Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“Babe, are you coming in?” asked Chris.

Arden snapped back into the present, Peter’s hot summer day vanishing in an instant. Chris had parked outside the Grass Is Always Greener, a junk shop in the strip mall just outside of town. He was already out of the car, his coat on, while Arden was still sitting in the passenger seat, staring at her phone.

“Coming,” she said, and she opened the door.

Arden and Chris’s task for today was to purchase hats for all sixteen members of American Fairy Tale’s chorus. Chris was not in the chorus, obviously. He was Chris Jump; he was the leading man. But he still wanted to be involved in the selection of hats because it was crucial to him that everything on stage look exactly right, even down to the hats on the heads of the people swaying in the background behind him.

Inside the Grass Is Always Greener, Chris tried on every single hat. Arden’s job was to rank each one on a scale from one to ten, and then he also ranked it on a scale from one to ten, and if the average score between us was higher than a five, he put it into the “maybe” category, and if its score was lower than five he returned it to the rack. Except in one instance where he overruled Arden’s score of one because he said it was “wacky” and she just didn’t “get” its “wackiness.”

He was wrong, by the way. The hat was covered in purple and green polka dots, but that didn’t make it wacky—it just made it stupid.

In between hat ratings, while Chris studied himself in the mirror, Arden clicked back to Tonight the Streets Are Ours, and she read on.



June 25

I am such an idiot. I keep checking my phone—maybe she’s called, maybe she’s called! A few minutes ago—this is so embarrassing to admit, but whatever, almost nobody reads this journal, so I’ll say it—a few minutes ago I called myself from my mom’s phone, just to make sure my phone was working. As if maybe the reason I haven’t heard from her is some major telecommunications technology breakdown, not just because she hasn’t called me. My reception is never out. I live in New York City, and there’s a cell phone tower on every street corner.

I didn’t have work today, but I went back to the bookstore anyway and hung around for a while, just in case she might wander in again. I would make a terrible criminal. I always return to the scene of the crime.

GET A GRIP, PETER. YOU ARE PATHETIC.

“Hey,” Chris said. Arden looked up from her phone, blinked at him. “Which of these hats?” He modeled.

“We already did those two,” Arden said. “I rated them both sevens, remember?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to get two black derby hats. They’re for the footmen, and Jaden and Eric already look enough alike without us putting them in the same hat. We’re trying to help the audience differentiate between their characters. So?”

“Get the one with the ribbon around it,” Arden said. “That one. Yeah. And give Jaden the green and purple polka dot one. That will help the audience tell them apart.”

“I thought you hated that one?”

“I changed my mind.”

Chris assigned the hats to their correct piles. “This would be a really fun thing to do on a date,” he said.

Arden scowled at him. “We are on a date,” she reminded him.

He glanced at her for a second. “Oh, right, I know. I just meant it’d be fun with someone you didn’t know very well, you know? Like, trying on silly hats with someone. Taking funny pictures, playing different characters.”

“We could be taking funny pictures right now, if you want,” Arden suggested. “We could play different hat-wearing characters.”

Chris shrugged. “Nah, that’s okay. We still have a lot to get through.”

Arden didn’t argue. She hadn’t really wanted to put away Tonight the Streets Are Ours, anyway. She was just offering because it seemed like what Chris wanted.