I didn't mention any names in this, but I think you guys will be able to figure out who this story is about. I don't own The Outsiders, just my OC who I'm going to call Hermit Lady. I hope you enjoy! :)
You wonder why there is so much yelling outside of your house at this time of night. You don't live in the best neighborhood, but by this time the noise usually dies down. You try to ignore it as you flip over in your bed, but then you hear something else. A loud popping noise that brings back too many painful memories. You can feel the flashbacks coming to plague your mind, but you push them away as you try to focus on what's happening in present time. After the first crack, there is another, a noise that could rival thunder and beat it any day. You wait for the sound of glass shattering because you assume some hoods are messing around and trying to hit people's windows or maybe are practicing their aim with beer bottles. You lift the blankets over your head and pray the shots weren't fired towards your house. Then you hear a yell, an anguished scream of, "He's just a kid!"
Your curiosity gets the better of you when you hear the sirens. You crawl out of the cocoon that you have created in your bed and head over to your window. There are flashing lights everywhere. The red and blue colors light up your room when you pull the curtain back and you feel all that you need to add to the effect is a shiny disco ball. There are people scattered all over the place; cops, EMTs, average Joe's who have ventured from their houses to see what was going on. You find yourself watching six people, four who are standing, and two who appear to be dead. You wonder if those two are the ones the cops had aimed for.
The cops are surrounding the boy with a leather jacket who has blood pouring from his mid section. He is completely still. You know he is gone. The other five boys are a few feet away, four of them surround a smaller one. You can't tell if he is bleeding or not, but the older boys surrounding him look as if they had been in a fight. The tallest one, who you figured was the oldest, was kneeling on the ground next to the fallen boy. A blond with a distinct jaw line held the boy's head in his lap and appeared to be crying. There was a mean looking one with black hair. He stood with his hands running through his curls, and next to him stood a shorter male. The shorter one was screaming at the cops, using vulgar language and insulting them, waving his fist in the air. He was angry, you could tell by his tone, and even though you can't see his face that well, you're positive that his eyes are blazing with hatred towards the cops. His movements and screams terrified you, maybe even more than the shots did.
The EMTs load the two bodies up and haul them away. The oldest boy gets in the ambulance with the smaller one. The blond rushes off with the black-haired one on his tail. The angry one watches them go. You're sure that he could've followed his friends if he wanted to, but that's not what he does. Instead his walks over to a cop and pokes him in the chest. You don't know what he is saying, but you can tell that whatever it is, it isn't friendly in any way. The officer shakes his head and gently pushes the angry teen away. The teen crosses his arms and storms away, probably after the two other boys, but he changes his mind last-minute and heads in the other direction. Now all the boys are gone, and you're not interested in sticking around to watch some cops clean up the crime scene, so you head back to bed and try to get the image of the dead boy in a leather jacket and the sounds of the gunshots out of your head.
Your dreams aren't pleasant that night. You jolt awake several times and you have to remind yourself that what happened to you was years ago. No one is here to hurt you. No more shots will be fired. When you wake up the next morning, the red and blue lights are no longer dancing throughout your room.
The paper boy knows to throw the paper close enough to the door so that you can reach it without stepping outside. You don't know how he knows this because you certainly didn't tell him, but you're glad that he does it. The morning after the gunfire you wish the paper boy wouldn't have even gone by your house.
Right there on the front page is the picture of the cop cars, the ambulances, the dead boy. Not while he was dead, but there is a picture of him alive, and you think maybe that's worse. You don't want to see him alive, it makes the fact that he's dead now, the fact that he was shot right by your house, all too real. It makes him too real. You see his name and his criminal record. You wonder if he really did pull a gun on the cops, or if they just said that so they wouldn't get in trouble. You wonder if they shot with no reason. Maybe they just wanted him gone, out of their way, dead. Two shots were fired, and you learn from the paper that none of them went anywhere near the small boy who had been lying on the ground. He had only fainted. You saw his picture, his name, read the story about him being a hero. You now recognize the boys from the paper yesterday. They were the ones that saved the kids from the fire up in Windrixville. You learn that the dark boy had died just a few hours before everything on the street went down. You wonder if he was connected to the reason that the criminal was shot.
You don't read anymore of the paper. You throw it in the trash because you don't want to know anymore about those boys. The ones that are dead and the one who looked dead to you last night. There is a knock on your door and you freeze. No one ever comes to your house except for the neighbor girl who goes out to buy your groceries on Fridays. Today is not Friday. It is a Wednesday and no one should be at your house on a Wednesday. You swallow your fears as you open the door to a man in a suit.
He tells you he's a reporter and he's collecting eye-witness accounts of the shooting last night. He asks if you saw or heard anything and because you don't want to talk to him, you lie.
"I was sleeping," you say so softly that he has to lean in to hear you. He nods, thanks you, and leaves. As you close the door, you notice that it's a beautiful day. If anyone was taking a walk through the neighborhood, they would never be able to guess that there was a horrific occurrence just the night before. They wouldn't think anything bad had happened recently, they would probably just focus on the way the birds were singing and the sun that was shining. They wouldn't have a clue. That is, until they noticed the giant red stain in the middle of the road.
You hadn't been able to sleep last night. You went out to the living room and curled up in the easy chair with a cup of hot tea and a book. In the early hours of the morning, just as the sun begins to rise, you notice movement outside. You glance at the clock, four AM. Who would be walking around at this time? Someone up to no good probably. You set down your book and walk over to the window to get a better view of the person. You were expecting a hood, someone dressed in dark clothes looking guilty. Instead what you see surprises you. There is a teenage boy with long, rusty sideburns, clad in jeans and a Mickey Mouse shirt, whistling to the tune of Jingle Bells. You wonder why someone his age would wear a shirt with a cartoon on it. You wonder why he is whistling Jingle Bells in the middle of September. You're curious as to why he is wandering around during the early sunrise hours. But the thing that you question the most is the reason for the bucket, bottle of soap, and the scrub brush that rest in his hands.
You watch as he surveys the area, then the houses, and you see him raise his eyebrows at the empty bucket as if it had said something to him. He glances at the houses once more, and he heads towards your's. You know he couldn't possibly see you peeking through the blinds, so you guess that he could see the light seeping through the cracks. The knock on the door is soft, very, very soft, and if you had been sleeping, you wouldn't have heard it. If you had been sleeping, your lights wouldn't be on, and this mysterious boy wouldn't have shown up at your door.
You open the door timidly, a bit afraid at what this boy's intentions are. You haven't spoken to anyone since the reporter showed up at your house three days ago, and before that you hadn't spoken to anyone for two weeks. You didn't like people. You didn't like going outside or the way the air would make you feel. You lived closed up in your home, only seeing the neighbor girl who brought your food, and only getting fresh air for the two seconds you opened your door to reach out and get the newspaper.
The boy's face look relieved when you open the door. "I hope I didn't wake you, ma'am." You shake your head, but don't offer anything else. "I was wonderin' if I could use your hose to fill this bucket. It was full when I left, but I guess some of the water ran off when I was making my way over here," he says with a smile. His gray eyes were gentle, and even though you don't know what this water is for, you allow him to use the hose. It's not like you ever use it anyway.
You nod without speaking. You wanted him to get off your porch as soon as possible.
"Thank you, ma'am. I really appreciate it." He steps off the porch and after you close the door you take a couple of deep breaths to clam your beating heart. The boy didn't seem dangerous, but the interaction terrified you anyway. You held your hands against your stomach and took deep breaths until it began to rise and fall evenly.
You walked over to the window to watch the mysterious boy. He was struggling to turn on the hose. You knew it hadn't been used in years; it was probably rusted over and impossible to turn by now. He puffed out his cheeks and pushed the handle with all his might and you had to hold your hand over you mouth to keep from laughing at his effort. He bit his lip and pushed the handle once more. This time it turned and water flew out in all directions. The teen jumped back and cursed when he looked down at the soaked jeans that clung to his body. He was shaking his head as he walked around the water and back to the handle to turn it down. You don't know how, but he got the water to come out normally, and he filled his bucket. He walked over to the street looking in all directions for cars. You wonder if he knows that there isn't anyone who drives around at four in the morning in this neighborhood.
He sits down in the middle of the road, pours the soap into the bucket, and then mixes the water with his hand. You don't understand what he is doing until he takes the hand-held scrubber that he dipped into the water and begins scrubbing the pavement. He's scrubbing the dead hood's blood from the road. You can't tell if the blood is coming off, but you doubt the cold hose water will remove the stain. You don't know why, maybe it's because you want the stain gone, or maybe you just appreciate what the boy is doing, but you feel compelled to help him out. You leave the window to go into the kitchen and put a giant pot of water on the stove. When the water comes to a boil you turn off the stove and walk to your front door. You stand there for a while trying to decide whether you really want to open the door. To breathe the fresh air. To talk to the mysterious boy. You still don't know what you want, but you open the door anyway.
"Excuse me," you call, or at least you think you do. No sound has escaped your mouth. "Excuse me," you try again. This time a faint whisper came out, but in the quiet of the morning it sounds like a scream. The boy looks up and you motion for him to come to you. "With your bucket," you say, a little louder than the first time you spoke. He picks up his bucket and comes to your porch. All too soon he's right in front of you and you have lost your courage. You stand and stare while he give you a questioning look.
"Are you alright ma'am?" He asks.
You nod taking a deep breath. "Dump it out."
"The water?" He questions for clarification. You nod again. "I don't want the soap to kill your plants." You try to decide if he answered that as a reflex, if he was trying to be annoying, or if he was trying to joke around. You know for a fact that there aren't any plants right outside your house. You try not to over think his response and motion for him to dump it anyway.
"Wait," you tell him and walk back to your kitchen. You return to him with the pot of steaming water. He holds the bucket out as you pour it in. You hold up a finger so he knows to wait a bit longer. You search through your cupboards until you find a bottle of bleach. When you get back to the boy you pour a quarter of the bottle in and hand him gloves. "Don't put the soap in with this, and wear the gloves."
His looks at the pair of yellow gloves in his left hand and then down at the bucket on the ground. He looks back at you and smiles. "Thank you, ma'am. This'll work a whole lot better than what I was using." When he smiled you realize something. He's the mad boy, the one that had gone crazy the night of the shooting. The one who had yelled at the cops and didn't follow his friends. The one who you thought was going to do something stupid and get himself arrested. He had you scared that night, and now you had just used up a month of your words to talk to him.
You nod and close the door as he turns. You make yourself another cup of tea and sit down at the dining room table to try to calm yourself down. Your head was pounding, your breaths came out fast, and your heart was beating so fast inside your cheat that you wondered if it would wear itself out and you would die right then and there. Then you stopped thinking about death.
For the next hour you stood at your window and watched the boy in the Mickey Mouse shirt scrub the blood of a fallen hood off the road. He whistled while he worked, and then he began talking, not to himself, but to who you assumed the blood belonged to. You felt like it was rude to eavesdrop, but you open your window a crack anyway and tried to decipher what he was saying.
"You lost my knife...you had it last...good knife, my favorite in fact...the kid is sick...real bad...probably my fault even though the big man told me it's not...why'd you do this...you did it on purpose...I know you...we lost both you and your innocent sidekick now...I almost drunk myself to death that night...still feeling the effects of the hangover after three days...no one's okay...why'd the kids run into that stupid church...why'd he die...he didn't deserve to die, you either...why'd you have to be so stupid?" His shoulders began to shake and you thought he was laughing, but then he dropped the brush and hid his head in his knees. He was crying. Sobbing. He looked so broken that you almost wanted to go outside and tell him everything would be okay. You didn't though. Because you knew that if you told him that, it would be a lie. The same lie that everyone told you. After death, nothing is okay. Nothing will ever be okay. You know that as a fact. If everything was okay then you wouldn't stay inside your house all the time, you would talk to people without fear of having a heart attack. You would be normal. After death, no one is normal.
You closed the window because you didn't want to hear him anymore. You told yourself to go do something else, forget about the boy. But you couldn't. You just stood there and watched the boy in the Mickey Mouse shirt, the one with kind gray eyes and a nice smile, the one who had gone mad yelling and cursing at the cops, the broken one, the one who admitted a drinking problem to a dead person, the one who was whistling Jingle Bells in the middle of September, the one that had gotten you to talk more than two words in a day, the one that could barely turn a rusted hose handle, the one that was wearing yellow cleaning gloves even though he was a tough hood, the one who had gotten up in the dead hours of the morning to do something no one else would've thought to do, the one who had a big heart, the one who broke down in the middle of the road. You watched as he sat in a puddle of water, bleach, and a hood's dried blood sobbing his heart out because he was broken. And if he was anything like you, then he would always be broken. No one would be able to fix him.