Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“Why? Because you already took home the gold?”


“Well, yeah!” He grinned and again proffered Leo’s flask. “Winners’ toast?”

“Nah.” She waved it off.

“You don’t drink?”

“Is that a problem?” she asked, her words a challenge.

He shook his head. “Just wondering why.”

“Well, I’m seventeen years old, so it’s illegal. For a start.”

“You don’t know any seventeen-year-olds who drink?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Do you have a history of alcoholism in your family? Is that why?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. Maybe I have a great-uncle or second cousin somewhere with a drinking problem, but no one I know of. I’m usually the designated driver, though,” she explained. “I’m old for my grade, so I got my license before most of my friends—and I’d saved up enough money from tutoring to buy the Heart of Gold—so I just got in the habit of being the one to drive. Plus…” She shrugged. “Lindsey gets into a lot of trouble. Somebody has to stay sober.”

Peter laughed. “She’s that much of a handful? I wouldn’t have guessed that from looking at her. She seemed pretty meek, actually. Out of the two of you, I would have pegged you as the troublemaker.”

“Me?” Arden asked. “Why?”

He stared at her, like he was searching her face for the answer. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “You just seem like trouble.”

They both leaned back against the chair, rocking back and forth. The party swirled on below them.

“You asked what happened to my brother,” Peter said.

Arden gave a brief nod, not wanting to scare him off.

“I’ll tell you the story. We assumed he was at Cornell, where he was supposed to be. We hadn’t heard from him for a few days, but nobody thought anything about that except for my mother. Dad and I were like, ‘He’s a freshman in college, he’s not going to call home every couple hours.’

“Then we got a call from his resident advisor. His roommate had gone to her, saying that my brother hadn’t been in the room for a few days and he was just wondering if anything was going on. They started looking into it, and it turned out no one had seen him for days. Not any of his professors or classmates. Not anyone at the frat he was pledging or the other guys on the football team. They sent out an all-campus e-mail, and heard back exactly nothing.

“So we started reaching out to everyone he knew in the city. High school friends, teachers, ex-girlfriends. Nobody had seen so much as a text message from him. That’s when my parents got the cops involved.”

“Maybe he was kidnapped?” Arden thought aloud.

“He’s not a kid.”

“You know what I mean. Abducted. Being held for ransom. No offense, but it sounds like your family has a lot of money.”

“I’m not offended by that.” The corners of Peter’s mouth lifted slightly. “And that’s good thinking, but it’s not what happened. For one thing, if there were kidnappers, they would have told us their demands, right? And that didn’t happen. For another thing, before he left, he sent us an e-mail.”

“An e-mail?” Arden’s eyes opened wider. “Saying what?”

“That he didn’t want to stay with people who would treat him this poorly. That he was through with us. That he’d never really felt like he belonged in our family, and now he knew for sure that he didn’t. That we should just let him live his own life and stop messing it up.”

“Wow. That’s intense. Did you have any idea that he felt that way?” Arden asked.

Peter scratched the back of his head and shifted uncomfortably. “We didn’t grow up in the easiest of households. Our parents screwed us both. But that doesn’t mean that the right answer would have been for them to never adopt him. Then he’d probably just be messed up in some different but equally delightful way.”