Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“Yeah.” Arden gulped some cranberry juice from her plastic cup. “It’s fine. My dad and Roman talked to her. They told her I’m a drug addict. She told them she’s subletting an apartment in New York City. We don’t need to speak directly to cover any of that.”


“New York? Whoa.” Arden watched Lindsey process the three hundred eleven miles between Cumberland, Maryland, and New York City. Arden knew it was three hundred eleven miles because when her father had given her her mother’s address—133 Eldridge Street, New York, New York—written down on a slip of paper, as if she might want to tack it to her bulletin board or something—she’d looked it up.

As far as she was concerned, when your mother walked out of your life and moved three hundred eleven miles away, you owed her nothing. Not a phone conversation, not an e-mail, not even a spare thought. For Roman to act otherwise was foolhardy. It was self-destructive. It was ignoring the mom that they had for the mom that they wished she would be.

“I swear,” Arden went on, “my brother is like an excitable dog. His neglectful owner walks back through the door and he jumps all over her and drools.”

The Huntley family used to have an actual dog, too, until about three weeks after their mother left, at which point Spot died. Roman didn’t seem to have figured out that their father had taken their needy old dalmatian to the vet and had him put down because it was too hard to take care of him without Mom there. “Two kids and a cat is quite enough,” her dad calmly told her when she confronted him about it. Now they were left with elderly, emaciated Mouser, who quaked with fear whenever anyone went near her—particularly Mr. Huntley.

Arden wasn’t telling Roman that their father was the one who issued the death sentence for their Spot, lest he worry that he was next in line. The argument could be made that no pets or kids would be quite enough for someone like their father.

“It’s just so weird,” Lindsey reflected, “because I always really liked your mom. Remember when she used to drive us to school?”

Arden did remember. In sixth and seventh grades, kids on their school bus—some of the same kids who were here at this party tonight, in fact—kept teasing Lindsey. They made fun of her for unexciting, stupid middle school reasons—because she was too tall and gangly, because she didn’t know what to wear and didn’t seem to realize she was supposed to care. Lindsey was upset, but Arden was miserable: the character of her best friend was under attack, and she felt powerless to protect her.

Arden poured out her heart to her mother, who decided that from then on, she would drive the girls to school. Simple. This didn’t mean that all of their classmates suddenly treated Lindsey with respect, but it did mean that she didn’t have to start every morning with soda cans getting accidentally-on-purpose spilled on her.

That was just how Arden’s mother was. She came to the rescue. If Arden was having a problem with a teacher, she solved it. If Roman had a nightmare, she’d curl up in bed right next to him and stay there until morning. If Arden forgot her homework, she would drive it into school for her in the middle of the day. If Roman was trick-or-treating, she handmade him three options for Halloween costumes and let him pick amongst them. If Arden was having a birthday party, she decorated the entire house. If Roman was doing a book report, she read the book right alongside him and helped him collect materials so that, while his classmates were handing in one-sheet essays, he was handing in a diorama with moving parts.

Arden understood what Lindsey was saying, because she had also liked her mother, at the time.