Author's Note: Just a quick thank you to soda-me for agreeing to beta my story and another thank you to Forget Tomorrow. Live Today. who sent me the longest review in history and helped point out some obvious grammar errors that I had overlooked. And another quick thanks to Shotgun Opera who was the first to read this and made sure to let me know Darry never wore hair grease :P So thank you all for your help. Greatly appreciated. :D The chapter below is a revised version.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Outsiders that belongs to S.E. Hinton. The quote is from the song "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright as is the title of this fic.
Summary: A car accident in 2008 sends college student Lauren Mathers back in time to Tulsa, Oklahoma 1965. The story is set in December of that year and I'm following marsonfire's Outsiders time line therefore, the Curtist parents are still alive.
~Driver take away my worries of today and leave tomorrow behind~
December 4, 2008
When I stepped out into the cold, night air I had only two things on my mind: finals and snow tires. December was just starting and that meant crunch time. I had an apartment stocked with cases of Red Bull. It would be the only thing that would get me through my College finals. That and dozens of late nights like this, spent at the public library.
Freezing rain poured down from the heavens, icing the parking lot and making it near impossible to reach my red Jetta. I stepped over the slick black top in almost a dance. It was a wide legged, goofy dance that would have gotten me made fun of if I were still in middle school.
The small, tin can of car sat, silent. It was more rust than automobile. Waiting for me, it gladly collected the cold rain. I looked to the wheels and cringed because they were bald. That or close to it. I'll be honest and say I'm not quite sure how to tell when tires are completely bald. I would imagine there'd be nothing left. The Jetta's wheels were getting there. They were worn down far enough.
I tossed my book bag into the back seat. The car rocked when I slammed the door. I thought it might even tip over, but it held on.
Good girl.
I hoped it would stay together until I made it home. The freezing rain would make for horrible road conditions. Nothing too unexpected when you lived in Northern Ontario but still something I hated to deal with.
I clambered into the driver's side and started the engine. The old Volkswagen made it onto the road with little hassle.
Hands tight around the wheel, I drove at a turtles pace. The car still slipped and skidded across the asphalt. I prayed I'd make it in one piece.
I'd been wishing I'd bought some winter tires. It was common sense. Most everyone I knew had winter tires but then again, most everyone I knew was not poor. They didn't live off Kraft Diner. They still mooched off their parents. How nice that would have been.
Why did I ever decide that independence rocked?
Independence sucks.
You don't live at home and sure that was great but then you were stuck eating food from a can every night of the week.
Some trade off that was.
One of the Jetta's wheels hit a dip in the road. The car lurched forward, throwing me against the steering wheel. The horn blasted in my ear, deafening me for a moment. It was probably the only thing left working anymore.
The tires squelched across the deserted road. My wiper blades weren't doing much of a job to keep the windshield clear. It was just another thing I didn't have money to fix. I drove; eyes squinted with my body hunched over the wheel.
We hit another bump. The car rattled and for a moment I stopped breathing. I didn't relax until the metal heap settled back onto the road.
I tried to think about something else beside the driving conditions. Like how I was going to make rent. With finals looming I'd done nothing but study. I'd been forced to take some time off work. It was just a petty waitressing job but it was money. Then again, they were my exams. I had to pass them. I also needed cash to keep myself afloat.
"What am I going to do?" I muttered to myself.
I didn't dare ask my parents. I knew they couldn't afford to lend me a dime, though they would if they knew my situation. I just couldn't bring myself to bother them with that. I was an adult now. I'd make my own way. I'd have to.
A set of headlights broke through the curtain of rain. The driver had their high beams on. They were blinding. I shrunk back in my seat though it did nothing to help.
My eyes narrowed to slits, barely open at all because of the brightness. The wipers were stuck; frozen to the windscreen of my car. I tried to look around them; around the onslaught of freezing rain.
Up ahead the car began to take shape. It was a black BMW and it was coming down the hill much faster than it should have been.
Who does this bozo think he is, Mario Andretti?
Reflexively my hands gripped the wheel tighter. I even slowed the car a bit more. All I wanted was to get home safely.
But as the car came rushing towards the Jetta, I noticed something that I hadn't before. It was swerving. Veering in and out of the lane; completely disregarding the white dashes that divided the road.
I'd been so caught up with actually trying to see the road that I hadn't paid attention to the car. Now it was too late. The drunk driver weaved across the asphalt and into my lane.
A short lived scream filled the Volkswagen. I jerked the wheel to the right, trying to get the shaky vehicle off the road. I was aiming for the gravel shoulder. Somewhere out of the way of the oncoming vehicle.
The car turned too slow. The reckless BMW came at the Jetta. It caught the left rear side of my precious tin can. The crunch of metal rang out. The car began to fishtail as I tried desperately to right it. There was absolutely no traction from the tires.
The car spun off the road, screeching as it tried to hold onto the tarmac. We hit the shoulder but didn't stop. I held on for dear life. Feet pushed against the floor in hopes of breaking for the inevitable.
The ice covered ground sent the car skittering through the gravel. There was a drop on the other side that we spun towards. It was impossible to see how far down it was but I imagined it to be something like thirty feet.
The Jetta went over it; somersaulting in the frozen rocks. Metal crunched as the poor, fragile vehicle broke. I was flung forward into the wheel with enough force to illicit a cry. Tears ran down my cheeks.
I'm going to die.
Glass shattered as the windshield crumpled under the second roll. Pieces of it filled the small interior. Something wet trickled down the left side of my face. My vision blurred as it got into my eyes.
The car lurched mid roll as if it might stop. It was so abrupt I was sent forward once more. My forehead connected with the dash.
A moment later the car started to move; completing its third and final tumble. As the Jetta took its last descent my vision began to cut out. Like a bad T.V. reception, it came and went.
I felt the car settle on even ground, but we were upside down. There was pain everywhere. It was all consuming. My ears rang. My chest ached from being thrown into the wheel too many times.
I struggled to open my eyes but they refused to budge and to be honest, I was too tired to force them. After a moment, I gave in to it. The pain, the worry; I let it take me until I finally succumbed to the dark.
000000
December 4, 1965
The walls of my mouth tasted of copper, like I'd been sucking on pennies. Those were my first thoughts as consciousness trickled in. The next thing I noticed was the pain. It was hard not to. My body felt stiff. Muscles sore. Every limb throbbed and my head pulsated in time to the beat of my heart.
I couldn't understand at first why I was hurting so much. The last thing I could remember was being at the library cramming for finals. There weren't many injuries one could acquire cracking open a textbook.
"Is she going to be okay, doc?"
A husky voice filled the room. It sounded close by.
Though it was a struggle, I forced my eyes to open. Fluorescent light flooded my vision. Everything shifted out of focus for a second. I blinked away offending tears. The brightness of it all stung. It was so white.
Things slowly started to clear. As my sight returned to normal, I realized with a sudden apprehension where I was.
Hospital.
I was seated on an examination table. The room was small and reeked of antibacterial soap. Stark, white walls stared back at me. Stainless steel counter tops lined one side of the room. Glass jars filled with swabs and Popsicle sticks and all types of other dangerous instruments doctors used to torture their patients with.
I hated hospitals. Everything about them terrified me. There was all that blood and the screaming children in the waiting rooms that never seemed to sit still. They had all those dead bodies everywhere. They had dead people sitting on ice, somewhere in this building at that very moment. No one thought about it but it was true. You were essentially in the same place as a bunch of stiffs. And hospitals always had someone dying. It was just a big, depressing building filled with blood and death.
I couldn't sit in place any longer. Anxiety had taken its hold and I climbed off the table too fast. My legs were unprepared to hold up the rest of my weight and they caved in, sending me crumpling to the ground.
The door to the room opened at that moment. A man, dressed in a white lab coat stood in the entrance. A younger man stood behind him, hovering.
"Don't mind me," I said, picking myself off the polished linoleum. "I'm new at this whole walking thing. Never really saw much use for it."
No one responded.
Whew, tough crowd.
I could feel my cheeks heating with embarrassment. The doctor reached for something in his coat pocket. I backed up, legs slamming into the table. The metal frame rattled.
"What are you doing?"
A sadistic smile appeared on the man's face. "It's only a penlight dear."
He removed the small, flashlight and held it up for me to see. Immediately I began to relax.
"We're just going to have a look at your pupils. That's quite a nasty bump you've got there."
At the mention of it, the pain felt worse. I touched a hand to my forehead. Thick medical gauze had been placed there. Underneath the fabric my skin itched. I wanted to scratch it better but the doctor shot me a warning look.
"You'll pull out the stitches if you start playing with that," he said.
"Stitches?"
The doctor lifted a single finger and asked me to follow it with my eyes. I did as I was told.
"Good, good. Your pupils seem fine."
He turned to his little clipboard and started jotting down something on the page.
"Wait, what did I need the stitches for? What happened to me?"
The panic was returning. A cold sweat broke out on my back. I fidgeted with a loose string on my pants, tying it into small, nervous knots.
"What is the last thing you remember?"
"Um, I was at the library studying." I began searching back as far as I could.
"Do you remember getting into your car?"
My breath hitched. "The Jetta? What happened to her?"
"You were in an accident only forty minutes ago. This young man here brought you in."
The boy who'd done nothing but hover for the past several minutes stepped into the room. He was a giant of a man. Broad shouldered, with these wide, tree trunk arms. His dark hair kicked out at the front. The style of it was ridiculous. No guy I knew wore their hair that way. Then there was that stupid, black t-shirt. It was plain and much too small for his frame; it practically clung to him. I kept waiting for the fabric to rip apart. I imagined pieces of black cloth exploding off his chest every time he took a deep breath.
He did, however, have nice eyes. They were blue-green; different. He had a handsome face and those muscles; they were so defined, so big. I wasn't sure about other women but they certainly made me melt.
When my mind climbed back out of the gutter, I realized I'd forgotten what we'd been talking about.
"You brought me in?" I asked.
The details were coming back to me. I could remember getting into the Jetta. Then there were those headlights. They'd been so damn bright; I couldn't see a thing besides them. It had been raining. No snowing. No freezing rain. I didn't have snow tires on my beat up Volkswagen either and then that idiot had been speeding towards me, swerving in and out of lanes until I was run right off the road.
I cut Mr. Muscles off before he could answer my original question.
"Was that you in the BMW?"
My voice shook with rage. I dug my hands into my pockets to keep them still. My whole body trembled with uncontrolled anger. At some point the doctor was called out of the room, leaving me to deal with the fashionably inept muscle man.
"You didn't bring me in to be a Good Samaritan," I accused. "You did it because you're the one that hit me."
A deep, gravelly laugh erupted from his chest. It was like a slap to the face. I took a step forward, doing my best to seem tougher than I truly was. I thought I could scare him into admitting it but when I'd closed the space between us I found that my head reached the middle of his chest. I had to look up at him in order to continue my glare, though I doubt it had any effect whatsoever.
"I brought you in because you were hurt," was his husky reply. "And because you were the one that hit me. My folks can't afford to pay for the damage and by the looks of your car, I'm sure you have insurance."
It was my turn to laugh. "That old jalopy is held together with duct tape. What makes you think I have the money pay for something that was your fault in the first place?"
The muscles in his arms suddenly expanded as he began clenching and unclenching his hands. They formed two powerful fists at his side. They were menacing things. For a moment I thought he was going to deck me. All it would take is one, solid punch to send me into a coma.
I watched his body tense beneath that tight shirt his and I took a protective step backwards. He raised an eyebrow.
"I ain't goin' to hit ya."
"Says the seven foot slab of muscles," I snapped back.
He sighed, dragging one of his big hands across his face. It made him look older than he really was.
"Can I please get your information so I can go on home?"
I folded my arms across my chest defiantly. "No."
"No?"
"That's right. No. I'm not giving you anything until you admit that you hit me."
"You're really somethin' you know that? Just because you ain't a good driver don't mean you can get out of paying for the damage to my truck."
"Your truck?" I hesitated. "Weren't you driving a black BMW?"
"It was a '55, Ford pickup that you totaled."
That couldn't be right. Muscles had to have been wrong. The car I'd seen had definitely not been a truck. I wasn't good with cars, so maybe I got the BMW thing wrong but I certainly knew the difference between a pickup and what I saw on the road earlier that night.
My brain wasn't working as fast as I'd have liked. I tried to understand how I could hit him. There'd been no one else on that stretch of road. I'd gone straight off the highway. The Jetta had rolled several times down a large embankment. It was impossible for me to hit him. For that matter, it was impossible that I was still walking.
What the hell is going on here?
"Lauren!"
A familiar voice screamed my name from down the hall.
"Lauren, dear, where are you?"
I took a step toward the doorway. An older woman, with a full head of blonde hair, tightly packed with hairspray stood at the opposite end. She kept sticking her head into the rooms that had their doors still open, calling my name every few seconds.
"I'm right here," I said after a moment. She looked up, eyes wide.
"George, she's over here!"
The woman came hurtling down the hallway. High heels click clacking across the floor as she ran. Before I could understand what was going on, she had me wrapped in her thin arms and was pulling me against her chest.
"Lauren, we'd thought something awful had happened to you." She was sobbing.
That's when it hit me. I knew why I recognized her voice.
"Mom?" I pulled back to get a better look.
It was her, but at the same time it wasn't. She shared the same build, the same face and eyes, but it wasn't quite her. This version was too clean, even her hair looked more blonde than my mothers. Not to mention it was pinned up in a beehive.
"What happened to your hair?"
I looked her over some more and realized it wasn't just the hair. It was the clothes too. They were incredibly outdated.
"And what are you wearing?"
She had this pink, Jackie Kennedy era dress on. I could feel the tacky fabric burning away my retinas when I looked too close.
My mother narrowed her eyes disapprovingly. "Your father bought this for me."
"Figures," I laughed, though I guess it wasn't that funny.
Her face remained devoid of emotion and she kept staring at me with this scolding look. I felt that somehow I wasn't quite the adult I used to be.
"You mind your manners, young lady," she hushed.
Mind my manners?
"Sorry?"
"That's better." She seemed to relax a bit.
What was happening here?
"Where's the idiot that hit my baby girl?"
The dad from "Leave it to Beaver" was rampaging up and down the hall. Red faced and nostrils flaring, he kept muttering obscenities under his breath. I was embarrassed for him, even if he wasn't.
My mom sighed and moved to catch his attention. When he looked over at us, he caught my gaze. I shrunk back, a little put off by him. I stumbled backward and accidentally bumped the giant, still lingering in the doctor's office.
"Sorry," I said, shifting away again.
Ward Cleaver started toward me with this glazed look in his eyes. He did not look like the happy, patriarch I knew and loved from T.V. He was a madman and he wasn't Beaver's father, he was mine.
"George Mathers, you calm that temper of yours right now," my mother was right on his heels. "People are starting to take notice."
"Let them look, Barbara."
He started rolling up the sleeves to his dress shirt. He had his eyes pinned on the poor, greasy haired kid next to me. The guy didn't even move, he just folded his arms across his chest, trying to make himself seem bigger.
What is wrong with these people?
"I'll teach you to drive recklessly," my father was shouting. "Good for nothing delinquent."
I'd never heard my dad so angry. 'Course this wasn't my dad. This was some, altered reality version of him and my mother.
"He's going to kill you," I whispered nervously. Muscles just lifted his head higher. God, he was a stubborn idiot.
"Daddy, wait."
I didn't think he'd listen to me, so I grabbed onto his left arm, holding my father in place.
"I was the irresponsible one."
I swear you could hear a pin drop. Everyone turned in my direction. My father seemed disbelieving.
"You wrecked the Mustang?"
Wait, whose Mustang?
I glanced over at Muscles. "Yeah…it was me. I did it. I wasn't really watching the road and…this cat…yeah, this damn cat…"
"Lauren, language," my mother interrupted.
"The cat just came out of nowhere and I swerved to avoid it and…that's how it happened."
Dad was unimpressed. "You mean to tell me, you got into an accident over a cat?"
"Sorry…"
"Do you know how much that Mustang cost me?"
I could imagine. Since when could we afford a Mustang anyway?
"George, lower your voice."
"Barbara, that was a new model. A '64!"
"Hold up," I said. "I wrecked a '64 Mustang?"
My father cut me off with a glare. "That's enough from you, Lauren."
I was shocked into silence. Of course I wanted to lash out. Wanted to scream at the top of my lungs and tell him he couldn't speak to me like that. I was an adult. I was twenty years old. I lived on my own. Paid my own rent and went to College. I wasn't thirteen anymore.
But despite all those facts, I went quiet. Something about the whole situation scared me enough that I shut up entirely.
If they'd been my real parents then I'd have fought back. My parents were pushovers; loving people who welcomed everyone in with open arms. My mom was a free spirited lady, who liked to kick back on weekends over a game of cards and cold beer. And my dad liked to embarrass me by telling dirty or inappropriate jokes to my girlfriends when they'd stop by the house. They were predictable. These two were loose cannons, or at least the dad was. There was no telling what he'd do.
"Sir, if I may. Lauren and I were just exchanging information."
Muscles shot me a cocky smile.
"I was saying that if you'd allow it, I know someone who wouldn't mind doing the body work on your Mustang. It would be a reasonable price, I can assure you."
I stared, open mouthed at him.
Who was this guy?
"I'll think it over, Mister?"
"Curtis, sir. Darrel Curtis."