Tonight the Streets Are Ours (28 page)

“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 hallway. 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 as 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.

“Is Peter still in his room?” the dad asks. Like his wife, Peter’s father has a foreign accent—Chinese, Arden thinks, though she hasn’t known enough people born in China to be certain.

Bianca shakes her head. “He must have gone out somewhere.”

Peter’s dad sighs impatiently and says to his wife, “Mei, can you call him? He is supposed to be here. Tell him that he can’t just run off to do whatever he wants whenever he wants.”

This is exactly the sort of thing Arden would expect Peter’s father to say: ordering people around, pooh-poohing Peter’s activities. She looks away so she won’t glare at him, glaring instead at the wall decoration hanging in the kitchen next to her: an ornately framed certificate heralding Peter K. Lau as the winner of a Scholastic Writing Award, three years ago.

“We have an appointment shortly,” Peter’s mother explains to the girls apologetically, picking up a phone. “We just want to be sure that Peter doesn’t miss it.”

She takes the phone into the other room to call him, and now the boy at the table speaks. He stares straight at Bianca and says, “Is it true that you two broke up?” His voice is higher than Arden would expect from someone with his build. It sounds funny coming out of him, but Arden does not feel like laughing, because there is something weird going on in Peter’s home.

Bianca’s cheeks turn pink, but she lifts her chin and says to the boy, “Yes.”

“Well.” He nods slowly. “I’m sorry, I guess. I hope you’re doing okay.”

“Thank you,” she says softly. “I didn’t know you were going to be here today. I thought you’d be up at Cornell.”

Arden knows exactly who is supposed to be at Cornell. But this can’t be him, because that doesn’t make any sense.

“I came home for the weekend,” he explains. “We have family therapy.”

“Son,”
his dad says in a warning tone.

And everything feels shaky, like the floor is tilting right under her, and there’s a buzzing in Arden’s ears, because none of this makes sense, none of this makes any sense at all.

“It’s okay if Bianca knows that we’re in therapy, Dad,” he says. “It’s not a big, shameful secret. And I don’t think she’s judging us.”

“I’m not judging you,” Bianca confirms, her voice hoarse.

“Every family has its issues,” the dad explains to the girls, as if they really
are
judges and to them he must provide a defense. “They’re unavoidable. You just have to work together to get through them.”

Arden and Bianca nod silently, their heads bobbing like birds on a wire.

“Now, may I offer you anything for lunch? Some fruit, perhaps?”

Arden prays with all her heart that Bianca will refuse, and fortunately, she does. “Thanks, but we already have lunch plans,” Bianca says, staring at the boy. “It was good to see you, though.”

“It was good to see you, too, Bianca,” the boy says, and he returns to his food.

“If you hear from Peter,” the dad says, “please remind him that we need him home.”

“Of course,” Bianca says, and she leads the way to the elevator.

As soon as they get in and the doors close, Bianca slumps against the elevator wall and lets out a long breath.

Arden knows the answer—how could she not?—but it’s so unbelievable that she needs to ask, and she needs to hear Bianca say it. “That guy,” she says. “The one sitting with Peter’s parents.” She rubs her temples. “Who is he?”

Bianca blinks up at her. “Oh, sorry, I should have introduced you. That’s Leo.”

“Leo?” Arden repeats, because that
isn’t
the answer she’d expected, not at all. What the hell is Bianca’s ex-boyfriend doing here?

“Yes, Leo,” Bianca says. “Peter’s brother.”

Brunch with Bianca

“My treat,” Bianca says once they’re seated at the caf
é
a few blocks from Peter’s apartment. “The least I can do to make up for yelling at you is feed you.”

Arden agrees. When the waitress comes over, she orders a strawberry banana smoothie, whole grain toast, hash browns, scrambled eggs, and a croissant. The past twenty-four hours have caught up to her, and she is, suddenly, ravenous.

She expects Bianca-the-angel to be one of those girls who subsists off of watermelon and Diet Coke, so she’s surprised when Bianca orders a burger and tears into it with decidedly non-angelic vigor.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Arden says.

“What do you mean?”

Where to start. “I thought Peter’s brother ran away.”

“He did. Last fall. It was incredibly scary. It was like he’d disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

“But he’s there right now,” Arden says. “We just saw him.”

“Well, yeah. He came home after a couple months. He came back in plenty of time for his second semester at Cornell.”

“Peter never mentioned that on Tonight the Streets Are Ours.” Arden thinks back, and she realizes that Peter hasn’t explicitly written about the loss of his brother since November, December at the latest. He’s written some fond memories of him, but that’s it.

Still, shouldn’t he have said,
By the way, my brother came home
? Rather than letting readers just assume that he was still missing? She wonders where Leo was all that time, and what finally brought him back.

“Are you kidding? That is so messed up,” Bianca says. “So you thought he was still missing, all these months later?” Arden nods silently, and Bianca shakes her head in disgust. “I’d assumed Peter announced his return on his blog when it happened, and I just missed seeing that particular entry. But yeah. That’s what happened, Arden. I cheated on my boyfriend with his younger brother. And Leo found out. He was devastated. And he ran away.”

It knocks the breath out of Arden. No
wonder
Bianca was acting so weird around Peter’s brother today. Because he is her ex-boyfriend.

And no
wonder
Peter panicked when he heard Leo was coming to Jigsaw Manor last night. Because he didn’t want to be there when Arden put two and two together.

“I can’t believe it,” Arden says—but she
can
believe it. It makes too much sense. She recalls the inscription on Peter’s flask last night.
Leonard Matthew Lau.
The same last name that Bianca used to refer to Peter’s parents. Of course.

The more this sinks in for Arden, the madder she gets. “Peter acted like his brother left for some inexplicable reason. Last night he blamed it on his parents. For months, I’ve felt so sorry for him. But actually it was
his
fault!”

“And my fault,” Bianca volunteers.

Of course, Arden realizes. Bianca betrayed Leo, too.

Bianca goes on. “When Leo left, he e-mailed me and Peter to say that he knew what we had done, and he hoped we’d be happy now that he wasn’t around to stand in our way.”

Arden recalls Peter’s version of this story, on the roof of Jigsaw Manor last night.
He didn’t want to stay with people who would treat him this poorly. He was through with us. He’d never really felt like he belonged in our family, and now he knew for sure that he didn’t.

Bianca pulls her hair out of her face. “My therapist says that there must have been other factors at play—depression, a chemical imbalance, problems fitting in at college, maybe unresolved issues with his adoption. Lots of people have issues with their girlfriends. Lots of people get into fights with their brothers. They don’t all disappear for three months. The vast majority of them get upset and go on. Maybe what Peter and I did was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it can’t have been the only thing at play. So my therapist tells me.”

“So
that’s
why you broke up with Peter right after Leo took off,” Arden realizes. “Because you felt guilty.”

“I couldn’t stand to be around Peter. I couldn’t see him without thinking about what we had done to Leo, and to his whole family. His parents were crazy with worry. I felt terribly guilty.”

“But Peter wanted you to stick around and be his girlfriend?” Arden asks.

“Oh, God, he clung to me. I think he felt like if he and I just stayed together, then there would be a point to Leo’s disappearance and all that misery. It would be ‘worth it’ because it would prove we were ‘meant to be.’” Bianca takes a bite of burger, swallows, then goes on. “He was a wreck the whole fall. Maybe he wrote about this on Tonight the Streets Are Ours, I don’t know, but he went out and got wasted every night of the week. Mostly alcohol, but, I mean, he’d do whatever he could get his hands on.”

Arden thinks about Peter’s autumn-time posts, all the parties he flitted around, all the girls he supposedly made out with. Those things probably did happen. He just didn’t mention that he was trashed for all of it.

“How did you know all that?” Arden asks. “I thought you didn’t speak to Peter the whole time.”

“I didn’t. I just wanted to separate myself from the whole thing. I just wanted Leo to come
home
. But it’s a small world. We know people in common—friends of Leo’s and mine, mostly. They reported back on what was happening with Peter. They weren’t aware that we’d been sneaking around together. They thought I’d be interested just because he was my boyfriend’s kid brother.”

“But you must have missed Peter.”

“Of course I did. I was wild about him. And it killed me to hear how he was treating himself.”

“So that’s why you went to him on New Year’s Eve?” Arden says.

Bianca sighs. “In hindsight, I can see I shouldn’t have gone back to Peter. But yeah. Leo came home right after Thanksgiving, and he and I finally got to have a proper break-up conversation. I said, ‘I’m sorry I cheated on you, I’m sorry I hurt you, and when there was someone else I wanted to date, I should have just ended things with you.’ It was civil. He’d gotten a lot of perspective on it just from being gone. He’d hitchhiked west, camped out, lived on the street for a while, worked in the kitchen of some sketchy restaurant—anything where he wouldn’t have to touch his parents’ money. And when he was ready, he just pulled out their credit card and bought a plane ticket home. He told me that once he’d seen how hard the world could be, dealing with me and Peter seemed easy.”

“Wow,” Arden says softly.

“So then when Peter pulled that stunt on New Year’s—which was
crazy
-romantic, by the way—I thought, well, maybe our time had come. Leo was safe. I was single. Let’s see where this goes.” Bianca shrugs. “And here’s where it went.”

It’s extraordinary to Arden that this story that has captivated and inspired her for months is just that: a story. Even Peter’s take on his parents was twisted for maximum sympathy. While they seemed uptight, especially when compared to Arden’s own parents, they also seemed like they’re trying to work things out, if they’re going to family therapy together.

She can no longer accept that they don’t even care about Peter’s talent. Not when she’s seen that writing contest certificate so carefully framed, so prominently displayed. Not when she considers that they spend the money to send him to a specialized art school where he can study writing. Shouldn’t that have been a red flag all along? How many other warning signs did Arden miss in pursuit of believing Peter’s fantasy?

Bianca signals the waiter for the check, and Arden feels the time pressure of needing to find out all the truth, now, while she can.