Tonight the Streets Are Ours (11 page)

He put his hands on her shoulders and held her back from him a little, so he could look in her eyes. “But no drama,” he said. “I can’t take any more drama.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “From here on out, all your drama will be strictly on stage. Speaking of…” She looked pointedly at her watch.

“All right, stage crew.” He gave a little salute. “I’ve got it.” His face broke into a grin, and she could see his dimple. Even if Mr. Lansdowne
did
cast him just because he was cute, that seemed like a good enough reason. “I’ll see you after the play,” Chris said, and, after one more kiss, he jogged off, just in time to make his entrance.

Arden followed after him at a more sedate pace, running her fingers over her lips, trying to make sure that this was real. She, Arden, backstage girl, nice girl, perennially single, lonely girl, had somehow snagged the leading man. And they’d stayed together ever since.

Stalking people, take one

The last guy Arden had been obsessed with, in her pre-Chris days last year, had been Ellzey. Yes, Ellzey of trying-to-smoke-pot-on-Matt-Washington’s-patio fame. The thing was, Ellzey was a tremendous singer. He was in show choir and sang a solo of Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes” so beautifully that it brought tears to Arden’s eyes every time she heard it, which was often, since she liked to watch online videos of the choir when she was supposed to be doing her homework. She had thought Ellzey was the most romantic guy in the world, or at least in Cumberland. There was no way he could sing a song with such depths of emotion if he weren’t.

Ellzey seemed to have a passing knowledge of Arden’s existence, mostly that she was the girl who said “great job” after every single chorus performance. Also one time he complimented her on her Harry Potter tote bag, which she then made a point of carrying to school every day, until Lindsey told her, “That bag is filthy. Dumbledore is rolling in his grave. Put it out to pasture, Arden.”

One Saturday night last March, Arden, Lindsey, and Naomi slept over at Kirsten’s house to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. At the time Naomi was going out with one of the guys in show choir, so she had insider information about choral activities. She happened to mention that a bunch of the guys in choir were also having a sleepover. That very night! She didn’t know exactly who was there. The guy she was dating, Douglas, for sure. Alex, Ellzey, maybe Carter?

“We should go,” Arden said.

“To the boys’ slumber party?” Kirsten asked, wrapping her long blond hair around a curling iron. Kirsten’s hair was her pride and joy. The rest of them called it “mermaid hair,” and while Kirsten would shoot down any other compliments sent her way (“No, I swear, these pants just make me
appear
skinny”; “Honestly, I had my dad explain the reading to me—I couldn’t finish it, either”; “I’m actually way worse at piano than should even be possible”), she accepted “mermaid hair” with the calm acknowledgment of one who knew this praise to be undeniable.

“Yes, to the boys’ slumber party,” Arden said.

“Why?” Kirsten asked.

“To say hi,” Arden explained.

“Why?” Kirsten asked again, holding her hair in place. “I just mean, like, what’s the point?”

“What’s the point of anything? Like, what’s the point of curling your hair?” Lindsey countered. Arden knew that Lindsey meant her question innocently—Lindsey genuinely did not understand the point of curling hair—but Kirsten glared at Lindsey as though this were a personal attack.

“Wouldn’t you like to see your boyfriend?” Arden asked Naomi.

“He’s not exactly my boyfriend,” Naomi said. “I mean, we haven’t had the ‘are we boyfriend and girlfriend’ talk or anything.”

“Obviously we should crash the boys’ slumber party,” Lindsey volunteered. Arden threw her a grateful look, while Kirsten and Naomi both frowned. They were not exactly Lindsey Matson fans, since most of the time they wanted to gossip about boys and try on each other’s jewelry, while Lindsey almost never wanted to gossip about boys, and last year she’d sold the small amount of jewelry that she owned in order to purchase absurdly expensive “performance” running shoes. She was here as a package deal with Arden, and all of them knew it—except for maybe Lindsey herself.

“What else is there to do?” Lindsey reasoned.

“We could stay here and watch a movie,” Kirsten suggested.

Arden felt deep in her bones that she was not put on this Earth to sit in her pajamas in Kirsten’s finished basement and watch a movie.

By the time she’d convinced her three friends to go to the boys’ sleepover, it was one a.m. “Whose house are they at?” she asked Naomi.

Naomi shook her head. “I don’t know. Not Douglas’s.”

“Will you text him and ask where they are?”

Naomi scrunched up her face. “Um … we don’t totally have that kind of relationship yet?”

They decided to try Alex’s house first. Alex’s house was big, and he didn’t have any younger siblings who might get underfoot, so this seemed like a likely location for a sleepover. Plus he lived only a few blocks away from Kirsten’s house. Kirsten scribbled a note that said, cryptically,
We’ll be back,
and left it on her kitchen table as they silently snuck out of the house. At the last minute, Arden grabbed one of the helium balloons that Kirsten’s stepmom had festively tied to the fridge. “When we show up, it’ll be like a parade,” she whispered.

But when they got to Alex’s, every window was dark. Either the boys weren’t there, or they were already fast asleep.

“I can’t imagine they’ve gone to bed already,” Naomi said as the girls stood in Alex’s driveway, staring up at the house. “Douglas said that last time they had a sleepover, they stayed up until four in the morning singing the entirety of
Les Miz
.”

“Are you
kidding me
?” Arden shrieked.

“You just described Arden’s most dearly held sexual fantasy,” Lindsey explained.

“Maybe they’re at Ellzey’s,” Kirsten suggested.

“Does anybody know where Ellzey lives?” asked Naomi.

Arden raised her hand. “I do.”

“Wait, how?” Naomi asked.

“Because she’s his stalker,” said Lindsey.

“Should we tie the balloon to Alex’s mailbox?” Arden asked before they left. “So they know that we were here?”

“Let’s not,” Naomi said quickly. She looked concerned.

Ellzey’s house was nearly a half-hour walk away, but it was a surprisingly warm night for March, and none of them was tired. When they entered his driveway, they noticed a light still on, on the second floor of the house, and three cars parked outside.

“That’s where they are,” Arden whispered.

They stared reverentially at the lit window. Arden imagined that she could hear Ellzey’s gentle tenor voice floating out and down to her. She felt momentarily like she was in
Romeo and Juliet
, the balcony scene. Only she would be Romeo, in this situation.

“Now what?” Kirsten asked.

“We have to get their attention,” Arden said.

“Are you sure you can’t just text Douglas?” Lindsey asked Naomi.

Even in the moonlight, it was clear that Naomi was blushing. “No way.”

So they tried throwing rocks at the window. This had no impact. Either because they had no aim and the majority of their rocks missed their mark, or because the boys were singing so loudly they were deaf to the thumping of rocks against their house. Maybe both.

“You’re an athlete,” Arden said to Lindsey as she hurled another pebble from Ellzey’s gravel driveway and it went flying off into the distance. “You’re supposed to be good at this stuff.”

“I’m on the track team,” Lindsey said, her next stone falling ten feet short of its mark. “There’s no throwing in track.”

“Think of this as cross-training,” Arden said.

When their arms grew tired, Lindsey suggested singing. “Like sirens in a Greek myth,” she explained.

“I can’t really carry a tune,” said Naomi. “That’s why I do stage crew.”

“Pull it together, Naomi,” snapped Lindsey.

Kirsten, of course, was already belting out her song from the fall production of
Cabaret
.

Together, the girls sang “And So It Goes,” with Arden trying her hand at Ellzey’s solo. It seemed like if anything would draw him to the window, that would work. But still, she saw no Ellzey.

The girls were about to admit defeat when the front door opened. The porch light turned on.
This was it.

In the doorway stood a gray-haired woman in a bathrobe. She stared out at the four girls, who were frozen like startled deer in the sudden light. “Hello?” she said.

“Hello,” the girls chorused. Then, because it seemed like somebody needed to say something, Arden added, “We’re here to see Ellzey,”

“Well,” said the woman in the bathrobe, “I’m
Mrs.
Ellzey.”

She opened the door wider, and even though it seemed like the wise course of action would be to flee the scene, the girls followed her inside like a string of dutiful ducklings.

“Bart!” Mrs. Ellzey hollered upstairs.

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Come down here. Bring your friends, young man.”

So that was Ellzey’s first name.
Bart.
Arden wondered if he started going by Ellzey because he didn’t like that name. She wouldn’t blame him. It sounded an awful lot like
fart
.

Ellzey and the rest of the guys stampeded downstairs. Their faces registered shock when they saw the four girls and the one yellow balloon still tied to Arden’s wrist. Ellzey clearly had not planned to see any girls tonight. He’d replaced his contacts with wire-frame glasses. He was wearing socks but no shoes, baggy gym shorts, and a shapeless sweater. Arden had dreamed of this, seeing Ellzey in his natural habitat. But maybe these weren’t the exact circumstances she had imagined.

“Did you really think you could get away with inviting girls over for a late-night rendezvous?” demanded Mrs. Ellzey, hands on hips. “You thought I wouldn’t notice?”

Ellzey’s friends turned pale. They furiously shook their heads. “We didn’t invite anybody,” Ellzey said.

“We have no idea what they are doing here,” added Douglas, narrowing his eyes at Naomi.

“Then what
possibly
brought four girls over here in the middle of the night?” Mrs. Ellzey countered.

Arden thought about Kirsten’s question before they’d left the house.
What’s the point?
This seemed, suddenly, like a relevant inquiry.

“Mom!” Ellzey cried. “We didn’t ask them to come here to, like, hook up with us or whatever gross thing it is that you’re thinking!” His voice cracked and he looked mortified.

“Can I just say something?” Lindsey asked. “I’m gay. So I’m definitely not here to hook up with your son.”

Mrs. Ellzey looked pained. “You girls need to go home,” she said. “And as for you, Bart…”

Arden and her friends fled. They didn’t say anything for the first four blocks on their walk back to Kirsten’s. Then, finally, Lindsey spoke.

“Well, it’s a good thing we didn’t leave the balloon at Alex’s.”

And they collapsed into giggles.

On Monday, Douglas broke up with Naomi. He said he thought they were “looking for different things.” Up until he approached her at Matt Washington’s party, a full year later, Ellzey acted like he didn’t really know who Arden was. But since that was how he’d always behaved, that felt disappointing but not dramatic. The most positive outcome was that in the year since then, Lindsey and Arden had been able to say to each other, pretty much any time they needed a laugh, “I’m
Mrs.
Ellzey,” and it never failed to cheer them up. And that alone made the whole thing worthwhile.

The parakeets vs. the wolverines

The weekend after she and Chris went shopping for sixteen hats at the Grass Is Always Greener, Arden woke up to a pounding on her door. She rolled over, blinking the gunk out of her eyes. “What?” she croaked out.

Roman flung open the door and stood there fully dressed in a basketball jersey, mesh shorts, and sneakers. “Can you drive me to my game?” he asked.

Arden sat up, slowly coming to terms with the fact that she was, yet again, awake. Why didn’t any of the boys in her life know how to sleep late? “You have a game today?” she asked. Mouser, who had been restlessly catnapping on the foot of her bed, bolted for the door, as though she, too, wanted no part in this.

“Yeah, duh,” Roman said. “In like twenty minutes.”

This was the first Arden had heard of it. “Can’t Dad take you?”

“He was supposed to.” Roman looked down at the floor and scuffed his shoe. “Uh, he left a note. He already went into the office. So…”

“It’s
Sunday
,” Arden said. When she was little, Sunday mornings meant eating their mother’s homemade pancakes in her pajamas and watching cartoons on TV. Her mother made silver dollar pancakes and laid them out on her plate like they were lily pads, with the syrup forming a river that flowed between them. Arden would take little plastic toys and place them on the pancakes like they were forest creatures who lived on these lily pads, and she would send them rafting down the syrup river. She would play like this until her pancakes were absolutely grubby, and then her mother would make her another batch, and those she would actually eat.

Arden should have woken up even earlier and made pancakes for her family today. She’d never tried to make them herself, but it couldn’t be that hard. She’d figured out how to do some cooking in the past two months. Some cooking, and a lot of ordering takeout. Her father turned out to be clueless about every aspect of the kitchen except for how to make hummus and spaghetti. (Not together, thank God.) Arden had started to seriously wonder how her father had ever survived on his own before her parents got married. How had he not starved to death?

“I’m calling him.” Arden reached for her phone. “He can’t just forget you have a basketball game today, Roman. That’s not right.”

“Yeah, whatever, but can you call him from the car? I’m going to be late, and then Coach won’t put me in the game. It’s the rule.”

There was a solid chance that Roman’s coach wouldn’t put him in the game anyway, since Roman was about half a foot shorter than any of the other sixth and seventh grade boys on his team, and also he was desperately nearsighted and refused to wear contacts when he played sports because he was scared of touching his eyeballs.