Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Arden knows the answer—how could she not?—but it’s so unbelievable that she needs to ask, and she needs to hear Bianca say it. “That guy,” she says. “The one sitting with Peter’s parents.” She rubs her temples. “Who is he?”


Bianca blinks up at her. “Oh, sorry, I should have introduced you. That’s Leo.”

“Leo?” Arden repeats, because that isn’t the answer she’d expected, not at all. What the hell is Bianca’s ex-boyfriend doing here?

“Yes, Leo,” Bianca says. “Peter’s brother.”





Brunch with Bianca

“My treat,” Bianca says once they’re seated at the café a few blocks from Peter’s apartment. “The least I can do to make up for yelling at you is feed you.”

Arden agrees. When the waitress comes over, she orders a strawberry banana smoothie, whole grain toast, hash browns, scrambled eggs, and a croissant. The past twenty-four hours have caught up to her, and she is, suddenly, ravenous.

She expects Bianca-the-angel to be one of those girls who subsists off of watermelon and Diet Coke, so she’s surprised when Bianca orders a burger and tears into it with decidedly non-angelic vigor.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Arden says.

“What do you mean?”

Where to start. “I thought Peter’s brother ran away.”

“He did. Last fall. It was incredibly scary. It was like he’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

“But he’s there right now,” Arden says. “We just saw him.”

“Well, yeah. He came home after a couple months. He came back in plenty of time for his second semester at Cornell.”

“Peter never mentioned that on Tonight the Streets Are Ours.” Arden thinks back, and she realizes that Peter hasn’t explicitly written about the loss of his brother since November, December at the latest. He’s written some fond memories of him, but that’s it.

Still, shouldn’t he have said, By the way, my brother came home? Rather than letting readers just assume that he was still missing? She wonders where Leo was all that time, and what finally brought him back.

“Are you kidding? That is so messed up,” Bianca says. “So you thought he was still missing, all these months later?” Arden nods silently, and Bianca shakes her head in disgust. “I’d assumed Peter announced his return on his blog when it happened, and I just missed seeing that particular entry. But yeah. That’s what happened, Arden. I cheated on my boyfriend with his younger brother. And Leo found out. He was devastated. And he ran away.”

It knocks the breath out of Arden. No wonder Bianca was acting so weird around Peter’s brother today. Because he is her ex-boyfriend.

And no wonder Peter panicked when he heard Leo was coming to Jigsaw Manor last night. Because he didn’t want to be there when Arden put two and two together.

“I can’t believe it,” Arden says—but she can believe it. It makes too much sense. She recalls the inscription on Peter’s flask last night. Leonard Matthew Lau. The same last name that Bianca used to refer to Peter’s parents. Of course.

The more this sinks in for Arden, the madder she gets. “Peter acted like his brother left for some inexplicable reason. Last night he blamed it on his parents. For months, I’ve felt so sorry for him. But actually it was his fault!”

“And my fault,” Bianca volunteers.

Of course, Arden realizes. Bianca betrayed Leo, too.

Bianca goes on. “When Leo left, he e-mailed me and Peter to say that he knew what we had done, and he hoped we’d be happy now that he wasn’t around to stand in our way.”