Tonight the Streets Are Ours

She told him the day she got home from Atlantic Beach. As soon as she was free from the car, she went running to Chris’s dad’s hardware store. And Arden, unlike Lindsey, was not a runner. She was the opposite: a sitter, a lie-downer, a sedate-stroller. But she ran to see Chris, because she wanted to tell him she loved him, she wanted to tell him in person, and she didn’t want to wait another minute.

She showed up at the hardware store breathless and sweaty. Chris was vaguely helping a woman choose between varieties of packing tape, a cause that he abandoned as soon as Arden walked in the door.

“You’re home!” he said, his eyes lighting up.

“I love you,” she blurted out.

The woman choosing the packing tape started to laugh.

“I love you,” Chris said right back.

And they’d never stopped saying it since then.

Now, at the school dance, it felt like they were back to that, that sunniness and heat of August. Arden’s mother had been right: she was silly to have any doubt about her and Chris.

When the dance ended, Arden dropped off everyone in her car, driving around Cumberland in a circuitous route until each one of them was delivered to his or her own house. And then Arden herself went home. It was late by then. Midnight.

But still her mother hadn’t come back.

Arden’s dad called her mom’s cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. He tried Arden’s mom’s brother, too, but Uncle George hadn’t heard from her. Arden had the surprising realization that she didn’t know who else her mother would go to after she stormed away from home. Unlike her father, who had his fantasy sports leagues and work buddies, her mother seemed to be friendly to everyone and close to no one outside of the family. Who would she go to in a moment of crisis? Where would she be, other than here?

The three remaining Huntleys waited up for her, sitting in the dark on the living room couch, the TV on without any of them processing what program it was showing. Roman passed out first, followed sometime thereafter by their father, until at last only Arden was left awake, watching the lights from the television screen cast flickering shadows across their faces. She waited and waited. But her mother never came home that night. When she did return, it was two days later, while the kids were at school. But that was only to pack a suitcase before heading out again.

And now weeks had passed. The Super Bowl had been played, Roman’s basketball team had lost five games, Arden had been suspended from school and returned to school and attended her first supposedly cool party. Life was marching on. And still, her mother was gone.





Arden realizes that the grass is always greener

The day after Arden asked the Internet why doesn’t anybody love me as much as I love them? and discovered Tonight the Streets Are Ours, she and Chris went shopping for props for the spring musical, American Fairy Tale, a nonsensical, borderline hallucinatory debut written by Mr. Lansdowne, the theater teacher, in what Arden considered to be a serious abuse of power. Chris picked her up early in his car. He didn’t like to drive in Arden’s car because he said it was likely to break down or explode at any minute, which was, quite frankly, a fair critique. Chris drove a three-year-old Honda Accord with automatic locks and working air bags. He liked to play it safe.

“How was last night?” Arden asked once she was settled in the passenger seat.

“So fun. We played some games and watched a movie. You’d have loved it.”

This was what Arden’s boyfriend and their theater friends did literally every single Friday night. Trust Chris to present it like it was the most exciting activity ever.

And—though Arden had never even hinted as much to her boyfriend—she didn’t actually enjoy playing theater games. That’s why she did stage crew in the first place—so she could be backstage, where if she made a fool of herself, no one would see. Chris Jump had something in him, like at the level of DNA, where he didn’t care if he made a fool of himself. Or maybe he didn’t even know how to look foolish. In their ten months of dating, Arden had never seen Chris do anything remotely embarrassing.