Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Tabitha’s first story was called Tabitha on Stage, and it was about Tabitha’s performing in The Nutcracker and how she took a leadership role to get all the mouse dancers to work together. The next one was called Break a Leg, Tabitha! and was about how Tabitha helped teach ballet at an underprivileged elementary school. Maybe you are starting to get a sense of what the Just Like Me Dolls’ books are like.

Arden didn’t know anything about the real-life Tabitha, not even where in the country she lived, but she was fascinated by her. Whenever Arden saw a black girl around her own age (which didn’t happen all that often, since Cumberland was overwhelmingly white), she would stare at her, trying to figure out if maybe this was the real Tabitha. Then her mother told her this behavior was rude and borderline racist and asked her to please stop.

Arden dreamed of becoming a Just Like Me Doll, but she didn’t see how to make that happen, since she, unlike Tabitha, did not have a “thing.” She didn’t do ballet, or gymnastics, or figure skating (all of which would lead to excellent doll accoutrements). She played soccer but badly, she took swimming lessons but only so she wouldn’t drown, she hadn’t quite yet gotten the hang of riding a bike without training wheels. She drew pictures that her mother called “abstract” and wrote stories that never got gold stars and got cast as fish number two in her class’s production of The Little Mermaid. One time she tried to cook something, and she exploded a glass mixing bowl on the stove. After that, her mother banned her from the kitchen.

What Arden did superlatively was this:

She was nice.

She absolutely killed at reading buddies—all the kindergartners fought to be paired up with her. She was the first to volunteer to collaborate on group projects with the kids who got bad grades. She was never without a hair elastic or tissues, just in case somebody needed to use them. One time she paid the library twenty dollars because her friend Maya had borrowed a book and lost it somewhere in the park, and that was enough to make Arden feel responsible.

Arden came by her niceness honestly. Her grandmother was nice. Her mother was nice. Her house was filled with wall art and embroidered pillows with quotations like If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all and Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty and You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose—this last one being a quote that her mother loved from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

The height of Arden’s kindness career came near the end of third grade, though she didn’t know it at the time. Her dad had been representing someone who worked for the Disney corporation, and when the case was over, this client had, in gratitude, given Arden’s dad family tickets for an all-expenses-paid trip to Disney World. This was easily the best thing ever to happen to Arden, or possibly to anyone.

And then she met Lindsey.

It was a Sunday in May. Arden’s brother, Roman, who was three at the time, was throwing a temper tantrum, as he did every single day, sometimes more than once. This particular tantrum was about how their cat, Mouser, was maliciously hiding under the couch instead of playing with him.

Arden escaped to the woods just behind her house so she wouldn’t have to listen to the screaming. She brought her Just Like Me Doll with her, even though her parents repeatedly asked her not to do this, since Tabitha had cost more than a hundred dollars and was already, after about five months, looking decidedly worse for the wear.

And it was there, in the woods, that Arden first encountered Lindsey.

She saw a tall, skinny, dark-haired girl in between the trees, focusing on a long metal device in her hands.

“Hi,” Arden said to the girl she did not recognize.

The girl looked up from the metal thing.