Tonight the Streets Are Ours (20 page)

This was the thing about Lindsey. She didn’t have the first clue how to operate in a reasonable way in the real world.

Arden thought again of that baby bird, slick with oil, trying to climb its way to fresh air, to freedom. It was fictional, of course. It was entirely made up. But did that even matter? Couldn’t it inspire her anyway?

One last time, Arden turned her key in the ignition. And the car came back to life.

Neither of the girls said a word, in case commenting on what was happening would jinx it. Arden just eased her way back into traffic, and they continued on toward New York.

Meeting Peter

The bookstore where Peter worked was called the Last Page. It was situated on a commercial street in Brooklyn, busier than almost every street in Cumberland, but calmer than most of the New York streets Arden had driven down to get there. She’d gotten honked at more times than she could count, and twice she had almost run over jaywalking pedestrians, one of whom was carrying a baby. Both times they yelled at her, which seemed unfair, since
they
were the ones walking against the traffic light, in the dark, wearing all black. Also, it was past nine o’clock, and she was no baby aficionado, but she thought that child should probably be in bed.

Once she’d found the store, she spent about ten minutes driving around, looking for a parking space she could pull into. When she realized no such parking spaces existed around here, she spent another five minutes trying to parallel park—a skill that she’d achieved competence at before her driving test and had not practiced once since then. For a while Lindsey offered up her opinions (“Maybe you should turn the wheel to the left. Maybe you should pull out and start over again.”) until Arden snapped, “Do
you
want to drive?” at which point Lindsey shut up.

Finally, the car was parked. Arden took a deep breath, grabbed her tin of peanut butter brownies, and marched into the store. She didn’t know exactly what the brownies were for, but one thing her mother had taught her was that people tended to be nicer to you when you gave them baked goods.

The Last Page was surprisingly big, bigger than its storefront had led Arden to believe, and it was filled floor-to-ceiling with books: new titles displayed on the ground level and a basement jumbled with used ones. The girls started on the main level, walking through every aisle, sort of looking at the books, mostly staring at the people and trying to figure out whether they were customers or employees and, if the latter, whether they might be Peter. Arden didn’t know if it was a New York City thing or just an annoying thing that no one in this store was wearing even a name tag, let alone a uniform.

“We could just ask someone,” Lindsey suggested. “Like, ‘Hey, where’s Peter?’”

“Sure,” Arden said. “Go for it.”

Lindsey stuck closer to Arden and didn’t ask anyone.

Fortunately, there weren’t that many high school–aged guys in the store. Saturday night was apparently not the most happening of times for their peers to be book-shopping. On the first floor they saw one guy with a little girl who must have been his sister or babysitting charge or someone; either way, Peter wouldn’t be working with a kid by his side. In the back Arden saw another one who was also probably her age, with long, unwashed hair, pants falling halfway down his ass, in the process of picking his nose.

“That could be him,” Lindsey pointed out. “Do you think an employee would wipe his boogers on a book spine like that?”

Arden paused. “That seems like customer behavior to me. Let’s come back to him.”

She pushed back a niggling worry that maybe the Last Page wasn’t even Peter’s bookstore. Maybe there was some other adolescent bookshop employee with the same name. New York was a big city; it was possible. Or maybe this
was
Peter’s store and he’d left already. There were so many reasons for him not to be here, and she didn’t want to think about any of them.

Downstairs they saw a guy who definitely did work at the store, because he was helping an old woman find a book, and at first it seemed like he
could
have been in high school, but then Arden noticed the wedding band on his ring finger.

That left one teenaged-looking guy in the store. The one behind the checkout counter downstairs. The one standing behind the computer, his elbows propped up on the counter in front of him, holding a copy of Dante’s
Inferno
.

“That’s him,” Arden said to Lindsey. “That’s him.”

Arden pretended to be interested in the books on the nearest display table, but really she was just sneaking peeks at Peter. She hadn’t consciously known what she’d expected him to look like, but seeing him now, she realized that she’d pictured him looking like … well, like Chris.

He didn’t. For one thing, he was Asian. Arden had just assumed he would be white, like she was, like almost everyone in Cumberland was. She felt immediately guilty for expecting, however subconsciously, that everyone she met would look like her. Peter was shorter than she’d anticipated, too, and he was wearing glasses, which she hadn’t pictured but which seemed just right on him. Yet he was still immediately, self-evidently Peter.

“He’s hot,” Arden whispered to Lindsey. “Right? He’s so hot.”

“I don’t know,” Lindsey whispered back. “Dudes aren’t hot to me.”

“Bullshit,” Arden hissed. “Even though I don’t want to make out with girls, I can still tell whether they’re hot. You’re gay, Lindsey, not
blind
.”

“Okay, I think he’s probably hot,” she whispered.

Arden checked her watch. Almost ten. Peter was going to get off work at any minute. She needed to approach him
now
. While he was still working and she was a customer and he would be required to talk to her.

Her hands felt clammy, and she wished she and Lindsey had taken their role-playing of this scene a little more seriously.

Seeing the book in his hands gave her a flash of inspiration. Without saying a word to Lindsey, Arden ran back to the poetry section and scanned the shelf desperately.

There it was.

She grabbed a book, bypassed Lindsey, and headed straight for Peter.

Her heart was pounding.

She stood right in front of him.

She set the book down on the counter.

Peter put down his copy of
The Inferno
and gave Arden a polite smile. “Will that be all today?” he asked.

She nodded mutely.

He took her book and moved to scan it, but then—because he was Peter, and she knew he couldn’t work cash registers without commenting on a customer’s purchase, he never managed to stop that, no matter how many book buyers he offended—he smiled and blurted out, “
Love Letters to the Portuguese.
Good choice. I love Elizabeth Barrett Browning. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways—’”

“‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach,’” Arden finished.

They looked at each other. He raised an approving eyebrow. “You know it.”

Only because of you,
she thought.

He scanned the barcode and bagged the book. Arden watched him carefully, but he didn’t write a note to her on the receipt, he didn’t stick his phone number in there. She supposed that was a one-time trick, and it didn’t end so well the last time.

“Enjoy,” he said. Then he stretched. “And I’m done! You’re my last customer of the day.”

“I know,” Arden said.

He cocked his head. “You know?”

She felt shaky and focused, like she was about to dive off the end of a very high diving board. Though she’d never done that before, actually. When she was a kid, every time her mom took her to the YMCA, she would climb all the way up, and she would walk to the edge of the board, and she would stand there and stand there, feeling this same feeling she had right now in her heart and her throat and all the way down to her fingers and toes. Then she would turn around and retreat back down the ladder, to the pool floor. She did this dozens of times. Eventually she just stopped climbing up there. The outcome was the same either way, and at least when she stayed at ground level, she never felt like she was failing at anything.

Even now, though, years later, Arden identified that feeling. That moment between certainty and mystery, between safety and soaring.

“Yes,” Arden said. “I know.” She swallowed hard, then thrust the tin in front of him. “Do you want a brownie? I baked brownies.”

Peter blinked a couple times when she pulled off the top to the tin. “Sure,” he said at last. He took a brownie.

As he was about to bite into it, Arden blurted out, “I read your blog. I love your writing.”

And that was all it took. Peter’s face split into a huge, dorky, tooth-filled smile, and for what felt like the first time all day, she exhaled.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Arden.”

“Thank you, Arden.” He stuck out his hand and shook hers, and she took all of this in, the smile on his face, the sensation of his palm against her own. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I’m Peter.”

Dinner with Peter

Arden, Lindsey, and Peter went to a kitschy diner down the road from the Last Page. Arden knew she should be ravenous—other than that Dairy Queen Blizzard, she hadn’t eaten since breakfast—but as it was, when the waiter brought over her basket of chicken fingers, she couldn’t imagine being able to choke them down.

“So how did you find Tonight the Streets Are Ours?” Peter asked after he’d swallowed his first bite of veggie burger. He sat across from Arden and Lindsey, shifting his gaze between them.

“Arden found it,” Lindsey explained. “Just Googling some stuff, right?”

“What exactly were you searching for?” Peter asked.

“Um.” Arden felt herself blush. “The sentence ‘Why doesn’t anybody love me as much as I love them?’”

Peter looked impressed—maybe with her memory, or maybe with the poignancy of his own words. “Did I write that?”

“Yes. About Bianca.”

“Oh. Of course.” Peter’s face slipped into a frown, but he shook it off. “So where did
you
get that phrase from?”

“I guess it’s something I’ve wondered sometimes,” Arden said quietly. This seemed like a lot to reveal to a stranger. But Peter didn’t feel like a stranger.

“And have you ever found any good answers to that question?” he asked, leaning forward.

Because I don’t deserve to be loved that much,
Arden thought. But she didn’t say it, because obviously Peter
did
deserve that—that and more—and she didn’t want to let on that in this one regard, she wasn’t like him at all.

“I think maybe I just love people too much,” Arden answered aloud. “So if other people love me a normal amount, that doesn’t come close to matching the way I feel about them.”

She felt Lindsey shift beside her, but didn’t look at her. She couldn’t say these words to Lindsey. But she could say them to Peter, because he could understand.

“Maybe I do, too,” Peter said. “Maybe we’re like mutant superheroes. Part of some government experiment gone awry, and we were left with a preternatural capacity for love.”

Arden broke into a smile.

“No way,” Lindsey objected, as Arden had assumed she would. “That’s not even true.”

“You mean we’re
not
superheroes?” Peter asked, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise.

“That nobody loves Arden as much as she loves them. Tons of people love you, you know that. Your parents, Chris, me, our other friends…”

Arden nodded at Lindsey’s words, but she thought about their argument when the Heart of Gold stopped running, and how wide the gap was between her and Lindsey’s definitions of love. Love meant taking care of someone else. It meant solving their problems for them, protecting them, supporting them even in times of crisis. But when Arden herself hit even a small crisis, like a broken-down car, Lindsey was no help at all. In her heart Arden knew:
There must be more to love, more than this.

“So what happened with Bianca?” Arden asked Peter softly, then quickly added, “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

But he did want to.

“She broke up with me three days ago,” he said, his long lashes fluttering as though he was blinking back tears. “She called before school, while I was still in bed. Usually I’d ignore a call while I was trying to sleep, but this was
Bianca
, and I never ignore calls from her. I used to silence my phone overnight, and now I leave it on just in case she needs something or wants to talk.

“Anyway, she called really early, and before I could say anything she told me that this was it, and it was over for real this time, and she never should have given me a second chance.”

“I’m so sorry,” Arden murmured. This wasn’t any new information, but hearing it from his mouth made her heart ache.

“Did she say why?” Lindsey asked.

“Well, a literary agent offered to represent me on Tuesday,” Peter began.

“Which is amazing, by the way,” Arden interjected. “Can we take a moment to discuss how amazing that is? I don’t know anybody who has an
agent
. You’re going to be a published author.
You
are! And then the whole world is going to know how talented you are.”
And I will have known it first,
she added silently.

She hoped that this speech did a little bit to make up for Bianca’s demoralizing response. Peter was right: this should have been the happiest moment of his life. She wanted to give him that happiness.

“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t know if I will actually get published. It might never happen. But just knowing that an agent, a professional in the field, read my writing and thought it
might
be good enough to be published? It’s unreal. It’s the only thing I ever wanted.”

He stared off into the distance of the diner for a moment, his gaze resting on the glittery portrait of a 1970s Elvis Presley hanging on the wall. Arden looked around, too. She felt overdressed for chicken fingers at a diner, but it didn’t take her long to notice a girl wearing an even shorter dress than hers and a guy wearing even more makeup, so that helped her feel at ease.