Tonight the Streets Are Ours

by Leila Sales

  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 ☺—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 didn’t have to happen like this. 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, 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.

  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 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 11 pm, 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…” Th
ough 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.