Tonight the Streets Are Ours

From the comments, Arden saw she wasn’t the only one to feel that way. His post about his breakup with Bianca had received more comments than anything else on Tonight the Streets Are Ours, with readers saying, I can’t believe she did this to you. What is her problem??? and, It’s going to be OK. You two are fated to be together. Just give it time, and, Now that your single, gimme a call J—with a racy photo pasted below.

Peter spent the rest of the fall piecing himself together. Some days he sounded as carefree as ever, analyzing a novel he was reading, or relating a funny story from school that day, or describing something weird that a stranger did on the subway and ordering Future Peter, Include this as a character in a story someday! But other days he would write on and on about how much he missed Bianca and how much he missed his brother.



October 29

They’re two different experiences of loss, so maybe I shouldn’t compare them. Both were irrational. Both simultaneously have everything to do with me and yet nothing to do with me. But the big difference is that I know where Bianca is. She’s living in the same apartment and attending the same school as the last time I saw her. So it seems like there must be something I could do (some combination of words I could speak, some gift I could give, some change I could make to my mind or body) that would win her back. If I could just figure out what that is …

As for my brother, though, he could be anywhere in the world. Or nowhere. He could be dead by now.

With both of them, there’s this feeling like I should have done more. I should have tried harder to hold on to them. My brother and I weren’t so close when he left. We’ve always been very different people, and the older we got, the more obvious those differences became.

But that never really mattered, because we’d grown up together. We got head lice at the same time and had to stay home from school for two weeks. The one and only time we went to overnight camp for two weeks, my brother decided that we were leaving after just one day and had us both pack our bags and try to walk out the front gate. (We didn’t get far.) Stupid, childish memories, things that are way in the past—but aren’t those the things that make up a life? Even as recently as June, we were going to parties together. And then of course there’s the fact that we suffered through our parents together, which should bind two people together for life.

Should. But didn’t.

Not a day goes by that I’m not seized with worry about him. I want him to come home, but if that can’t happen, then I just want to know that he is safe.



December 1

Kyla is always saying things like, “Ugh, if only I were prettier, I would be all-around happier and more loved.” Not in those exact words, but that’s the sentiment. That’s actually how she thinks.

I’d make fun of her for being so illogical, but that’s how I feel, too, except about my writing. If only I were a better writer, everything would come easily to me, I would be happy all the time, and never ever lonely. If only I were a better writer, Bianca would want me back.

But creating art is supposed to be ITS OWN REWARD. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS.

Unfortunately, I am not much of an artist. I am a minstrel, I am a dilettante. I will work for adoration. I am pathetic.

“Babe,” Chris said. “Babe.”

Arden looked up, slowly coming back into the present day, the auditorium that they sat in the back of while the rest of their class was on stage, playing Machine. This was a theater game in which each one of them did a repetitive action to form a complete “machine.” This particular machine would be really helpful if you needed your head patted insistently, or if you needed to hear Beth Page say the word boop a hundred times in a row. Otherwise, it wasn’t a super-functional technology.

“Sorry,” Arden said to Chris, subtly navigating away from Tonight the Streets Are Ours. “What’s up?” For some reason that she couldn’t pinpoint, she was sick of Chris calling her babe. She wished he’d just call her by her name. She used to love that anyone should think of her as a babe. Now it made her think of Babe the pig.

“Can you help me figure out a way to memorize these three lines here?” He indicated the place on the script. “I keep getting them confused.”