Tonight the Streets Are Ours (25 page)

“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 home?”

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.”

Peter and Arden thank him and get out of the car. As promised, Peter pays, and now they are standing on some random block in Manhattan. The street sign says
MERCER
, which to Arden could mean just about anything. There are more cars driving by than there were in Brooklyn. More lights. Roughly as many garbage bags. The fact that it’s past three in the morning does not seem to have resonated with the people who are carousing in a bar across the street, or the open convenience store next door, with a cat sitting in its window, licking her paw.

“Where to?” Arden asks.

“Let’s walk,” Peter says.

They walk.

“So what are you going to do about Bianca?” Arden asks after a block or two.

Peter makes a face. “Tonight we’re only going to discuss happy things, remember?”

“But tonight is the only time that you’ll have me here to talk to in person. And I’m a lot more useful in person than I am reading your journal over the Internet. So, talk.”

“I don’t know,” Peter says.

“Peter, even if you can’t win her back, you’ll find another girl. Somebody who
can
be happy for you when your dreams come true.”

Peter grins. “Because I’m a catch?”

“Exactly.”

The smile fades off his face as he says, “I don’t understand how she can do this to me. I don’t understand how anyone is capable of just leaving someone they love. Unless they didn’t really love them in the first place.”

Arden opens her mouth to agree with him, but then she doesn’t. “I don’t know,” she says instead. “I just left Lindsey. And that’s not because I never loved her in the first place.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean
you
,” Peter reassures her.

But maybe he should mean her. Maybe she has just done something that Peter can’t understand, because even she can’t quite understand it. She’s never done anything like that before. All she knows is that she doesn’t regret it.

She wonders if this is how her mother felt when she walked away. This terrifying freedom. She has no one to report to. Nobody needs her. Nobody knows where she is. She can do whatever she wants right now.

And she realizes that she doesn’t even know what she wants to do.

She thinks again of her mother’s letter, those words that clutter her brain against her will.
I only knew who I was in relation to somebody else. For years I was somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s friend, somebody’s daughter. And for once, I wanted to be somebody for myself.
Arden has a flash of understanding this because tonight, for the first time in her memory, she is being somebody for herself.

They come to a complicated intersection, with a half dozen different streets converging around a small patch of land that has an enormous cube-shaped metal sculpture in its center. “What’s that?” Arden asks, pointing at the cube, which is balancing on one of its eight corners.

“It’s a sculpture,” Peter explains. “It’s been here my whole life. Come on, let me show you something cool.”

She nods, and he leads the way across all the lanes of traffic. Cars swerve around them, every one of them honking, but somehow they make it to the traffic island still alive.

Up close, the cube looks even bigger than it did from across the street. Arden’s head barely reaches the lower corners. There’s a man who looks to be homeless lying down under a gray blanket on one side of the cube’s base, and on the other side three punk kids with green Mohawks and safety pins through their lips are sitting and sharing a bag of French fries.

“Excuse me,” Peter loudly addresses the crowd. Arden reflects on how much he’s had to drink and wonders whether he declaims at strangers when he’s
not
full of whiskey.

The three punks look at him with evident hostility. The homeless man doesn’t even muster up that much of a response. Arden wonders if the cool thing she is about to witness is Peter getting punched in the face. She hopes not. His is a face that deserves better than a punch.

“Arden here has never been to our city before,” Peter goes on. He pauses, as if waiting for the strangers to say
Welcome, Arden!
They do not. He continues. “So, since this is her first time, she’s never seen what this cube can do. Would you mind standing up, all of you, so that I can show her?”

For a moment nobody moves.

“I really don’t want to step on you,” Peter adds.

The girl punk shrugs. “What the hell.” She gets up, moves away from the cube, and stands there with her arms crossed, ready to return to her post the instant she’s granted permission. Once she’s up, her two friends join her, and, observing that he is the only holdout, the homeless man heaves a weary sigh and also moves aside.

Now the area directly under the cube is clear, and Peter shoots Arden a dazzling smile. “Ready?” he asks. “Go put your hands on that corner.” She does. He puts his hands on the next corner over. “Now push!” he shouts.

She does. At first she feels like an idiot, standing and pushing all her weight against an immobile steel slab, with her not-amused audience. But a minute later, with her pushing at her corner and Peter pushing the corner in front of her, the cube starts to rotate on its axis. Slowly at first, like it’s been stationary for a long time and forgotten that it knows how to spin. But then it shakes off the inertia and picks up speed, spinning so quickly that Arden nearly has to run to keep up with it. She notices that two of the punks have joined in, each of them grabbing a corner of their own and running. They whoop and holler. They are going so fast that Arden’s feet lift off the ground, just a little bit, and she holds on to her corner as tight as she can, because for a moment, she feels like she’s flying.