Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“So?” Arden asked, suddenly feeling very small. “I’m your girlfriend. Don’t you think they assume that we kiss sometimes?”


“Sure,” Chris said, “but it’s weird. We’re in the middle of the school day. Let me just work on my audition for now, okay? If you’re bored, you can help.”

He held up the script, and, after a moment, Arden took it.

She knew she should be proud of her boyfriend. He was trying to achieve something. Okay, it wasn’t a sign in Times Square. But it was his own attempt at grandeur. It mattered to him.

But proud was not how she felt.

Maybe Arden was just jealous of Chris and his ambition, the starry lights of Hollywood that always beckoned to him from afar. Because more and more these days, she wondered if the most exciting moment in her life was already in her past. If maybe the greatest thing about her had happened when she was nine years old, and it had all been downhill ever since then.





What happened on the best day of Peter’s life

By the middle of April, Arden was reading Tonight the Streets Are Ours in real time, experiencing Peter’s life alongside him basically as it happened. In real time, here’s what was going on:

Less than two months remained in Peter’s senior year. There was still no update on his brother, so Peter had little to say about him—just memories from their childhood, or occasional dreams about him.

Peter had recently gotten into NYU for college, so he would be staying in New York City next year, but moving into a dorm. He’d been accepted into a handful of other schools, too, but they were all “too artsy” for his father, who said that he wasn’t going to pay for a degree in creative writing, which was hardly a “real degree” anyway, and would be just the start of a lifetime of Peter moving back home and blowing through his parents’ money.



April 13

They say that tragedy changes you, and I guess I’d hoped that the positive side of his older son’s disappearance would be my dad realizing that life is finite, and people don’t stick around forever, and you should let them pursue their dreams now, before it’s too late. But that is decidedly not what happened.

I’ve been trying to find a way to show my dad that being an artist or a writer is a real career, and you can make a living without donning a suit that’s identical to every other guy’s suit, and squashing onto the subway at 7:30 every morning along with a zillion other guys in matching suits, and going into an office where you have a boss and your boss has a boss and your boss’s boss has a boss, and everybody tells everybody else what to do all day long, for the rest of your life.

I told Bianca that all I want to do once I’m an adult is work at the bookstore and see the world, and write about all the things I’ve seen. “You should do that,” she agreed. “I want to make money, though. But I want to make it doing something interesting.”

“You could make money and we could get married, and I could live off your money,” I suggested.

She laughed. “We’re still in high school.”

“I didn’t mean now. I meant someday.”

I kind of did mean now, though. I mean, I was kidding. But I’m not a very patient person.

Peter and Bianca were properly together now, and had been ever since the first of the year. There was no mention of Leo, so Arden pieced together that Bianca and Leo had broken up by December, if not earlier, and that was why she had returned to Peter on New Year’s Eve. Arden wondered if Peter had been a factor in Bianca and Leo’s breakup. If Bianca had told Leo that she’d been cheating on him, or if Leo had somehow found out all on his own. Or maybe not—maybe Bianca had just grown tired of Leo’s buffoonish behavior and told him she wanted to move on. Peter never said. It was as if he was so focused on their perfect relationship now that he didn’t want to waste any time thinking about what a struggle it was to get here, the obstacles that had once stood in their way.