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 al along was that Boris’s owner was not giving him the proper at ention and guidance he needed to

ourish 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. Wel , 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 wil 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, real y got en 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 nd 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 cal ed 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 eld. I couldn’t help it.

I was crying—not a ful -on embarrassing sobfest, but sil y yet profound tears of joy and gratitude.

“Wow, guys. Thank you” was al 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

hit ing 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 rst put this up to

defend your good name, and, Lily, you total y already have ve 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 o ers and other indecent proposals. There are a few

col ege 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 al 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, al

within a mat er of days.

Men just can’t make up their minds about what they want.

“A couple of days apart was just too much for you and Benny?” I asked my brother.

“That, yes. But also, we gured, you know, we started that whole red notebook thing for you. We have kismet together.”

“And you real y missed each other! And hopeful y decided to just admit that and see each other exclusively?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Langston said. “Let’s just say Benny and I have a behind-closed-doors Skype date for New Year’s Eve tonight while he’s

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Langston said. “Let’s just say Benny and I have a behind-closed-doors Skype date for New Year’s Eve tonight while he’s

in Puerto Rico. No babysit ing you and your hijinks.”

“Gross. And you never babysat me.”

“I know. And believe me, I’l be blamed for everything that’s happened for the rest of my life.”

“Thanks for doing a terrible job being in charge, Brother. I had a blast.” Something about the red notebook’s origins stil bothered me, though.

“Langston?” I asked.

“Yes, Lily celebrity-bear? Oh, Celebri-bear! That’s going to be my new name for you.”

I ignored that last bit. “What if it’s real y you he likes?”

“Who? What do you mean?”

“Dash. Finding the red notebook. That was your idea. I wrote the rst messages in my own handwriting, but the words and ideas were yours.

Maybe the person Dash asked out for New Year’s Eve is based on some gment of his imagination that you created?”

“So what if it is? You kept on with the notebook. You continued the adventure. And look what it turned into! I coughed away in my bedroom

and mistakenly broke up with my boyfriend. You went out and made your own destiny with that notebook!”

He didn’t get it.

“But, Langston. What if … Dash ends up not real y liking me? Me-me, not his idea of me.”

“So what if he doesn’t?”

I’d been expecting my brother to jump to my defense and proclaim his certainty in Dash’s certain liking of me. “What?” I said, o ended.

“I mean, if Dash doesn’t like you once he gets to know you, so what?”

“I don’t know if I want to take that risk.” Get hurt. Be rejected. Like Langston once was.

“The reward is in the risk. You can’t stay hidden inside Grandpa’s overprotective cloak forever. You’ve seemed like you needed to grow out of

that for a while. Mom and Dad going away, and the red notebook, these things just helped. Now it’s up to you to gure out how Dash gures into

the picture. How you t into this picture. Take the risk.”

I wanted so badly to believe, but the fear felt as great and overwhelming as the desire. “What if this al has been a dream? What if we’re just

wasting each other’s time?”

“How can you know if you don’t try?” Langston then quoted the poet he’d been named after, Langston Hughes. “ ‘A dream deferred is a dream

denied.’ ”

“Are you over him?” I asked.

We both knew the him I referred to was not Benny, but the him who broke Langston’s heart so devastatingly. Langston’s rst love.

“In some ways, I think I’l never be over him,” Langston said.

“That is such an unsatisfying answer.”

“That’s because you’re interpreting it the wrong way. I don’t mean it as a wistful, overdramatic declaration. I meant that the love I felt for him

was huge and real, and, while painful, it forever changed me as a person, in the same way that being your brother re ects and changes how I