Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“You don’t have to be happy for him if you don’t feel like it,” said Lindsey.

Arden shrugged.

“So is this it? Are you guys breaking up over this?”

“What?” Arden started, taking her eyes off the road for a moment to stare at Lindsey. “Of course not. It’s just a fight, Lindsey. People do way worse things than this all the time, and they stay together. I’m not going to break up with my boyfriend of one year just because we had a fight.”

Anyway, what she felt toward Chris … it wasn’t anger, not exactly. She was sad. And disappointed. In him, and in herself for somehow still managing to come in second place in his priorities, even when she was trying her hardest to be the girlfriend she desperately wanted to be.

She didn’t want to talk about Chris anymore, especially not with Lindsey, who was biased against him anyway. Arden changed the topic to explain Tonight the Streets Are Ours as best she could. Lindsey listened, enraptured, as Arden told her about Peter’s brother and his unexplained disappearance. About their parents, money-obsessed and status-conscious, who somehow refused to acknowledge the gifted artist living right under their own roof. About Bianca, beautiful and ambitious and perfect—who couldn’t handle it when Peter experienced real tragedy or real success of his own. And about Peter himself, talented and wise and heartbroken, over and over again. And now Lindsey was calling bookstores, trying to track him down.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Peter before?” Lindsey asked in a break between phone calls.

“I told you I was reading some guy’s blog.”

“But you didn’t tell me how interesting it was.”

Arden scrunched her eyebrows as she tried, and failed, to switch lanes. She didn’t have much experience with highway driving, and the other cars out here were much less accommodating than cars on the streets of Cumberland. Finally, she swerved her way back over to the slow lane and said to Lindsey, “I didn’t want you to think I was weird. You know, spending this much time following people we don’t even know.”

“Arden,” Lindsey said, “at this point, it is way too late in the game for me to think you’re weird. I know you’re weird.” Arden laughed, and Lindsey reflected for a moment. “Plus, it’s not really any different from following characters on a TV show, is it?”

Arden nodded thoughtfully.

“Typical Arden,” Lindsey said. “You can’t stand to see anyone suffer, even for a second, even when you don’t know the guy. It’s like that time you saved that bird’s life.”

“What bird?” Arden asked.

“You remember! We were kids. You found a baby bird in a pool of oil in the woods between our houses. It couldn’t get out. It must have fallen out of the nest or something. My dad wanted to wring its neck, to put it out of its pain. But you kept it in your room and nursed it back to health and set it free.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“It was definitely you. It’s not like I was playing in our woods with somebody else who rescued a bird.”

“I mean, no, that never happened at all. That was the plot of one of the Arden Doll books.”

Arden snuck a sideward glance to watch this realization slowly dawn on Lindsey. “Oh, yeah!” Lindsey said. “God, that’s so wild.”

Arden didn’t know what she’d do if she encountered a drowning bird. Probably she would try to rescue it. But maybe she would just walk away in horror.

“Well, whatever. You’re rescuing a brokenhearted boy today, which is basically the same as a broken bird.”

“Only if we find him,” Arden reminded her.