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.
But Arden did not say this. She just threw on the jeans and sweatshirt closest to her bed and headed downstairs.
Roman had already gone down to the kitchen and was eating brown sugar straight out of the bag. Arden took it away from him. “One, that’s disgusting. Two, are you an animal? Three, it’s like eight in the morning.” She stuck the bag on the uppermost shelf in the cabinet, which Roman would not be able to reach unless he climbed onto the counter, which he definitely would later.
“I need fuel,” Roman explained. “For my game. Coach says it’s important to eat an energizing breakfast before playing.”
They stepped outside, and Roman ran down the driveway to Arden’s car. March was still going through its “in like a lion” phase, and he was only wearing shorts. She should have made him put on a coat. Why did it never occur to children to dress for the weather?
“It’s locked,” he hollered at her.
She patted her pocket for her car key, then realized that she must have left it in her school locker. This was not the first time she’d forgotten her key—which was why she had Lindsey hold on to an extra copy for her.
“Wait here for a sec,” she told Roman.
“I’m gonna be late!” Roman protested, hopping in place to warm himself against the cold.
Arden ignored him and jogged through the woods between her house and Lindsey’s. The woods seemed smaller these days than they had when she first discovered Lindsey there. They were much smaller than they were described in the Arden books. No one from the Just Like Me Dolls Company had actually shown up in person to scope out the size of the woods where the drama went down. They just wrote the story.
Arden knocked on Lindsey’s back door. Knocking was a stupid rule that Mr. and Mrs. Matson enforced, even though Arden and Lindsey had been constantly in and out of each other’s houses for half of their lives. All things being equal, Arden’s parents had way more reason to be suspicious of Lindsey than Lind
sey’s parents had to be suspicious of Arden. Short of that one supposed pot-ownership incident, Arden was a rule-abiding, hand-raising, crosswalk-obeying, absolute golden child, and Lindsey was … well, Lindsey.
Arden’s father thought Lindsey was a troublemaker, which was true from an adult perspective, but irrelevant to how good a friend or person she was. He thought she was unambitious, which was decidedly not true; it’s just that her ambitions were not the sort that Arden’s father cared about. And though he would never come out and say this, and would deny it to the death if Arden had asked him point-blank, he didn’t like that Lindsey was gay. Whenever he was around and Lindsey was over, he would watch her like a hawk, as if concerned that she was going to suddenly try to stick her tongue in his daughter’s mouth.
But at least Arden’s parents had never given a damn whether or not Lindsey knocked on their door before she came in.
“Hello!” Mrs. Matson called from the kitchen.
Arden took this as her permission to enter. All three Matsons were sitting at the kitchen table, eating oatmeal. Lindsey perked up considerably when she saw Arden. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “It’s like the middle of the night for you.”
“Roman needed a ride to basketball.” Arden chose not to mention the bit where their father had forgotten about his son’s game, because that was just guaranteeing that Lindsey’s parents would gossip about and judge her dad as soon as she left the room. They didn’t understand that ever since Arden’s mom had left, her father was suffering, he was alone, he was lost, and he was focusing all his attention on the one part of his life where he felt like he was in control.
“Want to come to the game with me?” Arden asked Lindsey. If Lindsey came, then maybe this youth sports game would not be as tremendously boring as it was shaping up to be.
“Sorry, Arden, we have church this morning,” said Mr. Matson.
“It’s Sunday,” Mrs. Matson added, her tone implying that the equivalence of Sunday and church should be obvious to anyone who wasn’t a complete heathen.
Arden’s family had never been particularly religious. According to Lindsey, her parents used to be the same—until Mr. Matson got sick, a decade ago. To Arden this seemed backward. Wouldn’t it be more logical to believe in God until you got cancer? But as far as Lindsey’s dad was concerned, it was his newfound faith that had helped him pull through, and he’d been cancer-free for seven years now.
“I can stop by afterward,” Lindsey volunteered. “The game’s at Roman’s school, right? How long will it go for?”
“Like a hundred hours,” Arden guessed.
“Cool. See you there. Go team. Wait, what’s his team’s name again?”
“The Parakeets.” Arden shrugged.
“Go Parakeets. Tweet, tweet, tweet.”
“Can I borrow my car key?” Arden asked.
“Sure.” Lindsey ran upstairs to get it, her feet pounding the steps. Her parents watched this transaction with baffled expressions. There was a lot about having Lindsey as their daughter that they did not seem to understand.
Arden grabbed her key and headed back to the car. She unlocked the door for her shivering brother. “My muscles are going to seize up,” he told her once he was buckled in and the car was on. “Can’t you turn up the heat?”
“The heater’s working as hard as it can, kiddo. If you’re not satisfied, you are totally welcome to get out and walk,” Arden said, driving down their quiet street.
Roman considered this and said nothing more on the matter.
Arden watched early-morning Cumberland pass by her windshield. It was a quaint little city with lots of history, old houses that sold for cheap, and attractive church steeples that dotted the hillside. In the 1700s a vaguely important fort had been here, and in the 1800s Cumberland was a shipping junction and home to industry, facts which brought the city great pride and were commemorated by many plaques around town.
But if you were on a tour to see the Important Sites of Cumberland—a tour that every middle school student in the town had done, and almost nobody else—you would quickly realize that Cumberland’s most vibrant years were well behind it. Maybe that’s part of what attracted Arden’s parents here in the first place, that it seemed uneventful. Eighteen years ago, they’d bought a pretty brick house and two gently used cars, and Arden’s mom planted a garden out front, and it seemed like the perfect place to raise a family.
Now the garden was dead and straggly, and her mother’s car was gone, replaced by Arden’s junkyard heap. And it shouldn’t be like this, and her dad should be home and her mom should be home and Peter’s brother should be home as well, and everything seemed off-kilter.
As she drove through the empty morning streets, Arden pulled out her phone and called her father.
“Mom says you’re not supposed to talk on the phone while you drive,” Roman contributed.
“Mom isn’t here,” Arden said. And that shut him up.
“Arden?” her father answered. “What are you doing awake, honey?”
Arden wondered if everyone she knew secretly had received some sort of Arden Handbook, containing key Arden Facts, like “Arden does not like to wake up early.” Or maybe she was just really, really predictable.
“Roman has a basketball game today, Dad,” she said. “You were supposed to drive him.”
“No, I had that on my calendar. His game is on the fourteenth.”
“Today is the fourteenth.”
Her father paused, and she could picture him in his ergonomic desk chair that she used to spin around on when she was a kid, looking through his calendar on his computer. “Dammit,” he said. “I totally screwed up. I’m so sorry, honey. I got my days completely confused. I feel terrible.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m coming over right now. I’ll pick him up now.” She could hear him shuffling around.
“We’re already in the car,” she said. “I’ll get him there.”
Her father was silent for another moment, and when he spoke, his voice was low. “You’re a really good kid, Arden, do you know that? I hope I tell you that enough.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dad.” It wasn’t really his fault that she was in a car driving to a children’s sports game in what was basically the middle of the night. He was just doing the best he could with the situation he was given.
“I love you, honey. I’m sorry it’s such a hard time right now. Things will get better. I know they will.”
And she wanted him to be right, if only so he didn’t have to be so sad.
“It’s okay,” Roman said once she’d hung up, “because maybe Mom will be there.”
Arden felt her muscles tighten. “What makes you think Mom will be there?”
“Because I invited her.”
“What? When?”
“When I talked to her on Friday.”
Arden had artfully dodged that call, as she had so many others in the past seven weeks. She heard Roman’s and her dad’s ends of these conversations, though. She couldn’t help but overhear them pretending like everything was great at home, promising a repaired kitchen sink and an A+ science project and recordings of all Mom’s favorite TV shows, as if any of those things would be worth returning for. Arden couldn’t miss her father’s and brother’s desperate voices going on and on about what a blast they were having, what a delight it was to live here in this house with this family, and asking again and again, Will you come home now? Will you come home now please?
Arden didn’t want any part in these negotiations. They made her sick. What she knew was that you couldn’t force somebody to love you, you couldn’t convince them to feel something they didn’t feel, no amount of begging would work. All you could do was try, try to make yourself into somebody worth loving.
“Did Mom say she would come to your game?” Arden asked Roman.
“Not exactly…”
“What exactly did she say?”
“She said it was too soon,” Roman mumb
led.
“Too soon for what?”
“I don’t know. Just that it was too soon.” He stared out the window for a moment, then sat up straighter. “But I think she was just saying that. I told her my team is doing really good this year. I told her I was the point guard and if she came I’d score a basket just for her.”
Arden didn’t know anything about basketball, but she highly doubted that her brother’s role on the team was anything so important-sounding as “point guard,” and she was confident that he would not be scoring any baskets today, regardless of who was in the stands.
She hated this. The bargaining, the gambling, the promises. It was the same thing her father was trying to do by working seventy hours a week. You should come back because I am so successful. You should come back because I’m so good at basketball. Come back come back come back.
It was a stupid game and Arden wasn’t going to play it.
“She’s not going to come, Roman,” Arden said. “She’s three hundred miles away. She’d have to wake up at like four a.m. to make it there on time.”
He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Maybe she’s going to surprise me.”
“It’s not a surprise if you think it’s going to happen. She’s not coming.”
Roman was the last kid to arrive at the gym, but he still made it there two minutes before Coach’s cutoff, so good enough. The Parakeets were playing the Wolverines, which seemed like a recipe for a bloodbath. Arden settled into the bleachers with the parents and tried to fall back asleep. But these bleachers seemed to be torture devices designed to keep the people sitting on them awake. So Arden pulled out her phone and returned to Tonight the Streets Are Ours.
Yesterday she’d read further through Peter’s posts from last summer. He joked about the bookstore. He occasionally went to the Hamptons with his family. The Hamptons were a rich-person beach vacation area, so, as Peter put it, “Obviously my parents have to have a house there.” He went to parties—countless parties, with countless friends whose names Arden could never keep track of, and often couldn’t even tell if they were guys or girls.