Tonight the Streets Are Ours (2 page)

But the worst part, for Lindsey, was that getting caught with drugs meant you were immediately kicked off all sports teams for the rest of the year. No way around it. And Lindsey
lived
for the school track team. She loved running roughly as much as Arden hated it. Not only that, but being recruited for track was basically Lindsey’s only hope for getting accepted into a good college. She didn’t have a whole lot else going for her. This was not, by the way, Arden’s opinion. This was the opinion of countless guidance counselors, teachers, and Lindsey’s own parents.

Arden knew what would happen if she explained exactly how that bag of marijuana wound up in her locker. Lindsey would lose it all. Over one casual, stupid decision, and one massive helping of bad luck. That sounded about par for the course for Lindsey.

But fortunately, Arden didn’t play any sports.

Let’s go even further. Let’s go way, way back

When she was nine years old, Arden Huntley was turned into a doll.

It’s a very competitive process, to be a doll.

Only one girl gets this honor each year, and there are a lot of rules. She must be between the ages of eight and twelve. She must be a United States citizen. She must write an essay explaining why she thinks she has what it takes to be the Doll of the Year, and she must submit this essay to the Just Like Me Dolls Company by July first, and if her application is chosen above all the other thousands and thousands of girls who are vying for this honor, then she and only she will have a Just Like Me Doll modeled after her that goes on sale six months later.

When she turned eight, Arden’s grandparents gave her the Just Like Me Doll of that year, whose name was Tabitha. Tabitha had brown skin, brown eyes, and brown hair. Tabitha was a ballerina. That was her “thing.” So if Arden had more generous grandparents, they could have given her Tabitha’s barre and Tabitha’s performance tutu and Tabitha’s pointe shoes. Instead they just gave her Tabitha herself, in her normal, everyday leotard, and the four illustrated books that told the story of Tabitha’s life. Arden would have preferred the pointe shoes to the books, but she dutifully wrote a thank-you note, anyway.

Tabitha’s first story was called
Tabitha on Stage
, and it was about Tabitha’s performing in
The Nutcracker
and how she took a leadership role to get all the mouse dancers to work together. The next one was called
Break a Leg, Tabitha!
and was about how Tabitha helped teach ballet at an underprivileged elementary school. Maybe you are starting to get a sense of what the Just Like Me Dolls’ books are like.

Arden didn’t know anything about the real-life Tabitha, not even where in the country she lived, but she was fascinated by her. Whenever Arden saw a black girl around her own age (which didn’t happen all that often, since Cumberland was overwhelmingly white), she would stare at her, trying to figure out if maybe
this
was the real Tabitha. Then her mother told her this behavior was rude and borderline racist and asked her to please stop.

Arden dreamed of becoming a Just Like Me Doll, but she didn’t see how to make that happen, since she, unlike Tabitha, did not have a “thing.” She didn’t do ballet, or gymnastics, or figure skating (all of which would lead to excellent doll accoutrements). She played soccer but badly, she took swimming lessons but only so she wouldn’t drown, she hadn’t quite yet gotten the hang of riding a bike without training wheels. She drew pictures that her mother called “abstract” and wrote stories that never got gold stars and got cast as fish number two in her class’s production of
The Little Mermaid
. One time she tried to cook something, and she exploded a glass mixing bowl on the stove. After that, her mother banned her from the kitchen.

What Arden did superlatively was this:

She was nice.

She absolutely
killed
at reading buddies—all the kindergartners fought to be paired up with her. She was the first to volunteer to collaborate on group projects with the kids who got bad grades. She was never without a hair elastic or tissues, just in case somebody needed to use them. One time she paid the library twenty dollars because her friend Maya had borrowed a book and lost it somewhere in the park, and that was enough to make Arden feel responsible.

Arden came by her niceness honestly. Her grandmother was nice. Her mother was nice. Her house was filled with wall art and embroidered pillows with quotations like
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all
and
Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty
and
You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose
—this last one being a quote that her mother loved from Antoine de Saint-Exup
é
ry’s
The Little Prince
.

The height of Arden’s kindness career came near the end of third grade, though she didn’t know it at the time. Her dad had been representing someone who worked for the Disney corporation, and when the case was over, this client had, in gratitude, given Arden’s dad family tickets for an all-expenses-paid trip to Disney World. This was easily the best thing ever to happen to Arden, or possibly to anyone.

And then she met Lindsey.

It was a Sunday in May. Arden’s brother, Roman, who was three at the time, was throwing a temper tantrum, as he did every single day, sometimes more than once. This particular tantrum was about how their cat, Mouser, was maliciously hiding under the couch instead of playing with him.

Arden escaped to the woods just behind her house so she wouldn’t have to listen to the screaming. She brought her Just Like Me Doll with her, even though her parents repeatedly asked her not to do this, since Tabitha had cost more than a hundred dollars and was already, after about five months, looking decidedly worse for the wear.

And it was there, in the woods, that Arden first encountered Lindsey.

She saw a tall, skinny, dark-haired girl in between the trees, focusing on a long metal device in her hands.

“Hi,” Arden said to the girl she did not recognize.

The girl looked up from the metal thing.

“I’m Arden,” said Arden. “You’re in my woods.” As soon as she heard the words come out, Arden realized they sounded selfish, and she hastened to add, “It’s okay that you’re in my woods. There’s enough woods to go around. I just thought you should know.”

The girl gave Arden a weird look, and Arden wondered about the sentence
There’s enough woods to go around
. That was what her mother always said, like when she and Roman got grabby over a pint of ice cream.
There’s enough ice cream to go around.
Maybe it didn’t make as much sense when it came to woods.

“These are my woods, too,” the girl said in a low, uncertain voice.

“I don’t think so. But like I said, it’s okay. You can play in my woods.”

“We just moved in there.” The girl pointed to the house behind Arden’s. Its backyard abutted the small section of woods, like a mirror image of the Huntleys’ own home. “So I think these are both of our woods.”

“Hey,” Arden said, “we’re neighbors!”

Arden learned that the girl’s name was Lindsey Matson, and that she was finishing up third grade, too, and that she and her parents had just moved to town from a farm.

“You had your own farm?” Arden demanded. “Did you have sheep?”

“Yup.”

“Did you have horses?”

“Two of them!”

“Did you have zebras?” Arden had a particular yen for zebras.

“Um, no.”

“That’s okay.” Arden hadn’t really expected Lindsey’s personal farm to house zebras. She just thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Lindsey told Arden that her dad had gotten very sick. He couldn’t work on the farm anymore, and they couldn’t afford to pay anyone else to do it. So the Matsons sold the farm, they sold the sheep and the horses and everything else, and they moved here.

“It’s very expensive to treat cancer. Especially the kind my dad has,” Lindsey told Arden, sounding somber but also a tiny bit proud, like her dad was special for having a special kind of cancer. “That’s what this is for.” She gestured at the long metal object in her hands.

“What does it do?” Arden asked, wondering if the answer was somehow “cure cancer.”

“It’s a metal detector,” Lindsey explained. “I’m looking for coins. Preferably gold. That would help pay for my dad’s hospital bills.”

“How much have you found so far?” Arden asked.

“Nothing. But I just started looking.”

Arden thought if there was gold buried in her backyard, she would probably know about it. She changed the subject. “Are you going to start at Northeast tomorrow?” Northeast Elementary was where she went to school.

“I guess.” Lindsey scuffed at the dirt. “I don’t really want to make new friends.”

Arden didn’t quite know what to think of this. She’d never considered whether she wanted or didn’t want to make new friends. It was just something that happened. In fact, she was pretty sure it was happening right at this moment. “Everyone at Northeast is really nice,” Arden reassured Lindsey. “I’ll introduce you to them all tomorrow.”

Lindsey looked cheered by this. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s just for another few weeks, and then it’s summer break.”

“Yeah!” Arden enthused. “Are you going to camp this summer? I’m going to Disney World for the first time, and then day camp at the Y, and then we’re visiting my grandparents in Atlantic Beach in August. They live right on the ocean.” Arden was excited for all of this, even visiting her mother’s parents, which usually was boring, but now she had hope that they might give her Tabitha’s barre and pointe shoes.

Lindsey shook her head. “I wish I could do something like that,” she said, “but we can’t anymore. We have to save all our money for Dad. That’s what my parents say.” She shrugged, like,
What can you do?

Arden nodded. She felt bad about her expensive Just Like Me Doll still in her arms, and bad about her secret wish for Tabitha’s performance tutu. Probably Lindsey didn’t have any Just Like Me Dolls. “I hope you find some gold,” Arden said.

Arden thought about Lindsey all the rest of that afternoon, all through dinner and her TV time and her nightly bath. She liked her new neighbor. But she sensed Lindsey’s powerlessness, the odds stacked against her like a pile of bricks, and it made Arden sad. If there was one thing Arden never felt, it was powerless. Her mother had always drilled into her, from the time she was a baby, that her power was something that came from inside of her. Her strength was her kindness, her generosity, her positive spirit. “And no matter how bad circumstances get,” her mother would say, “you can always rely on yourself. If you only have ten cents to your name, give it away to charity. Being a charitable person will do more for you than ten cents ever could.”

Her mother had this idea that some people were like flowers and some people were like gardeners: each needed the other. She prided herself on being a gardener, and though she hadn’t much considered it before meeting Lindsey, Arden supposed that she was the same.

By the time her parents came to tuck her into bed that night, Arden knew what she wanted to do. “Can we give the Disney trip to Lindsey?” she asked.

Her parents, sitting on the edge of her bed, exchanged a look. “Who’s Lindsey?” her mother asked.

“Her family just moved into the house behind ours, on the other side of the woods,” Arden explained. “Her dad is sick, so they can’t afford to go on vacation. She can’t even go to camp. And she doesn’t have any brothers or sisters to play with at home. And she’s new to town so she doesn’t have any friends. And…” Arden shook her head and sat up. She didn’t need to explain this to her parents. She knew what she wanted. “I want to give the Disney trip to Lindsey.”

She worried that maybe her parents would say no because maybe they had really wanted to go to Disney World. It was her dad’s trip, after all. He’d said that Space Mountain seemed like a blast. But when she looked at them now, they were both smiling at her, and her mother’s eyes were moist with happiness.

“Okay,” said Arden’s mom, and, “Okay,” said Arden’s dad.

That was only the first day of a million days of Arden and Lindsey’s friendship, but it established how it would be: Lindsey would need, and Arden would deliver.

After Arden gave away the Disney trip, she wrote an essay about it, and she sent the essay in to the Just Like Me Dolls Company. She didn’t really think they would choose her to be the Doll of the Year when they had so many gymnasts and figure skaters and ceramicists and budding chefs to choose from. But she wanted somebody to know what she had done. Plus, she really wanted to be a doll.

A couple months later, her mom got the call. Out of all the thousands of girls between the ages of eight and twelve who had sent in their essays, Just Like Me Dolls had chosen Arden as their winner.

Because Arden was Girl of the Year, she got free copies of her books, with titles like
Arden in Charge
and
Arden’s New Friend
. She got a free doll, designed with peach-colored skin and light brown hair and hazel eyes, just like her. She got every single one of the Arden Doll’s accessories for free, too: a doll-sized tire swing and doll-sized metal detector, a doll-sized cat and doll-sized dog to mimic her own pets. They made it out to seem like Arden spent a lot more time in the woods than she actually did, like she was some kind of budding naturalist when actually she just went out there occasionally, and less so now that Roman’s tantrums were less frequent. But the slight inaccuracies didn’t bother Arden whatsoever.

She also got a free trip to New York City with her mother to visit the Just Like Me Dolls flagship store once the Arden Doll had gone on sale. It was the first—and wound up being the only—trip that was “just us girls,” as Arden’s mom put it. Going on this trip without her father or Roman made Arden feel delightfully grown-up.

She had never been to New York before, and she didn’t like it at all. The neon lights outside her twenty-first-floor hotel room windows kept her awake at night, and it seemed like every taxi driver was hell-bent on running over not just anybody, but
her
specifically.