Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Arden nodded. She felt bad about her expensive Just Like Me Doll still in her arms, and bad about her secret wish for Tabitha’s performance tutu. Probably Lindsey didn’t have any Just Like Me Dolls. “I hope you find some gold,” Arden said.

Arden thought about Lindsey all the rest of that afternoon, all through dinner and her TV time and her nightly bath. She liked her new neighbor. But she sensed Lindsey’s powerlessness, the odds stacked against her like a pile of bricks, and it made Arden sad. If there was one thing Arden never felt, it was powerless. Her mother had always drilled into her, from the time she was a baby, that her power was something that came from inside of her. Her strength was her kindness, her generosity, her positive spirit. “And no matter how bad circumstances get,” her mother would say, “you can always rely on yourself. If you only have ten cents to your name, give it away to charity. Being a charitable person will do more for you than ten cents ever could.”

Her mother had this idea that some people were like flowers and some people were like gardeners: each needed the other. She prided herself on being a gardener, and though she hadn’t much considered it before meeting Lindsey, Arden supposed that she was the same.

By the time her parents came to tuck her into bed that night, Arden knew what she wanted to do. “Can we give the Disney trip to Lindsey?” she asked.

Her parents, sitting on the edge of her bed, exchanged a look. “Who’s Lindsey?” her mother asked.

“Her family just moved into the house behind ours, on the other side of the woods,” Arden explained. “Her dad is sick, so they can’t afford to go on vacation. She can’t even go to camp. And she doesn’t have any brothers or sisters to play with at home. And she’s new to town so she doesn’t have any friends. And…” Arden shook her head and sat up. She didn’t need to explain this to her parents. She knew what she wanted. “I want to give the Disney trip to Lindsey.”

She worried that maybe her parents would say no because maybe they had really wanted to go to Disney World. It was her dad’s trip, after all. He’d said that Space Mountain seemed like a blast. But when she looked at them now, they were both smiling at her, and her mother’s eyes were moist with happiness.

“Okay,” said Arden’s mom, and, “Okay,” said Arden’s dad.

That was only the first day of a million days of Arden and Lindsey’s friendship, but it established how it would be: Lindsey would need, and Arden would deliver.

After Arden gave away the Disney trip, she wrote an essay about it, and she sent the essay in to the Just Like Me Dolls Company. She didn’t really think they would choose her to be the Doll of the Year when they had so many gymnasts and figure skaters and ceramicists and budding chefs to choose from. But she wanted somebody to know what she had done. Plus, she really wanted to be a doll.

A couple months later, her mom got the call. Out of all the thousands of girls between the ages of eight and twelve who had sent in their essays, Just Like Me Dolls had chosen Arden as their winner.

Because Arden was Girl of the Year, she got free copies of her books, with titles like Arden in Charge and Arden’s New Friend. She got a free doll, designed with peach-colored skin and light brown hair and hazel eyes, just like her. She got every single one of the Arden Doll’s accessories for free, too: a doll-sized tire swing and doll-sized metal detector, a doll-sized cat and doll-sized dog to mimic her own pets. They made it out to seem like Arden spent a lot more time in the woods than she actually did, like she was some kind of budding naturalist when actually she just went out there occasionally, and less so now that Roman’s tantrums were less frequent. But the slight inaccuracies didn’t bother Arden whatsoever.