Tonight the Streets Are Ours

by Leila Sales

  “It broke down on the highway earlier,” Arden explains. “I let it sit for a few minutes to recover, and after that it seemed fine. The engine had overheated, I think, which made sense because I’d been driving it at top speed for hours. But now it’s just been sitting here the whole time while we were in Jigsaw Manor, so I don’t know why…” She trails off and tries the key one last time. Please, please, please, I just need this to work, she thinks as hard as she can.

  Nothing.

  “Aaurghhh!” Arden throws her key down, and it clatters onto the floor of the car. She flings open the door, launches herself onto the street, and starts kicking at the Heart of Gold, her feet thumping against the wheels as if they were punching bags.

  She stops only when Peter grabs her from behind, wrapping his arms around her to stop her from hurling her fist through her window. “Shh,” he whispers.

  “Why won’t it work?” she cries. “I take care of this car. I treat it right. So why—won’t it—work!” She gets in one last good kick before Peter drags her away. He starts to laugh, and Arden whirls around, fists clenched. “Are you laughing at me?”

  “No. It’s just—you’ve only been here a few hours, and already you’re acting like a true New Yorker.”

  “What are you talking about?” she demands.

  “Picking fights with inanimate objects. Experiencing rage meltdowns.”

  “I am not a New Yorker.”

  “Fine, then you’re just having a very New York response. Trust me, it comes with the territory when eight million people are trying to share limited resources. One time I saw a guy literally pick a fistfight with a mailbox because it was in his way.”

  This distracts Arden from her rage meltdown. “Who won?”

  “The mailbox did, of course, but dude put up a good fight. I’m telling you, this sort of shit happens all the time in this city. People barely even register it.”

  Arden looks over to the crowd gathered outside Jigsaw Manor: the people waiting in line to get in (still, even though it’s nearly two thirty in the morning), the winged fairies smoking a cigarette on the street. Peter is right. None of them seems to care that across the street, there’s a girl physically fighting her car as if they’re in a cage match. There’s something unsettling about the fact that nobody is noticing her scene, nobody is coming over to ask what’s wrong or if she needs help, but what’s also unsettling is that this doesn’t bother her, because it makes her feel like she can do whatever the hell she wants.

  “What’s the plan for your car?” Peter asks.

  “I don’t know. I just want to get out of here. I want to go somewhere.”

  “Me, too,” Peter agrees. She sees him looking around, and she assumes he is keeping a watch out for Leo.

  Now that her fury has passed, Arden feels drained. She sits down on the curb. Questions threaten the edges of her consciousness: How am I going to get home, if my car doesn’t work? How is Lindsey going to get home? When am I going to go home?

  As if sensing, somehow, that Arden is plagued by pragmatic concerns, and knowing that “pragmatic concerns” might as well be his middle name, Chris chooses this moment to call.

  She answers automatically, not even bothering to consider whether or not she actually wants to speak to him at this moment. She feels like she doesn’t have any fight left in her—she used it all up on Lindsey and the Heart of Gold, and now she’s empty. “What?” she says, her voice weary.

  “Oh, wow, you’re still up! Okay, good. Well, I was just calling because, uh, Jaden wanted to know if we wanted to meet up for lunch at Piccino tomorrow. You in?”

  This is weird, hearing Chris’s voice and Jaden’s name, these hallmarks of home, while she is sitting on a curb outside an enchanted forest party in Brooklyn, her skin covered in marker. She’d imagined that she’d entered into another dimension, but now it turns out that she hadn’t.

  “I can’t do lunch. Sorry. Why are you still up?” she asks Chris distractedly. As soon as she answered the phone, Peter started wandering down the street. She’s keeping an eye on him, wondering where he’s going. It seems unlikely that he’s going to just ditch her here—but if for some reason he did, she has no idea what she would do. She doesn’t even know where she is.

  “I was having trouble sleeping,” Chris says. He clears his throat. “I guess I was worried … that you’re still mad at me. Are you still mad at me?”

  It feels like a million years have passed since her argument with Chris. It actually takes her a second to remember specifically what they were fighting about, and then it startles her to think of Chris, sitting in his bed alone and missing her, while she is hundreds of miles away, making giant soap bubbles in the air. The thought makes her feel powerful. Let him know what it’s like, for once. Let him know how it feels to be the one who gets left behind.

  “You seem like you’re still mad,” Chris says after a moment of silence from Arden.

  She was, it’s true, but now it seems absurd to be mad at him, when he is the reason she’s here at all, in New York, with Peter. It seems absurd to be mad at him because no amount of her anger or arguing would ever convince him that what he really wants to do, most in all the world, is be by her side. She doesn’t really know why she’d bother. She wants things between them to be right again. But being mad at him isn’t going to make that happen.

  “I’m not mad,” she says. “I’m just disappointed.” Peter has vanished from view and she stands up to try to figure out where he’s gone.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Chris promises, and probably he could, and would, if her disappointment were only about him, and only about what happened today.

  “How was the movie thing?” Arden asks. She is walking down the street slowly, away from the party and her car, scanning for Peter.

  “It was great,” Chris replies. “Everyone there was super nice, and I really felt like they all treated me as an equal, you know? Not just some random high school student. This is going to be a great learning experience, I can already tell. The girl who’s playing Gretchen seemed pretty interested in American Fairy Tale. She said she might check out one of our rehearsals some time, if it’s okay with Mr. Lansdowne.”

  “That’s good,” Arden says vaguely.

  Chris sighs. “Babe, why are you being so out of it?”

  This snaps her attention back to her phone. “It’s just really … late,” she explains. “I wasn’t expecting a call from you this late. But I’m glad you had a fun night.”

  “Okay,” he says. “And you’re good?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m good. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, all right?”

  “Yup. Love you.”

  “I love you, too”—but the words feel like a lie, and she wonders if they did yesterday, too, and the day before that—if they were always a lie, or if she really meant it once upon a time, and if she could ever manage to mean it again.

  She silences her phone, sticks it in her purse, and goes striding down the street in search of Peter. Once she gets past the crowd around Jigsaw Manor, the road is relatively quiet—relative to every place else she’s seen in New York, that is—with just the occasional taxi rumbling past.

  She sees Peter ahead, walking back toward her. “There you are,” she says. “I’m sorry, I had to answer that. I didn’t mean to—”

  He grabs her hand. “Come with me. I’ve found the solution to all our problems.”

  Arden scoffs, because they have so many problems between the two of them, she can’t even imagine what a solution would look like.

  They run down to the corner, and Arden looks in either direction, seeing nothing except a fast food joint and more taxis and more warehouses and a few piles of trash bags and a stretch limousine.

  “Um,” she says.

  Peter opens the door to the limousine and gallantly gestures toward it. “My lady,” he says.

  “Peter,” she says. “How did you suddenly get a limousine?”

  “Oh, I just hail
ed it.” He pantomimes sticking his arm in the air.

  “You hailed it. Like a taxi. Only you hailed a limousine.”

  “Yeeeah.” He drags out the word thoughtfully. “Sometimes people book a limo for a whole night. They want it there to drop them off and take them home again at the end of the night, you know? In the middle, the driver might cruise around, in case he can pick up some additional passengers and earn a little extra cash.”

  “So you hailed it,” Arden says again, trying to wrap her head around this.

  “Correct.”

  “How much does a limousine ride cost?” Arden peers inside the open door. She’s never ridden in one before, though she and Chris are going in with eight other theater kids to rent a limo for prom, which is only five weeks away. Yesterday’s Arden was excited for Future Arden’s first ride in a limo to be when she has her hair professionally done and the boy she loves all tall and handsome and debonair in a tux beside her. But today’s Arden doesn’t want to wait.

  “I’m paying,” Peter says. “And it’s cheap.”

  Arden’s eyes flicker back down the road, toward her car.

  “You said you just wanted to get out of here,” Peter reminds her.

  “I do,” Arden agrees, and she climbs in.

  Peter gets in after her and shuts the door. Inside the limo is quiet, with long black leather seats around all the sides, a rich rosewood-colored table in the middle, and small lights glowing on the roof. There’s a complicated audiovisual system with a TV and an iPod dock, and a panel with countless buttons that control everything from the temperature to the moon roof to the intercom with the driver. Arden presses them all.

  “Where you going?” the driver asks over the intercom. He has a foreign accent that Arden can’t place, and she feels a little like she’s in the James Bond flick she watched at the Glockenspiel last summer. “I must to be in Williamsburg before four, so not too far,” the driver cautions.

  “Do you need to get home at some point?” Peter asks Arden.

  She blinks at him.

  “I mean, is your mom expecting you?”

  Of course. He thinks she’s staying with her mom for the weekend. Because that would make sense.

  “At some point,” Arden says. “Are your parents expecting you home?”

  Peter raises his eyebrows and grins. “At some point.” To the driver he says, “Take us into Manhattan. Over the Brooklyn Bridge, please.”

  He turns off the intercom, and the limo pulls away.

  Arden and Peter sit on opposite sides, and they look across the table at each other.

  “Well,” Peter says, and Arden starts to laugh.

  “You were right,” she tells him. “You did find the solution to all our problems.”

  Arden is a catch

  “So who was calling you this late at night?” Peter asks as the limousine glides through the streets of Brooklyn. “Was that Lindsey asking you to come back already?”

  Arden’s stomach turns at the sound of Lindsey’s name. “It was my boyfriend,” she admits.

  Peter perks up at the word boyfriend. He’s immediately interested, and Arden wonders, not for the first time, if the most interesting thing about her is that she is somebody’s girlfriend. “What’s his name?”

  “Chris.”

  “How long have you two lovebirds been dating?”

  “A year.” She swallows hard. “One year today.”

  Peter whistles. “What’s his deal?”

  This is easy; Chris has a very straightforward deal. “He’s a junior, like me. He’s a super-talented actor. He wants to go to college for theater, and after that he plans to go to Hollywood. He’s a good student, though. It’s not like he slacks off in his other classes, even though he doesn’t need great grades to get into a theater program, if his audition is strong enough.”

  “He’s popular?”

  Arden shrugs. “Not in, like, a cool way. But he’s well-liked.”

  “Good-looking?”

  Arden nods.

  “Athletic?”

  “I mean, he can run a mile, so by my standards, yes.”

  “Does he recycle?”

  Arden laughs. “Yeah.”

  “He sounds perfect,” Peter concludes. He rests his elbows on his knees and leans forward, looking at her. He doesn’t ask the follow-up question, but Arden can sense it in the air between them: If Chris is so talented and so ambitious and so smart and so well-liked and so good-looking, then why aren’t you with him right now? If Chris is so perfect, then why are you here?

  Peter doesn’t ask, but Arden wants to tell him anyway. He’s revealed to her all his secrets. There’s no reason she can’t do the same.

  “I’m just not sure that he’s perfect for me,” Arden says.

  She’s never admitted this. Not even to herself. Everyone else knows Chris, and knows her as part of a Chris-and-Arden pair, and they wouldn’t understand. In Chris she’d gotten everything she wanted, but still she doesn’t feel happy. So maybe it’s that there is something wrong with her. A deep-seated discontentment.

  Peter says, “If for some reason it doesn’t work out between you two, I’m sure you will find somebody else.”

  Arden snorts. “Me? At Allegany High? Not likely.”

  “Well, I don’t know what the dating pool is like at Allegany High. But maybe. If not there, then somewhere else, you’ll find somebody else.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Why what?”

  She shakes her head, because she doesn’t want to put into words what she means, which is: why would anybody else want to be with me?

  But it’s like he understands her unspoken question, because he answers, “Because. You’re a catch.”

  He searches under his leather seat, and his eyes light up when he finds what he was looking for: a liquor cabinet, which he opens and triumphantly pulls out a glass bottle of dark brown liquid.

  Arden asks, “But what if I don’t find anybody else? Or what if anyone else who I like … doesn’t like me back?” She doesn’t want to admit that she’d never found anyone prior to Chris, because Peter seems so much more experienced in love and dating than she is.

  “Well, then, you’ll be alone.” Peter pours himself a tumbler of the liquor. “It’s not the end of the world, is it?”

  “Don’t you think it is?” Arden counters.

  He smiles and takes a sip and says nothing.

  “Is it even legal to drink in a moving vehicle in New York?” Arden asks.

  “Tinted windows,” Peter says, swirling around the liquid in his glass.

  “Why is there just a bottle of alcohol hanging out in here, anyway?” Arden wants to know.

  “I would guess that whoever rented the limo for the night also wanted to drink in a moving vehicle.”

  “Is it really okay for you to drink their stuff?”

  Peter rolls his eyes. “They’re rich enough to rent a limo for a night, even though there are hours in there when they’re not even using it. I think they’re rich enough that they can stand to lose a shot of Jameson.”

  Arden accepts that there are some things about this city that she just does not understand, and moves on. “Hey, Peter, I wanted to say that I’m sorry about what happened back there,” she says. “That fight with Lindsey, and my freak-out at the car. You must think I’m crazy, just showing up here and screaming all over the place, when you’ve never even met me before.”

  Peter shrugs this off. “I don’t mind a little crazy. And anyway, like I said, we’ve all done things we’re not proud of.”

  And Arden feels like this links them together. Their shared guilt.

  “Do you think there’s any truth to what she was saying about me?” she asks. “That I need her to be the screwup so I can be the savior? All that stuff?” She doesn’t know how Peter would be able to answer this question when he doesn’t know her—but she feels as if he knows everything.

  “No way,” Peter says. “She was just pissed off.”


  Arden leans her head against the window. “When I woke up this morning, this isn’t where I thought my day would take me,” she tells him.

  “Me, neither. But nothing ever seems to go the way I expect it will. I don’t know why I keep expecting anything.”

  “Where are we even going?” Arden asks. Right now, she feels like she could go anywhere.

  “I don’t know,” Peter says. “But hey, look out the window. I don’t want you to miss this.”

  She looks. They are driving on a bridge across a river. It’s a suspension bridge, constructed of stone and thick wires. The bridge towers before them arch up and toward the sky, calling to mind the photos of European Gothic cathedrals that Arden has seen in her history textbook. Beyond the towers, she sees the Manhattan skyline laid out for her, lit up in the night, its glittering high-rises and spires packed together so closely that they resemble one mighty monolith.

  Arden remembers the abrasive neon signs of her childhood trip to New York with her mother. This view of the city has a similar glow. But it feels different, because she’s on the outside, taking it all in. This reminds her more of the lush Maryland mountains that she drove through this afternoon: something so expansive that it’s impossible to fathom.

  “I never get tired of this view,” Peter says, but his words are sluggish. He lies down. After a moment, Arden does the same on the seat across from him. She points her toes and stretches her arms over her head, and still there’s room beyond her reach. She has the unfamiliar sensation of the world moving around her while she is lying motionless.

  The limo exits the bridge and descends into the city below. Arden and Peter lie across from each other, and they listen to the sounds of traffic beyond their tinted windows. And for them, all the red lights turn to green.

  Arden feels like she’s flying

  After they’ve been driving through the streets of Manhattan for about twenty minutes, the limousine stops. Through the intercom, the driver says, “I must to go now. I say I will be in Williamsburg soon.”