Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Miranda and Julio and I went to the free Probiotics show on the pier tonight. Miranda kept talking about how her mom knows somebody who knows somebody who knows the Probiotics’ manager and maybe she could get us backstage afterward. She kept threatening to “make some calls,” but I never actually saw her call anybody.

It was offensively hot, but there was some rainbow sprinkler set up that you could run through to cool off (like a normal sprinkler, but somehow they’d put rainbow lights over it?), and there were people giving away bottles of free Vitaminwater.

I do not understand Vitaminwater, by the way. Drink some water. Eat some vitamins. Are you so busy that you need those two tasks combined into one? I mean, I know New Yorkers have a lot going on, but chill the hell out.

We were dancing in the middle of it all, sweating up a storm, when we ran into Bianca. She was with Leo and a bunch of his asshole teammates.

Sorry. “Football teammates.” That’s what I meant.

I kind of froze when I saw her and Leo together, as though she and I had been doing something illicit, even though we haven’t, we haven’t done anything that’s not completely G-rated, I haven’t even held her hand. I barely ever see her. I felt guilty and then I felt mad at Leo for making me feel guilty, even though I guess that none of that is his fault.

Leo’s friends were all, “Dude, this is so lame,” and, “Dude, does anybody have any beer?” and, “Dude, why aren’t there any chicks here?” I have met some of these guys one-on-one before and they’ve seemed like reasonable human beings, but somehow their intelligence gets halved every time you add one more of them to the mix, so that by the time you have five of them in a crew like today, they are basically a pack of mentally challenged terriers.

“So you’re Bianca,” Miranda said, taking her in. Miranda is not the world’s greatest secret keeper, and I found myself wishing that I’d never said anything to her.

“Pleased to meet you,” Bianca said, sticking out her hand for a shake. “And you are…?”

Today Miranda was wearing a midriff top and shorts showing off her ass cheeks, and all Leo’s friends were salivating over her, but I only had eyes for Bianca. “You look really nice,” I told her. She was wearing about twice as many clothes as Miranda (which is not that hard to do), and she reminded me of an angel. If wings had sprouted from her shoulder blades, I would not have been the least bit surprised.

Leo and his friends came up with some asinine game where they had to burp as loud as they could in between the band’s songs, and if any of them burped loud enough to get the band’s attention, then they “won.”

“What do you win?” I asked.

The dog pack looked at me blankly.

“You just win,” explained Leo.

Okay.

“So, Leo,” I asked, making sure Bianca was in earshot. “What’s your favorite Probiotics song?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know many of their songs. That one they play on the radio is pretty good. What’s yours?”

Why are you doing this, Bianca? I wanted to ask her. Why are you still with him?

I mean, I love Leo. I love Leo more than anyone does. But she’s not right for him. He’s not right for her. She belongs with someone like me.

You just win.

Easy for you to say, Leo.

Arden had taken to skimming the entries that didn’t involve Bianca. She was as fascinated by Bianca as Peter was. She just wanted to spend more time with her, know more about her, uncover all the secrets of being Bianca.

Arden had also started reading the comments left by other Tonight the Streets Are Ours readers. There seemed to be a whole community of them. Whereas the early entries had garnered no feedback, the further into Peter’s story she got, the more commentary there was. The commenters didn’t seem to be people Peter knew—none of them said anything like, “Yeah, I was at that concert with you!” Presumably they were not Leo or Leo’s friends, since she couldn’t imagine Peter writing about his crush on Bianca if he knew that her boyfriend was reading. On this post, for example, the comments said:

I found ur blog cuz i am the biggest probiotics fan evarrr. probiotics rock!!! u r so lucky u got to see them for free!!! i have already seen them 8 timez.