Tonight the Streets Are Ours (15 page)

For a while, Arden wanted to grow up to be someone like Veronica. Lindsey wanted to grow up to marry someone like Veronica.

Arden came up with a plan. Every time they went to the Glockenspiel, they would ask Veronica a question. Just one. Just one question would seem perfectly natural and conversational, and maybe with time, they would befriend Veronica, or, barring that, at least they would know what she would say when asked various questions, and then they could mimic her responses in future conversations with other people.

Arden and Lindsey would spend the entire car ride to the cinema brainstorming what to ask. While they were buying their tickets, they would ask their one question. And then they would spend the entire car ride home analyzing Veronica’s answer.

When Arden asked what the best song in the world was, and Veronica answered, “Smashing Pumpkins, ‘1979,’” the two girls found that song online and listened to it over and over as they drove back to Cumberland.

When Arden asked where she and Lindsey should apply to college, Veronica answered, “Don’t bother. A college education will be irrelevant in ten years, anyway. You can teach yourselves anything you really want to know.” This prompted a vicious argument between Lindsey and Arden on the ride home, because Lindsey thought that was the best advice she’d ever been given about college applications, and Arden thought that you needed a college education if you ever wanted to do anything of substance with your life, and Lindsey’s crowning piece of evidence was, “Well, Veronica says you’re wrong,” and how was Arden supposed to argue with that?

When Arden asked Veronica what her dreams were for the future, Veronica answered, “Being the manager at a movie theater.” Which wasn’t exactly Arden’s or Lindsey’s dream, but after talking it through, they decided it was wisdom about appreciating what you have when you have it, rather than wishing your life away.

Arden always had to do the asking. Lindsey was too intimidated.

When Arden asked Veronica how you knew when you were in love with somebody—because this was when she was thinking of saying it to Chris, but she wasn’t quite sure whether she meant it—Veronica leaned out of the ticket booth and said, “I have a question, too. Why do you guys always ask me such weird things when you come here?” When they didn’t say anything, Veronica said, “Never mind,” and she sold them their tickets.

The film that night was
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
a classic from the sixties. It was depressing, about a long-married couple who just tore each other down and tore each other down, using everything they knew about the other to hurt them, just because they could.

After that movie, Arden and Lindsey didn’t speak at all on the car ride home. And they never went back to the Glockenspiel again, either.

Sometimes, people aren’t who you want them to be

Chris was biding his time. He had confided in Arden that he felt high school plays were—no offense—beneath him. “I’m not saying that I have nothing left to learn,” he’d explained. “You can always find something to learn from every experience, if you look for it. But let’s be honest, Mr. Lansdowne is not a top-tier director, and the people I’m playing opposite … well, enough said.” A sigh. “I’m worried that I’ve plateaued.”

Chris had big dreams, dreams that could never be realized in Cumberland. He wanted to be a Hollywood star. He resented his parents for raising him in a small town so far away from the movie industry, and for their complete lack of interest in helping him find an agent, get professional headshots, or attend audition coaching. Chris’s father’s hardware store had previously been managed by Chris’s grandfather, which meant he considered it basically written in stone that it would someday be managed by Chris.

Arden knew it was hard to make it in Hollywood. None of her other drama club friends even imagined it. Kirsten thought maybe she would audition for some musicals in college, or maybe she wouldn’t, but that was as far as her theatrical ambitions went. But Arden thought that if anyone from her town could manage a professional career as an actor, her boyfriend would definitely be the one. He had a deep voice, he could cry on command, he had a dimple, his arms were just the right amount of muscular, and he was tall—though she’d also read that most movie actors were surprisingly short, so maybe that wasn’t actually a point in his favor.

Chris kept an eye out for auditions and open calls held anywhere remotely nearby and, now that he had his license, too, he drove to them whenever he could. That’s why he was spending sixth period on Thursday, two weeks after that stupid letter came from Arden’s mother, running lines for a film audition that he was going to on Saturday. The film was a very, very small-budget production about coal miners, which was going to be shooting some scenes on-site in nearby West Virginia.

“Gretchen,” he said to Arden, squeezing up his eyes as he tried to remember the rest of the line. “I can’t help but think that you and I—”

“Me and you,” interrupted Arden, glancing at the audition script. “Not ‘you and I.’ Remember, the character left school when he was twelve to become a miner and support his family.”

Chris sighed and took back the script to study it further.

Sixth period on Thursdays was when Arden and Chris had theater class, which they signed up for because they could take it together, and because it was an easy A. Since they both were heavily involved in theater after school, Mr. Lansdowne already adored them. So while he made the other fifteen students in the class play games where they mirrored one another’s body movements or pretended to be animals, he let Arden and Chris do whatever they wanted. Today, this meant that Chris was brushing up on his backwoods accent, while Arden was ostensibly working on a history paper while actually finishing up her read-through of every single entry from last autumn on Tonight the Streets Are Ours. And here’s what she had learned:

The rest of September had been confusing. After Peter and Bianca got together that night in the Hamptons, they saw each other seemingly constantly—for about two weeks. Leo was off at college, out of the picture, so they had almost unlimited access to each other. Peter’s senior year started at the same time, so there were some posts about readjusting to school, deciding whether or not to stay on at the bookstore (yes, but only on Saturdays), and bemoaning how little writing he’d gotten done over the whole summer and how hard it was going to be to find time now that he had homework again.

But mostly he wrote about Bianca, just short bits and pieces, as he seemed to be too busy spending time with her to spend much time describing what they were doing. Still, these brief posts about Bianca (
This morning I brought her coffee on my way to school, just to see her smile
) resulted in dozens of reader comments.

But then there were eight days of silence.

And then that post about his brother running away.

And then that post about Bianca breaking up with him.

Both came completely without warning, and Arden’s heart ached for him. When September began, Peter was the guy who had it all. He even had the girl of his dreams, at last. But less than a month later, it all came crashing down.

The illogic and injustice of life killed Arden. You have to walk through this world knowing that at any moment, your brother might vanish, your mother might leave. No warning. How can you live staring that reality in the face? It didn’t seem right, that somebody else’s carelessness or selfishness could have such a huge impact on your life. Could destroy you. It didn’t seem fair that your happiness was constantly at the mercy of everybody else.

Arden found herself hating Bianca, a surprisingly intense feeling for a girl she did not know—indeed, a girl she’d admired with just as much intensity since she’d first read about her. Bianca, so beautiful. Bianca, the angel. Bianca, who was going to run the United Nations and travel the world someday. It all sounded so good.

But Bianca couldn’t even be there for Peter in the moment that he needed her. When Peter’s brother went missing, and Peter was in a tailspin, all Bianca did was break up with him. And tell him
Don’t worry, you’ll meet someone else
.

For the first time since she’d started reading about Peter’s world, Arden felt superior to Bianca. Sure, maybe she was plain and dependable in comparison. Maybe she was a small-town girl who had to look up where “the Hamptons” were and bought most of her clothes from chain stores and thought a thrilling night out was a school semiformal. But that didn’t matter, because she would have been there for Peter when he’d needed her. When the going got tough, Arden could tough it out.

She just wished she could tell him that.

From the comments, Arden saw she wasn’t the only one to feel that way. His post about his breakup with Bianca had received more comments than anything else on Tonight the Streets Are Ours, with readers saying,
I can’t believe she did this to you. What is her problem???
and,
It’s going to be OK. You two are fated to be together. Just give it time,
and,
Now that your single, gimme a call
J—with a racy photo pasted below.

Peter spent the rest of the fall piecing himself together. Some days he sounded as carefree as ever, analyzing a novel he was reading, or relating a funny story from school that day, or describing something weird that a stranger did on the subway and ordering Future Peter,
Include this as a character in a story someday!
But other days he would write on and on about how much he missed Bianca and how much he missed his brother.

October 29

They’re two different experiences of loss, so maybe I shouldn’t compare them. Both were irrational. Both simultaneously have
everything
to do with me and yet nothing to do with me. But the big difference is that I know where Bianca is. She’s living in the same apartment and attending the same school as the last time I saw her. So it seems like there must be something I could do (some combination of words I could speak, some gift I could give, some change I could make to my mind or body) that would win her back. If I could just figure out what that is …

As for my brother, though, he could be anywhere in the world. Or nowhere. He could be dead by now.

With both of them, there’s this feeling like
I should have done more
. I should have tried harder to hold on to them. My brother and I weren’t so close when he left. We’ve always been very different people, and the older we got, the more obvious those differences became.

But that never really mattered, because we’d grown up together. We got head lice at the same time and had to stay home from school for two weeks. The one and only time we went to overnight camp for two weeks, my brother decided that we were leaving after just one day and had us both pack our bags and try to walk out the front gate. (We didn’t get far.) Stupid, childish memories, things that are way in the past—but aren’t those the things that make up a life? Even as recently as June, we were going to parties together. And then of course there’s the fact that we suffered through our parents together, which should bind two people together for life.

Should.
But didn’t.

Not a day goes by that I’m not seized with worry about him. I want him to come home, but if that can’t happen, then I just want to know that he is safe.

December 1

Kyla is always saying things like, “Ugh, if only I were prettier, I would be all-around happier and more loved.” Not in those exact words, but that’s the sentiment. That’s actually how she thinks.

I’d make fun of her for being so illogical, but that’s how I feel, too, except about my writing. If only I were a better writer, everything would come easily to me, I would be happy all the time, and never ever lonely. If only I were a better writer, Bianca would want me back.

But creating art is supposed to be ITS OWN REWARD. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS.

Unfortunately, I am not much of an artist. I am a minstrel, I am a dilettante. I will work for adoration. I am pathetic.

“Babe,” Chris said.
“Babe.”

Arden looked up, slowly coming back into the present day, the auditorium that they sat in the back of while the rest of their class was on stage, playing Machine. This was a theater game in which each one of them did a repetitive action to form a complete “machine.” This particular machine would be really helpful if you needed your head patted insistently, or if you needed to hear Beth Page say the word
boop
a hundred times in a row. Otherwise, it wasn’t a super-functional technology.

“Sorry,” Arden said to Chris, subtly navigating away from Tonight the Streets Are Ours. “What’s up?” For some reason that she couldn’t pinpoint, she was sick of Chris calling her
babe
. She wished he’d just call her by her name. She used to love that anyone should think of her as a babe. Now it made her think of Babe the pig.

“Can you help me figure out a way to memorize these three lines here?” He indicated the place on the script. “I keep getting them confused.”

Arden scrutinized the page, then said, “They go in alphabetical order.”

“Genius!” Chris declared, grabbing it back from her.

She gave him a weak smile. Arden had recently developed a really bizarre, guilty, and specific fantasy. In this fantasy, she broke up with Chris. In this fantasy, Chris realized, suddenly, everything that would be missing from his life without her, and he tried desperately to win her back by showing up outside of her bedroom window holding a boom box aloft, or bringing her bouquets of flowers, or asking her to prom in an embarrassingly public and over-the-top manner (like on horseback, with a marching band). Eventually, he would wear down her defenses, and she would accept. He would have to really work for it, though.

She didn’t know why she was fantasizing about this. She just knew she wasn’t going to act on it. If Chris were a bad guy, then sure. She’d break up with him. If he were a criminal or a drug dealer, if he cheated on tests or if he cheated on her, if he were violent or racist. Then yeah, easy, decision made.