Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“I love you, too”—but the words feel like a lie, and she wonders if they did yesterday, too, and the day before that—if they were always a lie, or if she really meant it once upon a time, and if she could ever manage to mean it again.

She silences her phone, sticks it in her purse, and goes striding down the street in search of Peter. Once she gets past the crowd around Jigsaw Manor, the road is relatively quiet—relative to every place else she’s seen in New York, that is—with just the occasional taxi rumbling past.

She sees Peter ahead, walking back toward her. “There you are,” she says. “I’m sorry, I had to answer that. I didn’t mean to—”

He grabs her hand. “Come with me. I’ve found the solution to all our problems.”

Arden scoffs, because they have so many problems between the two of them, she can’t even imagine what a solution would look like.

They run down to the corner, and Arden looks in either direction, seeing nothing except a fast food joint and more taxis and more warehouses and a few piles of trash bags and a stretch limousine.

“Um,” she says.

Peter opens the door to the limousine and gallantly gestures toward it. “My lady,” he says.

“Peter,” she says. “How did you suddenly get a limousine?”

“Oh, I just hailed it.” He pantomimes sticking his arm in the air.

“You hailed it. Like a taxi. Only you hailed a limousine.”

“Yeeeah.” He drags out the word thoughtfully. “Sometimes people book a limo for a whole night. They want it there to drop them off and take them home again at the end of the night, you know? In the middle, the driver might cruise around, in case he can pick up some additional passengers and earn a little extra cash.”

“So you hailed it,” Arden says again, trying to wrap her head around this.

“Correct.”

“How much does a limousine ride cost?” Arden peers inside the open door. She’s never ridden in one before, though she and Chris are going in with eight other theater kids to rent a limo for prom, which is only five weeks away. Yesterday’s Arden was excited for Future Arden’s first ride in a limo to be when she has her hair professionally done and the boy she loves all tall and handsome and debonair in a tux beside her. But today’s Arden doesn’t want to wait.

“I’m paying,” Peter says. “And it’s cheap.”

Arden’s eyes flicker back down the road, toward her car.

“You said you just wanted to get out of here,” Peter reminds her.

“I do,” Arden agrees, and she climbs in.

Peter gets in after her and shuts the door. Inside the limo is quiet, with long black leather seats around all the sides, a rich rosewood-colored table in the middle, and small lights glowing on the roof. There’s a complicated audiovisual system with a TV and an iPod dock, and a panel with countless buttons that control everything from the temperature to the moon roof to the intercom with the driver. Arden presses them all.

“Where you going?” the driver asks over the intercom. He has a foreign accent that Arden can’t place, and she feels a little like she’s in the James Bond flick she watched at the Glockenspiel last summer. “I must to be in Williamsburg before four, so not too far,” the driver cautions.

“Do you need to get home at some point?” Peter asks Arden.

She blinks at him.

“I mean, is your mom expecting you home?”

Of course. He thinks she’s staying with her mom for the weekend. Because that would make sense.

“At some point,” Arden says. “Are your parents expecting you home?”

Peter raises his eyebrows and grins. “At some point.” To the driver he says, “Take us into Manhattan. Over the Brooklyn Bridge, please.”

He turns off the intercom, and the limo pulls away.

Arden and Peter sit on opposite sides, and they look across the table at each other.

“Well,” Peter says, and Arden starts to laugh.

“You were right,” she tells him. “You did find the solution to all our problems.”





Arden is a catch