by Leila Sales
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.
April 17
Last night was Raleigh’s birthday party and the theme was “fifties sock hop,” so all the girls got poodle skirts and I wore a bow tie. Bianca looked like Sandy from Grease. She had Sandy’s pre-transformation outfit and post-transformation sexiness. Other guys at the party kept trying to talk to her, and I was like, “Gents, she is here with me. Hands to yourselves.”
Nicola told me I looked like Buddy Holly, and somehow Bianca didn’t know who Buddy Holly was, WHICH IS AN OUTRAGE, so I made Cormac play every Buddy Holly song he could think of on his guitar, and Bianca and I cha-cha-ed around the apartment. Raleigh said that she wanted to learn to cha-cha, too, so I taught her, but in the process she fell into the table with her birthday cake and knocked the whole thing onto the floor. (She was pretty wasted.) We ate it anyway.
I will regret growing up. I don’t know if I’ll make a good grown-up. I’m not sure adulthood really fits with my character. I do know that being 13 didn’t fit with my character—though that’s probably true of everybody’s character. Being 13 sucked.
But I am awesome at being 18. Going to school in the daytime, going to parties on the weekends, making money at the bookstore and spending it however I see fit, dancing to Buddy Holly and eating cake off the floor … I look at my parents, and they don’t get to do anything like that, not even close. They never did. The au pair basically raised us, and whenever my parents were in charge it was like we were going through some infinite checklist of accomplishments, always set to a kitchen timer. Go do your homework. Kitchen timer set for forty-five minutes. Go practice the violin. Kitchen timer set for half an hour. Go help your father with his filing. Kitchen timer set again. Do they even know what fun looks like? My dad’s idea of happiness is a bottle of whiskey, and my mom’s is a bottle of sleeping pills.
Last night reminded me how many positive things there are in my own life, and it frightens me to think that someday all that might disappear. How long do you get to live like this? During college? After that? How long do you have until everyone expects you to hang up some dreams as impossible and commit yourself to being responsible?
It infuriated Arden to read about Peter’s parents. In their pursuit of “perfect” sons, they had managed to drive away the actually great sons that they already had. Why couldn’t they see how talented Peter was? Why couldn’t they love him the way he deserved to be loved, the way all parents should love their children?
She just wanted Peter to be happy.
Arden would say this about her mother: she might have walked out on them, for reasons that Arden found wholly unacceptable and indefensible, but at least she never tried to make her children into anybody they were not.
* * *
The next Tuesday, Arden was at her usual lunch table. Naomi, Kirsten, and the rest of the girls in her group were deep in conversation about some drama club gossip. Naomi reported that the teacher’s aide who’d been working with Mr. Lansdowne wasn’t coming to rehearsal all week, and so now they were trying to figure out whether a) he had quit, b) he had been fired for hooking up with a student—and, if so, which student—or c) he was just out sick.
Arden was reasonably interested in this debate, but not that interested, and about twenty percent of her brain was thinking about how she hadn’t checked Tonight the Streets Are Ours since before school that morning. She subtly pulled her phone out of her bag and quickly refreshed it. And indeed Peter had written a new entry since seven a.m. And when Arden read it, all her interest in student-teacher made-up sex scandals vanished.
April 20
TODAY IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE.
<
br /> I hadn’t mentioned it here because I didn’t want to jinx it or anything, but I’ve been reaching out to various literary agents to see if they want to represent my writing. I just feel like I’m almost done with high school, I’m 18 years old, and what do I have to show for my life? If I could publish a book, that would be something real and tangible. Even my father would have to admit that’s real.
So I’ve been sending out samples of my short stories and those 50 pages of the novel I wrote last year, because if somebody wanted to publish it, I would definitely get my shit together to finish writing the rest of it. And one of the agents that I queried was interested enough in my writing that she asked to see more. So I sent her this link, to Tonight the Streets Are Ours. And … SHE LOVED IT!!!
She wants to represent me. She wants to represent ME! We just got off the phone, and her vision is to turn Tonight the Streets Are Ours into a memoir. Not the novel, not the stories—she says THIS is where my unique voice shines. (She actually said that: my “unique voice”!!) I can use a lot of the material that I’ve written here, but obviously flesh it out and smooth it into a cohesive story. And once I do that, she’ll pitch it to publishers to try to get them to publish it. AS A BOOK. THAT YOU COULD BUY. IN BOOKSTORES.
This is the happiest I have ever been.
The comments went on and on after that. More than fifty people commented to say Congratulations! and I can’t wait to read the book! and I always thought you deserved a wider audience.
The chatter and laughter of the cafeteria swirled around Arden as she stared at Peter’s news on her phone. She was thrilled for him. Obviously. He was happy, just as she’d hoped he would be. His dream was coming true. She’d watched him want this for months, forever.
But her happiness for Peter tasted bittersweet. Because with each new person who discovered his writing, he became a little less hers and a little more everyone else’s. If this literary agent sold Tonight the Streets Are Ours to a publisher, and it became a book, and one day years in the future she went to a bookstore event for Peter, and she waited in line with all his other fans to get him to sign her book, how would he even know that she had been there first? That she wasn’t just another fan, that she was special in all the world?
“Do you guys know anyone who’s written a book?” Arden asked her tablemates loudly, looking up from her phone.
Their deliberations about who had or had not slept with the teacher’s aide ground abruptly to a halt. Naomi’s eyes immediately glazed over, and she stared off toward the football players’ table across the room. Arden’s question seemed to come out of nowhere, and it also seemed way less interesting than a conversation about people they knew making out with each other.
“No,” each of the girls said, or, “I don’t think so,” or, “My aunt wrote a mystery novel, but it’s not published or anything.”
“Arden, you are the person I know who’s closest to having written a book,” Kirsten said, twisting her mermaid hair into an improvised upsweep, then dropping it to let it slowly cascade down her shoulders.
Arden blinked at Kirsten in confusion.
“Your Just Like Me Doll books,” Kirsten reminded her.
“Oh. That’s not the same, though. I didn’t write those.”
“Why do you want to know?” asked Lauri, idly peeling the cheese off her pizza in the way that one might peel a scab off one’s skin.
“Because my … friend is writing a book.” Arden frowned. Friend was not the right word. She was at a table with six girls. These were her friends. She didn’t know what Peter was to her. But it was something else entirely.
“That’s cool,” said Naomi. “Which friend?”
“Lindsey?” asked Candace dubiously, because usually when Arden referred to a friend who was not at their lunch table, she did indeed mean Lindsey. But nobody really thought of Lindsey as a book-writer.
“No,” said Arden. “Just some guy. You don’t know him.”
“Cool,” Naomi reiterated, and then immediately redirected the conversation toward the likelihood of various classmates hooking up during the marching band’s upcoming trip to Disney World. If Arden’s author friend wasn’t anyone they knew, then they weren’t all that interested.
Arden hears her calling
If Tuesday was the best day of Peter’s life, Arden was prepared for Saturday to be the best day of hers. She woke up and opened her window, and it was warm at last—after what had seemed like a never-ending winter, she could smell spring in the air. She texted Chris, HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!, and practically waltzed downstairs. She baked peanut butter brownies—Chris was wild about peanut butter—and somehow managed to maneuver them into a tin and out of the kitchen without losing more than two squares to Roman’s gaping maw. For a skinny kid, Roman could lay waste to a surprising number of brownies.
Then she showered and blow-dried her hair and worked and worked on her makeup. There were like five layers of stuff on her face. There was the foundation and then there was the powder and then there was the blush and then there was the bronzer and then there was this spritz to keep it all in place. There were Internet videos for each step along the way, to make sure she was doing them right. There was even a video chat with Naomi, who oversaw makeup for their school plays and understood the necessity of getting her face exactly right for tonight, her anniversary.
“You are so lucky to have Chris,” Naomi told her authoritatively as they ended their call.
“I know I am,” Arden agreed. She did know. And tonight she would be good, she would be so good, she would be beautiful and charming and attentive and positive, she would listen to his every story and applaud his every choice, because she was so lucky to have him, and that was what he deserved.
She packed a small bag with bonus makeup supplies, a toothbrush, the brownies, pajamas, and the sexy dress. For now she just wore jeans and a T-shirt—normal, unsuspicious weekend clothes.
She knocked on the door to her dad’s study.
“Come in,” he called.
She did. He was sitting at his desk, wearing khakis, an old sweater, and slippers that Arden had given him last Christmas—his weekend clothes. He removed his computer glasses to smile at her.
“I’m going over to Lindsey’s,” she said.
Arden was certain he would look at her and say, Obviously you’re not. I know that today is your anniversary with Chris, so I’m sure you’re going to a hotel with him in order to engage in uninterrupted adolescent sexual activity.
But he didn’t say anything like that. Probably he didn’t even know it was her anniversary.
“I’m sleeping over there,” Arden went on, holding up her bag as if that were proof.
He nodded.
“So you’ll stay here and take care of Roman?”
“Of course,” he said. “What else would I do?”
What else would he do? Go to the office. Get involved in some fantasy sports thing or work project and lose track of time. There were a lot of other things he might do.
Since receiving her mother’s letter, Arden looked at her dad a little differently. She didn’t want to. She kept telling herself that it wasn’t his fault, it couldn’t be his fault that he had been left behind. He had always done the best he could. But she was finding it hard to get her mother’s words out of her head. I felt like I had done all the running of our household for seventeen years. I wasn’t getting the sort of support from your father that I needed.
Arden shook herself out of that line of thinking. “I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll be home around noon tomorrow.”
She gave him a quick kiss and hightailed it.
Check-in time was at two, and it was 2:03 when Arden parked the Heart of Gold in the lot of the hotel on the other side of town. The receptionist asked to see her driver’s license, and even though she’d prepared for this, Arden’s chest tightened. She’d gotten a fake ID specifically for tonight but had no idea if it would pass muster. She’d paid Kirsten’s stepbrother hands
omely for it, as he was older and “knew a guy.” She didn’t have a clue what would happen if the hotel saw this ID for what it was: an overpriced square of plastic. Best-case scenario, they wouldn’t let her into the room. Worst-case scenario maybe was jail?
But the receptionist had no visible reaction to Arden’s fake ID. She barely glanced at it before handing Arden a card key and saying, “Take the elevator to the fourth floor.”
So Arden did.
The room was clean and quiet and felt strangely immobile, like humans never disrupted it—even though of course they did; it’s just that the hotel had a paid staff to dispose of any evidence of that fact. There was a king-size bed in the center of the room, dominating the space. There was almost nothing else to look at.
Chris was supposed to arrive at four, so Arden would have plenty of time to prepare the room and herself before going down to meet him in the lobby. Once he was here, she had a whole evening planned out for them: ordering in room service, watching as many old musicals as he wanted on the room’s big TV screen, and, of course, lots of time in that king-size bed together.
Arden had told Chris the street address to come to but nothing else, and had begged him not to look it up. “It’s a surprise,” she’d told him weeks and weeks ago, when she first started planning this whole day. “So don’t ruin it.”
He’d sworn up and down that he wouldn’t. “I’ll like the surprise, right?”
“Of course. And tell your parents that you won’t be home until the next day.”
“I’m intrigued. Are you kidnapping me?”
“Maybe.”
Planning this whole secret event had been fun: collaborating with Kirsten and Naomi to find the right outfit and practice her hair and makeup, getting the fake ID, saving up for this hotel room, and, especially, dangling the whole secret in front of Chris, a present he couldn’t open yet. It had seemed like he was actually interested in finding out what this anniversary surprise would be. For once it had seemed like Arden knew something that he didn’t, and he was interested to find what it was.
