Tonight the Streets Are Ours

April 17

Last night was Raleigh’s birthday party and the theme was “fifties sock hop,” so all the girls got poodle skirts and I wore a bow tie. Bianca looked like Sandy from Grease. She had Sandy’s pre-transformation outfit and post-transformation sexiness. Other guys at the party kept trying to talk to her, and I was like, “Gents, she is here with me. Hands to yourselves.”

Nicola told me I looked like Buddy Holly, and somehow Bianca didn’t know who Buddy Holly was, WHICH IS AN OUTRAGE, so I made Cormac play every Buddy Holly song he could think of on his guitar, and Bianca and I cha-cha-ed around the apartment. Raleigh said that she wanted to learn to cha-cha, too, so I taught her, but in the process she fell into the table with her birthday cake and knocked the whole thing onto the floor. (She was pretty wasted.) We ate it anyway.

I will regret growing up. I don’t know if I’ll make a good grown-up. I’m not sure adulthood really fits with my character. I do know that being 13 didn’t fit with my character—though that’s probably true of everybody’s character. Being 13 sucked.

But I am awesome at being 18. Going to school in the daytime, going to parties on the weekends, making money at the bookstore and spending it however I see fit, dancing to Buddy Holly and eating cake off the floor … I look at my parents, and they don’t get to do anything like that, not even close. They never did. The au pair basically raised us, and whenever my parents were in charge it was like we were going through some infinite checklist of accomplishments, always set to a kitchen timer. Go do your homework. Kitchen timer set for forty-five minutes. Go practice the violin. Kitchen timer set for half an hour. Go help your father with his filing. Kitchen timer set again. Do they even know what fun looks like? My dad’s idea of happiness is a bottle of whiskey, and my mom’s is a bottle of sleeping pills.

Last night reminded me how many positive things there are in my own life, and it frightens me to think that someday all that might disappear. How long do you get to live like this? During college? After that? How long do you have until everyone expects you to hang up some dreams as impossible and commit yourself to being responsible?

It infuriated Arden to read about Peter’s parents. In their pursuit of “perfect” sons, they had managed to drive away the actually great sons that they already had. Why couldn’t they see how talented Peter was? Why couldn’t they love him the way he deserved to be loved, the way all parents should love their children?

She just wanted Peter to be happy.

Arden would say this about her mother: she might have walked out on them, for reasons that Arden found wholly unacceptable and indefensible, but at least she never tried to make her children into anybody they were not.

The next Tuesday, Arden was at her usual lunch table. Naomi, Kirsten, and the rest of the girls in her group were deep in conversation about some drama club gossip. Naomi reported that the teacher’s aide who’d been working with Mr. Lansdowne wasn’t coming to rehearsal all week, and so now they were trying to figure out whether a) he had quit, b) he had been fired for hooking up with a student—and, if so, which student—or c) he was just out sick.

Arden was reasonably interested in this debate, but not that interested, and about twenty percent of her brain was thinking about how she hadn’t checked Tonight the Streets Are Ours since before school that morning. She subtly pulled her phone out of her bag and quickly refreshed it. And indeed Peter had written a new entry since seven a.m. And when Arden read it, all her interest in student-teacher made-up sex scandals vanished.



April 20