Tonight the Streets Are Ours Page 10

  “Buy them all,” I said. “I get paid on commission. ”

  She did.

  I swear to God, this girl is driving me crazy.

  August 4

  Miranda and Julio and I went to the free Probiotics show on the pier tonight. Miranda kept talking about how her mom knows somebody who knows somebody who knows the Probiotics’ manager and maybe she could get us backstage afterward. She kept threatening to “make some calls,” but I never actually saw her call anybody.

  It was offensively hot, but there was some rainbow sprinkler set up that you could run through to cool off (like a normal sprinkler, but somehow they’d put rainbow lights over it?), and there were people giving away bottles of free Vitaminwater.

  I do not understand Vitaminwater, by the way. Drink some water. Eat some vitamins. Are you so busy that you need those two tasks combined into one? I mean, I know New Yorkers have a lot going on, but chill the hell out.

  We were dancing in the middle of it all, sweating up a storm, when we ran into Bianca. She was with Leo and a bunch of his asshole teammates.

  Sorry. “Football teammates. ” That’s what I meant.

  I kind of froze when I saw her and Leo together, as though she and I had been doing something illicit, even though we haven’t, we haven’t done anything that’s not completely G-rated, I haven’t even held her hand. I barely ever see her. I felt guilty and then I felt mad at Leo for making me feel guilty, even though I guess that none of that is his fault.

  Leo’s friends were all, “Dude, this is so lame,” and, “Dude, does anybody have any beer?” and, “Dude, why aren’t there any chicks here?” I have met some of these guys one-on-one before and they’ve seemed like reasonable human beings, but somehow their intelligence gets halved every time you add one more of them to the mix, so that by the time you have five of them in a crew like today, they are basically a pack of mentally challenged terriers.

  “So you’re Bianca,” Miranda said, taking her in. Miranda is not the world’s greatest secret keeper, and I found myself wishing that I’d never said anything to her.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Bianca said, sticking out her hand for a shake. “And you are…?”

  Today Miranda was wearing a midriff top and shorts showing off her ass cheeks, and all Leo’s friends were salivating over her, but I only had eyes for Bianca. “You look really nice,” I told her. She was wearing about twice as many clothes as Miranda (which is not that hard to do), and she reminded me of an angel. If wings had sprouted from her shoulder blades, I would not have been the least bit surprised.

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  Leo and his friends came up with some asinine game where they had to burp as loud as they could in between the band’s songs, and if any of them burped loud enough to get the band’s attention, then they “won. ”

  “What do you win?” I asked.

  The dog pack looked at me blankly.

  “You just win,” explained Leo.

  Okay.

  “So, Leo,” I asked, making sure Bianca was in earshot. “What’s your favorite Probiotics song?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know many of their songs. That one they play on the radio is pretty good. What’s yours?”

  Why are you doing this, Bianca? I wanted to ask her. Why are you still with him?

  I mean, I love Leo. I love Leo more than anyone does. But she’s not right for him. He’s not right for her. She belongs with someone like me.

  You just win.

  Easy for you to say, Leo.

  Arden had taken to skimming the entries that didn’t involve Bianca. She was as fascinated by Bianca as Peter was. She just wanted to spend more time with her, know more about her, uncover all the secrets of being Bianca.

  Arden had also started reading the comments left by other Tonight the Streets Are Ours readers. There seemed to be a whole community of them. Whereas the early entries had garnered no feedback, the further into Peter’s story she got, the more commentary there was. The commenters didn’t seem to be people Peter knew—none of them said anything like “Yeah, I was at that concert with you!” Presumably they were not Leo or Leo’s friends, since she couldn’t imagine Peter writing about his crush on Bianca if he knew that her boyfriend was reading. On this post, for example, the comments said:

  I found ur blog cuz i am the biggest probiotics fan evarrr. probiotics rock!!! u r so lucky u got to see them for free!!! i have already seen them 8 timez.

  —MyKingdom4AHorse

  I love your writing! I’ve also always wondered that about Vitaminwater. You’re so funny.

  —Delicate485

  Are you and Bianca ever going to get together??? I’m dying out here! Leo sounds like a tool. Ugh I don’t know what she sees in him.

  —MessyDressyBessy

  Arden considered leaving a comment, too. She couldn’t say, “Are you and Bianca ever going to get together?” because she was reading this now nine months in the future, so she knew that, yes, they would, and then later still, they would break up. She could add her voice to the chorus saying “I love your writing” and “You’re so funny,” because she did, and he was, but she didn’t want to be just another unnamed voice crowing about how great he was. She wanted to be something special to him, in the way that he was becoming something special to her. So she said nothing.

  She glanced up at the court. Roman was still sitting on the bench. He scanned the bleachers. She caught his eye and smiled, then remembered that he probably couldn’t identify her without his glasses. The plus side was that he wouldn’t notice if she kept staring at her phone rather than watching his game. So she read on, skimming, skimming—until she came to the next post with Bianca.

  September 2

  Mom had to go back to the city a day early for some meeting of some charity board that she’s on, so last night it was just us guys out in the Hamptons. You know what that means: BBQ! I don’t know why Dad is so into grilling out except that Mom never lets him do it, and I don’t know why Mom is so opposed to it except that she can tell it makes him happy. Thank you both for your extremely healthy relationship model, parents.

  Also I think men like grilling more than women do because it appeals to some caveman part of our brains. The part of our brains that goes, “Fire! I like fire!” Do women not have this part of their brains? Is this some biological difference between the sexes? Are women’s brains like, “Fire! That’s that thing that burns down my dwelling shack!”?

  I don’t know, guys. They don’t really teach biology at art school. Shh, don’t tell my dad.

  I love when my father barbecues, though. It’s one of the only times when he seems like a human being instead of a machine. Okay, so he still wears a designer button-down shirt that some personal shopper picked out while he’s grilling, but he rolls up the sleeves and doesn’t freak out if he gets some grease on it. He was in a good mood this weekend, too, actually asking me some questions about my life instead of just ordering me around. Not that I told him anything, of course. The more you tell him, the more ammunition he has.

  I get it bad, but you know sometimes I think my brother gets it worse. To some extent they’ve given up on me as a lost cause. I’m younger and I’m a daydreamer and a screwup, and I care more about fashion and poetry than a “real man” is supposed to, and I listen to music too loud. Whenever my father looks at me it’s like I’m some sort of vermin who’s crawled into his house that he can’t exterminate, but it’s not like he expects much from me.

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  They didn’t even want me, you know. They wanted a kid, but they were getting old and it wasn’t happening, so they finally decided to adopt. They’d had my brother for only a couple months before they found out they were pregnant with me. Maybe they even conceived me during some celebratory “We have a baby now!” sex.

  Gross.

  But they never let me forget it. That my brother, they chose. Me? A mistake.

 
; The problem for my brother, though, is that he acts like he’s everything my dad wants in a son: respectable and honest and business-minded. Which means he doesn’t get ignored and condescended to; he gets all the attention, all that suffocating attention, because he should know better and should do better. I don’t know how he stands it, but maybe he doesn’t know how I stand it, either.

  Anyway. Whine, whine, whine, it’s all beside the point, because this weekend didn’t feel like that, for once. This weekend was good. Mom was gone, Dad was grilling meat, everyone else was there eating it. And I do mean everyone. Even though obviously the Hamptons house is there year-round and we could go any time, the truth is that Hamptons season ends at Labor Day weekend. Coffee shops with a half-hour-long line today will have a handful of customers this time next week. So last night we were closing out the season, if not the house itself, in force.

  Julio kept cannonballing into the pool, and Uncle Todd was there being Uncle Todd, and Trotsky had invited over some heiress he met on the beach on Friday, and there were, like, five dogs running around and playing catch and I don’t know who any of them belonged to. It was chaos and I loved it and I just hope that none of the photos we were taking get seen by my mother, ever. The moment when one of the dogs stole a steak off the grill and then dropped it in the pool was priceless, and it would give my mother a heart attack, for no good reason, since nobody was hurt, except for the cow who gave its life, I guess.

  Leo had brought Bianca, which is how you know things are getting serious between them, because I have never known him to invite a girl out to the Hamptons for the weekend. It made me feel sick to see them together, and to know what that signified about their relationship. He goes to college next week, and obviously she’ll still be in the city, and I wonder if I’ll see her more now that he’s going to be physically out of the picture, or less, now that the official glue to bind us together will be out of town. Or maybe the distance will tear them apart anyway. Maybe he’ll fall for some college girl and Bianca will be just a distant memory for him. That would be nice.

  Not that he’s going so far away. And he’s arranged his schedule so all his classes are just Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. He kept chattering about how excited he was about that. So he could come back to see Bianca any time.

  If I only had to go to class three days a week, I could write a novel with all my time off. I could write freaking Don Quixote if I had as much time as Leo has. After he bragged about it for the third time, I asked what exactly he was planning to produce with all his spare time. He told me to shut up.

  It was late, late, late by the time everyone went home or just crashed at our place. It’s a big house, lots of beds, so no big deal, and some of those people were wasted. Probably everyone in the Hamptons was wasted last night, though. It would have been competitive for anyone to get a taxi home.

  It was a beautiful night and I didn’t feel like going inside, not least because the last time I checked, Julio and some famous painter’s daughter were making out in my bed. I just lay out in one of the deck chairs, staring up at the stars, until the fire in the grill had been put out and the dogs had been kenneled and the beer had been finished and everyone had gone to wherever everyone goes. I think they all forgot about me. I think I fell asleep.

  I woke up to the very quiet sound of waves. Our house is beachfront property, so you can always hear the ocean waves, but this was different. Quiet and different.

  I opened my eyes and saw someone swimming laps through the pool. It was pretty dark, so I just saw the shape of a person moving smoothly and rhythmically through the water.

  Maybe she sensed me watching her, because after she finished her next lap, she hoisted herself up the ladder and out of the pool, walking over to stand in front of me, her wet feet a quiet slap slap slap on the pavement.

  “Bianca,” I said. “What are you doing up?” She looked black and white in the moonlight, like an old photograph of someone you’ll never really meet.

  “Night swimming,” she said. She shook droplets of water out of her hair. “What are you doing up?”

  “Waiting for you,” I said, because I wasn’t, but I should have been. “Are you drunk?”

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  She shrugged. “A little. ”

  “You shouldn’t swim if you’re drunk. ”

  “I figured you would have rescued me if I’d needed it. ”

  “For all you know, I’m drunk, too. ” I wasn’t, but I thought I should say that I was, because I didn’t know what was going to happen between us there in the dark, and I wanted to be able to blame something outside of my control if I needed to. If I needed to forget everything about this whole night, I wanted that excuse ready for me.

  She shivered. Maybe that’s why the season ends at Labor Day. Because when it’s September and it’s impossibly late at night and you’re wearing nothing but a wet bikini, you get cold. We didn’t have this problem in July.

  “I have a towel,” I offered, holding up the one that I’d been using as a makeshift blanket. She walked toward me and held out her hand for it, but instead I wrapped it around her shoulders like a cocoon and pulled her toward me. She fell onto my deck chair so we were looking right into each other’s eyes, my hands still holding her towel in fists.

  Reader, I kissed her.

  It was a really short, small kiss. I wanted to give her the chance to get up and walk away if she wanted to—though if she had, I don’t know how I would have let her go.

  But she didn’t. She kissed me back, and there was nothing short or small about it.

  The next thing I knew, her towel was gone and my hands were on her skin, holding on to her as tight as I could, and her legs were threaded through mine, and I was tasting the chlorine on her everywhere.

  We didn’t say a word, as if someone would have heard the moment we spoke and come outside to investigate. I wanted to say I can’t believe this is happening and I have been wanting this since the moment we met, but the only sound I made was breathing into her ear, and I trust that she knew everything I meant.

  We went inside just as the sun was starting to hint at the sky. And I wrote this all down now. So I won’t forget.

  “Arden. ”

  Arden’s head snapped up in surprise, and she clicked off her phone.

  “Are you ignoring me?” Lindsey crawled onto the bleacher next to her, knocking over a mother’s purse as she went. The mom gave her a dirty look and moved up a row. Lindsey went on, “I’ve been calling your name since I walked in the door. ”

  Arden rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Sorry, Linds. I was reading something and I just … got really caught up in it. ”

  Lindsey swigged some water. Arden could tell from the sheen of sweat on Lindsey’s face that she had run all the way here, which made Arden’s sedate-walker cardiovascular system want to curl up into a ball and die.

  “I was looking at some guy’s blog,” Arden explained, which felt like such an understatement of what Tonight the Streets Are Ours was, or what it meant to her—but she felt like she had to say something about it to Lindsey, because when things mattered, Lindsey needed to know.

  “Some guy. Is he hot?” Lindsey asked.

  “Please, Linds. I have no idea. ” Which was not to say that Arden hadn’t tried to find out. She had searched for every relevant combination of words she could think of: Peter and Bianca. Peter and Leo. Peter and art school. Peter and bookstore. Whatever she tried, she didn’t have enough information to find photos. She suspected he was probably hot, though.

  “Yeah, right,” Lindsey said. “‘No idea. ’ You are such a stalker. This is going to be like Ellzey’s house all over again. What’s this guy’s last name?”

  “I don’t know. His first name is Peter. ”

  “You’re going to be like, ‘Peter, I read your blog,’ and his mom is going to say, ‘Well, I’m Mrs. Peter. ’”

  They both crack
ed up. A few more parents moved away.

  “It’s a basketball game,” Lindsey said loudly. “It’s okay to get a little rowdy. ”

  “Wooo!” Arden shouted toward the court, to support Lindsey’s statement.

  “Wooo!” Lindsey agreed. All the bleachers within a six-foot radius of them emptied.

  Once the game had ended, Arden drove Roman and Lindsey home, despite Lindsey’s protestations that she could run home the way she came. “Please don’t,” Arden said. “Just the thought of it makes me want to take a nap. ” In the car, Roman seemed subdued, even for a child whose basketball team had just been totally crushed for the hundredth time this season.

  “You killed it out there, Huntley,” Lindsey told him. “You wiped the court with those guys. I bet they’re scared to come back next time. ”

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  Roman had been in the game for all of six minutes, and Lindsey was a terrible liar, but it was possible that a child might believe her.

  Roman didn’t seem to be paying attention to her, though. “I don’t know where Mom went,” he said.

  “To New York, Roman,” Arden said. “You do know. ”

  He shook his too-big head. “I saw her in the stands, though. I saw her while I was playing. But she wasn’t there afterward. Why wouldn’t she come say hi? Because we lost?”

  Arden and Lindsey exchanged a glance. “She wasn’t there,” Arden said. “I promise. ” But there was a tightness in her chest. If her mother had been there, she would have noticed—right?

  “Yes, she was,” Roman insisted. “She was sitting right under the exit sign. ”

  Then Arden realized what had happened. Roman hadn’t been wearing his glasses, so of course it made sense that he would have gotten confused, from a distance. “No, Roman,” she explained, and she felt so bad for him, her baby brother, who had so much learning to do about the world and all of its disappointment. “That wasn’t Mom. That was just me. ”

  Arden’s mother explains herself

  It was funny that Roman thought their mother would come home for his basketball game, because the next day, she sort of did. Not in a literal, physical sense. But she sent a letter. It was addressed just to Arden, and her father hand-delivered it while she was sitting in her room doing homework on Monday after rehearsal.