Tonight the Streets Are Ours

She couldn’t imagine her mother, now, renting an apartment in a big city, apparently taking some graduate-level class at an extension school, as her dad had reported. Even though she knew, rationally, that her mom would look the same today as she had six weeks ago, Arden would not have been altogether surprised to discover that her mother had gotten a face transplant. She just didn’t sound like the same person at all—she sounded like a stranger.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Arden said to Lindsey. “We’re at a cool high school party, for once. Let’s just be cool high schoolers, you know?”

Lindsey snickered and nodded. They both watched as Dillon Rammstein lit up a joint and Matt Washington shouted at him to “Take that shit outside, man.” Dillon shoved past the girls’ couch to go onto the patio. It was reassuring to know that Matt was such a conscientious host.

“Arden, I love you for not ratting me out to Vanderpool,” Lindsey said as they watched Dillon go. “You are the most amazing friend, you know that, right?”

Arden had not told Lindsey how severe the punishment for that decision had actually wound up being, and she was never going to. Of course Lindsey knew that Arden had been suspended for three days—it seemed like every single person in Cumberland knew that. But Lindsey didn’t need to know that all of this would be reported to colleges in the fall. What’s done was done, and it would only make her feel guilty.

“It’s fine,” Arden told Lindsey now. “It was weeks ago. Just promise me you will never, ever touch any kind of drugs again. At least not until we’re in college. Okay?”

“Promise,” Lindsey said instantly. “I am officially scared straight. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

Arden half smiled. She would always worry about Lindsey.

A couple feet away from them, Beth Page and Bo Yang fell into a slobbery kiss. Arden watched Bo dribble spit on Beth’s chin as she might watch a nature documentary. Arden sighed. “I wish I had that.”

“Which part?” Lindsey asked. “A second-string soccer player’s hand on your ass, a terrible dye job, or the STD they’re currently swapping?”

Arden giggled. “A boyfriend who wanted to come to this party and make out with me. That part.”

“At least you have a boyfriend, though,” Lindsey pointed out.

“Yeah. And where is he?”

“I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question. Because it’s Friday night. So I’m going to put money on Chris being at Kirsten’s house, playing some elaborate game of charades right as we speak.”

Lindsey was correct. That was what Chris and the rest of the theater crowd did pretty much every Friday night after rehearsal. It was what Arden and Lindsey did most Friday nights, as well, except for the occasions when they hung out with Lindsey’s track teammates, who went to bed around the time the sun set so they could get up and go for ten-mile jogs the next morning.

This was a different crowd, here at Matt Washington’s house. Nobody seemed particularly interested in playing charades, or any game that didn’t involve killing computer-generated prostitutes. And nobody had gone to bed yet.

At rehearsal yesterday afternoon, Arden had tried to get Chris to come with her to this party. “Why would I want to do that?” he’d asked. “I don’t even like Matt Washington.”

“Because you could study him in his natural habitat,” Arden had suggested. “And then someday if you play a character like Matt, you’d know him inside out.”

“Did you just call him Matt?” Chris asked. “Are you now on a first-name basis with Matt Washington, just because he invited you to one party?”

“Jealous?” Arden asked.

Chris hadn’t graced that with a response. Her boyfriend had his good qualities and his bad qualities, and the fact that he never got jealous of anything she did or any boy she knew fell somewhere in between the two.