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 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 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 totally 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 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 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 figured, you know, we started that whole red notebook thing for you. We have kismet together.”
“And you really missed each other! And hopefully 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 in Puerto Rico. No babysit ing you and your hijinks.”
“Gross. And you never babysat me.”
“I know. And believe me, I’ll 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 still 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 really 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 figment 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 really 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, of 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 figures into the picture. How you fit 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 all 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 first love.
“In some ways, I think I’ll 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 evolve, and vice versa. The important people in our lives leave imprints. They may stay or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart. There’s no get ing over that.” My heart undoubtedly wanted to embrace and/or be trampled upon by Dash. That much was sure. The risk would have to discover its own reward.