“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 café 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 waiter 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 gone? 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 at the time, 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 feelings about 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 girlfrie
nd?” 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.
“Can I just ask you one more question?” Arden says.
Bianca waves her hand as if to say Go for it.
Arden clears her throat and asks what she’s been wondering about ever since she first read this story, weeks and weeks ago. “Why did you do it? Why did you stay with Leo and see Peter on the side? Why not just break up with Leo? Or just not hook up with Peter?”
Bianca looks wrecked. “Knowing what I know now, seeing how it tore their family apart, I wouldn’t do it. Obviously. But at the time … I cared about them both, in very different ways. I’d known Leo for much longer, because we went to school together. We had a lot in common. He was on the football team, and I’m a cheerleader, you know, so we already shared a whole friend group, anyway. And he’s just honestly, truly, nice. The sort of guy who will accompany you to the hair salon, wait around for your whole appointment, and then take you home again, or who will make chicken noodle soup when you’re sick and spoon-feed it to you no matter how germy you are. A sweet person, you know what I mean?
“And then I met Peter, and he … he was different. He wasn’t like anyone else I knew. He was sexy, and romantic, and artistic, and I wanted him. And he wanted me, too, which was … very flattering. I didn’t know if I should give up on somebody who I had this strong relationship with for somebody who seemed appealing from a distance. I didn’t know what to choose. So I just didn’t choose, which turned out to be the stupidest choice of all.”
Arden has always trusted that Bianca and Peter are soul mates, just the way Peter said. But seeing the way Bianca’s face softens when she talks about Leo, she’s not sure anymore.
The waiter brings the check, and Arden senses that wherever Bianca is going from here, it does not include her. Which is rational, of course. They are not friends. Bianca knows nothing about her. And, as it turns out, she doesn’t know very much about Bianca, either.
Bianca puts some cash on the table and stands up. The conversation is over.
“Thanks for brunch,” Arden says.
“Thanks for listening to me,” says Bianca.
And they go their separate ways.
Going home for the first time
Arden walks slowly down a crowded street, trying to figure out what to do from here. She is surrounded by more people than she’d find at an Allegany High sporting event, yet she is completely, irrevocably alone. Bianca has gone, she doesn’t ever want to see Peter again, her phone is dead, her car is dead, and for all she knows, Lindsey is dead, too. She feels so lost.
When Arden was a little girl, her mother instructed her that if they ever got separated—in the supermarket or at a fair—she should tell an official but otherwise just sit there and wait, because her mother would come find her.
Arden doesn’t think that this plan would work now that she’s seventeen and lost in New York City. And anyway, she’s done enough sitting and waiting to last her a lifetime. So she does something that she had vowed never to do. She stops walking, sticks out her arm—just like she saw Peter do at five o’clock this morning—and hails a taxi.
“Where you going?” the driver asks.
“One thirty-three Eldridge Street,” she tells him.
The whole ride there, Arden feels like she’s going to throw up—and not just because of the way the cabbie swerves back and forth across lanes of traffic and whips through yellow lights right when it seems he ought to be slowing down.
The driver drops her off at the address she gave him. It’s a five-story building with a bodega on the first floor, and unlike at Peter’s, there’s no doorman, just eight buzzers. One of them is labeled HUNTLEY, and suddenly this all feels too real.
Arden has never envisioned her mother living anywhere in particular in New York City. When she thought about her mom’s life now—which she tried really, really hard not to do—she pictured it taking place mostly in a vacuum, or maybe in the high-rise hotel where they’d stayed on their Just Like Me Doll trip.
But this is it. This is a plain brick building on a busy street with a fire escape outside the windows and her own last name on the buzzer.
Arden presses the button, and a moment later she hears her mother’s voice through the intercom. “Hello?”
“Mommy?” Arden says, the word coming out squeaky, as though through disuse. “It’s me.”
A long minute passes. Then Arden hears the slap-slap-slap of feet running down stairs, and her mother opens the door. And she looks exactly the same as she did the day she left, with the same pointy nose, hazel eyes, and brown hair as Arden’s own.
“Arden,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” Arden says. “I don’t know what I??
?m doing here.” And she starts to cry. Her mother holds out her arms, and Arden falls into them. “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” she blubbers into her mother’s shoulder.
Her mother rubs her back and holds her close. “I think we need pancakes,” she says after a while. “Can I make you some pancakes?”
And even though she just ate her weight in eggs and hash browns, Arden nods. “Yes,” she tells her mother. “Pancakes sound perfect.”
Arden finds out what love isn’t
“Did Dad tell you I was missing?” Arden asks once she’s settled on her mother’s couch, sipping a glass of juice, her phone plugged into a charger. She keeps staring at her mother. Three months is a long time.
“No.” Her mother stands at the counter, spooning pancake batter onto a frying pan. Her apartment is small. Much smaller than Peter’s, which had felt almost like a house—albeit a one-story house. It’s not hard for Arden and her mother to carry on a conversation even though one of them is technically in the kitchen and one is technically in the living room. “Are you missing?” her mother asks.
“Well, I haven’t spoken to Dad in more than twenty-four hours, so as far as he’s concerned, yes.”
Her mother checks her phone to make sure, then says, “He didn’t say anything to me.”
There’s a sour taste in Arden’s throat. “I guess he didn’t notice.” What does she have to do to get him to pay attention?
“I’m sure he noticed,” her mother says. She flips a pancake, and the batter sizzles and crackles. “I would guess that he didn’t tell me because he doesn’t want me to know that he lost you. But you need to call him, Arden. He’s got to be worried.”
Arden isn’t sure she believes this. “He’s not very good at taking care of us,” she says.
“He’s learning,” her mother says.
“I don’t want to call Dad,” Arden says. She feels her eyes fill with tears again and all she can manage to say through the tightness of her throat is, “I just want you to come home.”