Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“I’ll take notes for you,” whispered Arden’s friend Naomi. Arden smiled her thanks. Naomi’s notes tended to be word-for-word transcripts of teachers’ lectures in stunningly legible purple-penned handwriting.

Arden lifted her bag and followed the runner out of the classroom, through a series of halls, and downstairs. Cumberland was one of those towns where land was at the opposite of a premium. It was in northwestern Maryland, so far west it was almost West Virginia, so far north it was almost Pennsylvania, a solid two-hour drive from the nearest big city (which was Pittsburgh), in a corner of the world that should have been called something like MaryVirgiPenn, but wasn’t. All Cumberland had was land. As a result, the high school was sprawling, mega-mall-sized—and the principal’s office was at the other end of it.

Maybe Arden should have been nervous on that long walk to the principal, but she wasn’t. She suspected this had something to do with her mother, and as such, she flat-out refused to care.

Eventually they reached Vanderpool’s office, and the runner left her under the watchful eye of Mr. Winchell, the principal’s geriatric secretary. Arden waited on a too-small plastic chair that seemed better suited to an elementary school than to Allegany High.

When she thought Mr. Winchell wasn’t watching, Arden slid her cell phone out of her bag and texted Lindsey. GOT CALLED INTO VAN’S OFFICE. WTF.

A minute later, Lindsey texted back. Arden knew that Lindsey should be in Earth Studies right now, so either she was cutting or she was texting in the middle of class, both of which seemed like plausible Lindsey behaviors.

OH SHIT was Lindsey’s reply, and that gave Arden her first inkling that perhaps her best friend knew more than she herself did about why the principal wanted her. But before Arden could ask what, exactly, “oh shit” meant, Mr. Winchell snapped, “No telephones!” in the triumphant fashion of a man who has missed his true calling as a prison warden.

After another ten minutes of waiting, Arden was brought in to see the principal. Mr. Vanderpool was a preposterously tall human—so tall that it was easy not to notice how bald he was unless he was seated—who seemed awkward whenever confronted with actual teenagers rather than school board members or faculty. He rarely wandered the hallways and never showed his face in the cafeteria; his one interaction with the student body as a whole was during assembly, when he would stand on the stage and address them en masse from afar. He had a seemingly endless collection of novelty neckties, which was either the one area of his life where he gave himself permission to entertain whimsy or was his sad attempt at appearing kid-friendly. Arden wasn’t totally sure that Mr. Vanderpool knew who she was, as this was their first proper conversation in her nearly three years at his school.

“Arden Huntley,” he said once she was seated in his office, on the other side of his desk. “Do you want to tell me why you’re here?”

Arden blinked at him. “You called me here, Principal Vanderpool.”

He looked pained. “I am aware of that. Do you want to tell me why I called you here?”

Arden really wished that Lindsey had said something a little more useful than “oh shit.”

“Um, I don’t know,” Arden told the principal.

He cleared his throat and reached into a drawer in his desk. What he pulled out was a small plastic bag filled with some brownish flakes. “Does this look familiar?” he asked Arden.

“No?”

He sighed. “Arden, we found this bag of drugs in your locker today.”

“What were you doing in my locker?” Arden blurted out, even though that was, perhaps, not her most pressing question.

“Routine random locker checks,” Mr. Vanderpool replied. “But what I’d like to know is, what was this”—here he shook the baggie—“doing in your locker?”