Tonight the Streets Are Ours (5 page)

Lindsey squared her shoulders and went off to casually brush shoulders with her crush. Arden headed outside to the empty patio so she wouldn’t just be sitting on the couch looking obviously alone, which was pathetic.

Arden stood with her back to Matt’s house and looked out over the landscape, the two-story houses and two-car garages eventually giving way to mountains in the distance. The trees were barren, the stars stark against the sky. Arden checked her phone for a response from Chris. Nothing.

This shouldn’t make her feel so sad. She didn’t have to spend every weekend night with Chris. So he was busy. So what? She was busy, too. And anyway, she wasn’t alone. She was here with Lindsey.

When they were in elementary school, Lindsey and Arden liked to imagine that they would live together when they got older. They planned to buy a house someday. Maybe they would run a bakery out of their shared kitchen. Maybe they would live on a farm, like Lindsey’s family used to, and she would feed the chickens while Arden tended to the zebras. (Their imaginary farm obviously had zebras.) Maybe they would adopt some children. Maybe they would marry identical twins and the four of them would live in one big mansion together. One time Lindsey suggested that she and her twin husband could get a separate house, across the street from Arden and her twin husband, and Arden was like, “I don’t see why that would be necessary.”

Arden didn’t know if it made her an idiot or a romantic that this all still sounded like a good idea. Okay, not the twin boys thing because Lindsey was gay, but she’d be down to co-marry a set of fraternal twins.

Misfortune followed Lindsey, and so Arden did, too. In the nearly eight years of their friendship, Lindsey had suffered through her father’s battle with cancer, her grandpa’s death, getting arrested for shoplifting, getting caught plagiarizing an essay, failing her driver’s test, losing her mother’s engagement ring—and that was only scratching the surface. Lindsey was dyslexic and so teachers assumed she was just stupid, she was gay in a town whose primary understanding of lesbians came from occasionally watching Ellen DeGeneres, and she had parents who fundamentally believed that both dyslexia and homosexuality were just bad choices that Lindsey had made, probably to piss them off.

Until a month and a half ago, when her own family had so spectacularly collapsed, Arden had led a stable life, compared to Lindsey. Sometimes she’d wondered how she would handle it, if she
could
handle it, if she had Lindsey’s same bad luck. Maybe if she faced Lindsey’s same problems, she’d make Lindsey’s same mistakes.

“Hey, Arden.”

She turned at the sound of her name. A guy was standing there. Ellzey. Okay, his
last
name was Ellzey, but that’s what everybody called him, even the teachers. Arden’s heart quickened as she wondered why he had stepped outside right now when the whole party was indoors, if he’d seen her out here, if he’d been looking for her. For a brief moment, she let herself imagine kissing Ellzey, out here under the stars. She imagined him as a prince in a fairy tale, coming to save her.

Then she kicked the thought away. She was taken. Girls who are taken shouldn’t fantasize about kissing boys they barely knew on Matt Washington’s patio.

“Hey, Ellzey,” she said. “What’s up?” She wondered if he was going to mention the last time they had spoken—one of the
only
other times they had spoken—and hoped fervently that he was not. It had been an ignoble experience. She felt very glad that Lindsey was missing this conversation now. There was no way Lindsey would have been able to keep a straight face if she’d seen Ellzey talking to Arden.

“Beautiful night, huh?” he said, coming to stand next to her. Even though he didn’t touch her, she felt the warmth of his skin from his arm next to hers. “So many stars,” he went on.

Arden was impressed. She couldn’t help but compare Ellzey to her boyfriend, who had never commented on the number of stars. Unless it was the number of Hollywood stars in a particular movie or something. Arden said to Ellzey, “My dad used to keep a telescope on our roof when I was a kid. He wanted us to learn facts about astronomy, I think, like to identify different constellations. I could never find anything other than the Big Dipper. But I loved looking at the stars.” This was, hands down, the most sentences in a row Arden had ever spoken to Ellzey.

“You know what would make the stars even more beautiful?” Ellzey asked, looking into her eyes.

Arden wondered if Ellzey knew that she was taken. She and Chris Jump had been going out for more than ten months, so it seemed like everyone would know, but maybe they didn’t. Why would someone from the popular crowd monitor the relationship status of every random girl at school?

“What?” Arden said.

“If we were high right now,” Ellzey said.

They were both silent for a moment, as Arden expected him to produce a joint from his pocket or something. He did not.

Then Arden remembered that she had just been suspended for possession of drugs, so presumably she would be the one carrying joints in
her
pockets.

“I don’t really do that,” Arden said.

“Oh yeah?” He gave her a teasing smile. “You don’t have to keep secrets from me, Arden Huntley.”

I’m not,
Arden thought. “That was just a one-time thing,” she explained.

“Oh.”

“Sorry.”

Ellzey shrugged. “No sweat. Just thought I’d ask.”

“About the stars—” Arden began, but Ellzey had already headed back indoors.

Arden’s heart sank. That wasn’t what she had wanted from an interaction with Ellzey, not at all. That wasn’t what she’d thought he would be like, or what she’d thought she would be like around him. It all seemed wrong.

But then what exactly
had
she wanted, anyway, from Ellzey?

Arden checked her phone again. One text message had come in from Chris while she had been letting down her end of a drug deal.
I’M NOT GONNA MAKE IT THERE TONITE. HAVE FUN! LOVE U.

She shouldn’t have felt so disappointed. She’d known he probably wasn’t going to come anyway. But, there you have it.

Chris had understood, sort of, about Arden keeping pot in her locker because she was “acting out.” He understood, he said, that it was really hard for your mom to leave you, and that this might lead someone to rash decisions. Still, Arden sensed that he was judging her. Maybe just because she knew that Chris Jump would never be so foolish as to disrupt his future plans like this, no matter how many parents or other loved ones left him behind.

Her phone buzzed again, and her heart skipped, thinking maybe Chris had changed his mind, but it was Lindsey.
LET’S GET OUT OF HERE. I’M WAITING FOR YOU BY YOUR CAR.

Arden didn’t argue. After that conversation with Ellzey and that text message with Chris, she was through with this night.

She walked back through Matt’s house and smiled at a few people, but didn’t bother to say good-bye to any of them, figuring they were either too drunk to notice her leaving or they hadn’t realized she’d been there in the first place. So, now she knew how the other half of high school lived.

As promised, Lindsey was down the road, a lone figure leaning against Arden’s car, a decrepit old sedan that the girls had dubbed the Heart of Gold. Lindsey didn’t say anything as Arden unlocked the doors, or after they got in and Arden drove away, and that silence was how Arden knew that, despite Lindsey’s earlier reassurances, something had indeed gone wrong.

Once Matt Washington’s house had disappeared in the rearview mirror, Lindsey started talking. “So I asked Denise if she wanted to hang out sometime.”

“Wow.” Arden was impressed. In her life, she’d tried lots of tactics to get people to go out with her. Simply walking up to them and asking them, however, was one she’d never attempted.

“Denise said no. She said thanks, but she doesn’t like me like that.”

“Well.” Arden patted Lindsey’s leg. “That’s disappointing, obviously, but at least you said how you really felt. Good for you.”

“And then Beth and Jennie came up to me and said I should leave the party because I was creeping them out.”

“
Excuse
me?” Arden stepped on the gas too hard, and both girls jerked back against their seats.

“They said it made them uncomfortable that I was hitting on Denise, because for all they knew, I might turn to either of them next. They said it’s one thing to be gay and hook up with other gay people, but once a lesbian sets her sights on a straight woman, anything is possible.”

“Are you
kidding
me? I am going to turn right back around and kick their asses.”

“Oh my God, Arden, don’t you
dare
. I tried to explain to them that I thought Denise
was
interested in girls, and that’s why I asked her out. And also I told them that I’m not remotely attracted to either one of them, or frankly anyone else at Matt’s house tonight, but I actually think that made it worse? Because Jennie was like, ‘Are you saying I’m not pretty?’ And then Beth was like, ‘You’re not such a prize yourself, Lindsey Flatson.’”

“Is this girl nine years old?
Flatson?
Where does she get her insults from,
Sesame Street
?”

“I know I don’t have, like,
ginormous bazooms
, or whatever the cultural standard for feminine attractiveness is,” Lindsey went on. “But she didn’t have to say it like that, not to my face.”

“Linds, that girl is an idiot.”

Lindsey’s body looked like it was built up and down in a straight line, a very long straight line. She was the tallest girl in school by far, and there were guys on the football team with bigger chests. But that’s what made her such a great runner. And wasn’t that a positive thing, to be great at something?

“I know everybody says I look like a dude behind my back. Obviously they’re right. But it’s not my fault. It’s not like I chose to look this way. If I had a choice, of course I’d be beautiful. Do you think that’s why Denise doesn’t like me? Because I’m ugly?”

“No,” Arden said. “I think Denise doesn’t like you because she doesn’t like girls, or at least she doesn’t like girls at this particular time in her life. You
are
beautiful.”

“I don’t know,” Lindsey said. “Maybe Denise just likes hot girls. Do you think I’m going to be alone forever? Tell me honestly.”

“Definitely no.”

Lindsey sighed and leaned her head against the back of the seat, closing her eyes. “You wouldn’t know what that’s like, anyway. You have Chris.”

Ah, yes. Chris. The world’s most secure security blanket.

“I hate living here sometimes,” Lindsey said without opening her eyes. “I wonder, if I could just run fast enough and far enough, do you think I could run all the way out of here?”

“I bet you could.”

Lindsey shook her head. “I just want someone to want to kiss me,” she mumbled.

This had been a frequent refrain in Lindsey’s life. It had reached its zenith a couple years ago, but now she rarely expressed it, as if she was embarrassed to be nearly seventeen years old without a kiss to her name and didn’t want to call attention to it. But Arden knew it was still something that troubled Lindsey. There just weren’t that many out lesbians at their school, and those who were didn’t evoke much interest in Lindsey, or she didn’t evoke much interest in them. Either way, Lindsey wanted something that seemed like it ought to be simple but had proven impossible to achieve in Cumberland.

Arden remembered when they were thirteen, asking Lindsey, “How do you know you’re gay when you’ve never even kissed a girl?”

“How do you know you’re straight when you’ve never even kissed a guy?” Lindsey shot back.

Arden couldn’t argue with that.

Actually, a little-known and never-discussed fact was that Lindsey, technically speaking,
had
had her first kiss. It happened freshman year, with their classmate David Rappaport, at a school dance. She’d just come out to Arden and to her parents, but not yet to the world at large, and when David Rappaport asked her to dance, she’d said yes because she couldn’t figure out how to say no. Afterward Lindsey slept over at Arden’s, and she cried and cried. “You only get one first kiss in your whole life,” she kept saying, “and I wasted mine on some dumb boy.”

The answer finally came to Arden. “You don’t have to count it,” she told Lindsey.

“What do you mean?”

“You can just decide that your first kiss hasn’t happened yet. It’s going to be with some amazing girl who you probably haven’t even met yet.”

“Can I do that?”

“It’s your life,” Arden told her. “Of course you can.”

That night was the last time they ever mentioned Lindsey’s one make-out occurrence.

Now, Lindsey just sighed and reclined her seat all the way back. “It’s fine,” she said, more to herself than to Arden. “Tonight’s over. Tomorrow will be better.”

Arden thought about Beth and Jennie, and Chris and Ellzey, and Denise and Matt Washington, and her mother, and she didn’t believe that, not any of it, not for a second. But she didn’t say so to Lindsey. She just kept her eyes on the road, and she drove.

Why doesn’t anybody love Arden as much as she loves them?

By the time Arden had dropped off Lindsey and driven home, it was late, but still she wasn’t tired. Everything seemed rotten. She had unwittingly expected something about tonight to transform her, yet she had come home exactly the same, and somehow, therefore, even worse. Now she prowled around the house, looking for distractions. Her father was locked in his study—she didn’t go in, but she could tell he was there from the light coming through the crack under the door.

Arden’s dad had always worked hard. But ever since her mother moved out, it was like something deep inside of him kept telling him that the reason she left was that he wasn’t successful
enough
. And if he could just be
more successful
, then he could prove to her, or to himself, that he was worthy of her love again. He’d been working on being more successful for a month and a half now. He might be getting somewhere with that, but he’d not come any closer to bringing his wife back home.