Tonight the Streets Are Ours

She frowns and tries again. Still, the car does not start.

“Oh, come on,” Arden mutters. She pulls the key out of the ignition and blows on it. She has no reason to believe that blowing on a key will do anything to it—a car key is not a too-hot spoonful of soup—but she doesn’t know what else to do.

“Is something wrong?” Peter asks.

“My car won’t start.”

Peter looks baffled by this, and Arden realizes that even if she knows zero things about automobile maintenance, even if she did actually pour a Dairy Queen beverage under her car’s hood earlier today, she is still doing better than this guy, who lives in New York City and doesn’t drive outside of daddy’s BMW at his beach house.

“It broke down on the highway earlier,” Arden explains. “I let it sit for a few minutes to recover, and after that it seemed fine. The engine had overheated, I think, which made sense because I’d been driving it at top speed for hours. But now it’s just been sitting here the whole time while we were in Jigsaw Manor, so I don’t know why…” She trails off and tries the key one last time. Please, please, please, I just need this to work, she thinks as hard as she can.

Nothing.

“Aaurghhh!” Arden throws her key down, and it clatters onto the floor of the car. She flings open the door, launches herself onto the street, and starts kicking at the Heart of Gold, her feet thumping against the wheels as if they were punching bags.

She stops only when Peter grabs her from behind, wrapping his arms around her to stop her from hurling her fist through her window. “Shh,” he whispers.

“Why won’t it work?” she cries. “I take care of this car. I treat it right. So why—won’t it—work!” She gets in one last good kick before Peter drags her away. He starts to laugh, and Arden whirls around, fists clenched. “Are you laughing at me?”

“No. It’s just—you’ve only been here a few hours, and already you’re acting like a true New Yorker.”

“What are you talking about?” she demands.

“Picking fights with inanimate objects. Experiencing rage meltdowns.”

“I am not a New Yorker.”

“Fine, then you’re just having a very New York response. Trust me, it comes with the territory when eight million people are trying to share limited resources. One time I saw a guy literally pick a fistfight with a mailbox because it was in his way.”

This distracts Arden from her rage meltdown. “Who won?”

“The mailbox did, of course, but dude put up a good fight. I’m telling you, this sort of shit happens all the time in this city. People barely even register it.”

Arden looks over to the crowd gathered outside Jigsaw Manor: the people waiting in line to get in (still, even though it’s nearly two thirty in the morning), the winged fairies smoking a cigarette on the street. Peter is right. None of them seems to care that across the street, there’s a girl physically fighting her car as if they’re in a cage match. There’s something unsettling about the fact that nobody is noticing her scene, nobody is coming over to ask what’s wrong or if she needs help, but what’s also unsettling is that this doesn’t bother her, because it makes her feel like she can do whatever the hell she wants.

“What’s the plan for your car?” Peter asks.

“I don’t know. I just want to get out of here. I want to go somewhere.”

“Me, too,” Peter agrees. She sees him looking around the barren street, and she assumes he is keeping a watch out for Leo.

Now that her fury has passed, Arden feels drained. She sits down on the curb. Questions threaten the edges of her consciousness: How am I going to get home, if my car doesn’t work? How is Lindsey going to get home? When am I going to go home?