Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Actually, Chris was cute and a good actor, but whatever.

Shortly after rehearsals for the play kicked off, Chris started dating Natalia. Natalia played one of the nuns, which, from what Arden knew of Natalia, was basically the opposite of typecasting.

Natalia and Chris went together like fire and gasoline. When they weren’t on stage, or making out, they were screaming at each other. Then Natalia would stomp off to weep in the girls’ room, and the rest of the nuns would run after her, and Chris would complain to Arden.

“She’s just so crazy,” Chris would say.

“I know,” Arden would sympathize.

“It’s all about the drama with her,” Chris said one time, a hammer hanging idly from his hand while Arden pieced together scenery. “It’s like she wants to fight. We just spent half an hour arguing over which side of the stage was stage right and which side was stage left.”

“The left side from the audience’s perspective is stage right,” Arden said.

“That’s what I told her! But she refused to listen. So I looked it up on my phone, which obviously confirmed that you and I are right, and then she started crying because I was being ‘mean.’”

“You were not being mean,” Arden said, taking the hammer from Chris’s hands since he was not doing anything with it except swinging it around, which had the distinct potential to do more harm than good. “It’s not like you were telling her she was wrong in order to hurt her feelings. You just wanted her to know so she wouldn’t sound silly in front of anybody else.”

“Exactly,” Chris said. “Thank you.” He followed Arden around to the other side of the backdrop she was working on. “So how do I get her to stop fighting with me? What should I do so we can have a conversation without it turning into her crying? Should I just agree with her, even when she says something totally wrong, like that stage left is to the audience’s left?”

All told at that point, Arden’s dating experience included two kisses at school dances, one kiss at a bar mitzvah, and one week of “dating” Benedict Swindenhausen when they were in the seventh grade. She had no idea why Chris thought she was some kind of relationship expert, but she liked the role.

“I think you have to respect where she’s coming from,” Arden said, thinking it over. “You can’t just say, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ Say, ‘I see why you might think that stage left is to your left. That would make sense. I was also surprised when I learned that wasn’t the case.’ Then it seems like you’re on her side, you know?”

“That’s smart,” Chris said. “You’re smart.”

“Thank you.” Arden blushed a little.

“You give me hope that not all girls are total drama queens,” Chris said.

“Not me,” Arden said. “Not a drama queen.” She held up the hammer. “Just a hammer queen, I guess.”

That sounded stupid, but Chris laughed anyway.

“Why are you with her, anyway?” Arden asked. “If you make each other so unhappy, what’s the point?”

Chris just shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

Arden felt envy pulsate in her chest. She wanted that: the sort of love that you can’t explain. Like Heloise and Abelard. It didn’t make sense to anybody else but them—but that didn’t make it any less true.

But apparently what Chris and Natalia had wasn’t really love, since a couple weeks later, during intermission between the first and second acts of their final performance of Heloise and Abelard, she dumped him.

It was five minutes before Chris was about to make his entrance, and he was nowhere to be seen. “Find him!” ordered the disembodied voice of the stage manager through Arden’s headset.

Eventually she tracked him down behind a rack of coats in the costume closet. He was sitting on the floor in his monk outfit, his face buried in a floor-length fur cloak.