The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily(20)

This was the time for Lily to bail, oh-bee-vee-ess. Obvs, I really missed my phone. And home. And Mommy. But then Miss said, “Want to taste Magic Mike?”

“Um, yes,” said Jahna.

Miss winked at me. “This one’s the special batch.”

I took a bite of Magic Mike, and, man, was that boy delicious. He tasted a little different than I expected.

“What’s the special ingredient?” I asked.

“Right?” Miss said again.

Jahna probably knew what the special ingredient was, but Lily didn’t. Jahna nodded knowingly again and said “Awesome” again.

I ate the cookie, and it was so good I had to have another, and then one more.

And then I was so relaxed and happy, I forgot the desire to leave. Suddenly I was really hungry for more pizza, and maybe some brownies, and it seemed to me that Elsa and Anna were really reaching their full artistic potential in Miss’s gingerbread cookie drawings, and who was Jahna to deny them because Lily was such a Disney-loving virgin prude?

Jahna went to work.



Wednesday, December 17th

Jahna woke up on the futon when the sun burst through a hole in the papered windows of the store work space, but it was Lily who saw the clock on the wall and panicked. 11:15 a.m. FUDGE, FUDGE, FUDGE!

Miss was asleep on the floor.

I had no memory of falling asleep last night and no time to find out why I never made it home.

I bolted out the door and ran all the way to the ferry terminal. Knowing the level of crisis, I didn’t even stop for a bagel. I didn’t know what I feared more—how much trouble I was going to be in or that my family had gone totally Home Alone and hadn’t even noticed I was gone.

The answer to both questions was on a TV monitor in the ferry waiting area. The TV was tuned to the NY1 channel. The sound was off, but on the screen I saw my picture, in which I was wearing my red pom-pom hat, followed by a cell phone video of a certain incident from last year. The headline running across the screen announced, “Teen Baby-Catcher Is Missing.”





Wednesday, December 17th

It was about eight o’clock in the evening on Tuesday night when I received a text from Langston.

Is Lily with you?

I texted back: No.

Then he asked, Do you know where she is?

And I texted back: No.

Then I texted Lily. Where are you?

And I received the response: If she hadn’t left her phone behind, do you really think I’d be texting you?

Which is how I realized that Lily was, like, gone.

Ordinarily, it would be no big deal if a teenager missed her curfew. It’s practically a rite of passage. But Lily had never exhibited even a sprig of rumspringa, especially since she knew how much it would worry her grandfather if she didn’t return home one night.

So we were worried.

I called around to our friends, but nobody had seen her. Langston gave me periodic updates, and said his family phone tree had been activated.

Eleven o’clock, and still no word from her.

Midnight, and still no word from her.

Who’s Edgar Thibaud? Langston texted.

Some jerk, I replied. Then added, Why?

Just wondering if he would know where Lily was.

Why?

No reason.

That seemed weird. I had no idea that Edgar Thibaud and Lily were still in contact—but that was certainly what Langston’s question implied.

I filed that away.

12:30—no word.

1:00—no word.

It was hard to sleep. I dozed on and off, waking up every hour to get word from Langston.

2:00—no word.

3:00—police notified.

4:00—calling around to hospitals.

5:00—no word.

6:00—A sighting! Staten Island.

6:01—I text to Langston: So we’re going to Staten Island, right?

6:01:30—Right.

—

As I got dressed—as I explained to my sleeping mother why I had to skip school today, as I left the apartment and headed downtown to catch the ferry—all I could think was, This has to be my fault. A better boyfriend would have prevented his girlfriend from disappearing. A better boyfriend wouldn’t have given his girlfriend any reason to disappear. He wouldn’t have burned down her Christmas party. He would’ve known how to read her even if she was acting unreadable.

Where are you, Lily? I kept thinking.

—

“It’s all my fault.”

Langston did not look happy to be telling me this. He also looked like he felt he had to.

“Why do you say that?” I asked. We were standing on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry, even though it was really too cold and too early to be standing on the deck. The boat was pushing away from the dock, and our own batteries were just starting to get out of park. While there were plenty of people who’d gotten off in Manhattan to head to their skyscraper jobs, there weren’t that many people heading toward Staten Island at this hour. We were getting everything backwards.

At first, I didn’t think Langston was going to answer me—enough time went by that I started to wonder if we’d actually said anything at all, or if it was just my Lily-is-gone delirium that was inducing imaginary conversations. But then Langston lifted his right hand and showed me a gold ring he was wearing on his pinky.