Tonight the Streets Are Ours (19 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me about Peter before?” Lindsey asked in a break between phone calls.

“I told you I was reading some guy’s blog.”

“But you didn’t tell me how
interesting
it was.”

Arden scrunched her eyebrows as she tried, and failed, to switch lanes. She didn’t have much experience with highway driving, and the other cars out here were much less accommodating than cars on the streets of Cumberland. Finally, she swerved her way back over to the slow lane and said to Lindsey, “I didn’t want you to think I was weird. You know, spending this much time following people we don’t even know.”

“Arden,” Lindsey said, “at this point, it is way too late in the game for me to think you’re weird. I
know
you’re weird.” Arden laughed, and Lindsey reflected for a moment. “Plus, it’s not really any different from following characters on a TV show, is it?”

Arden nodded thoughtfully.

“Typical Arden,” Lindsey said. “You can’t stand to see anyone suffer, even for a second, even when you don’t know the guy. It’s like that time you saved that bird’s life.”

“What bird?” Arden asked.

“You remember! We were kids. You found a baby bird in a pool of oil in the woods between our houses. It couldn’t get out. It must have fallen out of the nest or something. My dad wanted to wring its neck, to put it out of its pain. But you kept it in your room and nursed it back to health and set it free.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“It was definitely you. It’s not like I was playing in our woods with somebody else who rescued a bird.”

“I mean, no, that never happened at all. That was the plot of one of the Arden Doll books.”

Arden snuck a sideward glance to watch this realization slowly dawn on Lindsey. “Oh, yeah!” Lindsey said. “God, that’s so wild.”

Arden didn’t know what she’d do if she encountered a drowning bird. Probably she would try to rescue it. But maybe she would just walk away in horror.

“Well, whatever. You’re rescuing a brokenhearted boy today, which is basically the same as a broken bird.”

“Only if we find him,” Arden reminded her.

Lindsey got back on the phone. “Can I speak with Peter, please? He’s supposed to be working there this afternoon … Oh, sorry, I must have the wrong number. My bad.” After hanging up, she said to Arden, “Are you
sure
he never said the name of his bookstore?”

“Positive.” Arden had read every entry—and there were hundreds of them. Some she’d read more than once. She knew everything he’d ever put in there. “Anyway, I have no clue what I’m going to say to him if we do find him,” she went on. “‘Hey, I just drove a million miles to meet you’ sounds kind of stalkery.”

“Let’s role-play,” Lindsey suggested. “I’ll be Peter, and you can be you.”

“Sounds like a theater game,” Arden cautioned, making a face.

“Not really, because you’re pretending to be
yourself
.”

“Okay, fine.” Arden cleared her throat. “Hi, are you Peter?”

Lindsey put on a deep, fake-masculine voice. “Who’s asking?”

“Uh, my name is Arden. And I just wanted to … meet you, I guess.”

“Are you another one of those girls who heard Bianca and I broke up? And now you’re trying to make your move as soon as Bianca’s out of the picture? That’s very exploitative, Arden—is that what you said your name was? I’m still in mourning. I’m not looking to just move on to the next available girl.”

“You are a terrible role-player,” Arden said. “Do you know that?”

“I just want you to be prepared for the worst,” Lindsey said in her normal-pitched voice. “Actually, I just thought of an even worse scenario.”

“Fabulous,” Arden muttered.

“What if the whole thing is an elaborate ruse?” Lindsey went on. “Like ‘Peter’ is just a code name for a kidnapper or murderer who’s created this artsy, sensitive online persona so he can lure unsuspecting young girls into his clutches. And then he keeps them locked up in a penthouse somewhere. Where he forces them into lives of servitude. And drinks their blood.”

“You’re conflating approximately a dozen distinct paranoias there,” Arden told her. “Also, I think there has got to be a better way to kidnap girls than to create a fake online journal, update it every day for a year, and then wait for your readers to somehow piece together what bookstore you supposedly work at.”

“It’s not out of the question, though,” Lindsey said. “Admit that it’s not out of the question.”

“Do you want me to let you out right here?” Arden asked. “I’ll do it. You can hitchhike home.”

They drove past the turnoff for Hancock. Lindsey snorted. “What a dumb name for a town.”

“I assume it’s named after John Hancock,” Arden said. “You know? One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence? Famous old dude? Ring any bells?”

“It sounds like slang for something sexual. Like ‘hand cock.’” Lindsey made a jerk-off motion with her hand.

Arden rolled her eyes, then cracked up. “You have a filthy mind, Lindsey.”

Half an hour later, they stopped for gas. The Heart of Gold had been making a weird
whump-whump-whump
noise, so Arden walked around, inspecting it. She felt like a fraud, since she blatantly had
no
idea what she was looking for on her car, and she was still wearing her shimmery anniversary dress, which presumably was not what people wore when they were engaging in auto mechanics. She had considered changing back into her normal clothes while she was still at the hotel. But she had this dress. She had planned to wear it today, and she still wanted to wear it. And if Chris wasn’t going to appreciate it, maybe Peter would.

She didn’t even bother to ask Lindsey for her automotive insight, since Lindsey did not have her license, due to a combination of being young for her grade, never practicing, and knowing that she could rely on Arden to drive her everywhere.

Arden’s one course of action about the
whump-whump-whump
s would have been to call her father, but she didn’t know what
he
would have done about it, either, or how he would have reacted to the news that she’d gone sixty miles out of town without telling him. So she just got back into the driver’s seat and drove on, turning up the volume on the Heart of Gold’s crappy stereo to drown out the noises coming from under the hood. Arden watched the road and thought about Chris heading to his cool cast meeting, and she wanted to text him and say,
I’m heading somewhere right now, too
.

“I think I’m going to work on a farm this summer,” Lindsey announced in a break between songs. For miles, all they’d been able to see out the windows was farmland.

“Which farm?” Arden asked.

“I don’t know. I’m going to look at job postings and stuff online to see if anybody nearby needs extra farmhands this summer. It’d be like when I was a kid, you know?”

“Then you’re going to have to get your license fast,” Arden advised her. “Because I am not driving you to a farm every morning. I
know
how early farmers have to wake up, and I want no part in that.”

“Hopefully I can find a place where I can live for the summer,” Lindsey said, resting her head against the window. “That way neither of us will have to worry about driving.”

Arden snuck a sidelong look at her. “You’d really live at a farm?”

“Sure, if I can.”

“Without me?”

“You could come, too, if you wanted.”

Arden did
not
want—unless there were zebras there, and possibly not even then. Zebras had lost some of their appeal over the past eight years.

“It’ll only be for the summer, anyway,” Lindsey went on.

Arden felt a twinge in her stomach. She thought about how much trouble Lindsey could get into when left to her own devices for ten minutes, and she shuddered to think what could happen if Lindsey was without her for ten whole weeks.

A couple years ago, when Arden’s family went to Atlantic Beach for a grand total of eight days, Lindsey had decided it would be a good idea to dress up in a sheet and stand alongside the road in the nighttime, to make drivers think they’d seen a ghost. One driver panicked when he saw her, swerved, and crashed into a tree. Nobody got injured, but the car required thousands of dollars of repairs, which Lindsey was still paying off. This was the sort of thing that happened when Arden left Lindsey alone.

But Lindsey probably wouldn’t go through with it, anyway, Arden reassured herself. The number of plans like this that Lindsey had made over the years, only to abandon because they took too much effort or were replaced by new, more-exciting ideas—they were countless. If Arden took every one of them seriously, she would never have time to do anything else but worry.

“Hey,” Arden said, pointing to a green road sign. “Shartlesville, Pennsylvania. The town you go to when you try to fart but you-know-what comes out instead.”

Lindsey guffawed and held up her hand. Arden smacked her a high five, swerving the whole car to the right. The truck behind her blared a long honk. “Arden Huntley,” said Lindsey, “you are a clever girl, you know that?” She picked up her phone again and dialed. “Hi, is Peter working tonight?”

She paused. Arden focused on the road before her.

“Teenage guy?” Lindsey said into the phone. “Goes to art school?” A moment of silence. “Cool, thanks. We’ll be there by ten.” She hung up.

“So,” Arden said, her heart fluttering.

“So,” Lindsey said. “I found him.”

The heart of the heart of gold is called into question

At six o’clock, they drove past the first road sign for New York.

“New York City, one hundred thirty-five miles,” Lindsey read aloud.

Arden felt suddenly gripped by the extraordinary potential of highway signs. They made the country seem deceptively small. The only thing that stood between her and New York City was the number 135. She could keep driving even farther and hit Connecticut, or Vermont—or Florida if she made a turn to the south—or she could turn around and drive through the night and the next day and the next night and the next day until she hit California and the Pacific Ocean. Highway signs made every place in America seem equally within reach, and even though Arden had been driving for hours now—even though her eyes were dry from watching the road continually unfurl before her like a never-ending ribbon—this first sign for New York City made her feel like she could keep going forever.

Twenty-five minutes later, her car broke down.

She was driving in the slow lane, as she had been for basically the entire trip, but then suddenly the Heart of Gold wouldn’t even keep up with the pace of the slow lane, and its muted
whump-whump-whump
s turned into a full-on whirring noise, and it started to smell bad, and … something was clearly wrong.

Arden coasted into the breakdown lane, stopped, and turned off the engine. She and Lindsey looked at each other. The traffic whizzed by them.

“What happened?” Lindsey asked.

“I don’t know.” Arden examined the lights and dials on her dashboard. The “check engine” light was lit up, but that was always lit up, so she didn’t put too much stock in it. She also noticed that the dial for the car’s temperature had gone up really, really high. Into the red zone. “Maybe the engine overheated,” she guessed.

“So what should we do?” Lindsey asked.

“I don’t
know
, Lindsey,” Arden snapped. “I am not a car expert. I have never driven farther than the Glockenspiel before. I don’t have access to any vehicular insider information here, okay? What do
you
think we should do?”

Lindsey was silent for a moment, slouched in her seat like a kicked puppy. At last she said, “We could hitchhike.”

“Great plan. Let’s abandon my car here and get a ride from a total stranger for the next hundred and twenty miles. What a safe and wise course of action! And you thought
Peter
might be a murderer or a kidnapper?” Arden said. “Lindsey, you have no sense of self-preservation.”

The two girls glared at each other across giant cups, leftover from a Dairy Queen stop much earlier in the state of Pennsylvania.

“It’s not my fault your car broke down,” Lindsey said finally.

This was true. Arden was frustrated, and she knew she was taking it out on Lindsey. It was Arden’s fault she’d bought a shitty car, Arden’s fault she never bothered to figure out why that “check engine” light was always lit, Arden’s fault she hadn’t learned the first thing about car mechanics, Arden’s fault they were on this highway on this wild goose chase in the first place.

But even though Lindsey wasn’t to blame for this situation, that didn’t stop Arden from wishing that Lindsey would at least try to help fix it.

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” said Arden. “We can’t sit on the side of the highway for the rest of our lives.”

When there was a break in the traffic, she got out and popped open the hood of her car. This, at least, was something her dad had taught her how to do. She peered at the machinery inside, then dumped her water bottle onto what she thought was the engine, followed by the remnants of their Dairy Queen Blizzards for good measure. If the engine was overheated, then it stood to reason that it needed to be cooled down.

When Arden climbed back into the car, Lindsey had her phone out. Not making eye contact with Arden, Lindsey said, “I looked it up online, and apparently the closest train station is in Lancaster. It’s not too far from here. We could take a taxi there.”

“And then what?” Arden asked.

“Well, then there should be a train back to Cumberland at some point.”

“What point is that, exactly?” Arden asked. “It’s nearly seven o’clock. I doubt that any more trains are running from here to Cumberland tonight. And even if there are, what makes you think there would be seats left on them? And how much would those last-minute seats cost? And who exactly would be paying for those train tickets, not to mention this supposed taxi ride to get us there?”

Lindsey was silent, her hair hanging in front of her face like a curtain separating her from Arden.

“And what,” Arden added, hearing her voice crack, “would happen to the Heart of Gold?”