Tonight the Streets Are Ours (32 page)

“Funny you should say that.”

“Why?” Lindsey asks. “What happened after you guys left?”

Arden takes a deep breath, then lets it out with a laugh. “Are you ready for a long story?”

Lindsey gestures at the packed road before them. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

Epilogue

All stories must come to an end

My name is Arden Huntley, and this is my journal. I’m not posting it online. I’m not showing it to anyone. I’m writing it for myself and no one else, just so that I can know what happened. And this is what happened:

The day after I came home from New York, I broke up with Chris. It was hard and it was sad, but Bianca was right: you can’t get through life without hurting people, sometimes even the people you love.

“Is this just because I missed our anniversary?” he asked, confused, and when I said no, he asked, “Are you in love with someone else, then?”

But while I broke up with Chris in part
because
of Peter, I didn’t break up with him
for
Peter, and there is a difference. I could have told Chris about that one forgotten kiss on Saturday night, led him to believe it was something much more significant than it actually was, and let him blame Peter. Let there be a bad guy other than me.

“No,” I told Chris. “There’s nobody else.”

The truth is that Chris is a great guy, and a good person. He has everything going for him. And I bet that someday I’ll see him starring in a Hollywood movie, and I’ll tell everyone that I knew him when. And I’m not sure that I ever
will
find someone else, or at least not anyone who makes me any happier than I was with him. Maybe that is exactly as happy as I’m capable of being. But I don’t want to mistake something good for something better. And I’m going to trust that the best parts of my life haven’t happened yet.

I think that movie Lindsey and I watched the last time we went to the Glockenspiel was bullshit. Hurting people, really, deeply hurting them—that isn’t something you do on purpose, not unless you’re some kind of sociopath. It’s just a by-product of living.

In the end, my fantasy of breaking up with Chris came half-true: although we indeed broke up, he never went to extreme lengths to win me back—or any lengths, actually. I guess that’s the thing about fantasies: if you’re lucky, they come partway true. And usually only the part that you have control over.

I kept reading Tonight the Streets Are Ours. Not every day, but sometimes, when I was up past my bedtime and everything was too quiet, I would look at it, even though I don’t know what I expected to find there. I did it even though there’s something shameful in it, in consciously trying to be fooled again by Peter’s stories, now that I know better.

Shortly after the start of my senior year, Peter posted that his memoir,
Tonight the Streets Are Ours
, would be released by a major publishing company, one that has published best sellers and award-winners. The post in which he announced this accumulated more comments than anything else he’d ever written in his journal. It seemed as if every girl on the Internet visited Tonight the Streets Are Ours just to express her personal excitement.

Not too long after that, Peter removed every last post and replaced them with a single message saying,
My debut book will be coming out next year—click here to preorder your copy!
And I clicked there. And I preordered my copy.

The disappearance of Tonight the Streets Are Ours left me with an odd sense of loss. I’d believed that maybe I had some impact on Peter’s actions, even though he didn’t act like it at the time. I’d hoped maybe he would think it over and realize that I was right: this book was exploitative of Leo and Bianca, the people he claimed to love, and it was wrong to publish it.

But really I think I had no impact on Peter. Our time together was just one in a string of nights, and when your life brings you luxury and adventure every day, one more adventure makes no difference to you. And if you do not write it down—as I asked him not to—then, once enough time passes, it will be as if that night never happened at all.

When I graduated from high school, I went to a good college in a small, quiet town about two hours north of New York City. I got in partially thanks to Lindsey, who voluntarily went to Mr. Vanderpool and took responsibility for the marijuana in my locker, striking it from my transcript; and thanks to Mr. Lansdowne, who wrote an absurdly complimentary letter of recommendation on my behalf.

By the time Peter’s book finally came out, I was in my second year at college. I got my copy and sat with it under a tree in the quad, and I started to read. Reading Peter’s words again felt like reuniting with an old friend. But I was surprised to see that the book was written and branded as a novel, not a memoir. Fiction, not reality. All the characters’ names had been changed: Bianca’s not called Bianca, and even the protagonist wasn’t named Peter. Leo was split into two characters: the main character’s inexplicably missing big brother, and Bianca’s undeserving boyfriend—no relation.

I wondered if Bianca somehow convinced Peter not to use real names or brand this story as nonfiction. I wondered if perhaps his literary agent or publishing company found out the truth about Peter’s stories. I wondered whose choice this was and whether I had any impact on it. I still don’t know these answers.

Despite what he said in the garden near my mom’s apartment that day, Peter did no book tour, and as much as I scoured the Internet, I found very little discussion about his novel: a handful of middling reviews, a couple of interviews with him on poorly trafficked blogs. Maybe if the book were presented as nonfiction, then people would have cared, in the way that I had cared. Maybe it’s only in fiction that Peter’s story seems—as
Kirkus Reviews
will put it—“self-congratulatory, navel-gazing, and aimless.” His book was published to a nearly universal lack of interest and then it disappeared, leaving behind almost no trace, like a rock sinking to the bottom of a very deep pond, or a single individual living high up in some big building in some very big city.

My friends and I visit New York City periodically to go to shows and museums, always by train or bus—the Heart of Gold has never again been on a journey so far from home. My mom is no longer there; she moved home eventually, and she and my father are working things out, or trying to, anyway. Whenever I go to New York, I walk around outside, I ride the subways, and I look at the face of every person I pass, because any one of them could be Peter or Bianca. But none of them ever has been. As Peter himself once wrote: there are a million different New Yorks, all layered on top of one another yet never intersecting.

After successfully graduating from high school, Lindsey got an internship at an organic farm in Pennsylvania. As so often happens with her, Lindsey forgot all about her New York City dream. She did at last learn to drive—not just a car, but a tractor, too. And Jamie did break Lindsey’s heart, and it was indeed sad, but now Lindsey is madly in love with a stable hand at her farm, and Jamie and her stupid nose ring are just distant memories.

I miss Lindsey every day. We don’t always make time to talk, we don’t have the same friends, and when Lindsey needs saving—which she has many times, and certainly will again—I’m not there to catch her. But when we do find each other, at home in Cumberland on holidays, or on the phone in those rare moments when Lindsey is resting and I’m awake, it’s as if nothing between us has changed.

I used to think that loving somebody meant sacrificing anything for them. I thought it meant writing a blank check. I thought it meant that you would die without each other. But it turns out that Peter was right about that, too: death and a broken heart are not the same.

These days I think that love is not so dramatic as all that. Maybe loving somebody means simply they bring out the best in you, and you bring out the best in them—so that together, you are always the best possible versions of yourselves.

You were promised a love story. And this is mine.

Acknowledgments

I am tremendously grateful to all who have supported my writing career and helped make
Tonight the Streets Are Ours
a reality. To name some of them:

Thank you to Joy Peskin, who has always believed in me. To Molly Brouillette, for her creativity and enthusiasm. And to the rest of the extraordinary team at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, including but not limited to Lauren Burniac, Angie Chen, Beth Clark, Liz Fithian, Angus Killick, Kathryn Little, Karla Reganold, Holly Ruck, and Mary Van Akin. You know how to treat an author right.

To Stephen Barbara: every day I feel lucky to have you on my side.

To everyone at Foundry Literary
+
Media—especially Jess Regel and Yfat Reiss Gendel—and to Michelle Weiner and her team at CAA.

To Venetia Gosling and the rest of the group at Macmillan UK for bringing my work to a whole other continent of readers.

To Kate Hurley, a ray of sunshine and my defender against inconsistencies.

To my writing partner, Rebecca Serle, for her unwavering love and support. And to the entire crew: Emily Heddleson, Lexa Hillyer, Lauren Oliver, Jess Rothenberg, and Courtney Sheinmel. Please let’s never stop being Type A and talking about ourselves.

To all my friends and colleagues—especially Kendra Levin, Brian Pennington, and Allison Smith—who have celebrated with me the good times, helped me through the rough times, and understood when I just have to stay home and write.

To the alternative spaces and parties throughout New York City, both past and present, that inspired Jigsaw Manor, especially Rubulad and Death By Audio.

Thanks to all who have taken the time to read my books, and who have told me the ways in which my writing has affected them. I could never find the words to express how much your support means to me.

And thank you to my parents, Amy and Michael Sales. I love you totally and completely.