Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Things with Chris weren’t always like this

Arden had nursed a dormant crush on Chris Jump through most of freshman and sophomore years. She wasn’t obsessed with him in the way she’d been with some other boys—like Ellzey, for example. But Chris was tall and handsome and very much at the center of the theater crowd, even when they were freshmen. So she was vaguely interested.

And then he got cast as Abelard in the play adaptation of the love letters of Hélo?se and Abélard, and she was a goner.

Arden got to watch Chris as Abelard most days after school, because she did stage crew: costuming, lighting, scenery, props, whatever else was needed backstage. She’d discovered stage crew at the beginning of freshman year, when Lindsey dragged her along to a drama club meeting. Lindsey never went back after that first time—as with so many other things, her interest flared and then disappeared within the course of a few days—but Arden was hooked. She saw it as a personal victory when a play went off with all the actors wearing exactly what they were supposed to be wearing, walking onstage at exactly the moments they were supposed to make their entrances.

This wasn’t just an inflated sense of self-importance. If she weren’t there with her walkie-talkie, muttering instructions, each actor would literally have no idea what was happening in the play outside of his or her own scenes. If she didn’t run onstage when the lights went dark to quickly reposition the scenery into the spots that she had marked with glow-in-the-dark tape, then the scenery would not get moved, and classroom scenes would take place in monasteries, kitchen scenes in forests. It made her feel like she mattered.

Plus, she made good friends through drama club, even before there was anything romantic between her and Chris. Arden clicked quickly with Kirsten, who, as an excellent singer and a mediocre-at-best actress, got major parts in all the musicals and bit parts in all the straight plays. Arden took a little while longer to connect with Naomi, who did stage crew with her and had a classic “don’t notice me” backstage personality, until she got comfortable with you. But after Arden and Naomi stayed six hours after school one time in order to rush a stage backdrop to completion, that friendship, too, was solidified.

Freshman year, Arden’s parents came to her first play. Afterward her dad complimented her, and then he said, “Maybe next year you’ll even make it on stage!” She hadn’t invited him to any performances since then. He didn’t get it. Arden’s ultimate dream, for when she was a senior, was to be the stage manager, the one who called the entire play. Like God, basically.

Last year, sophomore spring, Arden was doing tech for Abelard and Heloise. It was based on a real-life doomed romance of a couple in twelfth-century France. Heloise was a beautiful young woman, and Abelard was her teacher … until they fell in love. Nobody approved of their union, so Heloise was forced to join a nunnery and Abelard became a monk. For the last twenty years of Abelard’s life, the two wrote passionate love letters back and forth, forbidden to ever see each other again. They loved each other and nobody else except for God up until the day they died. Arden thought this was one of the greatest love stories she had ever heard. She would kill for a life like that—minus the bit where she had to become a nun.

Mr. Lansdowne’s decision to cast Chris as Abelard angered every theater guy in the junior and senior classes. There was a lot of indignant gossiping about it backstage, and, since Arden was always backstage, she overheard it all.

“The leads are supposed to go to the upperclassmen,” Brad griped. “Everyone knows that.”

“Mr. Lansdowne just cast Chris because he’s cute,” bitched Eric. “He’s not even that good an actor.”