by Leila Sales
The two of them creep down the hall, which is, fortunately for their purposes, covered in a cream-colored carpet. It seems like sound is incapable of permeating this thick carpet and the even thicker windows, so the only things Arden hears are the rhythmic tick-tock of the art deco clock on the side table and her quick, anxious breathing.
They reach Peter’s room.
He closes the door behind them and locks it.
They both breathe a deep exhale.
“I’m going to use the bathroom,” he says. “I’ve had to pee since Thirtieth Street.”
He disappears into the bathroom attached to his room, and Arden takes this moment to look around. This room has the same wall-to-wall carpeting as the rest of the apartment, and his bed is sleek and modern, with a low headboard and shimmery gray sheets. Arden’s bedsheets are white and patterned with faded flowers, and this is the first time in her life that it occurs to her that looking at somebody’s sheets could actually tell you something about them.
Peter’s hung a few quotes and prints around his room, like Arden’s mother’s embroidered You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed and Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. None of that is what Peter’s wall art says, though. His say things like A writer is someone who has written today and There is no friend as loyal as a book.—Ernest Hemingway.
A long bookshelf runs along one entire wall of his room, and under it is a desk sporting a brand-new laptop computer. That’s the computer he writes Tonight the Streets Are Ours on. That’s where the words come from. Arden cannot believe that she’s in the same room as that computer. She cannot believe this is happening.
Peter opens the bathroom door, comes out, and flops down on his bed, clothes and all. “What a night,” he mumbles.
Arden agrees. She stands there.
“You’re not going to sleep in that, are you?” Peter asks her.
“What else am I going to sleep in?” Her heart is thudding so loudly, he must be able to hear it. She wishes she’d thought to bring her overnight bag with her, but it’s still in the backseat of the dead Heart of Gold.
“I have some clean gym clothes in the top drawer there.” He points lazily across the room at his wardrobe. “Take whatever you want. Get comfortable.”
She opens the drawer and sees his neatly folded athletic wear. She wonders if he folds his clothes or if their maid does it. She grabs the first articles of clothing that she sees and takes them to change in the bathroom.
Arden locks the door and looks at herself in the mirror. “What are you doing,” she says aloud.
Mirror Arden has no response.
“Who even are you right now,” she goes on.
Mirror Arden remains silent.
She pulls on Peter’s elastic-waist shorts, which reach down to her knees, and an equally oversize T-shirt. She finds herself hoping that the shirt will smell like Peter, but it just smells like clean laundry. It’s from a Broadway musical—The Lion King—which amuses Arden, to think that Peter not only went to see a live staging of a Disney cartoon, but that he liked it enough to invest in a souvenir shirt. She wonders if one of his parents took him, even though neither of them sounds like they’d be big musical theater fans. Maybe they’d taken him just because buying Broadway tickets is a thing that rich people do.
Thinking about Peter’s parents at The Lion King makes her think of her own parents’ coming to her first play, two years ago. That’s probably the last time her dad stepped foot in a theater. She recalls his comment that with any luck, next time she’d make it on stage. Standing in front of the mirror in Peter’s private bathroom, she thinks that maybe her father was right. Not that she should be in the spotlight in a play—that has never interested her before and it doesn’t interest her now—but that she could be in the spotlight in her real life. That maybe Chris isn’t the only one who can handle a leading role.
She leaves the bathroom and sees that Peter has not moved from his rag-doll position on his bed. She stands there, holding her dress balled up in her hands, and still she does not know what to do. She knows what Bianca would do. Bianca would get right into that bed like she owned it. And Arden knows what she should do. She should lie down on Peter’s thick carpet, on the floor, and go to sleep, and not think anymore.
But she doesn’t do either of those things. She stands still.
“Hey,” Peter says after a while, his voice low and heavy. “Come here.”
She does.
He flaps his arm, haphazardly patting the mattress beside him. She sits. And then, because it is very late and she is very tired, she lies down, facing him.
“You don’t have to be so far away,” Peter says.
“I’m not.”
He rolls over to her side of the bed and flings an arm over her.
“Peter…” she says.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs. “We’re just cuddling.”
They lie there, him in his jeans, her in his gym shorts. This is the latest Arden has ever stayed up. She can hear birds waking up in the rich-person park across the street. The darkness coming through the slats in Peter’s blinds is no longer quite so dark. It is almost morning.
He is drunk and hardly awake, and Arden doesn’t want to take advantage of that—but at the same time, she does want to, more than anything she’s ever wanted. It knocks the air right out of her, how much she wants to.
She leans in just a little and kisses him.
His eyelids flutter, and he kisses her back. It’s a slow, languorous kiss, and she is lost in it.
Then Peter pulls away. He rolls onto his back and presses his forearm to his eyes. “I can’t do this,” he mumbles.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, still reaching out for him, and what she means to say is What’s wrong with me? but the end of the question is trapped in her throat.
Peter doesn’t respond. Within moments, his breathing grows calm and regular. He’s asleep.
Arden wants to wake him up and make him kiss her again and again. But she doesn’t.
She lies there on her sliver of bed. Between the birds chirping outside and Peter’s breathing and her own pounding heart, Arden can’t imagine ever falling asleep. But somehow, she does. She sleeps long and hard and without dreaming.
* * *
The next time Arden opens her eyes, sunlight is streaming in through the windows, and she is alone in the bed.
But there is somebody else in the room.
A girl, probably close to Arden’s age, with wavy red hair and big green eyes and a navy-and-white striped strapless dress. She is standing at the foot of the bed, and she is staring right at Arden. She needs no introduction; Arden recognizes this girl instantly.
“Who are you?” says Bianca.
The morning after
“This isn’t what it looks like,” Arden tells Bianca as she sits up in Peter’s bed, pulling the sheets around her. This feels like the ultimate in clichéd things to say, but it is, quite frankly, true.
“Really?” Bianca asks. “So you’re not some random girl sleeping in my boyfriend’s clothes in my boyfriend’s bed?”
Arden has no idea why Bianca is here or where Peter is or what’s going on, but Bianca’s assessment here seems needlessly harsh. “I thought you broke up with him?”
“Yeah, four days ago! Why don’t you at least give someone a full week before you make your move? Just try to show a little class.”
“I didn’t make a move. It’s really not like that,” Arden says. She feels like she would wield more power in this conversation if she were to stand, but she also feels like she doesn’t want to pit her boy-size gym clothes against Bianca’s Anthropologie sundress.
“How long has this been going on for?” Bianca demands, looming over Arden.
“How long has what been going on for?”
“You and Peter.”
Arden doesn’t know what to say. She and Peter have been going on for nearly two months. Or, she and Peter have never gone on
at all.
“I’m not hooking up with Peter,” Arden insists.
“I would like to believe you,” Bianca says. “Unfortunately, I can think of approximately one reason for you to be here right now. Who are you, even?”
“I’m Arden,” says Arden. “And you’re Bianca.”
Arden’s knowledge of her name momentarily silences Bianca.
“Look,” Arden says. “Can I get dressed before we continue this conversation?”
Bianca gives Arden a look that somehow conveys both pity and disgust. “Fine. I’ll wait.”
Arden crawls out of bed, feeling like a chimney sweep in comparison to Bianca, with her crisp face and put-together outfit. She checks her phone to see the time, then remembers that it lost its charge on the way to the Just Like Me Dolls Store.
She grabs her clothes from the floor and closes herself in the bathroom to change. Unfortunately, her skimpy dress looks exactly like it spent the night in a ball on the floor, meaning that she probably resembles a particularly disheveled sex worker. She leaves the bathroom without glancing in the mirror.
Bianca is standing right where Arden left her. She watches Arden emerge from the bathroom and asks, “What’s on your arms?”
Arden looks down. There’s loneliness, still, and there’s miss you miss you miss you, winding all the way up to her shoulder. “We went to a costume party,” she tries to explain. “At Jigsaw Manor.”
“A-ha,” Bianca exclaims. “So that’s where you met Peter? Jigsaw Manor?”
“No,” Arden says firmly. “I’m a fan of Peter’s writing. I read his blog. Tonight the Streets Are Ours.”
Bianca’s eyes widen. “That’s even worse,” she says. “You’re like a groupie. A groupie for some sad-sack, self-absorbed eighteen-year-old who has delusions that he’s famous.”
“That’s not what he’s like,” Arden says, shocked and offended on Peter’s behalf. This is the love of his life? This is how she talks about him?
“I think I would be the judge of that,” Bianca shoots back. “Better than you, anyway. And where is he?”
“I don’t know. I just woke up when you came in the room. He didn’t let you in?”
Bianca blinks a few times. “No. The doorman did. I didn’t see Peter anywhere else in the apartment, so I came in. I assumed he was holed up in here.”
“So he just … left me here?” Arden asks, glancing around the room for a note from Peter. He might have texted her to say where he’d gone. Only no, he didn’t, because even if her phone weren’t dead, they’d never exchanged numbers.
Bianca sneers. “Get used to it.”
Arden takes a step toward her. “Why are you being like this? Peter always made you sound like a really nice person.”
This seems to give Bianca pause. “He told you about me?” she asks, her voice quieter.
“Bianca. He talks about you constantly.” It occurs to Arden that perhaps she could help Peter win back Bianca’s heart. She could convey how obsessed with Bianca Peter is, how much Bianca means to him. And maybe just by being here now, Arden seems like enough of a threat that Bianca will want to take him back, to get him away from other girls. This actually would not be a bad plan. Peter would be grateful to her forever.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t want to win over Bianca. What she wants is for Peter to come back. To her. To whatever it is that they started here in his bed a few hours ago. She wants him to come back with a reasonable explanation for why he left her here. She wants to be the girl that people come back for.
“Let me be clear with you,” Arden says. “I have been reading Peter’s writing online, and I think he’s incredibly talented. I live hundreds of miles away, and I have never met him in person before last night. I didn’t have a place to sleep, because my best friend and I got in a huge fight and my car broke down and everything went to hell, and Peter gave me a place to crash because he’s a good guy. So please stop acting like I’m swooping in here to steal your man, when A, I didn’t steal him, and B, as far as I can tell, he is not even your man anymore, since you dumped him.”
Bianca is silent for a moment as she seems to weigh Arden’s words. “So you definitely didn’t hook up with him?” she asks at last.
Arden thinks about that one kiss with Peter last night—this morning, rather—how good it felt, how wrong it was.
It was only one kiss, though. And it wasn’t even Peter’s choice.
“I’m just a fan,” Arden says. “That’s all.”
Bianca sighs noisily.
“What’s your problem with that?” Arden demands. “He’s a great writer.”
“He has a way with words,” Bianca concedes, “but personally I’m not a big fan of the bit where he makes it sound like I randomly broke up with him a week after his brother disappeared. You know, just to make him suffer. And then he heroically won me back, because we’re ‘soul mates.’ And then I broke up with him again, right after he achieved his lifelong dream, because I am so selfish that I’m incapable of supporting anyone else’s happiness.”
Arden raises her eyebrows. “Well, didn’t you do all of that?”
Bianca smiles grimly. “Look, Arden, you read one version of the story. Peter’s. If you asked me, I’d tell you a different version. But nobody does ask me. Yes, I broke up with him—yes, twice. I have done things in the interest of self-preservation. And I have done some things that were stupid—really, really stupid—because I really, really wanted to. But I’ve never set out to hurt anybody, including Peter. Especially Peter.”
“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 sociopathic vampire, 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 ha
llway. 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 like 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.”
“Not a problem,” says Peter’s mother, though the chill in her tone belies her words. “We just got back from running a few errands. How nice that we caught you before you left. And who is this?” She stands and comes forward to shake Arden’s hand.
“I’m Arden,” she introduces herself, and she searches her brain for a normal explanation as to how and when she entered their house, who she is, why she is wearing this ridiculous dress. She could kill Peter for leaving her to handle this alone. If she had any idea where he was, she could kill him.
“Arden is a friend of mine,” Bianca says firmly, and miraculously this prevents any further questions about the weird stranger with permanent marker on her arms. The attention redirects to Bianca entirely.