Tonight the Streets Are Ours (16 page)

But he wasn’t any of those things. He was smart and handsome and talented and ambitious. Teachers liked him, parents liked him. Pretty much everyone liked him except Lindsey. He was obviously, as Kirsten and Naomi put it, “a keeper.” The only reason to break up with someone like Chris would be if she thought she could do better. And why would she think that?

“Chris,” she said.

“Yeah, babe?” He glanced up from the page.

But now that she had his attention again, she didn’t know what she’d wanted to say. She settled on saying, “I’m excited for our anniversary.”

One year was a crazy length of time. That was one-seventeenth of her life. Arden already had their anniversary night all planned out, even though it was nearly a month away. She’d used most of what remained of her tutoring money to get a hotel room to surprise Chris. She would wear a sexy dress, one he’d never seen before—she’d already bought that, too, a lacy, shimmery thing—and he would arrive at the hotel not knowing what to expect, only to find her lounging provocatively on the king-size bed. There would be no little brother and no parents and no theater crowd and no Lindsey; just the two of them, in love. And then their relationship would go back to feeling the way it was supposed to.
She
would go back to feeling the way she was supposed to. That was the plan.

Chris rubbed her shoulder. “I’m excited, too. Can you give me even a tiny hint about what we’re doing to celebrate?”

She grinned and shook her head. “Nope!”

He laughed. “I don’t know any other couples at school who have been together for a
year
. And who knows—if we’re lucky, maybe I’ll have a role in a movie by then.”

“It’ll be a good anniversary either way,” she told him, reaching up to squeeze his hand.

He went back to his script. She went back to Peter.

By the end of last year, Peter had all but stopped writing about his missing brother. Arden supposed that there was no news to report, and Peter had said on the matter all that there was to say. He was still trying to move on from Bianca, though. He’d even made out with a couple other girls, even though he swore his heart wasn’t in it. Arden thought back to Lindsey’s question and decided Peter was
definitely
hot. If she and Chris ever really did break up, it would probably take her a number of
years
before she found a couple other people willing to make out with her, and Peter had managed it in less than three months.

Then the year changed from last year to this one, and something happened that Arden had never seen coming.

January 2

I should have written about this yesterday, but Bianca and I have not been apart for a single second since New Year’s Eve, so I haven’t had a moment to breathe and record what happened.

“Bianca?” you’re saying right now. (“You” being “my readers”—happy new year, folks!) “I thought she had cut your heart out of your chest and then thrown it to the floor and stomped on it in high heels.”

That was true. But that was before my
grand geste.
(French again. Those French understand romance better than we ever will.)

It was December 31st. The end of a year. Out with the old, in with the new,
auld lang syne
and all that. But I didn’t want to let go of the old. Julio and Raleigh had both invited me to their New Year’s parties, but I didn’t feel like partying. If I could have spent New Year’s Eve alone somewhere with Bianca, I would have preferred that to the best soiree in New York City. (Soiree:
also French.
)

I asked Miranda, my amateur relationship coach, “How do you reach somebody who doesn’t want to be reached?”

She replied, “Art!”

Not helpful, Miranda.

But it got me thinking. I’m a writer. I know how to say how I really feel. Just give me enough words and I can say how I really feel here in this journal, and if somebody reads it, maybe they would understand.

But I never told Bianca—or anyone I know in my real life—about Tonight the Streets Are Ours. I have no way to make Bianca read these words. I could write her a letter, but she would never open it.

I needed something that she couldn’t ignore, a letter that she couldn’t help but open. Art that’s so in-your-face that there could be no misunderstanding.

And that’s when I came up with my
grand geste
.

It took a day of phone calls. I started with my dad’s Rolodex and I went from there. There may come a time when my dad finds out just how many of his clients and colleagues I called, and if that time comes, I will be in trouble. But it was worth it.

Apparently this thing that I was asking for can be done, but it costs money. It costs a lot of money. But I got it as a favor, from one of my dad’s contacts who does something obscenely important with Dow Jones and happens to have a soft spot for me and my family, especially after what happened with my brother. This is a good thing, because at that point I would have paid the money, no matter how much it was, and I would have paid it with my dad’s AmEx. And he would have legitimately disowned me. That’s always the threat with my father: if you don’t follow his rules, you won’t get his money. It’s how he keeps everyone in line.

I went to Julio’s party, after all. I was antsy the whole time. I talked to people but don’t remember what I said. I kept staring past them at Julio’s giant flat-screen TV, which was showing the mayhem in Times Square as they prepared to drop the ball at midnight. A million people came to see it in person this year, and a billion watched on TV.

At 10:30, it happened. On the electronic ticker tape circling Times Square, these words appeared:

BIANCA—A NEW YEAR MEANS A NEW START. COME FIND ME AT THE PLACE WHERE WE FIRST MET, AND WE WILL START ANEW. I’LL BE THERE WAITING FOR YOU AT MIDNIGHT. LOVE, PETER.

The message circled around twice before it was replaced by the headline news of the day.

“Dude,” Julio said, staring at the TV.
“Dude.
Is that you? Did you do that? How did you do that?”

“Now that is so sweet,” the cold-looking news anchor said to her cohost. “Bianca, girl, wherever you are, you should take Peter back!”

“Don’t you wish some man would send
you
such a romantic message?” asked the other host.

“You know it!”

“Man, you are such a
baller
!” Julio hooted, punching me on the shoulder. “How did you make that happen? Are you a magician now?”

“I have to go,” I said. I grabbed my coat. “I have to go.”

“Go where?” some girl asked. “It’s not even midnight yet.”

“To the bookstore,” I tried to explain. “I said I’d be there, so I need to be there.”

“What if she’s not there?” Mark asked.

But I couldn’t think about what I’d do if she wasn’t there. I still don’t know what I would have done.

It’s impossible to get a taxi on New Year’s Eve, so I took the subway from Julio’s, and then I ran the remaining blocks to the bookstore. It was cold, of course, my breath coming out in crystalline gasps, but I couldn’t slow down, because I couldn’t miss her, I couldn’t afford to miss her.

When I got to the bookstore, it was a bit past 11pm, and no one was around. The store was closed, the iron grate pulled down over its windows. No Bianca.

I checked my phone. I checked my phone over and over. No Bianca. And when the clock struck midnight, my phone chimed with a hundred “Happy New Year!” text messages, and none of them were from Bianca. That glittery ball in Times Square must have fallen, but I was in no position to see it.

All I wanted was another chance. I didn’t need her to feel about me the way I feel about her. I only wanted her to try.

Just as I was about to admit defeat and go home alone into a new year, she appeared under a streetlight in front of me.

“That message,” she said. Her laugh formed a cloud of air in front of her mouth. “How did you do that?”

I shrugged. Tried to play it cool. “A magician never reveals his tricks.”

“What even made you think I’d be watching?” she asked.

“You said you would be. That day, in the park…” Though it was so hard to reconcile that summer afternoon with us here, now, in the freezing cold dead of night.

“You remember that?” She sounded surprised.

“I…? Of course I do.”
I remember everything you’ve ever said to me,
I wanted to tell her.

“Well, I wasn’t watching,” she said. I blinked at her. “But lucky for you, my friend was. She freaked out when she saw my name. She was like, “It’s you, it’s you!” And I thought she was being ridiculous. But it was me, huh?”

“It was.” Now that she was here, I didn’t even really know what to say. “What took you so long?”

“It’s really hard to get a taxi on New Year’s,” she said.

She stepped forward, and I pulled her toward me, I wrapped my arms around her, and we’ve been together ever since.

Arden broke away from the screen.
They were together again.
And they had been for three months now.

Of course she could have known this if she’d just read ahead in his blog. There’d been no rule that she had to read it in chronological order, even though that was how Peter experienced it. She could have learned his life in any order she’d wanted, and she didn’t know why she hadn’t skipped ahead, except that she hadn’t wanted to miss anything.

Now Arden felt something really intensely, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was. She was happy for Peter that he and Bianca got back together, of course. That was the way it should be. It was like Beauty and the Beast making amends, Prince Charming giving Sleeping Beauty her kiss of life. Balance was once again restored, and what was halved was now whole.

But it also felt like Peter had been taken away from her. Like if he weren’t now Bianca’s, he could have somehow been Arden’s.

But that didn’t make any sense. With or without a girlfriend, he was never going to belong to Arden. After all, she didn’t even know him. And he didn’t know her. They didn’t know each other at all.

And
that
was the thing that she was feeling so intensely. She just didn’t know the word for it.

Anyway. She wasn’t alone. Peter had Bianca again now, and Arden—Arden was fine. She had Chris.

She leaned over and kissed her boyfriend. He wasn’t expecting it, and his mouth was a little slow to move against hers. When she tried to deepen the kiss, Chris pulled away. “Come on, babe,” he said. “We’re in public.” He waved toward their classmates on stage, none of whom was paying them the slightest bit of attention in between their coordinated “beep beep beeps” and “weee-ooos.”

“So?” Arden asked, suddenly feeling very small. “I’m your girlfriend. Don’t you think they assume that we kiss sometimes?”

“Sure,” Chris said, “but it’s weird. We’re in the middle of the school day. Let me just work on my audition for now, okay? If you’re bored, you can help.”

He held up the script, and, after a moment, Arden took it.

She knew she should be proud of her boyfriend. He was trying to achieve something. Okay, it wasn’t a sign in Times Square. But it was his own attempt at grandeur. It mattered to him.

But
proud
was not how she felt.

Maybe Arden was just jealous of Chris and his ambition, the starry lights of Hollywood that always beckoned to him from afar. Because more and more these days, she wondered if the most exciting moment in her life was already in her past. If maybe the greatest thing about her had happened when she was nine years old, and it had all been downhill ever since then.

What happened on the best day of Peter’s life

By the middle of April, Arden was reading Tonight the Streets Are Ours in real time, experiencing Peter’s life alongside him basically as it happened. In real time, here’s what was going on:

Less than two months remained in Peter’s senior year. There was still no update on his brother, so Peter had little to say about him—just memories from their childhood, or occasional dreams about him.

Peter had recently gotten into NYU for college, so he would be staying in New York City next year, but moving into a dorm. He’d been accepted into a handful of other schools, too, but they were all “too artsy” for his father, who said that he wasn’t going to pay for a degree in creative writing, which was hardly a “real degree” anyway, and would be just the start of a lifetime of Peter moving back home and blowing through his parents’ money.

April 13

They say that tragedy changes you, and I guess I’d hoped that the positive side of his older son’s disappearance would be my dad realizing that life is finite, and people don’t stick around forever, and you should let them pursue their dreams now, before it’s too late. But that is decidedly
not
what happened.

I’ve been trying to find a way to show my dad that being an artist or a writer
is
a real career, and you
can
make a living without donning a suit that’s identical to every other guy’s suit, and squashing onto the subway at 7:30 every morning along with a zillion other guys in matching suits, and going into an office where you have a boss and your boss has a boss and your boss’s boss has a boss, and everybody tells everybody else what to do all day long, for the rest of your life.

I told Bianca that all I want to do once I’m an adult is work at the bookstore and see the world, and write about all the things I’ve seen. “You should do that,” she agreed. “I want to make money, though. But I want to make it doing something interesting.”

“You could make money and we could get married, and I could live off
your
money,” I suggested.

She laughed. “We’re still in high school.”

“I didn’t mean now. I meant someday.”

I kind of did mean now, though. I mean, I was kidding. But I’m not a very patient person.

Peter and Bianca were properly together now, and had been ever since the first of the year. There was no mention of Leo, so Arden pieced together that Bianca and Leo had broken up by December, if not earlier, and that was why she had returned to Peter on New Year’s Eve. Arden wondered if Peter had been a factor in Bianca and Leo’s breakup. If Bianca had told Leo that she’d been cheating on him, or if Leo had somehow found out all on his own. Or maybe not—maybe Bianca had just grown tired of Leo’s buffoonish behavior and told him she wanted to move on. Peter never said. It was as if he was so focused on their perfect relationship now that he didn’t want to waste any time thinking about what a struggle it was to get here, the obstacles that had once stood in their way.