Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Arden didn’t know if it made her an idiot or a romantic that this all still sounded like a good idea. Okay, not the twin boys thing because Lindsey was gay, but she’d be down to co-marry a set of fraternal twins.

Misfortune followed Lindsey, and so Arden did, too. In the nearly eight years of their friendship, Lindsey had suffered through her father’s battle with cancer, her grandpa’s death, getting arrested for shoplifting, getting caught plagiarizing an essay, failing her driver’s test, losing her mother’s engagement ring—and that was only scratching the surface. Lindsey was dyslexic and so teachers assumed she was just stupid, she was gay in a town whose primary understanding of lesbians came from occasionally watching Ellen DeGeneres, and she had parents who fundamentally believed that both dyslexia and homosexuality were just bad choices that Lindsey had made, probably to piss them off.

Until a month and a half ago, when her own family had so spectacularly collapsed, Arden had led a stable life, compared to Lindsey. Sometimes she’d wondered how she would handle it, if she could handle it, if she had Lindsey’s same bad luck. Maybe if she faced Lindsey’s same problems, she’d make Lindsey’s same mistakes.

“Hey, Arden.”

She turned at the sound of her name. A guy was standing there. Ellzey. Okay, his last name was Ellzey, but that’s what everybody called him, even the teachers. Arden’s heart quickened as she wondered why he had stepped outside right now when the whole party was indoors, if he’d seen her out here, if he’d been looking for her. For a brief moment, she let herself imagine kissing Ellzey, out here under the stars. She imagined him as a prince in a fairy tale, coming to save her.

Then she kicked the thought away. She was taken. Girls who are taken shouldn’t fantasize about kissing boys they barely knew on Matt Washington’s patio.

“Hey, Ellzey,” she said. “What’s up?” She wondered if he was going to mention the last time they had spoken—one of the only other times they had spoken—and hoped fervently that he was not. It had been an ignoble experience. She felt very glad that Lindsey was missing this conversation now. There was no way Lindsey would have been able to keep a straight face if she’d seen Ellzey talking to Arden.

“Beautiful night, huh?” he said, coming to stand next to her. Even though he didn’t touch her, she felt the warmth of his skin from his arm next to hers. “So many stars,” he went on.

Arden was impressed. She couldn’t help but compare Ellzey to her boyfriend, who had never commented on the number of stars. Unless it was the number of Hollywood stars in a particular movie or something. Arden said to Ellzey, “My dad used to keep a telescope on our roof when I was a kid. He wanted us to learn facts about astronomy, I think, like to identify different constellations. I could never find anything other than the Big Dipper. But I loved looking at the stars.” This was, hands down, the most sentences in a row Arden had ever spoken to Ellzey.

“You know what would make the stars even more beautiful?” Ellzey asked, looking into her eyes.

Arden wondered if Ellzey knew that she was taken. She and Chris Jump had been going out for more than ten months, so it seemed like everyone would know, but maybe they didn’t. Why would someone from the popular crowd monitor the relationship status of every random girl at school?

“What?” Arden said.

“If we were high right now,” Ellzey said.

They were both silent for a moment, as Arden expected him to produce a joint from his pocket or something. He did not.

Then Arden remembered that she had just been suspended for possession of drugs, so presumably she would be the one carrying joints in her pockets.

“I don’t really do that,” Arden said.

“Oh yeah?” He gave her a teasing smile. “You don’t have to keep secrets from me, Arden Huntley.”

I’m not, Arden thought. “That was just a one-time thing,” she explained.

“Oh.”

“Sorry.”

Ellzey shrugged. “No sweat. Just thought I’d ask.”