“I can’t believe you, Arden!” her dad yelled, slamming his palm down on the desk. “You really didn’t think this one through, kid. ”
He was right. She really hadn’t. It’s for Lindsey, it’s for Lindsey, she reminded herself, knotting her fingers together in her lap. Her permanent record could take it, probably. Lindsey was going to have a hard enough time getting into college even without this mark against her. Her father could deal with it, probably. Lindsey’s parents would have most likely sent her to military school. It’s for Lindsey, it’s for Lindsey.
Arden had just never imagined that when she threw Lindsey a life jacket, she would be drowning herself.
Arden and Lindsey see how the other half lives
“She called again today,” Arden told Lindsey. She meant Arden’s mom. Lindsey, of course, knew this without it being spelled out.
It was ten o’clock on a Friday night, two weeks after the baggie of pot had been found in Arden’s locker, and now she and Lindsey were sitting on a futon in Matt Washington’s family room, watching an assortment of boys playing Grand Theft Auto.
Arden’s suspension had come and gone. After watching every Internet video that looked like it might be interesting, reading two books, and painting her toenails in rainbow stripes, she had spent her remaining prison sentence cleaning the house, which seemed not to have been swept, mopped, vacuumed, dusted, or treated in any other positive way since her mother left. When Roman and her dad came home, she expected them to laud her cleaning skills. She had literally gotten on her knees on the floor and scrubbed a toilet. She was essentially a scullery maid. But they did not seem to notice, or, if they did, they kept their noticing very well concealed. And by bedtime, someone had left pee on the toilet seat again.
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She had expected her father to have a stronger reaction to her suspension. She’d thought that he might stay home from work for those three days, monitoring her in person to make sure she wasn’t running off with her pothead friends or whatever. She’d thought that he might try to talk to her about what issues were plaguing her that might drive her to drugs, that he’d force her into therapy or Narcotics Anonymous. She’d been prepared for all kinds of overreaction, but instead all her dad did was yell at her for a while, search her room for a hidden drug stash, and then pay their neighbor to stop by the house randomly throughout the day to make sure Arden was still there.
Now she felt ridiculous for thinking that she might get anything more out of her father, for thinking that he’d be so easily derailed. She’d even thought her mother might come home to deal with her. That was silly.
Arden had returned to school, where she’d missed basically nothing in her classes—except for Spanish, which seemed to have morphed into an entirely different language in those three days. But her brief suspension had not gone unnoticed, and now gossip was swirling around school that Arden Huntley was actually, under her demure exterior, a badass drug dealer. That rumor was what had led to this unusual party invitation for her and Lindsey.
Actually, the invitation had just been for Arden. Lindsey rarely got invited anywhere on her own. But where Arden went, Lindsey went, too, an arrangement that everyone seemed to accept without question.
In a different world—a world where Arden’s mother was around—there was no way Arden would have been allowed out of the house tonight. Not when she’d been suspended from school two weeks ago. She’d be stuck at home, playing cards or engaging in other family-friendly activities, where her mom could keep an eye on her. But left to his own devices, that was not her father’s style. Left to his own devices, Arden’s father may or may not have even noticed that she’d gone out tonight.
“I am so wasted!” shrieked Beth Page in delight as she crashed into an unforeseen coffee table.
Arden and Lindsey exchanged a glance. They did not usually go to parties where people were so wasted. They did not usually go to parties with Beth Page.
“So did you talk to your mom when she called this time?” Lindsey asked.
“Barely. ”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘I’m sure you want an explanation for why I left. ’”
“And what was her explanation?”
“I don’t know. I just told her I wasn’t actually curious to hear it, and I gave the phone back to Roman. ”
“And that was it. ”
“Yeah. ” Arden gulped some cranberry juice from her plastic cup. “It’s fine. My dad and Roman talked to her. They told her I’m a drug addict. She told them she’s subletting an apartment in New York City. We don’t need to speak directly to cover any of that. ”
“New York? Whoa. ” Arden watched Lindsey process the three hundred eleven miles between Cumberland, Maryland, and New York City. Arden knew it was three hundred eleven miles because when her father had given her her mother’s address—133 Eldridge Street, New York, New York—written down on a slip of paper, as if she might want to tack it to her bulletin board or something—she’d looked it up.
As far as she was concerned, when your mother walked out of your life and moved three hundred eleven miles away, you owed her nothing. Not a phone conversation, not an e-mail, not even a spare thought. For Roman to act otherwise was foolhardy. It was self-destructive. It was ignoring the mom that they had for the mom that they wished she would be.
“I swear,” Arden went on, “my brother is like an excitable dog. His neglectful owner walks back through the door and he jumps all over her and drools. ”
The Huntley family used to have an actual dog, too, until about three weeks after their mother left, at which point Spot died. Roman didn’t seem to have figured out that their father had taken their needy old dalmatian to the vet and had him put down because it was too hard to take care of him without Mom there. “Two kids and a cat is quite enough,” her dad calmly told her when she confronted him about it. Now they were left with elderly, emaciated Mouser, who quaked with fear whenever anyone went near her—particularly Mr. Huntley.
Arden wasn’t telling Roman that their father was the one who issued the death sentence for their Spot, lest he worry that he was next in line. The argument could be made that no pets or kids would be quite enough for someone like their father.
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“It’s just so weird,” Lindsey reflected, “because I always really liked your mom. Remember when she used to drive us to school?”
Arden did remember. In sixth and seventh grades, kids on their school bus—some of the same kids who were here at this party tonight, in fact—kept teasing Lindsey. They made fun of her for unexciting, stupid middle school reasons—because she was too tall and gangly, because she didn’t know what to wear and didn’t seem to realize she was supposed to care. Lindsey was upset, but Arden was miserable: the character of her best friend was under attack, and she felt powerless to protect her.
Arden poured out her heart to her mother, who decided that from then on, she would drive the girls to school. Simple. This didn’t mean that all of their classmates suddenly treated Lindsey with respect, but it did mean that she didn’t have to start every morning with soda cans getting accidentally-on-purpose spilled on her.
That was just how Arden’s mother was. She came to the rescue. If Arden was having a problem with a teacher, she solved it. If Roman had a nightmare, she’d curl up in bed right next to him and stay there until morning. If Arden forgot her homework, she would drive it into school for her in the middle of the day. If Roman was trick-or-treating, she handmade him three options for Halloween costumes and let him pick among them. If Arden was having a birthday party, she decorated the entire house. If Roman was doing a book report, she read the book right alongside him and helped him collect materials so that, while his classmates were handing in one-sheet essays, he was handing in a diorama with moving parts.
Arden understood what Lindsey was saying, because she had also liked her mother, at the time.
>
She couldn’t imagine her mother now, renting an apartment in a big city, apparently taking some graduate-level class at an extension school, as her dad had reported. Even though she knew, rationally, that her mom would look the same today as she had six weeks ago, Arden would not have been altogether surprised to discover that her mother had gotten a face transplant. She just didn’t sound like the same person at all—she sounded like a stranger.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Arden said to Lindsey. “We’re at a cool high school party, for once. Let’s just be cool high schoolers, you know?”
Lindsey snickered and nodded. They both watched as Dillon Rammstein lit up a joint and Matt Washington shouted at him to “Take that shit outside, man. ” Dillon shoved past the girls’ couch to go onto the patio. It was reassuring to know that Matt was such a conscientious host.
“Arden, I love you for not ratting me out to Vanderpool,” Lindsey said as they watched Dillon go. “You are the most amazing friend, you know that, right?”
Arden had not told Lindsey how severe the punishment for that decision had actually wound up being, and she was never going to. Of course Lindsey knew that Arden had been suspended for three days—it seemed like every single person in Cumberland knew that. But Lindsey didn’t need to know that all of this would be reported to colleges in the fall. What’s done was done, and it would only make her feel guilty.
“It’s fine,” Arden told Lindsey now. “It was weeks ago. Just promise me you will never, ever touch any kind of drugs again. At least not until we’re in college. Okay?”
“Promise,” Lindsey said instantly. “I am officially scared straight. You don’t have to worry about me anymore. ”
Arden half smiled. She would always worry about Lindsey.
A couple feet away from them, Beth Page and Bo Yang fell into a slobbery kiss. Arden watched Bo dribble spit on Beth’s chin as she might watch a nature documentary. Arden sighed. “I wish I had that. ”
“Which part?” Lindsey asked. “A second-string soccer player’s hand on your ass, a terrible dye job, or the STD they’re currently swapping?”
Arden giggled. “A boyfriend who wanted to come to this party and make out with me. That part. ”
“At least you have a boyfriend, though,” Lindsey pointed out.
“Yeah. And where is he?”
“I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question. Because it’s Friday night. So I’m going to put money on Chris being at Kirsten’s house, playing some elaborate game of charades right as we speak. ”
Lindsey was correct. That was what Chris and the rest of the theater crowd did pretty much every Friday night after rehearsal. It was what Arden and Lindsey did most Friday nights, as well, except for the occasions when they hung out with Lindsey’s track teammates, who went to bed around the time the sun set so they could get up and go for ten-mile jogs the next morning.
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This was a different crowd, here at Matt Washington’s house. Nobody seemed particularly interested in playing charades, or any game that didn’t involve killing computer-generated prostitutes. And nobody had gone to bed yet.
At rehearsal yesterday afternoon, Arden had tried to get Chris to come with her to this party. “Why would I want to do that?” he’d asked. “I don’t even like Matt Washington. ”
“Because you could study him in his natural habitat,” Arden had suggested. “And then someday if you play a character like Matt, you’d know him inside out. ”
“Did you just call him Matt?” Chris asked. “Are you now on a first-name basis with Matt Washington, just because he invited you to one party?”
“Jealous?” Arden asked.
Chris hadn’t graced that with a response. Her boyfriend had his good qualities and his bad qualities, and the fact that he never got jealous of anything she did or any boy she knew fell somewhere in between the two.
“You should go because I’m going,” Arden said, which seemed like it should be reason enough. Wasn’t that the point of being in a relationship? Having someone to hang out with on Friday night? “I bet we could have some alone time there,” Arden had added. She kissed him, trying to hint that “alone time” could involve more things that were similar to kissing. Supposedly boys were very horny and were more likely to do things when those things might involve making out.
Arden’s boyfriend, however, seemed to be the exception to that rule. Maybe because he had already made out with her enough times and had gotten bored of it.
“Why do you even want to go, anyway? Since when are you friends with that group?”
Arden didn’t have a particularly good answer for him. She was just curious, she guessed. Curious about what life was like outside of the bubble of her and Chris’s theater friends, who were all the sort of kids who participated in class and went home in time for their eleven o’clock curfews. There was a whole other high school world that was coexisting with her own, and it seemed like that world should be thrilling and vibrant—the exact opposite of her high school world in every way.
Plus, didn’t everybody want to go to cool kids’ parties? Wasn’t that just a generally understood rule of adolescence?
“I’ll think about it,” Chris had said. That was how they’d left it.
Now, Arden took a Cool Ranch Dorito from a giant wooden bowl, pulled out her phone, and texted him. UR FAVORITE CHIPS R HERE. U COMING?
He did not text back immediately. Maybe a particularly rousing round of improvisational comedy was going down.
Lindsey stood up from the couch. “I just saw Denise go into the kitchen. I’m going to go get a drink and say hi or whatever while I’m in there. ”
Arden stood, too. “Want me to wingman you?”
Arden and Lindsey had spent a lot of time debating whether Denise was a hundred percent straight or possibly bisexual, and, if the latter, whether Lindsey should ask her out or no. Denise’s mere choice to attend this party pointed to “likes guys” with a high degree of certainty; however, Arden reminded herself, everybody could have a different reason for being here tonight.
“I’ll be okay,” Lindsey said.
Arden just looked at her.
“I’m going to be like twenty feet away from you. What kind of trouble could I possibly get into? Chill. ”
Lindsey squared her shoulders and went off to casually brush shoulders with her crush. Arden headed outside to the empty patio so she wouldn’t just be sitting on the couch looking obviously alone, which was pathetic.
Arden stood with her back to Matt’s house and looked out over the landscape, the two-story houses and two-car garages eventually giving way to mountains in the distance. The trees were barren, the stars stark against the sky. Arden checked her phone for a response from Chris. Nothing.
This shouldn’t make her feel so sad. She didn’t have to spend every weekend night with Chris. So he was busy. So what? She was busy, too. And anyway, she wasn’t alone. She was here with Lindsey.
When they were in elementary school, Lindsey and Arden liked to imagine that they would live together when they got older. They planned to buy a house someday. Maybe they would run a bakery out of their shared kitchen. Maybe they would live on a farm, like Lindsey’s family used to, and she would feed the chickens while Arden tended to the zebras. (Their imaginary farm obviously had zebras. ) Maybe they would adopt some children. Maybe they would marry identical twins and the four of them would live in one big mansion together. One time Lindsey suggested that she and her twin husband could get a separate house, across the street from Arden and her twin husband, and Arden was like, “I don’t see why that would be necessary. ”
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Arden didn’t know if it made her an idiot or a romantic that this all still sounded like a good idea. Okay, not the twin boys thing because Lindsey was gay, but she’d be down to co-marry a set of fraternal twins.
Misfortune followed Lindsey, and so Arden
did, too. In the nearly eight years of their friendship, Lindsey had suffered through her father’s battle with cancer, her grandpa’s death, getting arrested for shoplifting, getting caught plagiarizing an essay, failing her driver’s test, losing her mother’s engagement ring—and that was only scratching the surface. Lindsey was dyslexic and so teachers assumed she was just stupid, she was gay in a town whose primary understanding of lesbians came from occasionally watching Ellen DeGeneres, and she had parents who fundamentally believed that both dyslexia and homosexuality were just bad choices that Lindsey had made, probably to piss them off.
Until a month and a half ago, when her own family had so spectacularly collapsed, Arden had led a stable life, compared to Lindsey. Sometimes she’d wondered how she would handle it, if she could handle it, if she had Lindsey’s same bad luck. Maybe if she faced Lindsey’s same problems, she’d make Lindsey’s same mistakes.
“Hey, Arden. ”
She turned at the sound of her name. A guy was standing there. Ellzey. Okay, his last name was Ellzey, but that’s what everybody called him, even the teachers. Arden’s heart quickened as she wondered why he had stepped outside right now when the whole party was indoors, if he’d seen her out here, if he’d been looking for her. For a brief moment, she let herself imagine kissing Ellzey, out here under the stars. She imagined him as a prince in a fairy tale, coming to save her.
Then she kicked the thought away. She was taken. Girls who are taken shouldn’t fantasize about kissing boys they barely know on Matt Washington’s patio.
“Hey, Ellzey,” she said. “What’s up?” She wondered if he was going to mention the last time they had spoken—one of the only other times they had spoken—and hoped fervently that he was not. It had been an ignoble experience. She felt very glad that Lindsey was missing this conversation now. There was no way Lindsey would have been able to keep a straight face if she’d seen Ellzey talking to Arden.
“Beautiful night, huh?” he said, coming to stand next to her. Even though he didn’t touch her, she felt the warmth of his skin from his arm next to hers. “So many stars,” he went on.
Arden was impressed. She couldn’t help but compare Ellzey to her boyfriend, who had never commented on the number of stars. Unless it was the number of Hollywood stars in a particular movie or something. Arden said to Ellzey, “My dad used to keep a telescope on our roof when I was a kid. He wanted us to learn facts about astronomy, I think, like to identify different constellations. I could never find anything other than the Big Dipper. But I loved looking at the stars. ” This was, hands down, the most sentences in a row Arden had ever spoken to Ellzey.