by Leila Sales
Until a month and a half ago, when her own family had so spectacularly collapsed, Arden had led a stable life, compared to Lindsey. Sometimes she’d wondered how she would handle it, if she could handle it, if she had Lindsey’s same bad luck. Maybe if she faced Lindsey’s same problems, she’d make Lindsey’s same mistakes.
“Hey, Arden.”
She turned at the sound of her name. A guy was standing there. Ellzey. Okay, his last name was Ellzey, but that’s what everybody called him, even the teachers. Arden’s heart quickened as she wondered why he had stepped outside right now when the whole party was indoors, if he’d seen her out here, if he’d been looking for her. For a brief moment, she let herself imagine kissing Ellzey, out here under the stars. She imagined him as a prince in a fairy tale, coming to save her.
Then she kicked the thought away. She was taken. Girls who are taken shouldn’t fantasize about kissing boys they barely know on Matt Washington’s patio.
“Hey, Ellzey,” she said. “What’s up?” She wondered if he was going to mention the last time they had spoken—one of the only other times they had spoken—and hoped fervently that he was not. It had been an ignoble experience. She felt very glad that Lindsey was missing this conversation now. There was no way Lindsey would have been able to keep a straight face if she’d seen Ellzey talking to Arden.
“Beautiful night, huh?” he said, coming to stand next to her. Even though he didn’t touch her, she felt the warmth of his skin from his arm next to hers. “So many stars,” he went on.
Arden was impressed. She couldn’t help but compare Ellzey to her boyfriend, who had never commented on the number of stars. Unless it was the number of Hollywood stars in a particular movie or something. Arden said to Ellzey, “My dad used to keep a telescope on our roof when I was a kid. He wanted us to learn facts about astronomy, I think, like to identify different constellations. I could never find anything other than the Big Dipper. But I loved looking at the stars.” This was, hands down, the most sentences in a row Arden had ever spoken to Ellzey.
“You know what would make the stars even more beautiful?” Ellzey asked, looking into her eyes.
Arden wondered if Ellzey knew that she was taken. She and Chris Jump had been going out for more than ten months, so it seemed like everyone would know, but maybe they didn’t. Why would someone from the popular crowd monitor the relationship status of every random girl at school?
“What?” Arden said.
“If we were high right now,” Ellzey said.
They were both silent for a moment, as Arden expected him to produce a joint from his pocket or something. He did not.
Then Arden remembered that she had just been suspended for possession of drugs, so presumably she would be the one carrying joints in her pockets.
“I don’t really do that,” Arden said.
“Oh yeah?” He gave her a teasing smile. “You don’t have to keep secrets from me, Arden Huntley.”
I’m not, Arden thought. “That was just a one-time thing,” she explained.
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
Ellzey shrugged. “No sweat. Just thought I’d ask.”
“About the stars—” Arden began, but Ellzey had already headed back indoors.
Arden’s heart sank. That wasn’t what she had wanted from an interaction with Ellzey, not at all. That wasn’t what she’d thought he would be like, or what she’d thought she would be like around him. It all seemed wrong.
But then what exactly had she wanted, anyway, from Ellzey?
Arden checked her phone again. One text message had come in from Chris while she had been letting down her end of a drug deal. I’M NOT GONNA MAKE IT THERE TONITE. HAVE FUN! LOVE U.
She shouldn’t have felt so disappointed. She’d known he probably wasn’t going to come anyway. But, there you have it.
Chris had understood, sort of, about Arden keeping pot in her locker because she was “acting out.” He understood, he said, that it was really hard to have your mom leave you, and that this might lead someone to rash decisions. Still, Arden sensed that he was judging her. Maybe just because she knew that Chris Jump would never be so foolish as to disrupt his future plans like this, no matter how many parents or other loved ones left him behind.
Her phone buzzed again, and her heart skipped, thinking maybe Chris had changed his mind, but it was Lindsey. LET’S GET OUT OF HERE. I’M WAITING FOR YOU BY YOUR CAR.
Arden didn’t argue. After that conversation with Ellzey and that text message with Chris, she was through with this night.
She walked back through Matt’s house and smiled at a few people, but didn’t bother to say good-bye to any of them, figuring they were either too drunk to notice her leaving or they hadn’t realized she’d been there in the first place.
So, now she knew how the other half of high school lived.
As promised, Lindsey was down the road, leaning against Arden’s car, a decrepit old sedan that the girls had dubbed the Heart of Gold. Lindsey didn’t say anything as Arden unlocked the doors, or after they got in and Arden drove away, and that silence was how Arden knew that, despite Lindsey’s earlier reassurances, something had indeed gone wrong.
Once Matt Washington’s house had disappeared in the rearview mirror, Lindsey started talking. “So I asked Denise if she wanted to hang out sometime.”
“Wow.” Arden was impressed. In her life, she’d tried lots of tactics to get people to go out with her. Simply walking up to them and asking them, however, was one she’d never attempted.
“Denise said no. She said thanks, but she doesn’t like me like that.”
“Well.” Arden patted Lindsey’s leg. “That’s disappointing, obviously, but at least you said how you really felt. Good for you.”
“And then Beth and Jennie came up to me and said I should leave the party because I was creeping them out.”
“Excuse me?” Arden stepped on the gas too hard, and both girls jerked back against their seats.
“They said it made them uncomfortable that I was hitting on Denise, because for all they knew, I might turn to either of them next. They said it’s one thing to be gay and hook up with other gay people, but once a lesbian sets her sights on a straight woman, anything is possible.”
“Are you kidding me? I am going to turn right back around and kick their asses.”
“Oh my God, Arden, don’t you dare. I tried to explain to them that I thought Denise was interested in girls, and that’s why I asked her out. And also I told them that I’m not remotely attracted to either one of them, or frankly anyone else at Matt’s house tonight, but I actually think that made it worse? Because Jennie was like, ‘Are you saying I’m not pretty?’ And then Beth was like, ‘You’re not such a prize yourself, Lindsey Flatson.’”
“Is this girl nine years old? Flatson? Where does she get her insults from, Sesame Street?”
“I know I don’t have, like, ginormous bazooms, or whatever the cultural standard for feminine attractiveness is,” Lindsey went on. “But she didn’t have to say it like that, not to my face.”
“Linds, that girl is an idiot.”
Lindsey’s body looked like it was built up and down in a straight line, a very long straight line. She was the tallest girl in school by far, and there were guys on the football team with bigger chests. But that shouldn’t have mattered, because her body did exactly what she wanted it to, which was run: fast, far, and often. And wasn’t that a positive thing, to be great at something?
“I know everybody says I look like a dude behind my back. Obviously they’re right. But it’s not my fault. It’s not like I chose to look this way. If I had a choice, of course I’d be beautiful. Do you think that’s why Denise doesn’t like me? Because I’m ugly?”
“No,” Arden said. “I think Denise doesn’t like you because she doesn’t like girls, or at least she doesn’t like girls at this particular time in her life. You are beautiful.”
“I don’t know,” Lindsey said. “
Maybe Denise just likes hot girls. Do you think I’m going to be alone forever? Tell me honestly.”
“Definitely no.”
Lindsey sighed and leaned her head against the back of the seat, closing her eyes. “You wouldn’t know what that’s like, anyway. You have Chris.”
Ah, yes. Chris. The world’s most secure security blanket.
“I hate living here sometimes,” Lindsey said without opening her eyes. “I wonder, if I could just run fast enough and far enough, do you think I could run all the way out of here?”
“I bet you could.”
Lindsey shook her head. “I just want someone to want to kiss me,” she mumbled.
This had been a frequent refrain in Lindsey’s life. It had reached its zenith a couple years ago, but now she rarely expressed it, as if she was embarrassed to be nearly seventeen years old without a kiss to her name and didn’t want to call attention to it. But Arden knew it was still something that troubled Lindsey. There just weren’t that many out lesbians at their school, and those who were didn’t evoke much interest in Lindsey, or she didn’t evoke much interest in them. Either way, Lindsey wanted something that seemed like it ought to be simple but had proven impossible to achieve in Cumberland.
Arden remembered when they were thirteen, asking Lindsey, “How do you know you’re gay when you’ve never even kissed a girl?”
“How do you know you’re straight when you’ve never even kissed a guy?” Lindsey shot back.
Arden couldn’t argue with that.
Actually, a little-known and never-discussed fact was that Lindsey, technically speaking, had had her first kiss. It happened freshman year, with their classmate David Rappaport, at a school dance. She’d just come out to Arden and to her parents, but not yet to the world at large, and when David Rappaport asked her to dance, she’d said yes because she couldn’t figure out how to say no. Afterward Lindsey slept over at Arden’s, and she cried and cried. “You only get one first kiss in your whole life,” she kept saying, “and I wasted mine on some dumb boy.”
The answer finally came to Arden. “You don’t have to count it,” she told Lindsey.
“What do you mean?”
“You can just decide that your first kiss hasn’t happened yet. It’s going to be with some amazing girl who you probably haven’t even met yet.”
“Can I do that?”
“It’s your life,” Arden told her. “Of course you can.”
That night was the last time they ever mentioned Lindsey’s one make-out occurrence.
Now, Lindsey just sighed and reclined her seat all the way back. “It’s fine,” she said, more to herself than to Arden. “Tonight’s over. Tomorrow will be better.”
Arden thought about Beth and Jennie, and Chris and Ellzey, and Denise and Matt Washington, and her mother, and she didn’t believe that, not any of it, not for a second. But she didn’t say so to Lindsey. She just kept her eyes on the road, and she drove.
Why doesn’t anybody love Arden as much as she loves them?
By the time Arden had dropped off Lindsey and driven home, it was late, but still she wasn’t tired. Everything seemed rotten. She had expected something about tonight’s unprecedented party invitation to transform her, yet she had come home exactly the same, and somehow, therefore, even worse. Now she prowled around the house, looking for distractions. Her father was locked in his study—she didn’t go in, but she could tell he was there from the light coming through the crack under the door.
Arden’s dad had always worked hard. But ever since her mother moved out, it was like something deep inside of him kept telling him that the reason she left was that he wasn’t successful enough. And if he could just be more successful, then he could prove to her, or to himself, that he was worthy of her love again. He’d been working on being more successful for a month and a half now. He might be getting somewhere with that, but he’d not come any closer to bringing his wife back home.
Arden thought about her mother’s words on the phone earlier that day. I’m sure you want an explanation for why I left. She wondered if this explanation had been offered to her father, too. She wondered if he’d listened to it. She couldn’t imagine that her mother had left because her father wasn’t ambitious or hardworking enough. She thought that’s what he was doing to win her mom back not even because he thought it would work, but just because it was the only thing he knew how to do.
Roman had fallen asleep on the couch, Mouser catnapping on his feet, the overhead lights still on, the paused video game on the TV awaiting his next command. Arden watched him for a moment, the rise and fall of his little chest. In moments like this (when he was unconscious, basically), Arden’s love for her brother overwhelmed her, almost like a physical pain. His feet were resting against the pillow with the Little Prince quotation on it, and, without thinking about it, Arden pulled it out from under him and threw it in the trash.
That pillow was bullshit. Her mother did not know the first thing about being responsible for her rose.
Arden carried Roman up to his room and laid him down on his bed, something that he never ever would have let her do if he were awake, but as it was, he just drooled a little on her shoulder.
Arden felt a pang of guilt for going to Matt Washington’s house; she should have known Roman never would have gotten his act together to put himself to bed. There was no way he had brushed his teeth tonight before passing out. She wasn’t going to wake him up to make him do it now, and if her family continued on like this, Roman was probably going to contract gum disease before he made it out of middle school.
Arden left Roman’s door open because, even though he was eleven, he still freaked out if he woke up and the door was closed and the room was too dark. Then she went to her own room and curled up on her bed. She’d left a pile of rejected Matt Washington party outfits on top of her comforter, and now she kicked them to the floor. She’d eventually settled on her tightest, most revealing top and jeans, but all that had really accomplished was making her unnecessarily cold when she stood out on the patio with Ellzey.
She narrowed her eyes across the room at her Arden Doll, who lived in a glass case on the wall. Since her mother had seen the way Arden treated Tabitha, she’d built this case for the Arden Doll to protect her. “You’re going to want to show your doll to your children and your grandchildren,” Arden’s mother had said. “You’re not going to want her to be filthy and falling apart.”
Arden’s mother was correct, but on this particular night, Arden didn’t feel like being watched over by some pristine doll.
Arden is recklessly loyal.
It was a description she’d thought about a million times since it had been handed down by the Just Like Me Dolls Company. In school earlier this year, she had learned about a pivotal historical event called “the blank check.” This was in 1914, and the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had just been assassinated in Serbia. Obviously the Austro-Hungarian government was furious at the Serbs because, hello, they had murdered the emperor-to-be.
Then Germany showed up on the scene. The German emperor wrote a letter promising Austria-Hungary his nation’s faithful support in whatever Austria-Hungary decided to do to punish Serbia. That promise of blind support, no matter what—that’s what historians called “the blank check.”
When Arden read this in her history textbook, she felt breathless. She thought it was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard, this hundred-year-old political letter from the German chancellor to the Austro-Hungarian ambassador. Because in that moment, she realized that was exactly what she had done for Lindsey, for Chris, for Roman—she had written them each a blank check, a silent promise to stand by them through good times and bad, whether she agreed with their actions or not, to give them whatever help they needed, even though none of them could know yet what help that might be.
The first blank check, by the way? The original one, the letter that Germany wrote to Austria-Hungary? They honored that to a T. This deci
sion ultimately led to World War I, which completely decimated the German economy and populace. Maybe not the smartest move the German government ever made. Maybe if they’d known what it would someday come to, they wouldn’t have signed the blank check in the first place. But that’s the thing: when you swear to take somebody’s side no matter what, sometimes you have to go to war for them.
Now, Arden pulled her quilt around her and got up and walked to her desk, where she wouldn’t be under such direct scrutiny from her Arden Doll. She pulled up an Internet window and, still thinking about her reckless loyalty, she typed in her question for the universe. It was a really straightforward question, and Arden thought she was a pretty smart girl, so it seemed absurd that she couldn’t just figure out the answer.
Why doesn’t anybody love me as much as I love them?
She didn’t expect the Internet to have a particularly wise answer to her question. At best there might be a humorous video clip on the subject. Like anyone else, Arden sometimes went to the Internet for answers—like how to get a chocolate stain out of white pants, or how many countries there are in Latin America—but usually she went to the Internet to reassure herself that there was a whole world of people out there, living their lives just as she was living hers. Sometimes they had experiences like her own, and sometimes they had experiences that seemed completely bizarre, but either way, their mere existence made Arden feel less alone. No matter what time of day or night you go online, there are always countless other people there, too, announcing the recipes they’re cooking and the sights they’re seeing and the songs they’re recording. She’d discussed this with Lindsey before, and it made Lindsey frantic that all these things were going on and she couldn’t keep up with them all. But Arden found it comforting.
The first result that came up when she typed in that question was from a website called Tonight the Streets Are Ours. It used that exact phrase: Why doesn’t anybody love me as much as I love them? And that jolted her, that some random website had expressed this idea in the very same way as Arden, like someone else had seen inside her brain. So she clicked on the link.