Sure enough, as soon as he bounded through the door, he cried, “Hey! You ready to go see Coll ation?” Coll ation was, of course, the new Pixar animated movie about a stapler who falls helplessly in love with a piece of paper, causing all of his other o ce-supply friends to band together to win her over. Oprah Winfrey was the voice of the tape dispenser, and an animated version of Will Ferrel was the janitor who kept get ing in the young lovers’ way.

“Look,” Boomer said, emptying his pockets, “I’ve been get ing Happy Meals for weeks. I have all of them except Lorna the lovable three-hole punch!”

He actually put the plastic toys in my hands so I could examine them.

“Isn’t this the three-hole punch?” I asked.

He slapped his forehead. “Dude, I thought that was the expandable file folder, Frederico!” As fate would have it, Coll ation was playing at the same theater to which I’d sent Lily. So I could keep my playdate with Boomer and still intercept Lily’s next message before any rascals or rapscal ions got to it.

“Where’s your mom?” Boomer asked.

“At her dance class,” I lied. If he’d had any inkling that my parents were out of town, he would’ve been on the horn to his mom so fast that I would’ve been guaranteeing myself a Very Boomer Christmas.

“Did she leave you money? If not, I can probably pay.”

“Don’t you worry, my guileless pal,” I said, put ing my arm around him before he could even take his coat of . “Today, the movie’s on me.” I wasn’t going to tell Boomer about my other errand, but there was no get ing rid of him when I ducked behind Gramma’s cardboard booty to find the loot.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Did you lose your contact lens?”

“No. Someone left something for me here.”

“Ooh!”

Boomer was not a big guy, but he tended to take up a lot of space, because he was always jit ering around. He kept peering over cardboard Gramma’s shoulder, and I was sure it was only a mat er of time before the minimum-wage popcorn staf would evict us.

The red Moleskine was right where I’d left it. There was also a tin at its side.

“This is what I was looking for,” I told Boomer, holding up the journal. He grabbed for the tin.

“Wow,” he said, opening the lid and looking inside. “This must be a special hiding place. How funny is it that someone would leave cookies in the same place that your friend left the notebook?”

“I think the cookies are from her, too.” (This was con rmed by a Post-it on the top of the notebook that read: The cookies are for you.

Merry Xmas! Lily.)

“Really?” he said, picking a cookie out of the tin. “How do you know?”

“I’m just guessing.”

Boomer hesitated. “Shouldn’t your name be on it?” he asked. “I mean, if it’s yours.”

“She doesn’t know my name.”

Boomer immediately put the cookie back in the tin and closed the lid.

“You can’t eat cookies from someone who doesn’t know your name!” he said. “What if there are, like, razor blades inside?” Kids and parents were streaming into the theater, and I knew we’d have front-row seats to Coll ation if we didn’t move a lit le faster.

I showed him the Post-it. “You see? They’re from Lily.”

“Who’s Lily?”

“Who’s Lily?”

“Some girl.”

“Ooh … a girl!”

“Boomer, we’re not in third grade anymore. You don’t say, ‘Ooh … a girl!’ ”

“What? You f**king her?”

“Okay, Boomer, you’re right. I liked ‘Ooh … a girl!’ much more than that. Let’s stick with ‘Ooh … a girl!’ ”

“She go to your school?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Look, we’d bet er get a seat or else there won’t be any seats left.”

“Do you like her?”

“I see someone took his persistence pills this morning. Sure, I like her. But I don’t really know her yet.”

“I don’t do drugs, Dash.”

“I know that, Boomer. It’s an expression. Like put ing on your thinking cap. There isn’t an actual thinking cap.”

“Of course there is,” Boomer said. “Don’t you remember?”

And yes, suddenly I did remember. There were two old ski hats—his blue, mine green—that we’d used as thinking caps back when we were in rst grade. This was the strange thing about Boomer—if I asked him about his teachers up at boarding school this past semester, he’d have already forgot en their names. But he could remember the exact make and color of every single Matchbox car with which we’d ever played.

“Bad example,” I said. “There are definitely such things as thinking caps. I stand corrected.” Once we found our seats (a lit le too much toward the front, but with a nice coat barrier between me and the snot-nosed tyke on my left), we dove into the cookie tin.

“Wow,” I said after eating a chocolate snowflake. “This puts the sweet in Sweet Jesus.” Boomer took bites of all six varieties, contemplating each one and guring out the order in which he would then eat them. “I like the brown one and the lighter brown one and the almost-brown one. I’m not so sure about the minty one. But really, I think the lebkuchen spice one is the best.”