Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“Well, then there should be a train back to Cumberland at some point.”


“What point is that, exactly?” Arden asked. “It’s nearly seven o’clock. I doubt that any more trains are running from here to Cumberland tonight. And even if there are, what makes you think there would be seats left on them? And how much would those last-minute seats cost? And who exactly would be paying for those train tickets, not to mention this supposed taxi ride to get us there?”

Lindsey was silent, her hair hanging in front of her face like a curtain separating her from Arden.

“And what,” Arden added, hearing her voice crack, “would happen to the Heart of Gold?”

This was the thing about Lindsey. She didn’t have the first clue how to operate in a reasonable way in the real world.

Arden thought again of that baby bird, slick with oil, trying to climb its way to fresh air, to freedom. It was fictional, of course. It was entirely made up. But did that even matter? Couldn’t it inspire her anyway?

One last time, Arden turned her key in the ignition. And the car came back to life.

Neither of the girls said a word, in case commenting on what was happening would jinx it. Arden just eased her way back into traffic, and they continued on toward New York.





Meeting Peter

The bookstore where Peter worked was called the Last Page. It was situated on a commercial street in Brooklyn, busier than almost every street in Cumberland, but calmer than most of the New York streets Arden had driven down to get there. She’d gotten honked at more times than she could count, and twice she had almost run over jaywalking pedestrians, one of whom was carrying a baby. Both times they yelled at her, which seemed unfair, since they were the ones walking against the traffic light, in the dark, wearing all black. Also, it was past nine o’clock, and she was no baby aficionado, but she thought that child should probably be in bed.

Once she’d found the store, she spent about ten minutes driving around, looking for a parking space she could pull into. When she realized no such parking spaces existed around here, she spent another five minutes trying to parallel park—a skill that she’d achieved competence at before her driving test and had not practiced once since then. For a while Lindsey offered up her opinions (“Maybe you should turn the wheel to the left. Maybe you should pull out and start over again.”) until Arden snapped, “Do you want to drive?” at which point Lindsey shut up.

Finally, the car was parked. Arden took a deep breath, grabbed her tin of peanut butter brownies, and marched into the store. She didn’t know exactly what the brownies were for, but one thing her mother had taught her was that people tended to be nicer to you when you gave them baked goods.

The Last Page was surprisingly big, bigger than its storefront had led Arden to believe, and it was filled floor-to-ceiling with books: new titles displayed on the ground level and a basement jumbled with used ones. The girls started on the main level, walking through every aisle, sort of looking at the books, mostly staring at the people and trying to figure out whether they were customers or employees and, if the latter, whether they might be Peter. Arden didn’t know if it was a New York City thing or just an annoying thing that no one in this store was wearing even a name tag, let alone a uniform.

“We could just ask someone,” Lindsey suggested. “Like, ‘Hey, where’s Peter?’”

“Sure,” Arden said. “Go for it.”