Author's Note: There's more to the story of Ticket to Ride than what I'm able to put in from Curly or Katie's perspectives, so here is the first chapter of a small side-fic from the perspectives of Tim and Jodie. This chapter falls in with chapter one of Ticket to Ride.

Please be aware that all familiar characters and locations belong to S.E. Hinton and her book, The Outsiders. The chapter title and lyrics throughout are from DJ Snake's song, Middle. And the title of this fic comes from the song of the same name by The Beatles.

Sunday, 8 December 1968

There you go wishing, floating down our wishing well

It's like I'm always causing problems, causing hell

This was not the day Tim Shepard had expected when he had woken up to a throbbing headache and the bitter aftertaste of too many white spirits. Things had been tense between his gang and Brumly for months now ever since he had first caught one of Rick Thomas' boys selling shit on Shepard turf. The kid had been left black and blue and there hadn't been any more incidences like it until late October when Brumly started moving further in on their territory in greater numbers.

Tim thought Rick justified himself in his head by thinking that because Tim didn't sell the stuff Rick sold and that the potential buyers on Tim's turf were his for the taking, but it didn't change the fact that it was Tim's land and Tim had a problem with Rick and the junk his gang sold.

Tim had never wanted a war, though. Getting into one would just mess with his gang's business and their ability to move around on Brumly turf freely so long as they weren't causing trouble. So in recent months the Brumly boys who dared step foot onto Shepard turf for income earning purposes had copped a few hits, maybe a cracked rib or two, but it was fair defense and Rick knew it.

Today, though, things had changed completely. It hadn't been Rick who had crossed the line like Tim had always thought would be the case if things ever got to the point that the two gangs could no longer co-exist. One of Tim's boys had gone and shot one of Rick's in the head, and looking back retrospectively Tim only had himself to blame, which just pissed him off even more.

Arnie Barnes had joined the gang around the same time as Curly, having been close buddies with him all through school. He had started dating Tim and Curly's younger sister, Angela, and Tim had pushed them down the aisle together when Arnie knocked her up. It had later turned out to be a false alarm, but their names had already been signed on the dotted lines, and Arnie had gotten locked up not long after.

Arnie had just gotten out and now he was headed back probably for the rest of his life, if he didn't wind up in the electric chair instead. According to Curly's version of the day's events, Angela had spent a night with Mike Harvey while Arnie had been away and Arnie had found out about it the morning after he'd been released. Upon questioning, Angela had claimed that Mike had gotten her drunk and taken advantage.

Tim figured that something must have snapped in Arnie. Nobody knew where he had got his hands on a gun or why he had gone to the extreme measure of shooting Mike, but the damage was done now, and Tim just had to try to clean it up as best he could.

His stupid fucking brother should have stepped up and taken charge of the situation, though, or at least called Tim before going off half-cocked with Arnie to find Mike. He might not have known what Arnie was going to do, but for somebody who complained as much as he did that Pete was Tim's right-hand man and not himself, he should have manned up and given Tim a reason to believe he was growing up, but he was still the same reckless kid.

Tim still didn't know completely what he was supposed to do now or how he was going to deal with the war Rick had promised him in the chaos right after everything had gone down at The Dingo. He had instructed his gang to lay low for now. He didn't want them getting picked up by cops or looking for trouble on Brumly turf, in fact he had told them to steer clear of Brumly land altogether, not wanting to take any chances. He had told them not to go running their mouths or boasting about what had happened, but they still had to defend themselves. Mike had gotten what he'd deserved for messing with another guy's girl – how could he not have known that sleeping with Angela Shepard would land him in hot water?

I hope that I can turn back the time

To make it alright, all alright for us

"I didn't know if you would be in today or not," Jodie King's manager, Linda Perkins, commented as Jodie walked into the salon on Monday morning.

"Hello to you, too," Jodie responded cheekily as she took off her coat and hung it up near the front door. "Why wouldn't I be here?"

Linda shrugged as she organised her hair tools at her work station. "Someone got shot at one of those places you hang out at on the Ribbon; I thought you might've been there."

"What're you talkin' about?" Jodie demanded, spinning around to face Linda. "Who?"

Linda shrugged and nodded her head to the waiting area where the morning's newspaper sat on a coffee table for waiting patrons to read through. "Check the paper." Jodie snatched the paper up and straightened it out to look at the front page. "Mike something or other, I think."

Jodie's gaze landed on a picture of a boy whose skin around his eyes creased from his smile. "Mike Harvey," Jodie said slowly, recognizing him instantly and reading the beginning of the article in search of his involvement.

"Yeah, that's it," Linda responded, still ordering her things. "Sad stuff when someone that young dies. He was still a kid, really."

Jodie looked over the newspaper at Linda, who was now turning away from her workstation to face Jodie, the bulge of her pregnant stomach more evident today than in recent weeks.

"I knew him," Jodie told Linda, her voice breathy with disbelief.

Mike had been Jodie's ex-boyfriend's best buddy. They had been friends since before Jodie and Rick had met over four years ago, and Mike had always been in the background of the memories Jodie had shared with Rick. It was surreal and too big of a pill to swallow to think that somebody who had just always been there was gone.

"Oh, honey," Linda said, giving Jodie a concerned look. "Well?"

"He was Rick's best friend," Jodie said, wondering if Rick had been there and how he was handling it. Maybe he didn't even know yet, she thought before deeming it unlikely – wherever Mike was Rick was sure to be around somewhere, too, and vice versa.

"Who did it?" Jodie asked, looking back down at the newspaper. "And why?"

"It was a gang thing apparently," Linda explained as Jodie's eyes landed on Arnie Barnes' name.

She had heard his name before; he was infamous for his shotgun wedding to Angela Shepard and getting himself locked up not long after. He ran with Tim Shepard's crew and had been buddies with Tim's younger brother, Curly. That's all she knew about him, but it was enough to surmise that something had blown up between Rick and Tim's gangs. Rick had been holding a grudge against Tim for years and something in Jodie's gut told her that their problem with each other was now bigger than just her. Rick's best friend was dead and Tim's gang was to blame.

"Maybe you should've stayed home," Linda spoke again, her words slow and cautious. "You look a little pale."

Jodie looked back up from the paper and nodded her agreement with Linda. "Yeah, I don't feel so great," Jodie said as she turned to grab her coat and pull it back on. "Do you mind?"

Linda waved Jodie off nonchalantly and Jodie walked back out of the salon in somewhat of a daze. She didn't realize she was headed for the bus stop until she had been standing there for ten minutes and a bus was pulling up in front of her. With shaking hands she paid the fee and got on, riding it for the half hour it took to get out of the downtown area and onto Brumly territory. She got off at the stop closest to Rick's place, but when she got to his house his car wasn't parked out the front, so she walked another twenty minutes to Dennis McKay's house.

Dennis lived with a couple of other boys in the gang and Rick preferred using Dennis' house as a meeting place of sorts for his gang rather than the living room he shared with his mom and younger sister. Jodie was relieved to see Rick's car parked out on the curb as she approached, glad that she didn't have to walk on to the next likely place in the chilly air outside.

"Woah, you are not who I was expecting," Phil Black laughed when he opened the door to see Jodie on his doorstep. His brown eyes were heavily lidded and bloodshot and Jodie could smell smoke from something that wasn't a cigarette coming from inside the house.

"Rick's here, right?" Jodie asked, pointing her thumb back at where Rick's car was parked.

"Yeah," was all Phil said in answer.

"Can I see him?" Jodie persisted when it was clear Phil was just going to stand in the doorway like a stunned mullet unless she did something.

Phil glanced around the front door at something Jodie couldn't see before starting to move back into the house. Jodie thought he was going to close the door and leave her standing out in the cold, but he was quickly replaced by Rick, who nodded his head in beckoning for her to follow him through the living room and into the kitchen. The smell of grass hit her over the head as she walked through the living room, giving a few of the boys in there a small wave.

"What's goin' on?" Rick asked when they were alone, jumping up onto the counter to sit.

Jodie stood in front of him and looked him over a couple of times. His hair was messy and his hazel eyes were bloodshot like Phil's. The corners of his lips seemed like something was tugging them down, and Jodie didn't like the sadness that washed over her because of it – he looked so much better when he was smiling.

"I saw the newspaper," she said quietly as she stepped forward to sit up on the counter beside him.

"I didn't," Rick responded, bored. "Was there anythin' good in there?"

"Mike made the front page," she answered him, wishing he would look at her instead of the floor. He was too closed off like this and she didn't like not being able to read him. "I would've been here sooner if I'd known."

"Why?" Rick asked with a tired sigh. "You ain't my girl anymore."

Jodie had broken things off with him about a month before after one too many nasty fights, but this was what they did every time. They cooled things off for a little while, long enough for the problem to wear off or be forgotten about, and then they crashed back into each other like magnets.

"I've loved you off and on for years," she said honestly with a small, awkward laugh, "I don't know if it's possible for me to stop caring completely."

He finally looked at her with his eyebrows drawn close, the pain of his thoughts evident on his face. "Shepard did this."

"Are you sure?" Jodie asked.

Dread stirred in her stomach every time Tim came up in conversation with or around Rick. Their dislike for each other had stemmed from Jodie back in high school and what she had done was something that Rick had never forgotten despite Jodie's insistence that Rick was the one she wanted.

"Arnie was mad over Mike sleepin' with Angela while he was locked up," Rick explained, bitterness dripping from his words. "Don't tell me Tim wasn't pissed about it, too, or that he didn't give Arnie the okay to do what he did. Nothin' happens in that gang without Tim's tick of approval."

Jodie wanted to tell him that she didn't think Tim would be okay with one of his boys murdering somebody, whether that somebody be from Brumly or not, but didn't want Rick to think she was taking sides like he probably would.

"Gang problems aren't meant to come up because of girls," Jodie said, not sure why she felt the need to defend a girl four years her junior.

"They do, though," Rick said, giving Jodie a cutting look like she was stupid for not already knowing it.

"Were you there?" Jodie asked, wanting to move the topic of discussion away from where Rick was taking it – the past.

"Yeah," he nodded, "not that it mattered. Shepard's brother punched Mike from behind and while I was trying to deal with that Arnie pulled out the gun. I was wastin' my breath on the wrong dipshit."

Rick took a deep, controlled breath and glared up at the roof. Jodie saw how difficult it was for him to grasp one specific emotion as they all blurred into one inside him. He was angry, upset, and grieving. He was feeling guilty and defensive and vengeful. And all of that mixed together scared the hell out of Jodie.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice small and unsure.

She inched closer to Rick and rested her head on his shoulder, hoping that she would be enough to get him through this. When he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, she thought that maybe she might.

Lying down beside you, what's going through your head?

The silence in the air felt like my soul froze

Tim had only had the house to himself for an hour the next day when Curly walked back through the front door, Glenn and Dale trailing behind him this time. Tim rolled his eyes from where he sat in an armchair, still trying to wake up from his sleep in.

"What happened now?" he asked as his eyes assessed Dale's bloody nose and bruising right eye.

"Jeff Griffiths jumped him before school even started," Curly responded, sitting down in the other free armchair as Glenn went off in search of something frozen from the kitchen and Dale perched on the coffee table so as not to get any of the furniture bloody.

"How does he look?" Tim asked, looking at Dale now.

"Worse if it hadn't gotten broken up so quick," Dale grumbled with a shrug of his shoulders.

Tim's lips twitched irritably. Curly and his dumb buddies couldn't even make it more than twenty-four hours without causing even more trouble than they'd already created.

"Christ," Tim cussed, "I tell you boys to keep your heads down and you go gettin' into fights less than a day later. Do you ever actually listen to anything I fuckin' say?"

"He came at me!" Dale shot back. "I didn't even see him comin' til he'd already hit me. I didn't fuckin' start anything!"

"It's true," Curly defended his buddy. "Dale and Jeff ain't ever exactly liked each other, but Dale didn't go lookin' for this fight. Jeff jumped him."

Tim vaguely remembered that Dale and Jeff Griffiths hadn't liked each other before the problem with Arnie shooting Mike happened yesterday. Something about Jeff sliming around with Dale's girlfriend while they were on some kind of break.

Glenn returned to the lounge room with a frozen bag of vegetables and chucked them at Dale to catch and ice his face with. Silence fell between the four boys as Glenn, wary of the tension in the atmosphere, took a seat on the couch and Tim lit up a cigarette and puffed away at it eagerly to calm his temper.

He supposed it couldn't be helped if Jeff's attack had come out of nowhere and Dale truly hadn't instigated something. He thought the reason it still bugged him, though, was that these three boys always seemed to be the ones causing him headaches.

"I get y'all weren't responsible this time," Tim said, trying to keep his tone even and reasonable, "but every time there's a god damned problem, you three seem to be involved one way or another."

"But –" Curly began.

"Shut it," Tim barked, pointing his cigarette at Curly authoritatively. "Just keep yourselves out of fuckin' trouble, okay? I don't care if it means y'all have to stay inside and have no life outside of home and school, I don't wanna know you've been causin' any more trouble that this gang can't afford right now." Tim stared each boy down before adding, "I ain't gonna keep someone around if they ain't benefittin' the gang. Got it?"

Curly, Dale and Glenn all nodded their understanding in silence and Tim felt no need to hang around and make nice with them. He had plans to meet up with Pete soon anyway, so he decided to get to Pete's place a little early and got up and left the house. He hoped his brother and his buddies would pull their heads in real soon. As much as Tim hoped otherwise, he could see his problems multiplying over the next few months and hoped to God that Curly, Dale and Glenn wouldn't be causing him more problems than necessary.

Am I just overthinking feelings I conceal

This gut feeling I'm tryna get off me as well