Tonight the Streets Are Ours

TODAY IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE.

I hadn’t mentioned it here because I didn’t want to jinx it or anything, but I’ve been reaching out to various literary agents to see if they want to represent my writing. I just feel like I’m almost done with high school, I’m 18 years old, and what do I have to show for my life? If I could publish a book, that would be something real and tangible. Even my father would have to admit that’s real.

So I’ve been sending out samples of my short stories and those 50 pages of the novel I wrote last year, because if somebody wanted to publish it, I would definitely get my shit together to finish writing the rest of it. And one of the agents that I queried was interested enough in my writing that she asked to see more. So I sent her this link, to Tonight the Streets Are Ours. And … SHE LOVED IT!!!

She wants to represent me. She wants to represent ME! We just got off the phone, and her vision is to turn Tonight the Streets Are Ours into a memoir. Not the novel, not the stories—she says THIS is where my unique voice shines. (She actually said that: my “unique voice”!!) I can use a lot of the material that I’ve written here, but obviously flesh it out and smooth it into a cohesive story. And once I do that, she’ll pitch it to publishers to try to get them to publish it. AS A BOOK. THAT YOU COULD BUY. IN BOOKSTORES.

This is the happiest I have ever been.

The comments went on and on after that. More than fifty people commented to say Congratulations! and I can’t wait to read the book! and I always thought you deserved a wider audience.

The chatter and laughter of the cafeteria swirled around Arden as she stared at Peter’s news on her phone. She was thrilled for him. Obviously. He was happy, just as she’d hoped he would be. His dream was coming true. She’d watched him want this for months, forever.

But her happiness for Peter tasted bittersweet. Because with each new person who discovered his writing, he became a little less hers and a little more everyone else’s. If this literary agent sold Tonight the Streets Are Ours to a publisher, and it became a book, and one day years in the future she went to a bookstore event for Peter, and she waited in line with all his other fans to get him to sign her book, how would he even know that she had been there first? That she wasn’t just another fan, that she was special in all the world?

“Do you guys know anyone who’s written a book?” Arden asked her tablemates loudly, looking up from her phone.

Their deliberations about who had or had not slept with the student teacher ground abruptly to a halt. Naomi’s eyes immediately glazed over, and she stared off toward the football players’ table across the room. Arden’s question seemed to come out of nowhere, and it also seemed way less interesting than a conversation about people they knew making out with each other.

“No,” each of the girls said, or, “I don’t think so,” or, “My aunt wrote a mystery novel, but it’s not published or anything.”

“Arden, you are the person I know who’s closest to having written a book,” Kirsten said, twisting her mermaid hair into an improvised upsweep, then dropping it to let it slowly cascade down her shoulders.

Arden blinked at Kirsten in confusion.

“Your Just Like Me Doll books,” Kirsten reminded her.

“Oh. That’s not the same, though. I didn’t write those.”

“Why do you want to know?” asked Lauri, idly peeling the cheese off her pizza in the way that one might peel a scab off one’s skin.

“Because my … friend is writing a book.” Arden frowned. Friend was not the right word. She was at a table with six girls. These were her friends. She didn’t know what Peter was to her. But it was something else entirely.

“That’s cool,” said Naomi. “Which friend?”