Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Ellzey seemed to have a passing knowledge of Arden’s existence, mostly that she was the girl who said “great job” after every single chorus performance. Also one time he complimented her on her Harry Potter tote bag, which she then made a point of carrying to school every day, until Lindsey told her, “That bag is filthy. Dumbledore is rolling in his grave. Put it out to pasture, Arden.”


One Saturday night last March, Arden, Lindsey, and Naomi slept over at Kirsten’s house to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. At the time Naomi was going out with one of the guys in show choir, so she had insider information about choral activities. She happened to mention that a bunch of the guys in choir were also having a sleepover. That very night! She didn’t know exactly who was there. The guy she was dating, Douglas, for sure. Alex, Ellzey, maybe Carter?

“We should go,” Arden said.

“To the boys’ slumber party?” Kirsten asked, wrapping her long blond hair around a curling iron. Kirsten’s hair was her pride and joy. The rest of them called it “mermaid hair,” and while Kirsten would shoot down any other compliments sent her way (“No, I swear, these pants just make me appear skinny”; “Honestly, I had my dad explain the reading to me—I couldn’t finish it, either”; “I’m actually way worse at piano than should even be possible”), she accepted “mermaid hair” with the calm acknowledgment of one who knew this praise to be undeniable.

“Yes, to the boys’ slumber party,” Arden said.

“Why?” Kirsten asked.

“To say hi,” Arden explained.

“Why?” Kirsten asked again, holding her hair in place. “I just mean, like, what’s the point?”

“What’s the point of anything? Like, what’s the point of curling your hair?” Lindsey countered. Arden knew that Lindsey meant her question innocently—Lindsey genuinely did not understand the point of curling hair—but Kirsten glared at Lindsey as though this were a personal attack.

“Wouldn’t you like to see your boyfriend?” Arden asked Naomi.

“He’s not exactly my boyfriend,” Naomi said. “I mean, we haven’t had the ‘are we boyfriend and girlfriend’ talk or anything.”

“Obviously we should crash the boys’ slumber party,” Lindsey volunteered. Arden threw her a grateful look, while Kirsten and Naomi both frowned. They were not exactly Lindsey Matson fans, since most of the time they wanted to gossip about boys and try on each other’s jewelry, while Lindsey almost never wanted to gossip about boys, and last year she’d sold the small amount of jewelry that she owned in order to purchase absurdly expensive “performance” running shoes. She was here as a package deal with Arden, and all of them knew it—except for maybe Lindsey herself.

“What else is there to do?” Lindsey reasoned.

“We could stay here and watch a movie,” Kirsten suggested.

Arden felt deep in her bones that she was not put on this Earth to sit in her pajamas in Kirsten’s finished basement and watch a movie.

By the time she’d convinced her three friends to go to the boys’ sleepover, it was one a.m. “Whose house are they at?” she asked Naomi.

Naomi shook her head. “I don’t know. Not Douglas’s.”

“Will you text him and ask where they are?”

Naomi scrunched up her face. “Um … we don’t totally have that kind of relationship yet?”

They decided to try Alex’s house first. Alex’s house was big, and he didn’t have any younger siblings who might get underfoot, so this seemed like a likely location for a sleepover. Plus he lived only a few blocks away from Kirsten’s house. Kirsten scribbled a note that said, cryptically, We’ll be back, and left it on her kitchen table as they silently snuck out of the house. At the last minute, Arden grabbed one of the helium balloons that Kirsten’s stepmom had festively tied to the fridge. “When we show up, it’ll be like a parade,” she whispered.

But when they got to Alex’s, every window was dark. Either the boys weren’t there, or they were already fast asleep.

“I can’t imagine they’ve gone to bed already,” Naomi said as the girls stood in Alex’s driveway, staring up at the house. “Douglas said that last time they had a sleepover, they stayed up until four in the morning singing the entirety of Les Miz.”