March 5th, 1965

"Where is she?"

The front door slammed. For a second I couldn't hear anything. I guess he was waiting to see if I would volunteer myself for slaughter.

That's the thing I love most about Darrel: he's secretly an optimist.

"This is your worst idea," said Soda, who was sitting directly above me, "in a history of some pretty bad ideas."

"Shut up, perv." There were so many girlie mags under his bed I might I felt like I was in some dumb ironic hippie art show about the pointlessness of consumerism. The one closest to me had a girl with a red bouffant on the cover who was licking her lips suggestively, which made sense, I guess, but she was also leaning against a statue that was wearing football pads, which was beyond me. Unless they were trying to make the point that football is stupid.

King Football himself thundered into the room at just that moment, and he had not bothered to take off his workboots, which were all I could currently see of him. I chalked that down mentally for the next time he told me to take my damn shoes off in the house.

"Where is she?" he snapped at Soda, which he knew wouldn't work. There's no surer way to make Soda balk than to snarl at him, but Darrel lacks patience in moments of high emotion.

Newspaper rustled overhead. "Am I my sister's keeper?"

I could hear Darry rolling his eyes. "Fine. Where's Pony?"

"Bowling alley with Johnny," said Soda, "so I doubt he knows either. What'd she do?"

"Don't bullshit me. I know she was here. Where'd she go?"

"She didn't say."

"Christ, Soda!"

"Language," Soda said flatly. Darry thundered back down the hall, and a moment later the front door slammed again.

I shimmied out from under the bedframe, shredding magazine pages that clung to me as I went.

"Hey look, there was a monster under there after all," Soda said as I emerged.

"Very funny, Hefner. Maybe the real monster is commercial sexualization to pacify the masses, you ever think about that?"

"Oh, all the time." He grinned at me and nodded toward the door. "You fixin' to get your head torn off?"

"We'll see, I guess." I meant to do a little head-tearing of my own, when the time came, but I wasn't ready to go toe to toe with Darry yet. I had to get organized first.

"I still don't get why you don't just lay low for a while," said Soda. He was sitting against the wall with the newspaper in his lap, and when I turned to look at him he didn't look up. "Let him cool off."

Soda never was one for a shouting match. He wanted me to apologize, but I hadn't technically done anything wrong and I wasn't about to pretend I had.

"I'm throwing him off the trail. I told you, I have a plan."

"Is the plan for Two-bit to bring you money?"

Yes.

"No," I snapped, and grabbed a sweater off the top of his dresser. It was freezing in the house, especially since we tried to keep the heat off unless Pony was home. "What are you reading the paper for?"

He was really reading it, not just thumbing through the sports pages.

"No reason," he lied. Soda's a great liar. It's the pretty-boy charm. People will believe anything if you're good-looking.

I went into my mom's old bedroom and changed out of my school skirt and into a pair of her old slacks. Darry was on a real tear, he was hardly ever home from work before five thirty. It caught me off guard when the truck pulled up, or I would have hid under my own bed where the only magazines were Woman's Day and Vogue.

"What are you gettin' up to tonight?" I called over to Soda. Friday nights for him were usually about five hours in front of a mirror, and then two or three with Mary Alice Ayers. It was hard to tell which he found more interesting.

"Me and Stevie are going out. You gonna hide out over at the Randles?"

There was a tinge of hope in that question that almost made me feel bad. "Hell no. What's Ayers up to?"

"Don't know, don't care."

I stopped in the doorway of his room on my way to the kitchen. "Ah, the paper mystery solved. So which lonely hearts club do you think you'll join?"

Soda pitched a pillow at my head. "Can it."

I caught it and tossed it back. I wasn't too worried about hurting his feelings. They hadn't been serious. "You alright, though?"

Soda rolled his eyes. "Don't you have your own business to worry about?"

Well. He had a point. I'd told Two-Bit to meet me at the house, but that was before I knew that Darry was going to book it home from work. I jogged into the kitchen and called his house with the intention of warning him off, but nobody answered.

Two-Bit told me at lunch that he was taking Sharon Tovino home after school, so there was a good chance he was over at the Sun Diner at that very moment, blowing straw papers at waitresses and trying to joke his way down Sharon's blouse. If Darry skipped the Randle's- and he sounded pissed enough to go looking for me there in person- chances were he'd burn over to the diner next. Shit.

I shrugged my father's old flannel hunting jacket on, went out the back, and cut across the Borley's yard to get to Trenton. Knocking on the Mathew's door was a long shot, but I felt obligated to try. Chances were pretty good that Darrel and Two-Bit would collide somewhere in the next hour, which would be bad for Two-Bit, although there was a slim chance it might work out better for me if Darry had the opportunity to blow some steam before we went at it. There was a much fatter chance that Two-Bit would make my brother so angry that his heart would implode, and then I would be responsible for raising two teenage boys into functional members of society, and the hell with that.

I paused on the sidewalk in front of the Mathews' to break off some of the little ice edges that had formed around the dirty patches of snow in the yard with the toe of my shoe. The Mathews' place looked awful in the winter, with huge brown bushes all pressed up against the house like cows trying to huddle into a shed. In the summer, though, it was all white rhodendrons and pink roses.

I made my way around back, stepping in snow patches to keep out of the mud. We never went in the front door. It always jammed.

Two-Bit was sitting on the steps of the back porch, drinking his after-school beer and smoking a cigarette. When he saw me he took the cigarette out of his mouth and did a slow once-over, then put his elbows up on the step behind him and blew smoke in my direction.

"Sorry, mister, no free meals here. Try the Methodists."

I gave him the finger. "Don't you answer your phone?"

"I said I'd be over," he said flatly, and stubbed his cigarette out.

I climbed up the steps and sat down on the broken-down couch behind him to glare at his back. I could tell that he was in a mood, and if I'd had more patience I might have been sympathetic, but I had bigger problems than missing out on a chance to feel up Sharon Tovino.

"What's the matter?" I asked, just to get the conversation started. He didn't answer. "Sharon go home with Bill Kempsky?"

Two-Bit twisted around to stare at me. "Shit, word travels fast. What are you, the gossip columnist of Will Rogers?"

"Nah, you retain your title. They're in my history class. They've been sniffin' around each other like a couple of dogs in heat for a month."

Two-Bit made a face that was half incredulity and half disgust. "Kempsky?"

So that's what had him pissed. Well, I couldn't blame him. Bill Kempsky was one of the soc contingent who was never going to make it into the inner circle and was never going to stop trying. If that wasn't bad enough by itself, he was whiney. What Sharon thought she was doing was beyond me.

"I wouldn't of believed it either. But, to quote Emily Dickinson, the fur burger wants what it wants."

Two-Bit spit a mouthful beer onto the steps, coughed, and pitched over sideways laughing. If there's a surer way to get him out of a mood than desecrating a famous quotation, I don't want to know what it is.

Juvenile, maybe, but it worked. Also it gave me a chance to say fur burger out loud, a term I had recently discovered and found equal parts amusing and digusting.

"Brother, have you got a mouth on you," he said when he sat back up. "It's a wonder your teeth haven't rotted out."

I clacked them at him. He turned around to face the yard again, shaking his head. The back of his head was a complicated set of swirls, the grease making his hair look darker than it was. I closed my eyes and started to tilt my head back, and then changed my mind before my hair touched the couch cushion. That couch had been on the back porch for longer than I'd been alive, and who knew what all germs it had collected over the years.

We sat there in silence for a minute, not looking at each other. He was trying to make me ask for the money. That was Two-Bit all over. He would stick his neck out to help me in a heartbeat, and he'd beat the hell out of any guy who so much as looked at me wrong, the same as Darry or Soda. I would trust him with my life. But when there wasn't any real danger, when there was time to do it- I don't know, it was like he had to have his little power trip. He liked girls to ask him for things more than once. He liked for them- us- to bat eyelashes and pout and cajole.

Two months before, I might have done it. I might have pouted at him and cocked my hip out to the side and felt that little rush of pride you get when you flirt a boy into doing something for you.

Two months before, I wouldn't have needed the money.

I got up and walked into the house without another word. Two-Bit's kid sister, Kelly, was at the kitchen table cutting out paper dolls.

She wrinkled her nose at me. "Did you come to babysit? Mama said I could stay by myself because she'll be home at five and it's not that long."

"Doesn't anybody in this house answer the phone?" I shuffled through some papers on the table, even though I knew it wouldn't be there. "No, I didn't come to babysit. Did you have a snack?"

She was always starving right after school. She nodded, too busy concentrating on cutting around a foot to answer.

I ran upstairs to Two-Bit's room and waded through the piles of clothes on the floor to his closet, where he always kept stuff he wanted to hide. I didn't particularly want to feel around inside his old sneakers, but needs must when the devil drives, I guess. I found the roll of bills in the toe of a dilapidated tennis shoe.

I took a minute to count it and my heart started speeding up, which made me feel dumb as hell. It wasn't like I was doing something wrong. It was my money, I just hadn't been able to collect it the night before. It was also a lot of money, but that was no reason to feel shakey all of the sudden.

Two-Bit was coming up the stairs when I started down them. I stopped a step above him so that we were the same height. His eyes were a little too bleary for just one beer- I knew sometimes he took a hip flask to school with him, but he hadn't seemed too juiced up when I'd spoken to him earlier in the day.

"You that tore up over Sharon?" I asked, indicating his general demeanor.

Two-Bit leaned against the wall and nodded at the jacket I was still wearing.

"That your dad's coat?"

"It's the warmest one," I said, like I had to justify myself. I didn't mention that his other coat still smelled like his aftershave and this one only smelled like wool. I was trying not to think about that.

"Gotta keep warm when you're out wasting ducks," he said with a small grin, but it fell flat. I leaned against the railing and just waited.

"We can't do it again, you know," he said finally, while staring at the wallpaper. Lord, you would think we were two old married people having a torrid affair.

"Who said anything about doing it again? It's not like it was a lifelong dream of mine in the first place."

"Yeah, I know," Two-Bit said, still looking at the wall. "I didn't mean..."

He trailed off. He was acting weird enough that I started to get uncomfortable. Not like I was afraid of him or anything, just that it seemed like maybe he was actually upset about the night before, and I didn't want to dig through all the five hundred reasons why.

I stuck my hands in my pockets and said, "Anyway, Darrel came stompin' in about twenty minutes ago. I reckon his work buddy told him-"

Two-Bit tilted his head back and smacked his open hand against the wall. "That fucker. I figured. Shit, what's a man with a roofin' job doing on a Thursday night-"

I started past him down the stairs. "Tell it to the wind, Two-Bit. Lord knows I've heard it enough. Don't sweat it about King Football. I'll talk him around."

"Around to what? Murder?"

I gave him the finger without looking back. He started down the stairs after me.

"You're just gonna make him madder."

"Don't matter if he's madder," I said, and held up the roll of bills. "This is what matters. And he knows it, even if-"

"Hold it," Two-Bit stopped in the middle of the living room and held up his hands. "I think we might be talking about two different people. I'm talking about Darrel Curtis, about six two, dark hair, no sense of humor? You might also recognize him as the guy who's gonna break my head in the next time I see him? I thought the two of you were acquainted, maybe I'm mistaken."

"Ok, fine. But who cares if he blows his top? We didn't technically do anything wrong."

"Last time I checked, Little Miss Technicality, drugging people is kind of on the-"

There was a sharp gasp behind me. I turned to see Kelly standing in the doorway with a mixture of horror and delight on her face.

"You gave somebody drugs? Like the bad guy did to Barney?"

I wracked my brain for who Barney was. The Mathews' didn't have any pets. Confused, I turned back toward Two-Bit.

"From Andy Griffith," he sighed. "Kelly, get the hell-"

I smacked him hard on the arm. "Don't cuss at your sister. No, we didn't give anyone any drugs. We would never do that. We were pretending- just like on Andy Griffith, like how those actors are playing characters and saying words that other people wrote? That's what we were doing. For a play. We-" I met Two-Bit's eyes briefly, "-are rehearsing a play."

Kelly was ten, but she wasn't stupid. She put her hands on her hips and glared skeptically at the two of us. "What play?"

"Hamlet," said Two-Bit, which I strongly suspected was the only play he could name. Evidently Kelly had also heard of it, because her skepticism deepened.

But I was irritated at Two-Bit for that Little Miss Technicality comment and his inablity to leave well enough alone, so I dropped down on the couch and patted the cushion for Kelly to sit down too.

"Why don't we show you? Do your monologue, Two-Bit. You know, the big one."

"What's the big one?" Kelly asked as she sat down beside me. I grinned at Two-Bit, who was practically swelling up on account of all the swearing he was holding in.

"Well Kelly, it's called to be or not to be, and it's one of Shakespeare's greatest accomplishments. One of the best pieces ever written in the history of the world. It's a real honor for an actor to be delivering this particular piece. Go ahead, Keith."

Two-Bit tried to glare at me, but the truth was this was right up his alley and we both knew it. This was exactly the kind of dumb shenigans that lit him up like a candle. He gave up trying to glare, put a foot up on the coffee table, and stretched an arm out dramatically toward us.

"To be, or not to be, is the question," he said. "Which I will proceed to answer."

He paused long enough that I felt compelled to throw him a line.

"Whether," I prompted. He flapped his hand at me dismissively.

"Shut up about the weather, I'm actin' here," he said, and winked at Kelly. "To be or not to be, is the question, which I will proceed to answer. Like a river flows, surely to the sea, darling, so it goes- some things were meant to be."

I clapped. "Ladies and gentlemen; Hambone, Prince of Denmark."

Two-Bit made a sweeping bow.

Kelly laughed, then frowned, then looked up at me. "That didn't-"

"I'll give you a nickel if you go play in your room," said Two-Bit. She lit out before he finished the sentence. You never saw a kid take the stairs so fast.

"She's savin' up for a horse," said Two-Bit. I went through the kitchen and out the back door as he trailed along behind me. "Mom told her she could have one if she built the barn herself, which, technically speaking-"

I shut the screen door in his face before he could follow me out. "We didn't drug anyone. Dallas drugged- speaking of, where is Dallas?"

Two-Bit went over to the refrigerator and started rooting around inside while I stood on the porch and waited for him to answer. I got the feeling he was doing it just be annoying. After a minute he stood up, empty-handed, and turned back to me.

"Last I heard he was slitherin' over towards the bowling alley. Sylvia got a job at the concession stand and he bet Pete Simson that he could make her quit in an hour."

Charming. "You headin' over there?"

"I reckon. Close the door, would you, we ain't runnin' a snow-melting charity."

I didn't have to tell him to warn Dallas about Darry, he'd do that on his own. "Yeah, yeah. Hey, give Pony a ride, will you?"

"Yeah, ok," he said, and then, because he always had to have the last word: "Do us both a favor and stay out of Darry's way."

"Maybe he should stay out of mine," I snapped back over my shoulder, because I always have to have the last word, too.