by Leila Sales
“Plus, the Heart of Gold spaceship ran on the infinite improbability drive,” Lindsey added. “And it is infinitely improbable that this car will ever start.”
Arden smacked her shoulder. “Shh, you’ll hurt its feelings.”
After another fifteen minutes of harrowing New York City driving, Peter said, “Okay, you can park somewhere around here.” They had reached a quiet, run-down part of town, all concrete and trash on the ground, with none of the boutiques or restaurants that had characterized the Last Page’s neighborhood—but fortunately, lots of easy parking spaces. It seemed to Arden like the sort of place where your car would get stolen, your purse would get stolen, and you would be left for dead. If Chris were here, he would have locked all the doors and ordered her to keep driving. So instead, she parked and got out.
They joined a long line of people waiting outside a heavily graffitied door. Some were smoking cigarettes, drinking out of cans in paper bags, or sitting on the dirty sidewalk. Everyone was done up in some kind of costume, adorned with fairy wings or crowns of leaves or gobs of glitter.
“Your dress totally fits in here,” Lindsey said to Arden in wonder.
“It’s like I’d known we were coming,” Arden agreed.
Peter spotted two guys whom he recognized and pulled Arden and Lindsey into line with them. The girl they cut right in front of sighed loudly and said, “Really?”
“Sorry,” Arden said guiltily. She held out her tin. “Can I offer you a brownie?”
“I guess.” The girl adjusted the enormous antlers sticking out of her head, then took two brownies. And said nothing more about their cutting.
Peter introduced the girls to his friends. “Arden, Lindsey, these guys are Trotsky and Hanson.”
“Hey,” Arden and Lindsey said. Arden didn’t ask how they knew Peter, because she was worried they might ask the same of her in return. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to care.
“What’s the theme tonight?” Peter asked. He pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a quick sip, which seemed daring considering they were outside, and presumably public underage drinking was as illegal here as it was in Maryland. Arden tensed—it was one thing to see strangers drinking on the street, and quite another to see Peter do the same—but nobody else seemed concerned.
“Enchanted forest,” Trotsky said, sounding terribly uninterested.
“Like a Midsummer Night’s Dream kind of thing,” contributed Hanson.
“It’s ironic,” interjected Trotsky, “because it’s only April.”
“That’s why I made this.” Hanson put on a papier-mâché donkey’s head and then said something else, but it came out as “Mumble mumble mumble.”
“Ugh,” said Trotsky, sounding somehow even more bored now. “Honey, I told you I can’t hear you when you have that ass-head on.”
“Hey, my … Chris was in Midsummer’s once,” Arden said. My boyfriend. She’d almost said my boyfriend, and she knew she should have said it, because that’s still what Chris was.
But she didn’t say it.
“Do you guys have any extra supplies?” Peter asked. “We didn’t get our act together to make costumes. Clearly.”
Hanson shook his head a number of times. Trotsky said, sounding both bored and doubtful, “You could smear dirt on your face. I guess.”
“I have a couple colored Sharpies,” Lindsey volunteered, pulling them out of her bag. Lindsey never, ever unpacked her bag. It was constantly filled with used tissues and empty Chapstick tubes and magazines that she’d already read. Clutter just didn’t bother Lindsey very much. Generally this drove Arden crazy, but sometimes—like tonight—it paid off.
“Lindsey, my lady, you are resourceful,” Peter said. “I like that in a girl.” He gave her a winning smile. “Let me see them.”
Lindsey handed over the markers, and Peter turned to Arden. He looked at her really intently, like he was surveying a blank canvas. She felt herself turning red, but forced herself to be still, to submit to his gaze, to take in the feeling of his eyes on her body. And suddenly she was glad she hadn’t mentioned Chris.
“Okay, I have a vision,” Peter declared. “Get your hair out of the way.”
Arden swept it up in a ponytail, and he uncapped a marker and started to write on her. She shivered as the pen tip touched her chest bone.
“That is going to be a bitch to wash off,” Lindsey said, sounding respectful.
“Lose the coat,” Peter told Arden.
She pulled off the kelly green spring jacket and held it in her hand, stretching her arms out so he could reach her triceps, her clavicle, her shoulder blade. She felt cold in the nighttime air, but inside she felt like she was burning up. Lindsey was right that this was going to be a bitch to wash off. She didn’t care.
When she looked at her extended arms, she saw that Peter had covered her in his words. The text wrapped around her wrists, across her shoulders, and down her back, at all different angles, so she couldn’t read all of it, but she did make out I miss you I miss you I miss you, and the only one, and to linger too late, and, gigantic on her forearm, loneliness.
“I don’t know what the hell to do with markers,” Peter explained, handing the markers to Arden. “I’m not really an artist. The only thing I can draw are words.”
“Words are enough,” Arden said. And Peter’s words were, as always, perfect. They made her feel less alone, more connected, and understood in a way that was giddily palpable. Having his words on her body made her feel like she was wearing armor.
By the time they reached the door, all three of them were covered in marker. They didn’t look a thing like enchanted forest creatures. But they looked weird, Arden could say that for sure.
“Twenty dollars each,” said the guy working the door, who looked to be a few years older than they were, and who was wearing a full-body chipmunk costume.
Hanson and Trotsky both vaguely patted at their pants, as though they couldn’t quite figure out where they’d put their wallets, before Peter stepped forward and said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” He handed the door guy a hundred dollar bill and waved off Arden’s offer of cash.
Hanson opened the door, leading them into a basement that was designed to look like a—well, like an enchanted forest. Potted bushes lined the way, with silhouette cutouts of tree branches on the walls. Sculptures of fairies dotted the room, and giant colorful mesh butterflies hung from the ceiling. Eerie ambient music echoed around them.
“Whoa,” breathed Lindsey. She squeezed Arden’s hand, and Arden felt the remaining bit of the annoyance she’d felt at Lindsey, which had been hanging over her head like a dark cloud since their car ride, dissipate at last.
“It’s an art,” Arden said simply, and Peter burst out laughing.
“It’s wild,” he said. “It’s like you’re part of my brain.”
“Have you never met one of your readers before?” Arden asked.
He shook his head. “Not like you.”
“So what is the deal with this place?” Lindsey asked, stopping to study a blown-glass orb. “Is it like a nightclub, or…?”
“It’s an apartment, if you can believe that,” Peter replied. “Well, it wasn’t built to be an apartment. But it got converted a while back. And then a bunch of kids from Pratt—the art college, you know?—they rented it out. Every room in here has been passed down from Pratt student to Pratt student over the years.”
“Like a fraternity,” Arden said. “An art fraternity.”
“A fart-ernity?” Lindsey suggested, and the girls giggled.
“Sure,” Peter said. “It’s called Jigsaw Manor.”
“Jigsaw Manor?” Lindsey’s giggles grew even louder. “That is so random. Why?”
Peter stopped to think about it. “Uh, I have no idea! That’s just what it’s called. There are probably a dozen people who live here now. They throw parties every few weeks to cover their rent. Every time somebody new moves in, they add their own work, so there are layers upon la
yers of art in this place.”
“Also layers upon layers of dirt,” Hanson called back. He was on his way up the flight of stairs in the back of the basement.
Arden tried to look at everything so she could commit every last bit of it to memory. This would probably be the only time she would ever go to an art fraternity with her best friend and the writer she was obsessed with and Sharpie marks all over their bodies. Already she felt nostalgic for tonight. Already she could imagine herself months from now, wishing that she had made more of this one night while she was still in it.
“Do you know anyone who lives here?” she asked Peter as they climbed the dark stairs, the roar of sound from the floor above them getting louder and louder.
“Yes. One of the girls is friends with my brother.”
They opened the door to the next floor, and the dull roar burst into a cacophony. Jigsaw Manor was packed with partygoers in outrageous costumes, feathers and sparkles flying everywhere. At the front of the room, a ten-piece band was banging out something atonal and unrecognizable; each member seemed only dimly aware of the fact that a whole bunch of other instrumentalists were playing at the same time. A chandelier made mostly of duct tape and flashlights swayed dangerously overhead.
“Oh my God,” Arden and Lindsey breathed at the same moment.
Trotsky looked around and blew out a long breath. “There’s, like, nobody here tonight,” he concluded.
“Do you want to explore?” Peter asked the girls.
“Of course!”
They ran all over the place. Jigsaw Manor seemed ever-expanding because they kept discovering new rooms, and Arden could not figure out how they all fit together. One room was barely the size of a twin bed, and a couple was making out in there. That room was pretty boring. But in the next space over, a girl was Hula-Hooping with a half dozen different hoops twirling around her body, each one flashing a rainbow display of light. A massive rope net hung suspended from the ceiling, and a dozen more partygoers lay atop it, their bodies swinging overhead. Behind a bookcase that turned out to be a door, Arden found a chest of drawers, each of which played a different rhythm when it was opened, so they could create a dozen different pieces of music just by opening and closing drawers.
On a balcony outside one of the rooms, they found an enormous cage housing a human-size rabbit that seemed to be made entirely out of moss, a mannequin head hanging from a noose, and three actual human beings, a girl and two guys. The girl said to Lindsey, “I dig your aura.”
“Really?” said Lindsey. “What does that mean?” And the next thing Arden knew, Lindsey was all cozied up inside the cage with them, listening to a description of the colors that were supposedly emanating from her chakras or something.
“I’m going to keep exploring,” Arden told her. “Text if you need me, okay?”
Lindsey shot Arden an exasperated look. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “God, Mom,” she added, which made the three people in the human-size cage giggle.
Arden paused on the threshold, but then Peter grabbed her hand and pulled her away. They saw more rooms. One where everyone was dancing wildly, except for Trotsky and Hanson, who were hanging on the sidelines, snidely remarking on how boring and passé dancing was. Another with bins of soapy water and oversize bubble wands for them to play with. Eventually they wound up in front of a ladder propped against a wall in the back of the Hula-Hooping room. “Up,” Peter said, pointing.
Arden craned her head back. “What’s up there?”
“You’ll never know if you don’t climb, will you?”
She put her hands on the rungs, then turned back and said, “You’re going to be able to see up my dress, though.”
“I won’t look,” Peter promised, holding up a hand solemnly. “Scout’s honor.”
“I don’t know many kids in the Scouts,” Arden said. “We’re more a 4-H sort of town.”
“I don’t know what 4-H is,” Peter said.
“Exactly.” Arden started to climb.
When she got to the top of the ladder, she found herself on the roof, looking down over the line of partygoers still on the street. It was windy up there, and her hair blew into her eyes and mouth. Peter pulled himself onto the roof a moment later and put his hands on his hips, surveying the night sky. “Nice view, right?”
“Sort of.” There were too many lights from the city, and Arden couldn’t see a single star in the sky. She thought that her dad would have nothing to look at with his telescope here, and then she felt a quick pang of guilt for being so far from home, in this starless city, when she had told her father she’d be only on the other side of the woods. He’d already had his wife run off. He didn’t need for his daughter to do the same. He deserved better.
But that was different. Unlike her mom, Arden had her reasons. And unlike her mom, tomorrow she was going home.
“Did you get a glimpse of my underwear or what?” she asked Peter.
“I did not,” Peter said.
“Good.”
“But would it offend you if I told you that you have great legs?”
Arden stared at him. “Ha, ha.”
“Oh, come on, I’m sure people tell you that all the time.”
“Nobody’s ever told me that,” she said.
Although there were a number of other partygoers up on the roof, it was quieter than any of the rooms inside. No ten-piece band to contend with. Peter pulled his flask out of his pocket and took a long swig from it, tilting his head back. When he was done, he offered it to Arden.
She held the flask in her hands but didn’t drink from it. It was heavy and sterling silver, engraved with the name LEONARD MATTHEW LAU. She looked up. “Is this Leo’s? Bianca’s Leo?”
He studied the engraving, as though he had forgotten what it said. “Yes.”
She giggled. “So you took his girl and his flask.”
Peter offered her a half smile. “Something like that.”
Of course, it occurred to Arden, he’d managed to keep only one of those.
Peter turned, walked over to a giant rocking chair, and climbed onto it. There were a number of them scattered around the roof deck. Rocking chairs that could seat three or four people. Bicycles on rocking chairs. Seesaws on rocking chairs. Arden wondered what the emergency plan was if an underage drunk kid fell off a rocking chair seesaw on the roof of Jigsaw Manor.
She went over to Peter and gave his chair a little push.
“Look, Arden,” Peter said, taking the flask back from her. “I just want you to understand. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of.”
“So have I,” Arden said. “So has everyone. I mean, Lindsey once stole a canoe, and she doesn’t even know how to paddle a boat. She was pretty not-proud of that. I don’t love her any less for it.”
“That’s sweet.” Peter took another long swallow from Leo’s flask. “I just want to be the person you thought I would be. The Peter you were promised.”
She reached up to touch his arm, but the rocking chair put him slightly out of reach. “You already are,” she told him.
“I worry about that, too,” he said, staring off into the urban sprawl. “I worry that I’m not the person I seem to be on Tonight the Streets Are Ours. And then I worry that I’m exactly the person I seem to be.”
“Just don’t worry,” said Arden. “Not about me.”
He took his gaze off the skyline and smiled down at her. “Okay, friend,” he said. “Climb on up here.”
The chair was pretty high off the ground, and she wasn’t sure how to get onto it.
“Just jump,” he said.
She did. She didn’t make it that high. She landed roughly on her waist and wriggled the rest of the way until she was finally sitting next to him. “That was like an Olympic sport,” she said once she was settled.
“Then you just got a silver medal in climbing onto rocking chairs,” he said.
“Why? Because you already took home the gold?”
“Well, yeah!” He grinned
and again proffered Leo’s flask. “Winners’ toast?”
“Nah.” She waved it off.
“You don’t drink?”
“Is that a problem?” she asked, her words a challenge.
He shook his head. “Just wondering why.”
“Well, I’m seventeen years old, so it’s illegal. For a start.”
“You don’t know any seventeen-year-olds who drink?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Do you have a history of alcoholism in your family? Is that why?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. Maybe I have a great-uncle or second cousin somewhere with a drinking problem, but no one I know of. I’m usually the designated driver, though,” she explained. “I’m old for my grade, so I got my license before most of my friends—and I’d saved up enough money from tutoring to buy the Heart of Gold—so I just got in the habit of being the one to drive. Plus…” She shrugged. “Lindsey gets into a lot of trouble. Somebody has to stay sober.”
Peter laughed. “She’s that much of a handful? I wouldn’t have guessed that from looking at her. She seemed pretty meek, actually. Out of the two of you, I would have pegged you as the troublemaker.”
“Me?” Arden asked. “Why?”
He stared at her, like he was searching her face for the answer. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “You just seem like trouble.”
They both leaned back against the chair, rocking back and forth. The party swirled on below them.
“You asked what happened to my brother,” Peter said.
Arden gave a brief nod, not wanting to scare him off.
“I’ll tell you the story. We assumed he was at Cornell, where he was supposed to be. We hadn’t heard from him for a few days, but nobody thought anything about that except for my mother. Dad and I were like, ‘He’s a freshman in college, he’s not going to call home every couple hours.’
“Then we got a call from his resident adviser. His roommate had gone to her, saying that my brother hadn’t been in the room for a few days and he was just wondering if anything was going on. They started looking into it, and it turned out no one had seen him for days. Not any of his professors or classmates. Not anyone at the frat he was pledging or the other guys on the football team. They sent out an all-campus e-mail, and heard back exactly nothing.
