Tonight the Streets Are Ours

Peter reads the sign aloud. “The Just Like Me Dolls Store. Oh, yeah, I remember Just Like Me Dolls. All the girls in my elementary school had them. I even wanted one for a while, but my dad said boys don’t play with dolls. My dad is inappropriately tied to gender norms.”


Arden hasn’t been here since she was nine years old. It looks startlingly familiar, and she realizes that her one visit here has been lodged in her brain all these years. In science class earlier this year, they’d learned about something called flashbulb memories—incredibly vivid and precise memories of monumental moments in one’s life. Arden’s mind had formed a flashbulb memory of her trip to the Just Like Me Dolls Store, and she didn’t even know it until she saw it again.

“My mom took me here when I was a little girl,” Arden reminisces. “It was our first trip without my father and brother. Our last trip without them, too. Mom said the Just Like Me Dolls Store was not going to hold any interest to a little boy and a grown man.” She shoots Peter a smile. “Maybe she’s too invested in gender norms, too.”

Arden looks through the front window, which is floor-to-ceiling Jessalynn, the Just Like Me Girl of the Year, who is “patriotic and athletic, always bringing a ray of sunshine to everybody’s day.” Jessalynn is blond and brown-eyed and tan, and Arden can tell from her accoutrements that she is in her school’s color guard. The Jessalynn Doll is surrounded by an absurd number of flags.

Arden wonders what will become of Jessalynn when she grows up. What if she learns new information about America, about its role in wars or corruption in its government, and she doesn’t feel so patriotic anymore? What if she gives up flag-spinning and athletics in order to spend more time with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or to join a gang, or to study for the SATs? What if she no longer wants to bring a ray of sunshine to everybody’s day? What if that becomes just too much responsibility, or she simply loses the knack for it?

“Do you want to buy one?” Peter asks. “They’re not going to be open for a few hours, you know. That’s okay, though. We can wait. And when they open up, I will buy you a doll, Arden. I will buy you whatever doll you want. I’ll buy myself one, too, just to piss off the old man.”

She doesn’t pay attention to him. She walks around the store, peering in all its windows. And there, in the farthest window around the corner, she finds herself.

This window sports a banner saying JUST LIKE ME GIRLS OF THE PAST, and its risers bear all the dolls of the past fifteen years. There’s Tabitha, her Tabitha, “graceful and inspiring.” There’s “brave and committed” Jenny, “quick-witted and fun-loving” Katelyn, and dolls who were created after them, girls whom Arden does not recognize because she was already too old by the time they came about.

And there’s Arden.

Brown hair, hazel eyes, overalls perfect for playing in the woods. She looks the same as the Arden Doll in the glass case in Arden’s bedroom, but it’s different seeing her here, among her doll brethren.

“That’s me,” Arden tells Peter, pointing at her doll, sandwiched in between Tabitha and Lucy.

“I know,” he says.

She turns to him, shocked. How would he know such a thing? Could he have figured it out on his own? Nobody has ever discovered this fact about Arden without her telling them—but maybe it would make sense, for Peter to know something hidden about her when she knows so many hidden things about him.

“That’s me, too,” he goes on, and he waves at the store window and makes a funny face.

She turns back around, trying to understand what he’s talking about or if he’s just so drunk that he’s not talking sense. Then she exhales as she understands what’s going on. The two of them are reflected in the window, ghostly outlines of themselves visible in the streetlights. That’s all he means.