In the end, my fantasy of breaking up with Chris came half-true: although we indeed broke up, he never went to extreme lengths to win me back—or any lengths, actually. I guess that’s the thing about fantasies: if you’re lucky, they come partway true. And usually only the part that you have control over.
Page 96
I kept reading Tonight the Streets Are Ours. Not every day, but sometimes, when I was up past my bedtime and everything was too quiet, I would look at it, even though I don’t know what I expected to find there. I did it even though there’s something shameful in it, in consciously trying to be fooled again by Peter’s stories, now that I know better.
Shortly after the start of my senior year, Peter posted that his memoir, Tonight the Streets Are Ours, would be released by a major publishing company, one that has published best sellers and award winners. The post in which he announced this accumulated more comments than anything else he’d ever written in his journal. It seemed as if every girl on the Internet visited Tonight the Streets Are Ours just to express her personal excitement.
Not too long after that, Peter removed every last post and replaced them with a single message saying, My debut book will be coming out next year—click here to preorder your copy! And I clicked there. And I preordered my copy.
The disappearance of Tonight the Streets Are Ours left me with an odd sense of loss. I’d believed that maybe I had some impact on Peter’s actions, even though he didn’t act like it at the time. I’d hoped maybe he would think it over and realize that I was right: this book was exploitative of Leo and Bianca, the people he claimed to love, and it was wrong to publish it.
But really I think I had no impact on Peter. Our time together was just one in a string of nights, and when your life brings you luxury and adventure every day, one more adventure makes no difference to you. And if you do not write it down—as I asked him not to—then, once enough time passes, it will be as if that night never happened at all.
When I graduated from high school, I went to a good college in a small, quiet town about two hours north of New York City. I got in partially thanks to Lindsey, who voluntarily went to Mr. Vanderpool and took responsibility for the marijuana in my locker, striking it from my transcript; and thanks to Mr. Lansdowne, who wrote an absurdly complimentary letter of recommendation on my behalf.
By the time Peter’s book finally came out, I was in my second year at college. I got my copy and sat with it under a tree in the quad, and I started to read. Reading Peter’s words again felt like reuniting with an old friend. But I was surprised to see that the book was written and branded as a novel, not a memoir. Fiction, not reality. All the characters’ names had been changed: Bianca’s not called Bianca, and even the protagonist wasn’t named Peter. Leo was split into two characters: the main character’s inexplicably missing big brother, and Bianca’s undeserving boyfriend—no relation.
I wondered if Bianca somehow convinced Peter not to use real names or brand this story as nonfiction. I wondered if perhaps his literary agent or publishing company found out the truth about Peter’s stories. I wondered whose choice this was and whether I had any impact on it. I still don’t know these answers.
Despite what he said in the garden near my mom’s apartment that day, Peter did no book tour, and as much as I scoured the Internet, I found very little discussion about his novel: a handful of middling reviews, a couple of interviews with him on poorly trafficked blogs. Maybe if the book were presented as nonfiction, then people would have cared, in the way that I had cared. Maybe it’s only in fiction that Peter’s story seems—as Kirkus Reviews put it—“self-congratulatory, navel-gazing, and aimless. ” His book was published to a nearly universal lack of interest and then it disappeared, leaving behind almost no trace, like a rock sinking to the bottom of a very deep pond, or a single individual living high up in some big building in some very big city.
My friends and I visit New York City periodically to go to shows and museums, always by train or bus—I never try to drive the Heart of Gold as far as I did that time. My mom is no longer there; she moved home eventually, and she and my father are working things out, or trying to, anyway. Roman reports that Mom lets him eat school lunches now, even though they’re less nutritious, and Dad hasn’t missed one of his games yet this year, even though he is once again on a last-place team. Whenever I go to New York, I walk around outside, I ride the subways, and I look at the face of every person I pass, because any one of them could be Peter or Bianca. But none of them ever has been. As Peter himself once wrote: there are a million different New Yorks, all layered on top of one another yet never intersecting.
After successfully graduating from high school, Lindsey got an internship at an organic farm in Pennsylvania. As so often happens with her, Lindsey forgot all about her New York City dream. She did at last learn to drive—not just a car, but a tractor, too. And Jamie did break Lindsey’s heart, and it was indeed sad, but now Lindsey is madly in love with a stable hand at her farm, and Jamie and her stupid nose ring are just distant memories.
Page 97
I miss Lindsey every day. We don’t always make time to talk, we don’t have the same friends, and when Lindsey needs saving—which she has many times, and certainly will again—I’m not there to catch her. But when we do find each other, at home in Cumberland on holidays, or on the phone in those rare moments when Lindsey is resting and I’m awake, it’s as if nothing between us has changed.
I used to think that loving somebody meant sacrificing anything for them. I thought it meant writing a blank check. I thought it meant that you would die without each other. But it turns out that Peter was right about that, too: death and a broken heart are not the same.
These days I think that love is not so dramatic as all that. Maybe loving somebody means simply they bring out the best in you, and you bring out the best in them—so that together, you are always the best possible versions of yourselves.
You were promised a love story. And this is mine.
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