Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“Linds, that girl is an idiot.”


Lindsey’s body looked like it was built up and down in a straight line, a very long straight line. She was the tallest girl in school by far, and there were guys on the football team with bigger chests. But that’s what made her such a great runner. And wasn’t that a positive thing, to be great at something?

“I know everybody says I look like a dude behind my back. Obviously they’re right. But it’s not my fault. It’s not like I chose to look this way. If I had a choice, of course I’d be beautiful. Do you think that’s why Denise doesn’t like me? Because I’m ugly?”

“No,” Arden said. “I think Denise doesn’t like you because she doesn’t like girls, or at least she doesn’t like girls at this particular time in her life. You are beautiful.”

“I don’t know,” Lindsey said. “Maybe Denise just likes hot girls. Do you think I’m going to be alone forever? Tell me honestly.”

“Definitely no.”

Lindsey sighed and leaned her head against the back of the seat, closing her eyes. “You wouldn’t know what that’s like, anyway. You have Chris.”

Ah, yes. Chris. The world’s most secure security blanket.

“I hate living here sometimes,” Lindsey said without opening her eyes. “I wonder, if I could just run fast enough and far enough, do you think I could run all the way out of here?”

“I bet you could.”

Lindsey shook her head. “I just want someone to want to kiss me,” she mumbled.

This had been a frequent refrain in Lindsey’s life. It had reached its zenith a couple years ago, but now she rarely expressed it, as if she was embarrassed to be nearly seventeen years old without a kiss to her name and didn’t want to call attention to it. But Arden knew it was still something that troubled Lindsey. There just weren’t that many out lesbians at their school, and those who were didn’t evoke much interest in Lindsey, or she didn’t evoke much interest in them. Either way, Lindsey wanted something that seemed like it ought to be simple but had proven impossible to achieve in Cumberland.

Arden remembered when they were thirteen, asking Lindsey, “How do you know you’re gay when you’ve never even kissed a girl?”

“How do you know you’re straight when you’ve never even kissed a guy?” Lindsey shot back.

Arden couldn’t argue with that.

Actually, a little-known and never-discussed fact was that Lindsey, technically speaking, had had her first kiss. It happened freshman year, with their classmate David Rappaport, at a school dance. She’d just come out to Arden and to her parents, but not yet to the world at large, and when David Rappaport asked her to dance, she’d said yes because she couldn’t figure out how to say no. Afterward Lindsey slept over at Arden’s, and she cried and cried. “You only get one first kiss in your whole life,” she kept saying, “and I wasted mine on some dumb boy.”

The answer finally came to Arden. “You don’t have to count it,” she told Lindsey.

“What do you mean?”

“You can just decide that your first kiss hasn’t happened yet. It’s going to be with some amazing girl who you probably haven’t even met yet.”

“Can I do that?”

“It’s your life,” Arden told her. “Of course you can.”

That night was the last time they ever mentioned Lindsey’s one make-out occurrence.

Now, Lindsey just sighed and reclined her seat all the way back. “It’s fine,” she said, more to herself than to Arden. “Tonight’s over. Tomorrow will be better.”

Arden thought about Beth and Jennie, and Chris and Ellzey, and Denise and Matt Washington, and her mother, and she didn’t believe that, not any of it, not for a second. But she didn’t say so to Lindsey. She just kept her eyes on the road, and she drove.