Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“We just slept. And then this morning she made me a tofu scramble and a kale smoothie for breakfast, and I told her that the Heart of Gold broke down on the highway yesterday so she called over her friend who’s a mechanic to work on it.”


“Her friend did a good job.” Arden rubs the car’s steering wheel appreciatively. They’re still on city streets, so it’s easy to stay well under her mother’s sixty-mile-an-hour edict. “Thank you,” Arden adds. “You’re a miracle worker.”

“I know I don’t always know the right thing to do or say,” Lindsey says. “Sometimes it takes me a while to figure it out. Sometimes I do the wrong thing first. But if you give me enough time, Arden”—she shrugs—“eventually I’ll figure it out.”

Arden never imagined that she would like having the day saved by somebody else. But today, she is surprisingly grateful.

She merges onto the highway, which is, as she’s come to expect from New York City streets, filled with traffic. “Something tells me this is going to take more than six hours and two minutes.”

“I hope your night was okay,” Lindsey says. “I’m sorry I didn’t want to leave with you. I just really wanted to see if anything was going to happen with Jamie. And honestly? I wasn’t that into Peter. Don’t be mad. I know he’s smart and funny and talented and everything. But there was something about him … Like, he never even asked how we managed to track him down. He just seemed to take it for granted that he’s such a big deal that random girls would follow him around. You know? It just seemed a little self-absorbed to me.”

“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.