Tonight the Streets Are Ours (24 page)

She heard Peter suck in his breath.

“That’s a low blow,” Lindsey said, her voice catching in her throat. “That’s really, despicably low, Arden. And as for the pot, you did not need to take the blame for that. Are you insane? I never asked you to do that for me.”

“You didn’t ask,” Arden agreed, “but you let me do it.”

“When you found out it was going to go on your transcript, you could have just told them the truth,” Lindsey argued. “Let me take the blame. I would have been fine.”

Arden imagined a Lindsey without the track team. She imagined how Mr. and Mrs. Matson would have reacted. She imagined Lindsey trying to apply to college or to jobs, trying to do
anything
with her life, with her terrible grades and a record of drug possession. Maybe this was Lindsey’s real problem: a failure of the imagination.

Arden recalled her mother’s old theory that some people are flowers and some people are gardeners. Lindsey was the worst kind of flower: one who didn’t even realize she needed a gardener to help her survive.

“You don’t always have to jump to my rescue, Arden. I can handle things on my own.” Lindsey gestured around the room. “I was handling this just great, until you showed up and started screaming at me.”

“Oh, really?” Arden said.

“Yes, really!”

“So you don’t even need me? When you were the first kid at our school to come out, you would have handled that without me? When your dad almost died, you didn’t need me then, either? Do you honestly think you don’t need
my
friends,
my
invitations to parties, rides in
my
car—you’d do just fine without any of that?”

Lindsey lifted her chin. “I didn’t even need your stupid Disney vacation.”

That struck Arden like a physical punch.

“You know what I think?” Lindsey went on, her eyes bright. “I think
you
need
me
to be the screwup. Because then you get to swoop in and save the day. ‘La, la, la, I’m Arden! I’m important! Lindsey’s going to absolutely fall to
pieces
without me!’”

“And you think I
like
that?” Arden asked, outraged.

“Oh, please. I know you do.”

“You think I come to your rescue, when you’re crying, or you’re about to fail a class, or you’re grounded, because it’s
fun
. For
me
.”

“I didn’t say
fun
—”

“Lindsey, if that is how you feel, then I am done rescuing you.”

Lindsey was silent, wary. She knotted her fingers in her lap and squinted up at Arden.

“I’m not going to force my unwanted support on you any longer,” Arden said. “You can hang out here with your shiny new friends, and using all your awesome powers of self-reliance, you can find your own way home.”

“Home … to Maryland?” Lindsey asked.

Arden hesitated. This did seem unrealistic. How, exactly, was Lindsey going to travel three hundred miles without her? On what bus? With what money?

“I mean, if you need my help…” Arden backtracked.

Lindsey scowled and shook her head

“Okay, then.” Arden gave her a mirthless smile. “You’re on your own. Just how you wanted it.”

“What’s her problem?” threw in Jamie, as Arden turned away.

Arden flinched. Of course a stranger thought this was all her fault. She didn’t know anything about Arden or Lindsey or their years of friendship or how much had gone into this one moment. Arden didn’t care what this girl thought of her. But she looked at Peter. Because if
he
thought she was in the wrong, she didn’t think she’d have it in her to leave Lindsey now. Not if it meant losing his trust.

But Peter locked eyes with her, and he nodded. And that gave Arden the courage to say to Lindsey, “I’m over this. Good luck finding your way out of here.”

She and Peter walked away.

“Arden, wait!” she thought she heard Lindsey call after her.

But Arden didn’t wait. And Lindsey didn’t try to stop her.

She kept walking right back out the way they’d come in, two and a half hours earlier. Past the atonal ten-piece band, down the stairs lit only by a thousand glow-in-the-dark stickers, through the enchanted forest basement, all the way through Jigsaw Manor until she had made it outside and into the fresh spring air, where she was, at last, free.

And that brings us up to the present day

Sucking air into her lungs, Arden keeps walking from Jigsaw Manor, step after step after step, like her legs have forgotten how to stand still.

“Where are you going?” Peter asks. He’s almost jogging to keep up with her.

“Away.”

She reaches the Heart of Gold and unlocks it, slamming herself into the driver’s seat. Peter climbs into the passenger seat—Lindsey’s seat—without a word.

She turns the key in the ignition. And … nothing happens.

She frowns and tries again. Still, the car does not start.

“Oh, come on,” Arden mutters. She pulls the key out of the ignition and blows on it. She has no reason to believe that blowing on a key will do anything to it—a car key is not a too-hot spoonful of soup—but she doesn’t know what else to do.

“Is something wrong?” Peter asks.

“My car won’t start.”

Peter looks baffled by this, and Arden realizes that even if she knows zero things about automobile maintenance, even if she did actually pour a Dairy Queen beverage under her car’s hood earlier today, she is still doing better than this guy, who lives in New York City and doesn’t drive outside of daddy’s BMW at his beach house.

“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 the barren street, 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 hailed 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.