Tonight the Streets Are Ours

by Leila Sales

  The page was written like somebody’s journal. It was dated October, five months ago. She could tell this post was letting her in midstory, but she didn’t know when the story began, so she just started reading.

  October 10

  I called Bianca three times before she finally texted to ask what I wanted. “I want my stuff back,” I replied. Come on, Bianca. Cut me a break.

  She insisted on meeting at the bookstore because she didn’t want me to come over to her house, and she refused to come over to mine. The bookstore, where it all began. What cruel bookends. She got there five minutes after I finished my shift.

  “I can’t believe you’re already back at work,” she said.

  “Life goes on,” I told her. “It has to.”

  “Yours does, maybe.”

  “What did you think was going to happen if we met at your house?” I asked. “Did you think I was going to throw you down on your bed and start ravishing you?”

  “No,” she said. “But I thought you would have wanted to.”

  “I still want to,” I said. “And we’re not anywhere close to a bed. We’re at a bookstore.”

  “Ha,” she said, handing me a tote bag of my stuff. There wasn’t a lot in there. I never left much at Bianca’s house, for obvious reasons. I knew that already, but I wanted it back anyway. Because I wanted a reason to see her. So sue me. The bag contained just a T-shirt, two books, and an opened bag of Cheetos.

  “Really?” I said, looking up. “Some half-eaten snack food, Bianca? You couldn’t have just thrown that away?”

  She shrugged. “You said you wanted your stuff.”

  Why can’t you love me as much as I love you? I wanted to ask in that moment. I thought about the events of these past few weeks, and I just felt so defeated and indignant. The world has cracked open over my head, like a smelly egg. Why doesn’t anybody love me as much as I love them?

  “You’ll find another girl,” Bianca said as we stood across from each other. At a bookstore. Like strangers. “You’re Peter. Girls love you.”

  As if all of my feelings for her come down to the fact that she’s a girl and I’m a guy. Substitute in any other guy and any other girl, they’ll fit those empty spaces just as well.

  “I don’t want another girl,” I said. “I want you.”

  I didn’t get her, though. I got my Cheetos. Then I threw them away.

  Who were these people, Peter and Bianca? Arden wondered. They could be any age, living anywhere in the English-speaking, book-shopping world. Peter could be a fifty-year-old physical therapist in Akron, Ohio, with a fondness for Cheetos. But she felt like he probably wasn’t.

  She read on to the next post.

  October 12

  Why do I lose everyone who matters? First my brother. Now Bianca. I don’t really know which of those losses hurts worse: my brother, because he has always been a part of my life, or Bianca, because I chose her into my life, and I thought she chose me, too—but I thought wrong. I will walk down every street and avenue knowing that she might be walking right in front of me, but she will never again be mine.

  I hate that this is how life has to be. The progressive loss of everyone who matters to you. That’s all there is to it, you know: if you live long enough, your reward is that you get to watch everyone you love die or leave you behind.

  Oh, but I am being ridiculous. I know. I know. Death and a broken heart are not the same.

  Now Arden didn’t just want to know what happened with Bianca, why they broke up. She wanted to know what had happened to Peter’s brother, too. She wanted to know everything. She never had been able to manage a calm, reserved interest in other people.

  Maybe she needed to start at the beginning. That would make this whole story become clear, if it unfolded in chronological order.

  Peter’s very first post was from nearly a full year ago, but it said nothing about Bianca or a brother, or love or loss at all.

  March 21

  Hi, my name is Peter, and this is Tonight the Streets Are Ours. (What do you think? I needed a URL, and it turned out basically everything else was taken. Plus I’m really into that song, and I figured, hey, if it works for Richard Hawley, it’ll work for me, too. Tonight the streets are mine, you know.)

  If you’re here, then congratulations! You’ve found my blog. Welcome! Stick around awhile.

  I want to be a writer when I grow up. Actually, I want to be a writer right now, and also when I grow up. Today is my seventeenth birthday, so I have made a new year’s resolution. (Yeah, it’s not the new year for everybody, but it’s a new year for ME, so, good enough.) I’m going to post here every day, and that will be good writing practice, and also when it’s time for me to write my memoirs, I will already have these collected notes on my teen years. You’re welcome, Future Peter.

  My dad says that I don’t want to pursue a career as a writer because writers are—what did he say? Something like “congenitally miserable alcoholics.” If he’s right, then I guess I’ll fit right in! Haha, kidding.

  Also, my dad is a congenitally miserable alcoholic, too, and he doesn’t even produce any writing or whatever to show for it. You can be a congenitally miserable alcoholic even if all you do is manage hedge funds, apparently. Seems like a waste. If you’re going to have the tortured soul of an artist, then you might as well create some art while you’re at it.

  Arden smiled a little at Peter’s description of his father. It was nice to know that her mother wasn’t the only screwed-up parent around. And now that she knew Peter was just a year older than she was, she felt even more intrigued by him and his miserable dad and the girl who broke his heart and the mysteriously disappeared brother.

  She wanted to read whatever came next, but more than that, she wanted to know where Peter’s brother went. So she skipped forward a few months. At last she found an explanation, in a post dated just a couple weeks before Bianca and Peter’s breakup.

  September 24

  I know I haven’t written here for a while, and I’m sorry.

  I’m sorry for a lot of things, in fact.

  I don’t really know where to start. That’s the problem with updating a website every day: once you miss a week, you’ll be behind forever.

  So, basically, my brother ran away. He’s been gone for a week now, and he’s left no trace. He’d only been at college for a month, and from all we heard from him, he seemed to be fitting in well, making friends, going to classes, learning stuff, I don’t know, whatever it is people do at college.

  And then he took off.

  None of his new college friends know where he went. None of his old high school friends have heard from him. The cops say they can’t be much help because he’s eighteen, he’s a legal adult, he can go where he wants. There’s no sign of him; it’s as if he never existed in the first place.

  My dad is hiring a private investigator. He’s livid. He says, “I will spend every penny, if that’s what it takes to find that boy.” My mom keeps crying. It’s like they know it’s their fault. If they weren’t like this, maybe he wouldn’t have left.

  Everyone’s asked me if he told me anything, if I have any ideas. Because we’re just a year apart, we’re supposed to be so close. We’re supposed to share things. From the time we were little kids, we shared toys, we shared clothes, we shared friends. But I’m as clueless as everyone else right now—how do you think that makes me feel?

  I stayed home from school almost all last week. My parents stayed home from work. It’s as if he died. For all I know, maybe he is dead.

  Can’t say that to my parents.

  I remember when I was eight years old, when I finally really understood where babies come from—or at least, where my brother really came from. I asked him, “But what if Mommy and Daddy hadn’t adopted you? What if your birth parents had kept you? Or what if somebody else adopted you instead? What if Mommy and Daddy got the call about some other little boy two weeks before they got the call about you, and then by the time you were a
vailable, they weren’t looking for you anymore?”

  “That was never going to happen,” he answered with the confidence of a nine-year-old who’s got it all figured out. “I always belonged to our family, even before Mom and Dad knew it, even before you were born. We didn’t have to come together exactly the way we did. But one way or another, it was going to happen.”

  I always liked this explanation because it meant that if he and I ever lost each other along the way, we would always find each other again. That’s how it seemed to me, as a stupid little kid.

  I don’t know what else to say. Why is it that I can find a million words to write about a party, and I can’t think of a single word to explain how I feel right now?

  Arden turned away from the computer and hugged her quilt around herself, chilled to the bone. Because this, Peter’s story—this was why you needed to love people while you could, while they were right there in front of you. Because if you waited, it might be too late.

  And that, of course, made her think of her mother.

  When Arden’s mom left

  Arden’s mom did not leave because of the dress. But if the dress had never existed, maybe she would still be here now.

  Arden had seen the dress in a photo of the movie star Paige Townsen, featured in an issue of Us Weekly a few months ago, which Arden had borrowed from her friend Naomi. Naomi was on stage crew and was a celebrity gossip junkie. Deep down, Naomi really did believe that stars—they’re just like us!

  Although Arden didn’t think she was anything like a star, she wished that she were when she saw this dress. It was maroon, with cap sleeves and a belt at the waist that could create the illusion of a well-defined waist even though Arden did not exactly have one for real. The dress was classy and stately and seemed like it belonged in a movie from the 1940s, along with a veiled hat and elbow-length gloves. Arden clipped the image from Naomi’s magazine and taped it to her mirror.

  “Wouldn’t it be great to have a dress like that?” Arden asked her mother one night as her mom quizzed her on the elements of the periodic table.

  Her mother stood to inspect the picture more closely. “I don’t know where you could buy such a thing.”

  “Oh, it’s by some designer and costs a trillion dollars,” Arden assured her. “You can’t buy such a thing.”

  “I could sew it for you,” her mother offered.

  “Really?” Arden blinked. Her mother had needlepointed wall decorations and done quilting. She’d sewn dresses for Tabitha when Arden was little. But Arden didn’t know that her mom could make human-size dresses, too.

  “I bet I could figure it out. And then you could wear it to the Winter Wonderland dance!” Her mother smiled in the way she did whenever she solved a problem—even though this time, Arden hadn’t even known that a problem existed.

  “If Chris and I are still together then,” Arden cautioned. It was hard to imagine Chris breaking up with her—they’d been a couple since last April, so another few weeks together seemed like it should be a given. But it didn’t totally feel that way.

  Her mother gave her a knowing look. “That boy is wild about you. Trust me, honey, you don’t have anything to worry about. Don’t be silly.” Arden’s parents were themselves high school sweethearts, so to her mother, being silly was imagining that a teenage romance might even end.

  And so Arden’s mother set to work on sewing the dress. She mostly worked on it while Arden was at school, so Arden didn’t have much awareness about how it came together. She just knew that one day there was red fabric and then one day there was a dressmaker’s dummy and one day she was getting measured and then, a few days before the dance, the dress suddenly existed and she was trying it on.

  “Well?” her mother said as Arden modeled it in the living room. “What do you think?”

  “I think, can I have my screen time yet?” Roman asked from his perch on the arm of the couch.

  “Soon. Say something nice about how your sister looks first.”

  “You look red,” Roman said.

  “Roman,” their mother said in a warning tone.

  “Your dress, I mean,” he said. “Your dress looks red.”

  “Dennis!” their mother called toward their dad’s closed study door. “Do you want to come out and see your beautiful daughter?”

  There was a pause, and then he shouted back, “I’m in the middle of something right now, sweetie. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Arden rolled her eyes. “Out in a minute” was dad-code for “I’ve already forgotten that you asked me to do something.” Only about two weeks remained before the Super Bowl, which meant her father was chest-deep in fantasy football. Ostensibly he was working on some important legal case right now, but it was equally likely that he just wasn’t coming out of his study until he’d read every post about every game on every NFL news site that he frequented.

  “What do you think of the dress, Arden?” her mother asked.

  Honestly? Arden thought it looked slightly off in some way. It just didn’t look on her like it did on the actress taped to her mirror. The cap sleeves seemed too long, the neckline too high and bunchy, the waist too low, the fabric too matte. Or maybe this just wasn’t the dress for her—maybe when she saw it in that magazine and pictured it on her own body, she was picturing herself as somebody else entirely.

  “I love it,” her mother went on. “I can’t believe it—this is the first dress I’ve made in years, and somehow it turned out just right. You look stunning, honey. So grown-up.”

  “I love it, too,” said Arden.

  Two days later, she was at the mall with her two closest theater friends, Kirsten and Naomi. Arden had of course invited Lindsey, who had declined; Lindsey was not a mall person. Kirsten was riffling through clothing racks at an alarming rate when she stopped and declared, “This is it, guys! This is going to be my Winter Wonderland dress!”

  Arden and Naomi crowded in to inspect it. It was gauzy, pink, strapless, sheer at the top, barely ass-covering at the bottom. The sort of dress an extra in the nightclub scene of a music video might wear.

  “Ughhh, it’s so amazing, I want one, too,” Naomi said immediately.

  “Do it!” said Kirsten. “I’ll get the pink one and you can get the silver one and Arden can get the gold one and we’ll match.”

  Naomi squealed.

  Arden considered saying that she already had a dress. That her mom had made. But the thing was, she didn’t actually want to wear that dress. And now that she’d seen what her friends were going to be wearing, she really didn’t want to wear that dress, to be the one frumpy, old-fashioned girl in a skirt past her knees.

  So she spent some of her hard-earned tutoring money to buy the gold dress. She figured she would wear the one her mother made to some other event. Like the theater club’s annual masquerade ball. Or a church service. Until then, she hung it in her closet.

  The next day was Saturday, and the dance. All the theater kids were getting ready at Kirsten’s house, which was always where they had big gatherings, because Kirsten’s place was huge, and her dad and stepmom didn’t really care what their kids’ friends got up to so long as nobody set their house on fire. Arden packed her stuff to take over there: makeup, curling iron, gold dress, high heels. She grabbed her car keys and headed downstairs.

  “I’m leaving,” she said as she stopped by the kitchen.

  Her mother and brother both ignored her. They were locked in battle across the kitchen table from each other. “You love macaroni,” her mother was saying, staring him down.

  Arden’s eyes flicked to the tray of homemade macaroni and cheese sitting at Roman’s place. It smelled amazing. If she hadn’t known that Kirsten was ordering in pizza, she would have just eaten Roman’s dinner herself.

  “Not anymore,” Roman said.

  “Since when?” asked their mother.

  He shrugged his skinny shoulders impatiently. “I don’t know. Since sometime.”

  “You liked macaroni la
st week.”

  “Well, I don’t anymore. Can I go watch my movie now?”

  “No,” their mother said. “You have to eat dinner before you can watch.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Arden jumped in, cuffing him on the shoulder, “Mom says so.” In the years since Roman’s toddler-age tantrums, he had stopped crying so often, but he had never gotten less finicky.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll eat.” He stood up, crossed to the cabinet, and pulled out a bag of Goldfish crackers. He stuck a handful in his mouth. “Okay?” he mumbled, his teeth gummy with orange gobs.

  “Not okay,” Arden said. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Not okay,” said their mom. “That’s not dinner. Sit down, Roman Huntley, and eat your macaroni and cheese.”

  “But I don’t want it!” he cried. “You said I don’t have to eat anything I don’t want to eat! Are you going to force-feed me macaroni? What is this, prison?”

  “I’m not force-feeding you anything!” Their mother threw her hands up. “I worked hard on that macaroni, Roman. I made a special trip to the grocery store just to get the sort of shells you like. I made the bread crumbs from scratch. All of that, just for you, Roman. Arden isn’t even joining us for dinner tonight, and I made poached salmon for us grown-ups. The macaroni exists for you. So please, at least try it.”

  Arden stole a bite off his plate. “It’s delicious, Mom. You’ve outdone yourself.”

  Roman crossed his arms. “You can’t psychology me into eating it.”

  “Dennis!” their mother called.

  “One second!” their father shouted back.

  “Not ‘one second’—right now.”

  Arden was impressed. Her mother sounded firm. Even her father must have heard something unusual in her tone, because he emerged from his study to ask, “What’s going on?”

  “Your son won’t eat his dinner,” Arden’s mother explained, pointing to the offending meal.

  “Roman, eat your dinner,” their dad said immediately. “It’s dinnertime.”