five minutes she spends getting to know the broader layout of the store even more intimately than before. Two full laps of the store and her legs are begging her to quit, until she sees a cover of two boys surrounded by desserts on a display for LGBTQIA+ Young Adult novels.
And then her feet can’t move quick enough. In a second Café Con Lychee is in front of her, pages turned, lines counted, words read…
SOLEMNLY SWEAR
Lily chuckles despite herself. Whoever left this puzzle is clearly an absolute buffoon. She turns the page eagerly.
Very resourceful.
Now that you’ve found this in the teen section,
I must ask you:
are you a teen?
If so, I’m afraid our journey ends here.
Must be 18+ to ride this ride.
If you’re a Hogsmeade student, even better – we’ve got something in common.
With a tiny shiver, Lily’s mind reels with possibilities – who does she know at her school is silly and clever and dedicated enough to pull this off?
While we’re at it, if you feel uncomfortable holding a gay novel in a bookstore, kindly fuck off and choke.
Lily snorts.
However, if you already own this book,
or would find it relatable to your life,
I am terribly sorry that our time here must come to an end.
This boy can only go boy-girl,
so if you’re into boy-boy, I completely support that,
but I don’t see where I’d fit into the picture.
Now, one last book:
3. Fair-Weather Fires, by Janet Heap
24/5/9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
__________ __________ __________ __________
__________ __________ ?
Lily immediately shifts to the poetry section, excited and admittedly shocked that Notebook Boy knew and referenced Janet Heap. Lily read this exact poetry collection for a seminar her junior year, and each line had pierced something new in her, pricking fresh wounds in her heart and mind.
After a thorough investigation of the poetry Hs, Lily finally finds the slim volume on the highest shelf, with just a corner peeking out. Like the person who left it there wanted it safe. She stretches herself as high as possible to retrieve it and turns breathlessly to page 24.
YOU ARE UP TO NO GOOD ?
Lily lets out an involuntary, “Ha!”
Do you solemnly swear you are up to no good?
What an absolute fucking idiot. She stands there in the aisles, red notebook in one hand, three precariously stacked books in the other, and contemplates the weeks ahead of her. Microwave meals, stoned walks in the snow, and reading until her eyes are sore. It doesn’t sound all too bad to Lily, but maybe…
Maybe it does sound a bit lonely. And definitely rather tame.
Maybe “no good” could do her a bit of good. She turns the page.
So here we are.
Now it’s up to you what we do
(or don’t do).
If you are interested in continuing this conversation,
maybe getting into a spot of mischief here or there (what can I say, it follows me)
please choose a book, any book, and
leave a slip of paper with your email address inside of it.
Give it to Remus at the information desk.
If you ask Remus any questions about me,
he will not pass on your book.
So no questions.
Once you have given your book to Remus,
please return this book to the shelf where you found it.
Do all these things, and you very well
might hear from me.
Just know that I will absolutely be judging your book selection.
Thanks,
Prongs
Suddenly, for the first time all semester, Lily is looking forward to winter break, and even more so, fucking relieved she’s not already halfway to Petunia’s pristinely dusted suburban hell of a home.
Lily doesn’t want to think too hard about what book to choose, or else she’ll end up second and third and fourth guessing herself until Flourish and Blotts kicks her out. She chooses a book rather impulsively and digs something out of the recesses of her bags as she marches over to Remus’s desk.
He glances up as she approaches, and the smile on his face is nearly imperceptible, but it’s there. Lily beams, chest heaving a bit, like she’s won a marathon on a light jog. She steals the pen from his desk, scribbles something down, and hands the book over without a word. He nods and puts it in a drawer.
And as for the notebook…well, what would be the fun in putting it back on the shelf? Leave it for someone else to blunder through after that puzzle was hers for the besting? No. Lily slips the Moleskine into her tote bag and takes Neuropedia and Café Con Lychee to the register.
Two, she decides, can play this game.