Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Lindsey stuck closer to Arden and didn’t ask anyone.

Fortunately, there weren’t that many high school–aged guys in the store. Saturday night was apparently not the most happening of times for their peers to be book-shopping. On the first floor they saw one guy with a little girl who must have been his sister or babysitting charge or someone; either way, Peter wouldn’t be working with a kid by his side. In the back Arden saw another one who was also probably her age, with long, unwashed hair, pants falling halfway down his ass, in the process of picking his nose.

“That could be him,” Lindsey pointed out. “Do you think an employee would wipe his boogers on a book spine like that?”

Arden paused. “That seems like customer behavior to me. Let’s come back to him.”

She pushed back a niggling worry that maybe the Last Page wasn’t even Peter’s bookstore. Maybe there was some other adolescent bookshop employee with the same name. New York was a big city; it was possible. Or maybe this was Peter’s store and he’d left already. There were so many reasons for him not to be here, and she didn’t want to think about any of them.

Downstairs they saw a guy who definitely did work at the store, because he was helping an old woman find a book, and at first it seemed like he could have been in high school, but then Arden noticed the wedding band on his ring finger.

That left one teenaged-looking guy in the store. The one behind the checkout counter downstairs. The one standing behind the computer, his elbows propped up on the counter in front of him, holding a copy of Dante’s Inferno.

“That’s him,” Arden said to Lindsey. “That’s him.”

Arden pretended to be interested in the books on the nearest display table, but really she was just sneaking peeks at Peter. She hadn’t consciously known what she’d expected him to look like, but seeing him now, she realized that she’d pictured him looking like … well, like Chris.

He didn’t. For one thing, he was Asian. Arden had just assumed he would be white, like she was, like almost everyone in Cumberland was. She felt immediately guilty for expecting, however subconsciously, that everyone she met would look like her. Peter was shorter than she’d anticipated, too, and he was wearing glasses, which she hadn’t pictured but which seemed just right on him. Yet he was still immediately, self-evidently Peter.

“He’s hot,” Arden whispered to Lindsey. “Right? He’s so hot.”

“I don’t know,” Lindsey whispered back. “Dudes aren’t hot to me.”

“Bullshit,” Arden hissed. “Even though I don’t want to make out with girls, I can still tell whether they’re hot. You’re gay, Lindsey, not blind.”

“Okay, I think he’s probably hot,” she whispered.

Arden checked her watch. Almost ten. Peter was going to get off work at any minute. She needed to approach him now. While he was still working and she was a customer and he would be required to talk to her.

Her hands felt clammy, and she wished she and Lindsey had taken their role-playing of this scene a little more seriously.

Seeing the book in his hands gave her a flash of inspiration. Without saying a word to Lindsey, Arden ran back to the poetry section and scanned the shelf desperately.

There it was.

She grabbed a book, bypassed Lindsey, and headed straight for Peter.

Her heart was pounding.

She stood right in front of him.

She set the book down on the counter.

Peter put down his copy of The Inferno and gave Arden a polite smile. “Will that be all today?” he asked.

She nodded mutely.