Dash & Lily's Book of Dares (24 page)

“No, really,” I said. “I think she’s great. And I honestly like her about twenty times more now than I did when we were dating. But love needs to have a future. And Sofia and I don’t have a future. We’ve just had a good time sharing the present, that’s all.”

“You really think love needs to have a future?”

“Absolutely.”

“Good,” Lily said. “So do I.”

“Good,” I echoed, leaning in. “So do you.”

“Don’t repeat what I say,” she told me, swatting at my arm.

“Don’t repeat what I say,” I murmured, smiling.

“You’re being silly,” she said, but the silliness was falling out of her voice.

“
You’re
being silly,” I assured her.

“Lily is the greatest girl who ever was.”

I drew closer.
“Lily is the greatest girl who ever was.”

For a moment, I think we’d forgotten where we were.

And then the officers returned, and we were reminded once again.

“Well,” said Officer White, who was black, “you’ll be happy to know that the videos of your exploits this afternoon have already garnered two hundred thousand hits on YouTube. And you were captured at pretty much every angle possible—it’s impressive that the statue of George Washington didn’t whip out an iPhone and email the photos to his friends.”

“We’ve looked at all the footage closely,” said Officer Black, who was white, “and have come to the conclusion that there’s only one guilty party in this room.”

“I know, sir,” I stepped in. “It was all my fault. Really, she had nothing to do with it.”

“No, no, no,” Lily disagreed. “I was the one who hung that poster. It was a joke. But that made the mommies go a little crazy.”

“Seriously,” I said, turning to Lily, “you did nothing but help. It’s me they wanted.”

“No, I’m the one they thought was stealing the baby. And believe me, I don’t even
want
a baby.”

“Neither of you is to blame,” Officer White interrupted.

Officer Black pointed her finger at Boris. “If there’s anyone at fault, it’s the one on all fours.”

Boris shuffled back guiltily.

Officer White looked at me. “As for Johnny One-Eye, we can’t find anything actually wrong with him. So even if you happened to hit him with a snowball in the middle of a snowball fight—and I’m not saying you did or didn’t—no harm, no foul.”

“Does that mean we’re free to go?” Lily asked.

Officer Black nodded. “You’ve got quite a posse waiting for you outside.”

Officer Black wasn’t kidding. Boomer was there with not only Yohnny and Dov but Sofia and Priya as well. And it looked like Lily’s whole family was waiting in the wings, presided over by Mrs. Basil E.

“Take a look!” Boomer said, holding up two printouts, one from the
Post
website, one from the
Daily News
.

Both had a dazzling photo of the baby falling into Lily’s arms.

OUR HERO!
shouted the
Daily News
.

BABY STEALER!
cried the
Post
.

“There are reporters outside,” Mrs. Basil E. informed us. “Most of them quite indecent.”

Officer Black turned to us.

“Well, then—do you want to be celebrities or not?”

Lily and I looked at each other.

The answer was pretty clear.

“Not,” I said.

“Definitely not,” Lily added.

“The back door it is, then!” Officer Black said. “Follow me.”

With the crowds that had come to fetch us, Lily and I lost
each other in the shuffle. Sofia was asking if I was okay, Boomer was enthusing that Lily and I had finally met, and the rest were just taking it all in.

We didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. The doors opened and the police told us to move quickly, because the reporters would catch on quick.

She went her way with her people, and I went my way with mine.

I felt a weight in my pocket.

Sly girl, she’d slipped me the notebook.

eighteen
(Lily)

December 30th

The news of the world travels fast and far. Even to Fiji.

They didn’t know it, but I was intermittently muting my computer speakers while my parents ranted from their side of our video chat. Occasionally I’d click the speakers back on to hear snippets of their tirade:

“How are we supposed to trust you on your own, Lily, if—”

Mute.

Their hands flailed madly about from across the world while my hands concentrated on my new knitting project.

“Who is this Dash? Does Grandpa know about—”

Mute.

I watched as Mom and Dad furiously tried to pack luggage while yelling at their computer.

“We’re late for our flight! We’ll be lucky to make it. Do you know how many calls we’ve—”

Mute.

Dad appeared to be yelling at his cell phone for ringing again. Mom peered into the computer screen.

“
Where
has Langston been all this time—”

Mute.

I continued working on my newest creation: a pin-striped, jail-uniform-themed doggy sweater for Boris. I looked up to see Mom’s index finger wagging at me.

Un-mute.

“And one more thing, Lily!” Mom’s face peered as close as she possibly could to her computer screen. I’d never noticed before, but she had truly excellent pores, which could only bode well for my own aging process.

“Yes, Mommy?” I asked as Dad sat on their hotel bed behind her, flailing his arms around again, explaining the situation again to someone calling his phone again.

“That was a marvelous catch, darling.”

Grandpa was driving through Delaware (the toll capital of the highway world, he says) when Mr. Borscht called his cell to tell him about the headline, followed by calls from scandalized Messrs. Curry and Cannoli. First Grandpa almost had a heart attack while driving. Then he went to McDonald’s for a Big Mac to calm himself down. Then he called Langston and yelled at him for allowing me to become a jailbird and an international celebrity in the few hours since Langston was supposed to be in charge after Grandpa left back for Florida. Grandpa then turned around and returned to Manhattan, arriving home just in time for Langston and Mrs. Basil E. to bring me home from the police station.

“You’re grounded until your parents get home to take care
of this mess!” Grandpa screeched at me. He pointed at poor little Boris. “And keep that terror dog away from my cat upstairs!” Boris barked loudly and appeared poised to topple Grandpa, too.

“Sit, Boris,” I told the beast.

Boris plopped down onto the floor and placed his head across my feet. He hissed a low growl in Grandpa’s direction.

“I don’t think Boris and I agree about being grounded,” I told Grandpa.

“This is nonsense, Arthur,” Mrs. Basil E. chimed in. “Lily didn’t do anything wrong. It was all a big misunderstanding. She saved a baby! It’s not like she stole a car and went out joyriding.”

“It’s common knowledge that no good comes to a young lady appearing on the cover of the
New York Post
!” Grandpa bellowed. He pointed at me. “Grounded!”

“Go to your room, Lily bear,” Mrs. Basil E. whispered in my ear. “I’ll take care of this from here. Take that pony with you.”

“Please don’t tell Grandpa about Dash,” I whispered back.

“Can’t keep a lid on that one,” she said aloud.

The upshot of all the parental and grandparental hysteria was that I did not technically get grounded. Instead, I was told, most affirmatively, to lay low until Mom and Dad got home from Fiji on New Year’s Day. It was
recommended
that I stay home and chill for the time being.

Not that I wanted to anyway, but I’ve been instructed I’m not allowed to talk to the press, all my trash must go through a shredder, I’m not to plan how I’d look on the cover of
People
magazine (an exclusive, which could potentially pay for my
whole college education in one fell swoop), and if Oprah calls, she talks to my mom first, and not to me. Quite frankly, the family are all hoping some celebrity dies or is exposed in a tawdry scandal ASAP so the tabloids can move on from Lily Dogwalker.

For my own emotional well-being it has been suggested that I not Google myself.

There aren’t many people you can trust in this world who aren’t related to you, according to the familial overseers. Better to stay within your own family’s tender bosom till all this blows over.

What I know for certain is: You can always trust a dog.

Boris liked Dash.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat animals. Dash never hesitated to grab for Boris’s leash when crisis struck. He’s one stand-up (or sat-upon, in the case of the crimson alert mommies) kind of dude, for sure.

Boomer, who’s rather like a dog, also likes Dash.

Dog instincts are always right.

Dash must be very likable.

There are just lots of possibilities in the world, I’ve decided. Dash. Boris. I need to keep my mind open for what could happen and not decide that the world is hopeless if what I want to happen doesn’t happen. Because something else great might happen in between.

The verdict on Boris, therefore, is unequivocal: He’s a keeper.

Boris’s owner, my cousin Mark’s co-worker Marc from the Strand, had been illegally harboring Boris at his own studio apartment, in a no-pets building. He’d been able to get away with it before, because his building was run by an off-site
management company with no super or owner living there, but now that Boris is so famous (according to a
New York Post
online poll, 64 percent of respondents think Boris is a menace to society, 31 percent think he’s an unwitting victim of his own strength, and 5 percent think Boris should meet his maker in an unmentionable way), Marc obviously can’t bring Boris “home.”

That’s okay, because I’ve made the executive decision that my home is now Boris’s home. In the less than twenty-four hours since he’s been under my care, Boris has learned to Sit, to Heel, to Not Beg for Food at the Dinner Table, and to Drop It (meaning Grandpa’s shoes about to be chewed to oblivion). Clearly the problem all along was that Boris’s owner was not giving him the proper attention and guidance he needed to flourish and become an upstanding member of society. Also, according to the Internet, Marc was not a reliable pooper-scooper and only used Boris as a pawn to meet girls. More disturbingly, Marc has texted me several times that he doesn’t mind me keeping Boris as long as I want. That’s one high-maintenance dog. Obviously Marc never deserved Boris to begin with.

Boris and I spent a night at the jailhouse together. We are bonded for eternity. Well, we spent a few hours in an interrogation room at the police precinct together, with an extremely cute boy. Close enough. Boris’s home is with me now, and Mom and Dad and everyone else will just have to get used to that. Family takes care of family, and Boris is family now.

My crisis management team turned out to be Alice Gamble, along with Heather Wong and Nikesha Johnson, two other girls from my soccer team.

As we hung out in my room, Alice said, “So, Lily. Even
though we’ve known you for a long time, we’ve never, like, really gotten to
know
you, know you, right? So since your grandpa invited us over for this slumber party to keep you from going outside—”

“The slumber party was my idea,” I interrupted. “Grandpa just had conveniently hidden my phone before I had a chance to ask you myself.”

“Where’d you find your phone?” Alice asked.

“The cookie jar. So. Obvious. It’s like he wasn’t even trying.”

Alice smiled. “The girls and I, we conjured up something sweet for you, too.” She sat over my laptop and called up a video clip on YouTube. “Since you’re not available to the media to defend yourself, we decided your soccer could do it for you.”

“Huh?” I said.

Nikesha said, “You’re a mad good goalie! And who but a mad good goalie could make a baby catch like that? A goalie catches babies by natural instinct. Not because they’re trying to steal it! They’re trying to save it.”

Heather said, “Behold,” and started the YouTube video.

And there it was. To the tune of “Stop,” by the Spice Girls, my teammates had assembled a series of photos and video clips showing me in soccer goalie motion—running, grunting, kicking, leaping, jumping, soaring.

I had no idea I was that good a player.

I had no idea my teammates had ever noticed, or cared.

Maybe I’d never bothered to think of them as my teammates before. Maybe I myself had been the biggest part of the friendship impasse.

There’s no
i
in
team
, as the saying goes.

When the clip ended, the girls wrapped me in a victory
huddle in my bedroom such as we’d never shared together on the field. I couldn’t help it. I was crying—not a full-on embarrassing sobfest, but silly yet profound tears of joy and gratitude.

“Wow, guys. Thank you” was all I could blubber to say.

“We chose the ‘Stop’ song because that’s what you do—stop the other team from scoring,” Heather said. “Just like you stopped that baby from hitting the pavement.”

Nikesha said, “And as a Beckham homage, too.”

“Obvs,” Alice and I both said.

Heather said, “If you read the comments—I mean, there are 845 of them so far, so maybe don’t. But I perused them when we first put this up to defend your good name, and, Lily, you totally already have five proposals of marriage in there, at least until I stopped reading. I mean, 95,223 views—no, just jumped to 95,225 as of this second. I could only read so many of the marriage offers and other indecent proposals. There are a few college recruiters who posted that you should try out for their teams, too.”

Boris barked approvingly from his new dog bed at the corner of my room.

December 31st

“Benny and I are back together,” Langston announced over lunch. The slumber party girls had all gone home to prepare for their own New Year’s Eve celebrations, and Grandpa was upstairs negotiating on the phone with Mabel to forsake Miami to visit him in New York—in
January
!—so he wouldn’t have to drive down to Florida again, return to New York
again, turn around back to Florida again, then return to New York again, all within a matter of days.