Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Arden recalls Peter’s version of this story, on the roof of Jigsaw Manor last night. He didn’t want to stay with people who would treat him this poorly. He was through with us. He’d never really felt like he belonged in our family, and now he knew for sure that he didn’t.

Bianca pulls her hair out of her face. “My therapist says that there must have been other factors at play—depression, a chemical imbalance, problems fitting in at college, maybe unresolved issues with his adoption. Lots of people have issues with their girlfriends. Lots of people get into fights with their brothers. They don’t all disappear for three months. The vast majority of them get upset and go on. Maybe what Peter and I did was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it can’t have been the only thing at play. So my therapist tells me.”

“So that’s why you broke up with Peter right after Leo took off,” Arden realizes. “Because you felt guilty.”

“I couldn’t stand to be around Peter. I couldn’t see him without thinking about what we had done to Leo, and to his whole family. His parents were crazy with worry. I felt terribly guilty.”

“But Peter wanted you to stick around and be his girlfriend?” Arden asks.

“Oh, God, he clung to me. I think he felt like if he and I just stayed together, then there would be a point to Leo’s disappearance and all that misery. It would be ‘worth it’ because it would prove we were ‘meant to be.’” Bianca takes a bite of burger, swallows, then goes on. “He was a wreck the whole fall. Maybe he wrote about this on Tonight the Streets Are Ours, I don’t know, but he went out and got wasted every night of the week. Mostly alcohol, but, I mean, he’d do whatever he could get his hands on.”

Arden thinks about Peter’s autumn-time posts, all the parties he flitted around, all the girls he supposedly made out with. Those things probably did happen. He just didn’t mention that he was trashed for all of it.

“How did you know all that?” Arden asks. “I thought you didn’t speak to Peter the whole time.”

“I didn’t. I just wanted to separate myself from the whole thing. I just wanted Leo to come home. But it’s a small world. We know people in common—friends of Leo’s and mine, mostly. They reported back on what was happening with Peter. They weren’t aware that we’d been sneaking around together. They thought I’d be interested just because he was my boyfriend’s kid brother.”

“But you must have missed Peter.”

“Of course I did. I was wild about him. And it killed me to hear how he was treating himself.”

“So that’s why you went to him on New Year’s Eve?” Arden says.

Bianca sighs. “In hindsight, I can see I shouldn’t have gone back to Peter. But yeah. Leo came home right after Thanksgiving, and he and I finally got to have a proper break-up conversation. I said, ‘I’m sorry I cheated on you, I’m sorry I hurt you, and when there was someone else I wanted to date, I should have just ended things with you.’ It was civil. He’d gotten a lot of perspective on it just from being gone. He’d hitchhiked west, camped out, lived on the street for a while, worked in the kitchen of some sketchy restaurant—anything where he wouldn’t have to touch his parents’ money. And when he was ready, he just pulled out their credit card and bought a plane ticket home. He told me that once he’d seen how hard the world could be, dealing with me and Peter seemed easy.”

“Wow,” Arden says softly.

“So then when Peter pulled that stunt on New Year’s—which was crazy-romantic, by the way—I thought, well, maybe our time had come. Leo was safe. I was single. Let’s see where this goes.” Bianca shrugs. “And here’s where it went.”