You may have a DIY venue in your town -- a down-and-dirty place to see music regardless of your age. Or, you may live in a suburb devoid of such places -- but follow them from afar via the Internet and social media. Well, Leila Sales' characters understand your situation, whether you're hitting up underground spots nightly or dreaming of escape.

In Sales' upcoming YA novel, "Tonight The Streets Are Ours," Arden Huntley is getting pretty bored of her life -- I mean, she's best described as being "recklessly loyal," which is just basically a fancy way of saying "super willing doormat." So when Arden discovers the blog Tonight The Streets Are Ours, in which a New York teen named Peter documents his seemingly miraculous life, she's only too willing to uproot herself and head to the city, best friend Lindsey in tow, to meet the boy.

I won't give away too much about what happens, but Sales did provide us with a telling sneak peek from the book, out Sept. 15. She also told us a little bit about the DIY venues that inspired the book. Check it all out below! (Note, all photos of Rubulad were sourced from Instagram and partygoers' hashtags.)

Leila On DIY

As a general rule, teenagers are more obsessed with music than anyone else is. When I was 17, I would regularly stare at jpegs of my favorite singer (Rob Thomas, of Matchbox Twenty fame, obvs), arrange them into collages, and read all his interviews and then quote them in my AOL Instant Messenger profile. In general, adults don’t do that stuff, because they don’t tend toward obsession in the way many teens do -- and because their priority lists have been taken over by “cleaning” and “going to the gym.”

Teens also tend to be way better than adults at staying up late. I absolutely still do that, but these days it requires a lot of strategic napping. Whereas when I was in my first year of college, I regularly stayed awake until sunrise for no reason except that the night was more exciting than the day.

So it’s sadly ironic how many shows and parties are 21+. The very people who are most likely to appreciate these events are the ones who are legally not allowed to participate. It doesn’t make much sense.

This is one big reason why DIY venues are so important. Since they’re already operating in a variety of quasi-legal ways (often serving alcohol without a license, rarely heeding fire regulations), they’re likely to be 18+ or even 16+. A good DIY venue understands that the point of all of this is to bring together people, regardless of age or sexuality or background, to make them feel like they belong to a community, to something greater than themselves.

My all-time favorite DIY party is called Rubulad, and I drew on it heavily when I wrote the scene you’re about to read in "Tonight the Streets Are Ours." Rubulad has been throwing parties for I don’t know how long -- maybe 20 years? It’s a legend in underground nightlife. For many years it occurred in one stunningly decorated artspace, but it lost its home a few years back. The Rubulad party now moves from warehouse to warehouse around Brooklyn. It’s a blast no matter where it is, but I will always cherish my memories of that dirty, maze-like, magical artspace on an otherwise empty street in Bed-Stuy. And I’m so glad that in my new book, I get to share a little bit of that magic with readers -- particularly teenagers, so they can know that there is a whole world out there, waiting to greet them.

If reading "Tonight the Streets Are Ours" piques your interest in Brooklyn’s nightlife, then I also recommend checking out "Oriana Leckert’s new book "Brooklyn Spaces: 50 Hubs of Culture and Creativity," and the website YouDontHaveToSettle.com. There is so much to see and do, so much adventure to be had, if you just stay up late enough and keep your eyes open.

Get A Sneak Peek At 'Tonight The Streets Are Ours'

Arden drove to the party, which was in a different part of Brooklyn. She plugged the address into her phone and let the GPS direct her there, because, although the party venue was only a few miles away, Peter had no idea how to get there. Apparently he took the subway or taxis everywhere.

“But I could tell you how to take the G to the L to get there,” he offered from the backseat. She’d been worried that the Heart of Gold wouldn’t live up to whatever rich-person transit he was accustomed to, but instead he just seemed delighted that there was a car for him to ride in at all, no matter how busted it was.

“I’ll G your L,” Arden replied, having no idea what these letters stood for. “Do you even know how to drive?” It was funny, these gaping holes in her understanding of Peter. She knew everything and nothing; she knew his inside jokes and most profound anxieties, but not simple facts like his last name or whether he had a license. Which of those was more important? Which of those did you really need to know a person?

“It’s okay if you can’t drive,” Lindsey said from her customary passenger seat up front.

“Say it loud and proud. It’s not really as important a life skill as people make it out to be.”

“Only if you, like Lindsey, have a built-in chauffer,” Arden said.

“I can drive,” Peter said. “We have a summer place out in the Hamptons—”

“I know you do,” Arden interrupted.

He shook his head and laughed. “Of course you do. I keep forgetting how much you know. It’s hard to believe. Anyway, sometimes I drive my parents’ car when we’re out there. There’s just not much point to driving in the city. The subway runs 24 hours, and even if I did have a car here, it’s almost impossible to find legal parking. I’m surprised you have a car, actually.”

“Well, we don’t live here,” Lindsey said. “We’re just in town for tonight.”

“Where do you live?”

The topic hadn’t come up at the diner, while they’d been busy discussing Peter’s love life.

“Maryland,” Arden said. “Close to the happening states of both Pennsylvania and West Virginia. MaryVirgiPenn.”

“Arden is trying to make ‘MaryVirgiPenn’ a thing,” Lindsey explained. “It hasn’t caught on yet, though.”

“Except with you,” Arden pointed out.

Lindsey tilted her head in accord. “I do say MaryVirgiPenn a lot.”

Peter looked impressed. “That’s a far drive. What brought you to the city this weekend?”

Arden shared a sidelong glance with Lindsey. She could be honest. But would that creep him out? She would be creeped out if a stranger drove hundreds of miles just to see her.

“Arden’s mom lives in Manhattan,” Lindsey said finally, which was a true statement, if not the truth.

“Where?” Peter asked.

“One thirty three Eldridge Street,” Arden said, reciting the address from memory. She’d intended to throw away that slip of paper her dad had given her. She’d just never quite done it.

“Ah, a Lower East Side lady,” Peter said. “Cool.”

“Not really,” Arden said shortly. She didn’t totally know what or where the Lower East Side was, but any place where her mother lived did not sound that cool to her.

Clearly Peter could tell that she didn’t want to say anything more about it, because he changed the subject. “Why do you call your car the Heart of Gold?” he asked.

“It’s after the spaceship in 'Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,'” Arden explained.

“Oh, yeah, I never read that book, but my brother was into it.”

Arden waited for him to volunteer more information about his brother here. When he didn’t, she want on, “Well, that was the name of their spaceship, and it got them everywhere they needed to be, just like my baby here.” Arden patted the dashboard.

“Plus, the Heart of Gold spaceship ran on infinite improbability drive,” Lindsey added. “And it is infinitely improbably that this car will ever start.”

Arden smacked her shoulder. “Shh, you’ll hurt its feelings.”

After another 15 minutes of harrowing New York City driving, Peter said, “OK, you can park somewhere around here.” They had reached a quiet, run-down part of town, all concrete and trash on the ground, with none of the boutiques or restaurants that had characterized the Last Page’s neighborhood -- but fortunately, lots of easy parking spaces. It seemed to Arden like the sort of place where your car would get stolen, your purse would get stolen, and you would be left for dead. If Chris were here, he would have locked all the doors and ordered her to keep driving. So instead, she parked and got out.

They joined a long line of people waiting outside a heavily graffitied door. Some were smoking cigarettes, drinking out of cans in paper bags, or sitting on the dirty sidewalk. Everyone was done up in some kind of costume, adorned with fairy wings, or crowns of leaves, or gobs of glitter.

“Your dress totally fits in here,” Lindsey said to Arden in wonder.

“It’s like I’d known we were coming,” Arden agreed.

Peter spotted two guys whom he recognized and pulled Arden and Lindsey into line with them.

The girl they cut right in front of sighed loudly and said, “Really?”

“Sorry,” Arden said guiltily. She held out her tin. “Can I offer you a brownie?”

“I guess.” The girl adjusted the enormous antlers sticking out of her head, then took two brownies. And said nothing more about their cutting.

“Arden, Lindsey, these guys are Trotsky and Hanson,” Peter introduced the girls to his friends.

“Hey,” Arden and Lindsey said. Arden didn’t ask how they knew Peter, because she was worried they might ask the same of her in return. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to care.

“What’s the theme tonight?” Peter asked. He pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a quick sip, which seemed daring considering they were outside, and presumably public, underage drinking was as illegal here as it was in Maryland. Arden tensed -- it was one thing to see strangers drinking on the street, and quite another to see Peter do the same --but nobody else seemed concerned.

“Enchanted forest,” Trotsky said, sounding terribly uninterested.

“Like a Midsummer Night’s Dream kind of thing,” contributed Hanson.

“It’s ironic,” interjected Trotsky. “Because it’s only April.”

“That’s why I made this.” Hanson put on a papier-mache donkey’s head and then said something else, but it came out as “mumble mumble mumble.”

“Ugh,” said Trotsky, sounding somehow even more bored now. “Honey, I told you I can’t hear you when you have that ass-head on.”

“Hey, my... Chris was in Midsummer’s once,” Arden said. My boyfriend. She’d almost said my boyfriend, and she knew she should have said it, because that’s still what Chris was.

But she didn’t say it.

“Do you guys have any extra supplies?” Peter asked. “We didn’t get our act together to make costumes. Clearly.”

Hanson shook his head a number of times. Trotsky said, sounding both bored and doubtful, “You could smear dirt on your face. I guess.”

“I have a couple colored Sharpies,” Lindsey volunteered, pulling them out of her bag.

Lindsey never, ever unpacked her bag. It was constantly filled with used tissues and empty Chapstick tubes and magazines that she’d already read. Trash just didn’t bother Lindsey very much. Generally this drove Arden crazy, but sometimes -- like tonight -- it paid off.

“Lindsey, my lady, you are resourceful,” Peter said. “I like that in a girl.” He gave her a winning smile. “Let me see them.”

Lindsey handed over the markers, and Peter turned to Arden. He looked at her, really intently, like he was surveying a blank canvas. She felt herself turning red, but forced herself to be still, to submit to his gaze, to take in the feeling of his eyes on her body. And suddenly she was glad she hadn’t mentioned Chris.

“Okay, I have a vision,” Peter declared. “Get your hair out of the way.”

Arden swept it up in a ponytail, and he uncapped a marker and stared to write on her. She shivered as the pen tip touched her chest bone.

“That is going to be a bitch to wash off,” Lindsey said, sounding respectful.

“Lose the coat,” Peter told Arden.

She pulled off the kelly green spring jacket and held it in her hand, stretching her arms out so he could reach her triceps, her clavicle, her shoulder blade. She felt cold in the nighttime air, but inside she felt like she was burning up. Lindsey was right that this was going to be a bitch to wash off. She didn’t care.

When she looked at her extended arms, she saw that Peter had covered her in his words. The text wrapped around her wrists, across her shoulders and down her back, at all different angles, so she couldn’t read all of it, but she did make out "I miss you I miss you I miss you," and "the only one," and "to linger too late," and, gigantic on her forearm, "loneliness."

“I don’t know what the hell to do with markers,” Peter explained, handing the markers to Arden. “I’m not really an artist. The only thing I can draw are words.”

“Words are enough,” Arden said. And Peter’s words were, as always, perfect. They made her feel less alone, more connected and understood in a way that was giddily palpable. Having his words on her body made her feel like she was wearing armor.

By the time they reached the door, all three of them were covered in marker. They didn’t look a thing like enchanted forest creatures. But they looked weird, Arden could say that for sure.

“Twenty dollars each,” said the guy working the door, who looked to be a few years older than they were, and who was wearing a full-body chipmunk costume.

Hanson and Trotsky both vaguely patted at their pants, as though they couldn’t quite figure out where they’d put their wallets, before Peter stepped forward and said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” He handed the door guy a hundred dollar bill and waved off Arden’s offer of cash.

Hanson opened the door, leading them into a basement that was designed to look like a -- well, like an enchanted forest. Potted bushes lined the way, with silhouette cut-outs of tree branches on the walls. Sculptures of fairies dotted the room and giant colorful mesh butterflies hung from the ceiling. Eerie ambient music echoed around them.

“Whoa,” breathed Lindsey. She squeezed Arden’s hand, and Arden felt the remaining bit of the annoyance she’d felt at Lindsey, which had been hanging over her head like a dark cloud since their car ride, dissipate at last.

“It’s an art,” Arden said simply, and Peter busted out laughing.

“It’s wild,” he said. “It’s like you’re part of my brain.”

“Have you never met one of your readers before?” Arden asked.

He shook his head. “Not like you.”

“So what is the deal with this place?” Lindsey asked, stopping to study a blown glass orb. “Is it like a nightclub, or...?”

“It’s an apartment, if you can believe that,” Peter replied. “Well, it wasn’t built to be an apartment. But it got converted a while back. And then a bunch of kids from Pratt -- the art college, you know? -- they rented it out. Every room in here has been passed down from Pratt student to Pratt student over the years.”

“Like a fraternity,” Arden said. “An art fraternity.”

“A fart-ernity?” Lindsey suggested, and the girls giggled.

“Sure,” Peter said. “It’s called Jigsaw Manor.”

“Jigsaw Manor?” Lindsey’s giggles grew even louder. “That is so random. Why?”

Peter stopped to think about it. “Uh, I have no idea! That’s just what it’s called. There are probably a dozen people who live here now. They throw parties every few weeks to cover their rent. Every time somebody new moves in, they add their own work, so there’s layers upon layers of art in this place.”

“Also layers upon layers of dirt,” Hanson called back. He was on his way up the flight of stairs in the back of the basement.

Arden tried to look at everything, so she could commit every last bit of it to memory. This would probably be the only time she would ever go to an art fraternity with her best friend and the writer she was obsessed with and Sharpie marks all over their bodies. Already she felt nostalgic for tonight. Already she could imagine herself months from now, wishing that she had made more of this one night while she was still in it.

“Do you know anyone who lives here?” she asked Peter as they climbed the dark stairs, the roar of sound from the floor above us getting louder and louder.

“Yes. One of the girls is friends with my brother.”

They opened the door to the next floor, and the dull roar burst into a cacophony. Jigsaw Manor was packed with partygoers in outrageous costumes, feathers and sparkles flying everywhere. At the front of the room a 10-piece band was banging out something atonal and unrecognizable; each member seemed only dimly aware of that fact that a whole bunch of other instrumentalists were playing at the same time. A chandelier made mostly of duct tape and flashlights swayed dangerously overhead.

“Oh my God,” Arden and Lindsey breathed at the same moment.

Trotsky looked around and blew out a long breath. “There’s like nobody here tonight,” he concluded.

“Do you want to explore?” Peter asked the girls.

“Of course!”

They ran all over the place. Jigsaw Manor seemed ever-expanding because they kept discovering new rooms, and Arden could not figure out how they all fit together. One room was barely the size of a twin bed, and a couple was making out in there. That room was pretty boring. But in the next space over, a girl was hula-hooping with a half dozen different hoops twirling around her body, each one flashing a rainbow display of light. Behind a bookcase that turned out to be a door, they found a chest of drawers, each of which played a different rhythm when it was opened, so they could create a dozen different pieces of music just be opening and closing drawers.

On a balcony outside one of the rooms, they found an enormous cage housing a human-sized rabbit which seemed to be made entirely out of moss; a mannequin head hanging from a noose; and three actual human beings, a girl and two guys. The girl said to Lindsey, “I dig your aura.”

“Really?” said Lindsey. “What does that mean?” And the next thing Arden knew, Lindsey was all cozied up inside the cage with them, listening to a description of the colors that were supposedly emanating from her chakras or something.

“I’m going to keep exploring,” Arden told her. “Text if you need me, OK?”

Lindsey shot Arden an exasperated look. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “God, Mom,” she added, which made the three people in the human-sized cage giggle.

Arden paused on the threshold, but then Peter grabbed her hand and pulled her away. They saw more rooms. One where everyone was dancing wildly, except for Trotsky and Hanson, who were hanging on the sidelines, snidely remarking on how boring and passé dancing was. Another with bins of soapy water and oversized bubble wands for them to play with. Eventually they wound up in front of a ladder propped against a wall in the back of the hula hooping room.

“Up,” Peter said, pointing.

Arden craned my head back. “What’s up there?”

“You’ll never know if you don’t climb, will you?”

She put my hands on the rungs, then turned back and said, “You’re going to be able to see up my dress, though.”

“I won’t look,” Peter promised, holding up a hand solemnly. “Scout’s Honor.”

“I don’t know many kids in the Scouts,” Arden said. “We’re more a 4-H sort of town.”

“I don’t know what 4-H is,” Peter said.

“Exactly.” Arden started to climb.

When she got to the top of the ladder, she found herself on the roof, looking down over the line of partygoers still on the street. It was windy up there, and her hair blew into her eyes and mouth. Peter pulled himself onto the roof a moment later and put his hands on his hips, surveying the night sky. “Nice view, right?”

“Sort of.” There were too many lights from the city, and Arden couldn’t see a single star in the sky. She thought that her dad would have nothing to look at with his telescope here, and then she felt a quick pang of guilt for being so far from home, in this starless city, when she had told her father she’d be only on the other side of the woods. He’d already had his wife run off. He didn’t need for his daughter to do the same. He deserved better.

But that was different. Unlike her mom, Arden had her reasons. And unlike her mom, tomorrow she was going home.

“Did you get a glimpse of my underwear or what?” she asked Peter.

“I did not,” Peter said.

“Good.”

“But would it offend you if I told you that you have great legs?”

Arden stared at him. “Ha, ha.”

“Oh, come on, I’m sure people tell you that all the time.”

“Nobody’s ever told me that,” she said.

Although there were a number of other partygoers up on the roof, it was quieter than any of the rooms inside. No 10-piece band to contend with. Peter pulled his flask out of his pocket and took a long swig out of it, tilting his head back. When he was done, he offered it to Arden.

She held the flask in her hands but didn’t drink from it. It was heavy and sterling silver, engraved with the name LEONARD MATTHEW LAU. She looked up. “Is this Leo’s? Bianca’s Leo?”

He studied the engraving, as though he had forgotten what it said. “Yes.”

She giggled. “So you took his girl and his flask.”

Peter offered her a half-smile. “Something like that.”

Of course, it occurred to Arden, he’d managed to keep only one of those.

Peter turned, walked over to a giant rocking chair, and climbed on to it. There were a number of them scattered around the roof deck. Rocking chairs that could seat three or four people. Bicycles on rocking chairs. Seesaws on rocking chairs. Arden wondered what the emergency plan was, if an underage drunk kid fell off a rocking chair seesaw on the roof of Jigsaw Manor.

She went over to Peter and gave his chair a little push.

“Look, Arden,” Peter said, taking the flask back from her. “I just want you to understand. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of.”

“So have I,” Arden said. “So has everyone. I mean, Lindsey once stole a canoe, and she doesn’t even know how to paddle a boat. She was pretty not-proud of that. I don’t love her any less for it.”

“That’s sweet.” Peter took another long swallow from Leo’s flask. “I just want to be the person you thought I would be. The Peter you were promised.”

She reached up to touch his arm, but the rocking chair put him slightly out of reach. “You already are,” she told him.

“I worry about that, too,” he said, staring off into the urban sprawl. “I worry that I’m not the person I seem to be in Tonight the Streets Are Ours. And then I worry that I’m exactly the person I seem to be.”

“Just don’t worry,” said Arden. “Not about me.”

He took his gaze off the skyline and smiled down at her. “OK, friend,” he said. “Climb on up here.”

The chair was pretty high off the ground, and she wasn’t sure how to get on to it.

“Just jump,” he said.

She did. She didn’t make it that high. She landed roughly on her waist and wriggled the rest of the way until she was finally sitting next to him. “That was like an Olympic sport,” she said once she was settled.

“Then you just got a silver medal in climbing onto rocking chairs,” he said.

“Why? Because you already took home the gold?”

“Well, yeah!” He grinned and again proffered Leo’s flask. “Winners’ toast?”

“Nah.” She waved it off.

“You don't drink?”

“Is that a problem?” she asked, her words a challenge.

He shook his head. “Just wondering why.”

“Well, I’m 17 years old, so it's illegal. For a start.”

“You don’t know any 17-year-olds who drink?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Do you have a history of alcoholism in your family? Is that why?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. Maybe I have a great-uncle or second-cousin somewhere with a drinking problem, but no one I know of. I’m usually the designated driver, though,” she explained.

“I’m old for my grade, so I got my license before most of my friends-- and I’d saved up enough money from tutoring to buy the Heart of Gold -- so I just got in the habit of being the one to drive. Plus...” She shrugged. “Lindsey gets into a lot of trouble. Somebody has to stay sober.”

Peter laughed. “She’s that much of a handful? I wouldn’t have guessed that from looking at her. She seemed pretty meek, actually. Out of the two of you, I would have pegged you as the troublemaker.”

“Me?” Arden asked. “Why?”

He stared at her, like he was searching her face for the answer. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “You just seem like trouble.”

They both leaned back against the chair, rocking back and forth. The party swirled on below them.

“You asked what happened to my brother,” Peter said.

Arden gave a brief nod, not wanting to scare him off.

“I’ll tell you the story. We assumed he was at Cornell, where he was supposed to be. We hadn’t heard from him for a few days, but nobody thought anything about that except for my mother. Dad and I were like, ‘He’s a freshman in college, he’s not going to call home every couple hours.’

“Then we got a call from his resident advisor. His roommate had gone to her, saying that my brother hadn’t been in the room for a few days and he was just wondering if anything was going on. They started looking into it, and it turned out no one had seen him for days. Not any of his professors or classmates. Not anyone at the frat he was pledging, or the other guys on the football team. They sent out an all-campus email, and heard back exactly nothing.

“So we started reaching out to everyone he knew in the city. High school friends, teachers, ex-girlfriends. Nobody had seen so much as a text message from him. That’s when my parents tried to get the cops involved.”

“Maybe he was kidnapped?” Arden thought aloud.

“He’s not a kid.”

“You know what I mean. Abducted. Being held for ransom. No offense, but it sounds like your family has a lot of money.”

“I’m not offended by that.” The corners of Peter’s mouth lifted slightly. “And that’s good thinking, but it’s not what happened. For one thing, if there were kidnappers, they would have told us their demands, right? And that didn’t happen. For another thing, before he left, he sent us an email.”

“An email?” Arden’s eyes opened wider. “Saying what?”

“That he didn’t want to stay with people who would treat him this poorly. That he was through with us. That he’d never really felt like he belonged in our family, and now he knew for sure that he didn’t. That we should just let him live his own life and stop messing it up.”

“Wow. That’s intense. Did you have any idea that he felt that way?” Arden asked.

Peter scratched the back of his head and shifted uncomfortably. “We didn’t grow up in the easiest of households. Do I think my dad damaged him by trying to mold him in his image, by drinking too much, by teaching us that money matters more than art, or feelings, or people? Do I think my mom damaged him by acting like everything was a competition, and she’d love him more if he was the winner? Sure. Of course. They screwed us both. But that doesn’t mean that the right answer would have been for them to never adopt him. Then he’d probably just be screwed up in some different but equally delightful way.”

“So where do you think he is? How do you think he’s surviving?” Arden asked, trying to picture a brother of Peter’s, fresh off the Cornell football team, living deep in the woods somewhere, off the grid.

“I can’t really say.” Peter buried his face in his hands. Arden resisted the urge to stroke his back, to hold him.

She considered saying she was sorry for Peter’s loss, but that wasn’t so much what she was thinking about. “It’s so selfish,” she said instead.

“What?” Peter looked up, and she realized that probably most people just said they were sorry, and that was the correct answer, and she should have stuck with that.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “I take it back.”

“No. Tell me what you meant.”

“Well,” she said, “he just... left you. He was thinking about himself, and where he was going, but he obviously didn’t give a damn thought to who he was leaving behind to worry about him and to pick up the pieces. OK, so his life was hard. Big deal. Life is hard for you, too. And I’m sorry if he’s out there begging on the street or dealing drugs somewhere, truly, I am. But he’s not the only victim here. You are, too. And that’s what makes him selfish.” Arden shrugged. “That’s what I think, anyway.”

“I think you’re right,” Peter said. “And I don’t want to feel sad tonight.” Peter jumped off the rocking chair. “Screw that. I’m going to be a bestselling author, and you’re only in New York City for one night. And if my girlfriend or my brother or anyone else isn’t here to appreciate all that, then screw them. This is our celebration. From here on out, let’s have no more talk of death and heartbreak. Tonight, let’s have only happy things.”

“Tonight, the streets are ours,” Arden said, and she jumped to the ground.