by Leila Sales
“You’re not eating dinner,” Roman retorted.
“I’m finishing up a big project. But once I’m done, I’m going to eat some of this tasty food that your mother cooked for us.”
“No, you’re not,” Roman said. “You’re going to eat poached salmon. I’m the only one who has to eat this macaroni. And I don’t like macaroni.”
“Oh.” Their father scratched his head. “I didn’t know you didn’t like macaroni.”
“None of us did,” contributed Arden.
“Do you want to just eat the salmon, too?” their father offered.
And even though Roman had a strict anti-seafood policy, he said, “Yeah!”
“Well, then.” Their father grinned and tousled his son’s hair. “Problem solved.”
“Problem not solved,” their mother snapped. “Dennis, please. Back me up here.”
“I’m leaving,” Arden tried again.
“If you’re leaving, then where’s your dress?” Roman asked.
All attention in the room shifted to Arden. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks and mentally cursed her little brother. Roman was the only sixth-grade boy she’d ever met who would notice whether his big sister was bringing the correct outfit to a high school dance.
“Where is your dress?” Arden’s mom asked softly.
A moment too late, it occurred to Arden to lie. To say that she’d forgotten it, and hold on a sec, she was just going to run back upstairs and grab it.
“I…” Arden began. But her guilt was written all over her face. She started over. “Kirsten and Naomi wanted us all to wear matching dresses, so…”
“You know what?” her mother said, standing up shakily. “Forget it.”
“Forget what?” asked their father.
“All of it. Everything. I can’t do this anymore. I’ve had it. It’s clear that none of you need me anyway, so I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”
“What?” Arden asked.
Her mother didn’t answer. She just grabbed her purse and walked out the front door.
The three remaining Huntleys stared at one another in stunned silence for a moment. At last, Roman said, “Nice going, Arden. You made her mad.”
“You made her mad,” Arden retorted. “You couldn’t have just eaten the mac and cheese?”
“I can’t think with your bickering!” their dad shouted.
They immediately shut up. Their father was much scarier than their mother when he yelled.
“She’s just gone for a walk,” their dad told them, pressing his fingers against his temples as if he were holding his head together. “She’s just gone to get some fresh air.”
“Okay,” Arden said. “I am leaving, though.” She checked her phone. Chris had already texted to say that he’d arrived at Kirsten’s. She kissed Roman’s head and kissed her dad’s cheek. “I’m sorry Mom’s mad,” she said.
Her dad nodded. “It’ll be okay, Arden.”
So she drove to Kirsten’s, where she met up with the rest of her friends and all the girls changed into their dresses and a couple of the guys put on suits but mostly the boys just hung out and ate as much pizza as they could before Kirsten told them to “leave some for the rest of us.” Then they caravanned over to the dance, five kids in Arden’s car and five in Chris’s.
Once they were there, Chris and Arden danced in the center of the room, and with the music too loud for words and his arms around her, things between them felt better than they had in weeks, like a Rubik’s Cube that had just been shifted into place. Though they were surrounded by people on all sides, it was one of those rare moments when Arden somehow felt like they were all alone, just the two of them.
She leaned in close, so her lips were right up against his ear, and she shouted, “I love you!”
“I love you, too!” And he kissed her, that same stage kiss that had swept her off her feet nine months prior.
Arden closed her eyes and felt like she was being sucked backward in time. At the end of the summer, right before the Huntleys’ annual family trip to visit her mom’s parents in Atlantic Beach, Arden was packing and thinking that she really, really didn’t want to be apart from Chris for ten days. The idea of their physical separation made her heart hurt, so, just to see what it would feel like, she imagined them being apart forever. And the thought of it made her heart contract, her throat seize up, and her hand reach for her phone to call him, to hear the sound of his voice. That was how she knew that she loved him: she couldn’t picture her life without him anymore.
She told him the day she got home from Atlantic Beach. As soon as she was free from the car, she went running to Chris’s dad’s hardware store. And Arden, unlike Lindsey, was not a runner. She was the opposite: a sitter, a lie-downer, a sedate-stroller. But she ran to see Chris, because she wanted to tell him she loved him, she wanted to tell him in person, and she didn’t want to wait another minute.
She showed up at the hardware store breathless and sweaty. Chris was vaguely helping a woman choose between varieties of packing tape, a cause that he abandoned as soon as Arden walked in the door.
“You’re home!” he said, his eyes lighting up.
“I love you,” she blurted out.
The woman choosing the packing tape started to laugh.
“I love you,” Chris said right back.
And they’d never stopped saying it since then.
Now, at the school dance, it felt like they were back to that, that sunniness and heat of August. Arden’s mother had been right: she was silly to have any doubt about her and Chris.
When the dance ended, Arden dropped off everyone in her car, driving around Cumberland in a circuitous route until each one of them was delivered to his or her own house. And then Arden herself went home. It was late by then. Midnight.
But still her mother hadn’t come back.
Arden’s dad called her mom’s cell phone, but she didn’t pick up. He tried Arden’s mom’s brother, too, but Uncle George hadn’t heard from her. Arden had the surprising realization that she didn’t know who else her mother would go to after she stormed away from home. Unlike her father, who had his fantasy sports leagues and work buddies, her mother seemed to be friendly to everyone and close to no one outside of the family. Who would she go to in a moment of crisis? Where would she be, other than here?
The three remaining Huntleys waited up for her, sitting in the dark on the living room couch, the TV on without any of them processing what program it was showing. Roman passed out first, followed sometime thereafter by their father, until at last only Arden was left awake, watching the lights from the television screen cast flickering shadows across their faces. She waited and waited. But her mother never came home that night. When she did return, it was two days later, while the kids were at school. But that was only to pack a suitcase before heading out again.
And now weeks had passed. The Super Bowl had been played, Roman’s basketball team had lost five games, Arden had been suspended from school and returned to school and attended her first supposedly cool party. Life was marching on. And still, her mother was gone.
Arden realizes that the grass is always greener
The day after Arden asked the Internet why doesn’t anybody love me as much as I love them? and discovered Tonight the Streets Are Ours, she and Chris went shopping for props for the spring musical, American Fairy Tale, a nonsensical, borderline hallucinatory debut written by Mr. Lansdowne, the theater teacher, in what Arden considered to be a serious abuse of power. Chris picked her up early in his car. He didn’t like to drive in Arden’s car because he said it was likely to break down or explode at any minute, which was, quite frankly, a fair critique. Chris drove a three-year-old Honda Accord with automatic locks and working air bags. He liked to play it safe.
“How was last night?” Arden asked once she was settled in the passenger seat.
“So fun. We played some games and watched a movie. You’d have loved it.”
This was what Arden’s boyf
riend and their theater friends did literally every single Friday night. Trust Chris to present it like it was the most exciting activity ever.
And—though Arden had never even hinted as much to her boyfriend—she didn’t actually enjoy playing theater games. That’s why she did stage crew in the first place—so she could be backstage, where if she made a fool of herself, no one would see. Chris Jump had something in him, like at the level of DNA, where he didn’t care if he made a fool of himself. Or maybe he didn’t even know how to look foolish. In their ten months of dating, Arden had never seen Chris do anything remotely embarrassing.
“How was the rest of Matt Washington’s party?” Chris asked, turning onto the main road.
Arden shrugged. She didn’t want to admit that it had been a total bust, because Chris would probably say, “I told you so,” and, “I don’t know why you even went in the first place when you could have come with me.” So Arden just said, “Lindsey finally asked out Denise Alpert.”
“Whoa. How’d that go?”
“Well, she didn’t say yes. Beth and Jennie also offered some choice opinions on the matter.”
Chris snorted. “I’m not surprised. What did Lindsey think was going to happen?”
Arden couldn’t answer that question, because that was the thing about Lindsey: she didn’t think. She wasn’t doing some statistical analysis of the likelihood of Denise saying yes or no. She was just guided by hope.
“Dumb move,” Chris said, with a smug knowingness that made Arden want to strangle him. Chris had never come out and said it, but it was clear that he didn’t like Lindsey very much, probably because she was constantly making “dumb moves” like asking out straight girls or oversleeping or forgetting about math tests—all of which Chris found to be illogical behavior.
In return, Lindsey did not like Chris very much, because she thought he ate up too much of Arden’s time and attention. Last summer, Lindsey had said accusingly, “You’re turning into one of those girls who’s always, ‘Blah blah my boyfriend says blah blah, oh I can’t come because my boyfriend wants to blah blah, oh that’s cool that you’re into blah blah because my boyfriend is, too.’”
“I am not turning into one of those girls,” Arden had defended herself. But, just in case, she tried to mention Chris to Lindsey as little as possible. And she tried not to mention Lindsey to Chris, either. And when one said something negative about the other, she simply tried not to engage. Now, for example, she pulled out her cell phone as if an important text had come in.
The first thing she saw on her phone was Peter’s website. Tonight the Streets Are Ours. She’d been reading it in bed last night until almost three a.m., after she had finally heard her father leave his study and go to bed.
She’d made it through all the posts of the first two and a half months, which felt like an accomplishment. But now that late-night reading seemed like a poor decision, since Chris was a big believer in the early bird getting the worm and she’d had to wake up a full hour before he picked her up in order to get ready. She hadn’t always been a daily makeup-wearing kind of girl. It was something she’d started doing a few months ago, to make Chris think she looked prettier than she actually was. He didn’t seem to have much of a response to it, but she kept doing it anyway, just in case. Even if the presence of makeup on her face didn’t make him think she was gorgeous, she didn’t want the absence of makeup to make him think she was a troll.
Now, instinctively, she picked up reading where she’d left off seven hours before.
June 21
Today a customer came into the bookstore looking for a title called The Soft and the Furry. I spent about half an hour helping her scour the shelves in the pet care section before I was like, “Wait. Do you mean The Sound and the Fury? One of the most famous American novels of all time?”
She shrugged. “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
Of course we had, like, ten copies of it in stock. She read the back cover. And then she didn’t buy it.
June 22
This evening I rang up a customer who was buying a book called What to Expect When You’re Divorcing.
“Oh,” I said. “Are you getting a divorce?”
“No,” she said, really quickly.
“It’s okay if you are,” I said, then added, just so she wouldn’t feel like she was the only one, “I mean, I’m divorced.”
She rolled her eyes, like she didn’t believe me.
“See?” I held up my left hand. “No ring.”
“How old are you?” she asked. “Seventeen?”
“Yes, actually. I got divorced when I was fourteen. So I’ve moved on now. Don’t worry; you will, too.”
It’s possible that I think I’m funnier than other people do.
June 23
I was working registers today (again). It’s so interminable. No matter how many customers I check out, no matter how quickly, eventually another customer will always come along. It’s impossible to feel like you’re making any actual progress because there is no finish line. If this is what actual full-time employment is like, I don’t ever want to get a job.
I said this to Julio, and he pointed out, “Dude, you don’t even need to have a summer job. Your family is richer than God. You have a maid come over, like, every day. If you’re that bored, just quit.”
But I want to be a writer. And the best way to become a writer is to surround yourself with words.
Today I checked out a man about my dad’s age. He was buying a copy of Corduroy. I said, “I remember this book! I loved it when I was a kid. Let me guess: do you have a five-year-old son?”
The man looked at me with a combination of sadness and resignation and anger. “My son is fifteen,” he said. “He’s developmentally delayed. I don’t need a receipt.” And he walked away.
I should really stop expressing my opinions on customers’ purchases, maybe.
June 24
Something amazing happened today. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s nothing at all. It felt like something, though.
If you want something to be amazing, if you really want it, do you think you can somehow make it become that way? Like you somehow imbue it with amazingness, even if it doesn’t have anything special inherent to it?
Let me back up.
Today I was working registers. Again. It’s a beautiful day out, the sort of day we get here in NYC only a handful of times a year, when the skies are clear, and it’s hot but not muggy, and the air doesn’t even reek of garbage. If I were a tourist in NYC today, I’d think to myself, Yeah, I could live in that city. Anyway, because it was the most beautiful day of the year, the bookstore was vacant, which meant there didn’t need to be three of us hanging around behind the registers. So I offered to shelve some books to kill time.
That’s when I saw Her.
She was standing next to the poetry display table, thumbing through a copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese. She was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in person. She put that sunshiny day to shame.
It’s hard for me to pick out what the specific thing is that made her so breathtaking. It’s something about the way all the parts of her body fit together, not just any one in isolation. Her hair was long and silky and the shade of red where I couldn’t quite believe that it was natural, but I also couldn’t ask if it was dyed because I’m sure everyone asks her that. She was wearing a bright yellow sundress that made her look like a daffodil, with thin straps accenting her delicate shoulder blades, and a little bit of lace at her, you know, décolletage. (Shame on the English language for not having a word for décolletage. This is why the French are better than we are.)
I saw her and I wanted to … I don’t even know. I know that she inspired me to want to do something. I just don’t know exactly what that something is.
I walked over to her because I couldn’t stay away. She seemed engrossed in the book—I don’t think she noticed me. When I was next to her, I said, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to
the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of Being and ideal Grace.”
She looked up from the book, and her long eyelashes fluttered. I’d had no idea that eyelashes could be sexy.
“I’m sorry, what?” she said.
And in my head, I thought of Romeo and Juliet: She speaks! O speak again, bright angel! But I didn’t say that aloud. Because maybe I had already said too much.
Instead I said, “I was quoting one of the sonnets. From there.” I pointed at the book she was holding.
She smiled. She smiled at me. “You’re an Elizabeth Barrett Browning fan?” she asked.
“I’m a poetry fan.”
“I don’t know very much about her work,” she admitted.
“Well, if there’s anything you want to know,” I said, “I’m happy to teach you.”
She opened her mouth to reply. And then Leo showed up.
“Hey, man!” Leo said. He seemed glad to see me. “So I guess you already met Bianca?” And he put his arm around her. Around her, that gorgeous girl.
So this was Bianca. Bianca, whom we’d been hearing so much about for the past six weeks, but whom we’d never seen, to the point where I’d started to wonder if maybe Leo had just made her up to sound cool. Yet here she was. In the flesh. In the smooth, tanned flesh.
Leo had mentioned some things about her before. She’s my age. She lives on the Upper West Side. Stuff like that; practical stuff. He didn’t mention that she was more beautiful than the sun, and I hated him for that—had he never noticed? How dare he never notice what he had in front of him?
“Bianca,” I said. “Hey. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“All good things, I hope.” She looked up at me through lowered eyelashes.
I locked eyes with her. “Of course. What else could there be?”
“I thought we’d come by to surprise you,” Leo said.
“You succeeded,” I said, not looking away from her.
“When do you get off work?” he asked. “Maybe we could all get iced coffee or something after.”