Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Besides, why wouldn’t he believe her? Who would lie about such a thing?

“Wow,” Lindsey said, and suddenly she laughed, the carefree laugh of someone who has just been caught by an unanticipated parachute when she thought she was plummeting out of the sky to her death.

But it was Arden’s parachute Lindsey was using, so Arden didn’t laugh. “Why the hell did you bring pot to school?” Arden whispered, so quietly that Mr. Winchell’s hearing aid would never make out her words.

“To smoke it?” Lindsey replied in a small voice.

Arden rolled her eyes. “Linds,” she said, “go home. Honestly, I’ve got this.”

So Lindsey hugged her, and she went home.

But the longer Arden sat waiting for her father, the school emptying out around her, the less confident she became. The thing was, she didn’t want to miss three days or more of school; she’d fall behind in everything (especially Spanish). She didn’t play any sports, that was true, but she did stage crew—would she be forced to quit that? And what would her classmates think of her after this? Naomi, Kirsten, all of her other friends—not to mention Chris.

But this was selfish thinking. Arden knew she could live without the spring musical. She could live if she never figured out how to conjugate a single verb in a foreign language. The one thing she couldn’t live with was Lindsey’s misery.

What had become abundantly clear to Arden over the past month was this: there were people in this world who didn’t know how to take care of others. There were people who walked away even when they’d made a promise to stand by you. There were people who threw around the word love but only acted on it when it was convenient for them.

And Arden was not one of those people.

It was nearly six p.m. by the time her father finally showed up to collect her. The custodian had already come through the office to take out the recycling and trash, and Mr. Winchell kept shooting Arden death glares, as if it were all her fault that he was still at work at a time when he would have otherwise been already chowing down on the early bird special at Mamma Luciana’s Pasta Shack.

When her father arrived, he was wearing his business suit and carrying his briefcase, and he looked annoyed. “What’s going on here? Arden, I got two messages at work saying you’re in trouble and they’re going to be taking ‘disciplinary action.’ I had to call Roman’s after-school teacher and beg her to let him stay late. What on God’s green Earth is this about?”

He probably got those messages four hours ago, but whatever; Arden was actually impressed he’d made it there before midnight. This may have been the earliest he’d left the office in a month. She felt simultaneously accomplished and ashamed to be the cause of her father’s abbreviated workday.

Arden’s father was a lawyer. Not a TV-style lawyer, with custom-made suits and luxury cars and multimillion-dollar cases argued in front of the Supreme Court. Arden’s dad was the other kind of lawyer, the kind with a small office downtown and his name in a plaque on the door, the kind who sometimes argued in front of the judge at the district courthouse, but who mostly settled out of court. Being that kind of a lawyer wasn’t fancy. Still, it was a good job in a town without many good jobs on offer, and it was important. He didn’t like for it to be interrupted. So it almost never was.

Mr. Vanderpool ushered them into his office and closed the door. Arden could see Mr. Winchell craning his neck from his desk in reception, trying to keep his eye on the drama.

“Mr. Huntley,” the principal began, “I appreciate your taking time to address this situation. As I indicated in my message to you earlier, your daughter has admitted to bringing contraband substances to school and storing them in her locker.”

“Can you define contraband substances?” Arden’s father asked.