Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“But you did hurt him,” Arden points out. “You have to take responsibility for that. You have to try to hurt people as little as possible.”


“No, I don’t,” Bianca says. “Why would I have to try to do that? If not hurting people was my number-one goal in life, I would never do anything.”

Arden opens her mouth to protest, then closes it. Because after walking out on Lindsey, leaving her brother and father three states away, trying to cheat on Chris—maybe, no matter what she used to believe, trying not to hurt people isn’t her top priority anymore, either.

Bianca goes on. “That stupid blog of his, that story that you love so much—it isn’t true. And he’s found some agent to represent it, and I bet he will find some book publisher to publish it as a memoir, and it will be this story about some poor lovelorn literary hero, constantly victimized by his bullheaded parents and his runaway brother and his meanie girlfriend, and that isn’t true.”

Arden doesn’t understand what Bianca is driving at. “You might not like it, but that doesn’t make it all fake. He didn’t invent an imaginary online identity for himself.” She thinks about Lindsey’s idea, of Peter as some pedophilic murderer, and shakes her head. “Even just since meeting Peter last night, I have seen for a fact that the things he wrote about are true. He does work at a bookstore. I saw him there. His parents are loaded. Look at this apartment. He does go to ridiculous parties. He does love you.”

Bianca looks suddenly exhausted. “Do you want to get brunch?” she asks Arden. “I can tell you what I mean, but this would all go down a lot more smoothly with a cup of coffee.”

“What time is it?” Arden asks.

“A little past one.”

Arden feels a sick knot in the pit of her stomach as her mind tries to come to grips with the passage of time: all the things she needs to do, how little time she has before she’s due at school tomorrow morning, all the people she is surely supposed to report to, the number of text messages that must be waiting, the distance she has to travel, the impossibility of it all, how little she wants to do any of it. Even though she cannot see the demands on her darkened cell phone, she senses them there, tugging at her hands and clothes like beggar children. She wishes she had not asked Bianca for the time. She wishes it could have stayed last night forever.

“Yeah,” Arden says, tossing her dead phone into her purse. “Let’s get brunch.”

They leave Peter’s room and head back down the hallway. It’s still dark in this corridor, as dark as it was in the dead of night. They’re almost at the front door when a quiet woman’s voice says, “Bianca?”

The girls turn. Arden sees three strangers sitting in the hypermodern, stainless steel kitchen. They are eating lunch and staring back at her.

Two of them Arden knows immediately to be Peter’s mother and father. They’re Asian and look older than she expects parents to be. She’d place the mom around sixty, and the dad maybe even seventy. He—Peter’s dad—is wearing jeans and slippers, while Peter’s mother is in yoga pants and a zip-up. They have the newspaper and a spread of fresh fruits and vegetables out on the glass countertop in front of them.

The third person she’s not so sure of. He looks to be a couple years older than she is, with a muscular build and curly reddish-brown hair. He’s wearing a T-shirt, track pants, and flip-flops, and he has a plate full of food in front of him. Arden feels a little bit as she did that night at the Ellzeys’ house: like she’s seeing something behind the scenes, something she is not supposed to witness.

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Lau,” Bianca says to Peter’s mother, her voice going high-pitched. She and Arden step into the kitchen. “Sorry, I was just dropping off a book Peter had lent me. The doorman let me in. I hope that’s okay.”