Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Arden didn’t know anything about basketball, but she highly doubted that her brother’s role on the team was anything so important-sounding as “point guard,” and she was confident that he would not be scoring any baskets today, regardless of who was in the stands.

She hated this. The bargaining, the gambling, the promises. It was the same thing her father was trying to do by working seventy hours a week. You should come back because I am so successful. You should come back because I’m so good at basketball. Come back come back come back.

It was a stupid game and Arden wasn’t going to play it.

“She’s not going to come, Roman,” Arden said. “She’s three hundred miles away. She’d have to wake up at like four a.m. to make it there on time.”

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Maybe she’s going to surprise me.”

“It’s not a surprise if you think it’s going to happen. She’s not coming.”

Roman was the last kid to arrive at the gym, but he still made it there two minutes before Coach’s cutoff, so good enough. The Parakeets were playing the Wolverines, which seemed like a recipe for a bloodbath. Arden settled into the bleachers with the parents and tried to fall back asleep. But these bleachers seemed to be torture devices designed to keep the people sitting on them awake. So Arden pulled out her phone and returned to Tonight the Streets Are Ours.

Yesterday she’d read further through Peter’s posts from last summer. He joked about the bookstore. He occasionally went to the Hamptons with his family. The Hamptons were a rich-person beach vacation area, so, as Peter put it, “Obviously my parents have to have a house there.” He went to parties—countless parties, with countless friends whose names Arden could never keep track of, and often couldn’t even tell if they were guys or girls.

There was no hint in any of these posts of Peter’s brother’s tragic disappearance, which Arden knew, from reading ahead, was barreling down on them. There was very little mention of his brother at all. Peter’s summer seemed bright with possibility and hazy with freedom, and it made Arden feel nostalgic for a summertime that she had never actually experienced and likely never would. Today was cold and tomorrow would be cold, too, and even when the weather finally warmed up, what could Arden expect? Ten weeks of waking up to drive Roman to sports games and playdates while her father worked and her mother was off enjoying her big-city adventures. Keeping the house clean and getting food on the table. Trying to keep Lindsey out of trouble. For excitement, she could have a job at the hardware store with Chris—Mr. Jump had already offered.

Her summer plans weren’t anything bad, nothing to complain about. But Arden felt like Tonight the Streets Are Ours had shone a spotlight on her own life and revealed that everything in it was happening in black and white, when there was a whole world of color out there. Arden never would have said that tonight the streets were hers. At best, she felt that this space on the bleachers where she sat right now was hers, at least for the next couple hours.

But for all the color and light in Peter’s life that Arden enjoyed reading about, there were no entries she loved to read as much as the ones about Bianca. She never knew when Bianca was going to appear in Peter’s stories, so every time she did, Arden felt a thrill.



July 15

Bianca showed up at the bookstore today. Alone.

“Oh, yoo-hoo, shop clerk,” she said to me. “I’m trying to decide which of these books to buy. Any recommendations?” She set down in front of me three books of poetry. Love poetry. And she winked at me.

“Buy them all,” I said. “I get paid on commission.”

She did.

I swear to God, this girl is driving me crazy.



August 4