Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Her mother gave her a knowing look. “That boy is wild about you. Trust me, honey, you don’t have anything to worry about. Don’t be silly.” Arden’s parents were themselves high school sweethearts, so to her mother, being silly was imagining that a teenaged romance might even end.

And so Arden’s mother set to work on sewing the dress. She mostly worked on it while Arden was at school, so Arden didn’t have much awareness about how it came together. She just knew that one day there was red fabric and then one day there was a dressmaker’s dummy and one day she was getting measured and then, a few days before the dance, the dress suddenly existed and she was trying it on.

“Well?” her mother said as Arden modeled it in the living room. “What do you think?”

“I think, can I have my screen time yet?” Roman asked from his perch on the arm of the couch.

“Soon. Say something nice about how your sister looks first.”

“You look red,” Roman said.

“Roman,” their mother said in a warning tone.

“Your dress, I mean,” he said. “Your dress looks red.”

“Dennis!” their mother called toward their dad’s closed study door. “Do you want to come out and see your beautiful daughter?”

There was a pause, and then he shouted back, “I’m in the middle of something right now, sweetie. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Arden rolled her eyes. “Out in a minute” was dad-code for “I’ve already forgotten that you asked me to do something.” Only about two weeks remained before the Super Bowl, which meant her father was chest-deep in fantasy football. Ostensibly he was working on some important legal case right now, but it was equally likely that he just wasn’t coming out of his study until he’d read every post about every game on every NFL news site that he frequented.

“What do you think of the dress, Arden?” her mother asked.

Honestly? Arden thought it looked slightly off in some way. It just didn’t look on her like it did on the actress taped to her mirror. The cap sleeves seemed too long, the neckline too high and bunchy, the waist too low, the fabric too matte. Or maybe this just wasn’t the dress for her—maybe when she saw it in that magazine and pictured it on her own body, she was picturing herself as somebody else entirely.

“I love it,” her mother went on. “I can’t believe it—this is the first dress I’ve made in years, and somehow it turned out just right. You look stunning, honey. So grown-up.”

“I love it, too,” said Arden.

Two days later, she was at the mall with her two closest theater friends, Kirsten and Naomi. Arden had of course invited Lindsey, who had declined; Lindsey was not a mall person. Kirsten was riffling through clothing racks at an alarming rate when she stopped and declared, “This is it, guys! This is going to be my Winter Wonderland dress!”

Arden and Naomi crowded in to inspect it. It was gauzy, pink, strapless, sheer at the top, barely ass-covering at the bottom. The sort of dress an extra in the nightclub scene of a music video might wear.

“Ughhh, it’s so amazing, I want one, too,” Naomi said immediately.

“Do it!” said Kirsten. “I’ll get the pink one and you can get the silver one and Arden can get the gold one and we’ll match.”

Naomi squealed.

Arden considered saying that she already had a dress. That her mom had made. But the thing was, she didn’t actually want to wear that dress. And now that she’d seen what her friends were going to be wearing, she really didn’t want to wear that dress, to be the one frumpy, old-fashioned girl in a skirt past her knees.