Page 49 of How To Plot a Payback

And here she is, on the ground, while pedestrians are slowly coming to a stop around us, having the audacity to look helpless and innocent and infuriatingly unconcerned about being roughly two seconds away from having her earlobe ripped off and needing emergency surgery.

Meanwhile, again, I’m about to be late.

And she is just looking up at me, careless to her plight, nattering away about all the “happy times” at school that were in fact very, very, very much the opposite.

I check my watch. Grit my teeth. Not in a silent way to relieve tension but in a way that declares very loudly, I am frustrated to the point that I don’t care who knows it.

For me, this is significant.

To other people, I have no doubt this looks bad. A celebrity sweetheart is on the ground getting mauled by a bus-size dog gnawing on her earlobe, and a man is standing above her, tapping his foot impatiently and throwing out his hands in exasperation.

It looks bad.

But looks are deceiving.

“You took my role,” I say, rolling my neck in why-me? fashion and drop-throwing the leash to the ground.

The cat crate goes down on the cement.

One knee goes down so I can save the blasted woman from the blasted dog.

“I was not, in fact, Puck,” I say, clamping my hand around the dog’s mouth to lock him in place, then working to free the earring. “You were, if you recall.”

Bernie is thrilled I’ve joined the game. He growls in a puppy-growl sort of way and digs in, his nails clawing the pavement.

“Nonsense. I was your understudy all the way to the end. You were the big hurrah.”

The dog tries to jerk his head out of my grip, but when my hands stay firmly in place, he gives a throaty rumble and scrunches up his nose. His razor-blade puppy teeth are clamped around the gigantic hoop.

“And what kind of ridiculous earring is this, for the record? They’re as big as Frisbees.”

“It’s called offsetting my outfit, thank you for noticing,” she replies. Honestly, if she were on a sinking ship, she’d be the one standing on the deck with a glass of champagne as she looks over the side and cries happily, “Those waves do look big, don’t they? You know, that reminds me of this one time at this great little spot just outside Montecito . . .” Lavender motions towards her denim cutoffs, the strings frayed all along the hemline. Her leather flip-flops, clinging loosely to her toes. “I don’t want to be too casual.”

“So you thought rolls of copper wiring around your earlobes was the answer. Sure,” I reply. “And no, I was not the big hurrah. My name may have been on the program. Auntie Flora may have wept when we heard the good news. I may have spent three months in front of my bedroom mirror, wearing home-sewn jester ears—and for the record, he’s a mischievous sprite, not a mere fairy—memorizing my lines. I may have turned down my spot on the cross-country team—because Mrs. Harris said the demands of the role required I choose one or the other. Despite the fact that I was an excellent hurdler with a real chance at earning a scholarship for uni. All facts I chose to ignore.”

The puppy begins to wiggle his head ferociously, and I get him into a choke hold. Lavender’s ridiculously golden hair is everywhere around me, and I spit some strands out of my mouth and continue. “No, Lavender. I was Puck up until the very last moment. And then it was you.”

“Yes. I remember that,” she says, her neck grazing my nose and sending the scent of a thousand coconuts directly into my sinuses. “Something about your foot, wasn’t it? You broke your ankle?”

“You broke my ankle,” I retort, holding my breath to keep her offensively tropical aura out. “Technically.”

I pry the jaws open at last. Lavender lifts her chin, and the hoop is released.

She collapses onto her backside, takes the hoops from both ears, and pops them into her palm before Bernie can make another go at them.

Then of all things, she laughs.

The world-renowned celebrity is on her backside in the middle of the sidewalk with a pool of hair around her as a swarm of people watching on the outskirts video away.

And she’s laughing.

The baseball cap she was wearing is long gone, and the spun-around bun thing she had going at the nape of her neck is now lopsided, with half of her hair fanned around her face. With fresh determination, the dog has locked his jaws around the hoops in her hand.

“Wouldn’t this be a funny picture of the two of us?” she says. She laughs again and opens her hand, letting the hoops go. “You and your face. Me and this dog. We should frame a picture of this and send it over to Mrs. Harris. Can you imagine? Esteemed Welling School duo, success across the pond.”

I frown, and when it becomes clear she’s not going anywhere in a hurry, I hold out my hand to help her up.

“And about me breaking your ankle,” she says, grinning as she comes to standing. “C’mon, Finn. That’s a stretch if I ever heard one.”