Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“So who was calling you this late at night?” Peter asks as the limousine glides through the streets of Brooklyn. “Was that Lindsey asking you to come back already?”


Arden’s stomach turns at the sound of Lindsey’s name. “It was my boyfriend,” she admits.

Peter perks up at the word boyfriend. He’s immediately interested, and Arden wonders, not for the first time, if the most interesting thing about her is that she is somebody’s girlfriend. “What’s his name?”

“Chris.”

“How long have you two lovebirds been dating?”

“A year.” She swallows hard. “One year today.”

Peter whistles. “What’s his deal?”

This is easy; Chris has a very straightforward deal. “He’s a junior, like me. He’s a super-talented actor. He wants to go to college for theater, and after that he plans to go to Hollywood. He’s a good student, though. It’s not like he slacks off in his other classes, even though he doesn’t need great grades to get into a theater program, if his audition is strong enough.”

“He’s popular?”

Arden shrugs. “Not in, like, a cool way. But he’s well-liked.”

“Good-looking?”

Arden nods.

“Athletic?”

“I mean, he can run a mile, so by my standards, yes.”

“Does he recycle?”

Arden laughs. “Yeah.”

“He sounds perfect,” Peter concludes. He rests his elbows on his knees and leans forward, looking at her. He doesn’t ask the follow-up question, but Arden can sense it in the air between them: If Chris is so talented and so ambitious and so smart and so well-liked and so good-looking, then why aren’t you with him right now? If Chris is so perfect, then why are you here?

Peter doesn’t ask, but Arden wants to tell him anyway. He’s revealed to her all his secrets. There’s no reason she can’t do the same.

“I’m just not sure that he’s perfect for me,” Arden says.

She’s never admitted this. Not even to herself. Everyone else knows Chris, and knows her as part of a Chris-and-Arden pair, and they wouldn’t understand. In Chris she’d gotten everything she wanted, but still she doesn’t feel happy. So maybe it’s that there is something wrong with her. A deep-seated discontentment.

Peter says, “If for some reason it doesn’t work out between you two, I’m sure you will find somebody else.”

Arden snorts. “Me? At Allegany High? Not likely.”

“Well, I don’t know what the dating pool is like at Allegany High. But maybe. If not there, then somewhere else, you’ll find somebody else.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Why what?”

She shakes her head, because she doesn’t want to put into words what she means, which is: why would anybody else want to be with me?

But it’s like he understands her unspoken question, because he answers, “Because. You’re a catch.” He searches under his leather seat, and his eyes light up when he finds what he was looking for: a liquor cabinet, which he opens and triumphantly pulls out a glass bottle of dark brown liquid.

Arden asks, “But what if I don’t find anybody else? Or what if anyone else who I like … doesn’t like me back?” She doesn’t want to admit that she’d never found anyone prior to Chris, because Peter seems so much more experienced in love and dating than she is.

“Well, then, you’ll be alone.” Peter pours himself a tumbler of the liquor. “It’s not the end of the world, is it?”

“Don’t you think it is?” Arden counters.

He smiles and takes a sip and says nothing.

“Is it even legal to drink in a moving vehicle in New York?” Arden asks.

“Tinted windows,” Peter says, swirling around the liquid in his glass.

“Why is there just a bottle of alcohol hanging out in here, anyway?” Arden wants to know.

“I would guess that whoever rented the limo for the night also wanted to drink in a moving vehicle.”

“Is it really okay for you to drink their stuff?”