Tonight the Streets Are Ours (10 page)

5) Her favorite place in the city is Times Square. (She’s the first New Yorker I’ve ever met who actually
likes
Times Square. As far as I’m concerned, Times Square is tourist-land, and let them have it. But Bianca swears that she loves it there. “Do you even go to watch the ball drop on New Year’s?” I teased her, and she answered—totally honestly—“I used to go every year! Now I just watch the whole thing on TV. It’s my weird little obsession.”)

6) She hates romantic comedies. (“Because you hate romance, or because you hate comedy?” I asked her. “Neither,” she said.)

7) She wants to get a job in international politics when she grows up, like work for the UN or be a diplomat or something else where she travels a lot and wields influence.

8) Her biggest phobia is fire, which she says is a “rational fear,” since fire can kill you. She laughed at me when she found out that my biggest phobia is public speaking, because according to Bianca, public speaking cannot actually result in death.

9) She’s the most incredible girl I’ve ever met.

When the field started filling up with the after-work crowd, we left our spot and walked around for a while. I bought us lemon Popsicles from a pushcart. We were talking so much that we barely made the time between sentences to eat, so her Popsicle melted all over her hand. She was laughing at the sticky mess, and I wanted so badly to lick every last drop of lemon off her fingers—but I didn’t, I didn’t touch her fingers with my tongue or any other part of her with any part of me.

We wound up at the carousel, so I bought tickets for both of us and we rode horses next to each other. Afterward, I walked her to the subway, all the way down to the turnstile, as far as I could go without actually getting on her train with her.

“I had a lot of fun this afternoon,” she said.

“Me, too,” I said. “Maybe we’ll do it again sometime.”

And neither of us said anything about Leo at all.

I wanted to kiss her. I would have traded anything for it. Watching her walk away felt like suffocating, and again I thought of
Romeo and Juliet
.
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

See, this is why it’s hard to be a writer. Some other writer has always said it all before you, and surely they have said it better.

But today I don’t care, not about any of that. Life is sort of like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, if you know what I mean. Some days are too big. Some days are much too small. But today was one of those rare days that was just right.

While Chris was buying his sixteen hats, Arden poked around the Grass Is Always Greener. On one of the racks, she found a dress that didn’t look too far off from what Bianca had been wearing the first day Peter saw her in the bookstore. It was bright blue, not yellow, but it had that lace trim at the top, just like what Peter had described. That style had been very en vogue last year, so it wasn’t surprising to find it here.

Arden slipped into the dressing room and tried it on. The straps were a little too long, so they kept sliding down her shoulders, but maybe that was sexy? Otherwise, it fit well. She stood on tiptoe and held her hair off her face in an improvised upsweep.
I look pretty,
she thought.
I think.

“Arden?” She heard Chris’s voice from outside the dressing room.

She opened the curtain. “Hi.” She looked up at him through lowered eyelashes.

“Oh, there you are,” he said. “I’m ready to go. I got the last hat for free, because I’m buying so many! Anyway, I’m starving. You want to get some food?”

Arden swallowed hard. “Um,” she said. “What do you think of this dress?” She pirouetted slowly, still on her toes.

When she turned around to face front, Chris seemed to have only just registered that she wasn’t wearing the jacket and jeans that she’d been in all day. “It’s nice,” he said. “But don’t you already have something like that?”

She dropped to flat feet. “No.”

“Well, then you should get it if you like it. I’m going to start loading the hats into the car while you’re doing that, okay? I’ll meet you out there. And then food! God, I’m starving.”

He galloped out of the store, and Arden returned to the dressing room. Before peeling off the dress, she looked in the mirror for a second, but she didn’t see anything pretty there anymore. She just saw herself.

Back in regular clothes, she handed the dress to the sales clerk, who asked, “You buying this?”

“No, that’s okay.”

“It looked good on you,” the sales girl said with a shrug.

Arden shook her head. “It’s not really worth it.” And she followed her boyfriend into the cold outside.

Things with Chris weren’t always like this

Arden had nursed a dormant crush on Chris Jump through most of freshman and sophomore years. She wasn’t obsessed with him in the way she’d been with some other boys—like Ellzey, for example. But Chris was tall and handsome and very much at the center of the theater crowd, even when they were freshmen. So she was vaguely interested.

And then he got cast as Abelard in the play adaptation of the love letters of H
é
lo
ï
se and Ab
é
lard, and she was a goner.

Arden got to watch Chris as Abelard most days after school, because she did stage crew: costuming, lighting, scenery, props, whatever else was needed backstage. She’d discovered stage crew at the beginning of freshman year, when Lindsey dragged her along to a drama club meeting. Lindsey never went back after that first time—as with so many other things, her interest flared and then disappeared within the course of a few days—but Arden was hooked. She saw it as a personal victory when a play went off with all the actors wearing exactly what they were supposed to be wearing, walking onstage at exactly the moments they were supposed to make their entrances.

This wasn’t just an inflated sense of self-importance. If she weren’t there with her walkie-talkie, muttering instructions, each actor would literally have no idea what was happening in the play outside of his or her own scenes. If she didn’t run onstage when the lights went dark to quickly reposition the scenery into the spots that she had marked with glow-in-the-dark tape, then the scenery would not get moved, and classroom scenes would take place in monasteries, kitchen scenes in forests. It made her feel like she mattered.

Plus, she made good friends through drama club, even before there was anything romantic between her and Chris. Arden clicked quickly with Kirsten, who, as an excellent singer and a mediocre-at-best actress, got major parts in all the musicals and bit parts in all the straight plays. Arden took a little while longer to connect with Naomi, who did stage crew with her and had a classic “don’t notice me” backstage personality, until she got comfortable with you. But after Arden and Naomi stayed six hours after school one time in order to rush a stage backdrop to completion, that friendship, too, was solidified.

Freshman year, Arden’s parents came to her first play. Afterward her dad complimented her, and then he said, “Maybe next year you’ll even make it
on
stage!” She hadn’t invited him to any performances since then. He didn’t get it. Arden’s ultimate dream, for when she was a senior, was to be the stage manager, the one who called the entire play. Like God, basically.

Last year, sophomore spring, Arden was doing tech for
Abelard and Heloise
. It was based on a real-life doomed romance of a couple in twelfth-century France. Heloise was a beautiful young woman, and Abelard was her teacher … until they fell in love. Nobody approved of their union, so Heloise was forced to join a nunnery and Abelard became a monk. For the last twenty years of Abelard’s life, the two wrote passionate love letters back and forth, forbidden to ever see each other again. They loved each other and nobody else except for God up until the day they died. Arden thought this was one of the greatest love stories she had ever heard. She would kill for a life like that—minus the bit where she had to become a nun.

Mr. Lansdowne’s decision to cast Chris as Abelard angered every theater guy in the junior and senior classes. There was a lot of indignant gossiping about it backstage, and, since Arden was always backstage, she overheard it all.

“The leads are supposed to go to the upperclassmen,” Brad griped. “Everyone knows that.”

“Mr. Lansdowne just cast Chris because he’s cute,” bitched Eric. “He’s not even that good an actor.”

Actually, Chris was cute
and
a good actor, but whatever.

Shortly after rehearsals for the play kicked off, Chris started dating Natalia. Natalia played one of the nuns, which, from what Arden knew of Natalia, was basically the opposite of typecasting.

Natalia and Chris went together like fire and gasoline. When they weren’t on stage, or making out, they were screaming at each other. Then Natalia would stomp off to weep in the girls’ room, and the rest of the nuns would run after her, and Chris would complain to Arden.

“She’s just so crazy,” Chris would say.

“I know,” Arden would sympathize.

“It’s all about the drama with her,” Chris said one time, a hammer hanging idly from his hand while Arden pieced together scenery. “It’s like she
wants
to fight. We just spent half an hour arguing over which side of the stage was stage right and which side was stage left.”

“The left side from the audience’s perspective is stage right,” Arden said.

“That’s what I told her! But she refused to listen. So I looked it up on my phone, which obviously confirmed that you and I are right, and then she started crying because I was being ‘mean.’”

“You were not being mean,” Arden said, taking the hammer from Chris’s hands since he was not doing anything with it except swinging it around, which had the distinct potential to do more harm than good. “It’s not like you were telling her she was wrong in order to hurt her feelings. You just wanted her to know so she wouldn’t sound silly in front of anybody else.”

“Exactly,” Chris said. “Thank you.” He followed Arden around to the other side of the backdrop she was working on. “So how do I get her to stop fighting with me? What should I do so we can have a conversation without it turning into her crying? Should I just agree with her, even when she says something totally wrong, like that stage left is to the audience’s left?”

All told at that point, Arden’s dating experience included two kisses at school dances, one kiss at a bar mitzvah, and one week of “dating” Benedict Swindenhausen when they were in the seventh grade. She had no idea why Chris thought she was some kind of relationship expert, but she liked the role.

“I think you have to respect where she’s coming from,” Arden said, thinking it over. “You can’t just say, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ Say, ‘I see why you might think that stage left is to your left. That would make sense. I was also surprised when I learned that wasn’t the case.’ Then it seems like you’re on her side, you know?”

“That’s smart,” Chris said. “You’re smart.”

“Thank you.” Arden blushed a little.

“You give me hope that not all girls are total drama queens,” Chris said.

“Not me,” Arden said. “Not a drama queen.” She held up the hammer. “Just a hammer queen, I guess.”

That sounded stupid, but Chris laughed anyway.

“Why are you with her, anyway?” Arden asked. “If you make each other so unhappy, what’s the point?”

Chris just shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

Arden felt envy pulsate in her chest. She wanted that: the sort of love that you can’t explain. Like Heloise and Abelard. It didn’t make sense to anybody else but them—but that didn’t make it any less true.

But apparently what Chris and Natalia had wasn’t really love, since a couple weeks later, during intermission between the first and second acts of their final performance of
Heloise and Abelard
, she dumped him.

It was five minutes before Chris was about to make his entrance, and he was nowhere to be seen. “Find him!” ordered the disembodied voice of the stage manager through Arden’s headset.

Eventually she tracked him down behind a rack of coats in the costume closet. He was sitting on the floor in his monk outfit, his face buried in a floor-length fur cloak.

“Is everything okay?” Arden asked, crouching down beside him.

He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Arden waited for him to speak. Finally he got out, “She broke up with me.” He sucked in his breath and bit down on his knuckles.

Arden pushed her way through the coats so she was sitting on the floor next to Chris. She rubbed his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Where is he?”
demanded the stage manager’s voice in her ear.

“This will be for the best, though,” Arden said. “I know it doesn’t feel like it right now. But she wasn’t making you happy. You fought all the time. Everything was an argument. Remember?”

Chris nodded, slowly. Then he protested, “But sometimes we were happy,” and his face crumpled again.

Arden put her arm around him. “Not often enough, Chris. And not happy enough. You deserve better. You’re a great guy, and you should have a girl who appreciates you.”

“Not that great, I guess.” He gave a sad little laugh. “I’m sitting in some ladies’ coats when I should be preparing to make my entrance. But Arden, how can I go out there?”

“Because you’re an actor,” Arden said. “Because you’re the real deal. You’re talented, and you’re driven, and you’re thoughtful—”

The next thing she knew, he was kissing her.

When they pulled apart, Arden was breathing hard.
So that’s what it feels like to be part of a stage kiss.

“Chris. Why did you … What was that? I mean, thank you. Wow. But … where did that even come from?”

“From eight weeks of dating the wrong girl,” he replied. He stood up and smoothed his hair. “Arden,” Chris said, “will you go out with me?”

Arden stood up, too. After a lifetime of unrequited crushes and secret stalking, how did the answer turn out to be so easy?

“Yes,” she said. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him again. “I’d love to go out with you.”