Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“New York City, one hundred thirty-five miles,” Lindsey read aloud.

Arden felt suddenly gripped by the extraordinary potential of highway signs. They made the country seem deceptively small. The only thing that stood between her and New York City was the number 135. She could keep driving even farther and hit Connecticut, or Vermont—or Florida if she made a turn to the south—or she could turn around and drive through the night and the next day and the next night and the next day until she hit California and the Pacific Ocean. Highway signs made every place in America seem equally within reach, and even though Arden had been driving for hours now—even though her eyes were dry from watching the road continually unfurl before her like a never-ending ribbon—this first sign for New York City made her feel like she could keep going forever.

Twenty-five minutes later, her car broke down.

She was driving in the slow lane, as she had been for basically the entire trip, but then suddenly the Heart of Gold wouldn’t even keep up with the pace of the slow lane, and its muted whump-whump-whumps turned into a full-on whirring noise, and it started to smell bad, and … something was clearly wrong.

Arden coasted into the breakdown lane, stopped, and turned off the engine. She and Lindsey looked at each other. The traffic whizzed by them.

“What happened?” Lindsey asked.

“I don’t know.” Arden examined the lights and dials on her dashboard. The “check engine” light was lit up, but that was always lit up, so she didn’t put too much stock in it. She also noticed that the dial for the car’s temperature had gone up really, really high. Into the red zone. “Maybe the engine overheated,” she guessed.

“So what should we do?” Lindsey asked.

“I don’t know, Lindsey,” Arden snapped. “I am not a car expert. I have never driven farther than the Glockenspiel before. I don’t have access to any vehicular insider information here, okay? What do you think we should do?”

Lindsey was silent for a moment, slouched in her seat like a kicked puppy. At last she said, “We could hitchhike.”

“Great plan. Let’s abandon my car here and get a ride from a total stranger for the next hundred and twenty miles. What a safe and wise course of action! And you thought Peter might be a murderer or a kidnapper?” Arden said. “Lindsey, you have no sense of self-preservation.”

The two girls glared at each other across giant cups, leftover from a Dairy Queen stop much earlier in the state of Pennsylvania.

“It’s not my fault your car broke down,” Lindsey said finally.

This was true. Arden was frustrated, and she knew she was taking it out on Lindsey. It was Arden’s fault she’d bought a shitty car, Arden’s fault she never bothered to figure out why that “check engine” light was always lit, Arden’s fault she hadn’t learned the first thing about car mechanics, Arden’s fault they were on this highway on this wild goose chase in the first place.

But even though Lindsey wasn’t to blame for this situation, that didn’t stop Arden from wishing that Lindsey would at least try to help fix it.

“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” said Arden. “We can’t sit on the side of the highway for the rest of our lives.”

When there was a break in the traffic, she got out and popped open the hood of her car. This, at least, was something her dad had taught her how to do. She peered at the machinery inside, then dumped her water bottle onto what she thought was the engine, followed by the remnants of their Dairy Queen Blizzards for good measure. If the engine was overheated, then it stood to reason that it needed to be cooled down.

When Arden climbed back into the car, Lindsey had her phone out. Not making eye contact with Arden, Lindsey said, “I looked it up online, and apparently the closest train station is in Lancaster. It’s not too far from here. We could take a taxi there.”

“And then what?” Arden asked.