Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Arden scrutinized the page, then said, “They go in alphabetical order.”


“Genius!” Chris declared, grabbing it back from her.

She gave him a weak smile. Arden had recently developed a really bizarre, guilty, and specific fantasy. In this fantasy, she broke up with Chris. In this fantasy, Chris realized, suddenly, everything that would be missing from his life without her, and he tried desperately to win her back by showing up outside of her bedroom window holding a boom box aloft, or bringing her bouquets of flowers, or asking her to prom in an embarrassingly public and over-the-top manner (like on horseback, with a marching band). Eventually, he would wear down her defenses, and she would accept. He would have to really work for it, though.

She didn’t know why she was fantasizing about this. She just knew she wasn’t going to act on it. If Chris were a bad guy, then sure. She’d break up with him. If he were a criminal or a drug dealer, if he cheated on tests or if he cheated on her, if he were violent or racist. Then yeah, easy, decision made.

But he wasn’t any of those things. He was smart and handsome and talented and ambitious. Teachers liked him, parents liked him. Pretty much everyone liked him except Lindsey. He was obviously, as Kirsten and Naomi put it, “a keeper.” The only reason to break up with someone like Chris would be if she thought she could do better. And why would she think that?

“Chris,” she said.

“Yeah, babe?” He glanced up from the page.

But now that she had his attention again, she didn’t know what she’d wanted to say. She settled on saying, “I’m excited for our anniversary.”

One year was a crazy length of time. That was one-seventeenth of her life. Arden already had their anniversary night all planned out, even though it was nearly a month away. She’d used most of what remained of her tutoring money to get a hotel room to surprise Chris. She would wear a sexy dress, one he’d never seen before—she’d already bought that, too, a lacy, shimmery thing—and he would arrive at the hotel not knowing what to expect, only to find her lounging provocatively on the king-size bed. There would be no little brother and no parents and no theater crowd and no Lindsey; just the two of them, in love. And then their relationship would go back to feeling the way it was supposed to. She would go back to feeling the way she was supposed to. That was the plan.

Chris rubbed her shoulder. “I’m excited, too. Can you give me even a tiny hint about what we’re doing to celebrate?”

She grinned and shook her head. “Nope!”

He laughed. “I don’t know any other couples at school who have been together for a year. And who knows—if we’re lucky, maybe I’ll have a role in a movie by then.”

“It’ll be a good anniversary either way,” she told him, reaching up to squeeze his hand.

He went back to his script. She went back to Peter.

By the end of last year, Peter had all but stopped writing about his missing brother. Arden supposed that there was no news to report, and Peter had said on the matter all that there was to say. He was still trying to move on from Bianca, though. He’d even made out with a couple other girls, even though he swore his heart wasn’t in it. Arden thought back to Lindsey’s question and decided Peter was definitely hot. If she and Chris ever really did break up, it would probably take her a number of years before she found a couple other people willing to make out with her, and Peter had managed it in less than three months.

Then the year changed from last year to this one, and something happened that Arden had never seen coming.



January 2

I should have written about this yesterday, but Bianca and I have not been apart for a single second since New Year’s Eve, so I haven’t had a moment to breathe and record what happened.