This is Kin, again! Honestly didn't start considering Ponyboy/Cherry until it occurred to me that they are basically just the right amount of similar and different for a good relationship.
I don't own The Outsiders, though I would've liked to.
By the way, I heard that Hinton said that Soda died in Vietnam and Steve came back a heroin addict. But Ponyboy is good. Dunno how real this is, but whatever.
This was tense.
Cherry sat, once again, at a drive-in movie late in the night. To her left was Pat, her friend and neighbor. To her right was Evelyn, her loud thirteen-year old sister.
The time following Bob's death, then Johnny's and Dallas Winston's, had been tense days at school and nights in her bed, barely eating and wondering just what would happen if the warm darkness under her blankets just took her now.
"You're disturbin' us, Cherry!" Eve had said one day. "It's like ya wanna be dead or something!"
"Eve, no, I'm fine," she'd insisted. And she was. She didn't want to be dead, she wanted to make sure Bob was fine.
Wherever he was, if he even was. And the idea of Johnny and Dallas, who she hadn't even been close to, being at peace was the kind of sentimental wishing she'd disregarded til now.
Now she just wanted closure, like there was a happy ending to their mini-sized lives found somewhere behind the sanitary white pages of a fairy tale.
So she'd lie in bed and imagine death enveloping her soul and carrying it into a realm of peace and...
But the more she'd delved into the life of death, the more she'd realized how it was just the darkness underneath blankets, castles in clouds, the feeling of the open road and everything in the living world. If death did not abide by the laws of life, why would she be able to comprehend it now?
Eve wasn't really keeping up with fringe philosophy, and she had her own solution to catharsis. Even a year later, Cherry got slow sometimes.
"Let's go to a movie!" she'd chirped this morning, phone in hand to call someone. "You love movies!"
"Movies?" Cherry had asked. "The only one in town's the drive-in, and the car's in the shop."
"We can walk, y'know." Evelyn smiled, her gray eyes sparkling in the chandelier light of the front hall.
"Last time I was there..." It hadn't been a good memory, except for...
"This isn't..." Eve had begun, but stopped. Their parents were trying to knock some sensitivity into her lately.
"You gonna be afraid of it forever?" She'd settled on.
Afraid. That was something that summed Cherry up. Afraid of death. Afraid of outsiders. Afraid of a dumb drive-in movie...
"...No, you're right..."
This was a first for Eve.
The first name that came to mind was Patricia Hersh, who was not allowed to drive and got left out of a lot of scenes. She was glad to go anywhere, even if it could be crawling with Greasers. Marcia was on vacation, and even then, her wisecracks had gotten too personal for Cherry sometimes. They still spent time together, but less. It wasn't something her family mentioned.
They started walking down the road, Eve making sure to step on all the leaves for their crunching sounds. It was enough time to get Cherry to wonder if this was a bad idea, but she pushed ahead.
The movie this time was about love. A girl too dumb for school, pursued by the handsome chess club president for her beauty alone.
Honestly, Cherry hadn't liked it. The infatuation of society with opposites attract was cheesy at best and harmful at worst. The two could barely keep a conversation going, and they wanted to get married?
Just with a scene, (climactic, no doubt), where she has to sweet-talk her boyfriend's chess opponent into letting him win, Cherry decided to get up for something.
"Oh, Cherry," Pat had said, "Get me a soda, please?"
"Yeah..." The crowded seats and noise all around were fairly new this night, and it seemed to mostly be populated by couples and women uninterested in her. Not a flashback to a year ago, thankfully.
Pat's money and her own in hand, Cherry trudged down the concrete, her heels feeling more painful now.
And then she saw him. The boy who'd been the start of all this, along with herself and few others, anyways. Right here. How funny.
Standing in line with another Greaser who was chatting up a girl, Ponyboy Curtis was reading a book- Robert Frost poems, it seemed.
Maybe he knew how bad this movie would be. She smirked, then faltered.
He'd actually seen her, Ponyboy, at school. Cherry hated to think about it, about his face brightening slightly. Waving at her.
She'd ignored him. She couldn't... She didn't want to, she hadn't wanted to be that girl again, the one who'd fraternized with Greasers and gotten her boyfriend killed. And all he'd be to her friends was a Greaser.
But her friends weren't here right now. She was safe, right?
He saw her as he glance up. He looked different now, a year later. His hair was shorter, but only slightly. He was taller and a bit more muscular, though he still didn't look exceptionally strong.
His eyes were strikingly sharp though, like hard slabs of tree agate. Scrutinizing, meaner than she remembered.
Then he blinked and that look disappeared.
Quickly, with no reason but impulse to do so, Cherry waved.
She sucked in her breath. His eyes darted to the poems and powers had shifted. Ponyboy could decide what to do now: acknowledge her and preserve a whisper of a life past class feuds, or-
He blinked again and waved back.
Okay. She smiled and exhaled quickly. The other boy turned away from his pick-up and looked her up and down. Cherry went rigid as he whispered something to Ponyboy, a leery look in his eye.
Ponyboy's expression, narrowed eyebrows and a protruding lip told Cherry that it wasn't savory gossip.
Stepping forward, Ponyboy smiled at her, if not a little shakily.
"Don't mind him, Cherry." He looked back at the boy. "Curly's being an idiot."
"I'm not, don't worry," Cherry said, "I'm... I'm just trying to get some food."
"Right," he said. There was a pause. He looked at her again, a trace of the sharpness she saw before, but with something else as well. He seemed anxious, on-edge, as if there was something to say, but he didn't know how.
She knew the feeling. In fact, she was feeling something like it right now, along with a sickness from something else, something like self-disgust.
"Hey…" she said, stepping to the end of the line, "I need to talk to you later."
He looked at her for another moment. His jaw tensed. Then his gaze softened.
"Yeah. Yeah, okay."
Cherry smiled and looked away, missing Ponyboy punching Curly hard in the arm.
A few minutes later, his trio left. She watched as they sat down in the back, Curly and the girl beginning to make-out and Ponyboy just… reading. She smirked again. She hadn't exactly figured him out yet, but he wasn't a typical hood, and he wasn't the wholesome poor martyr waiting to be saved either. He was just a person.
She got her food and walked back to the girls, handing the soda to Pat.
"Cherry, were you the one talkin' with the JD? Lindy said you were," Eve said, casting Cherry a look of disgust different from how she felt. Lindy, her classmate, nodded in front of them. "You were always the weird kid."
"I think it's romantic," Pat muttered, taking a sip of her soda instead of looking Eve in the eye.
"Oh, no, we're not like that," Cherry said quickly. Suddenly, it seemed like she was in a romance. Her face felt hot, so she added, "He can't be older than fifteen, even now."
"My dad was eighteen and my mom was fifteen when they started dating," Pat said slowly, "I think you're okay."
"That's if it's an older guy and a younger girl," Lindy said, and Eve nodded concurrently.
Maybe this was time to find him. Cherry got up and set her drink down.
"You gonna see 'im?" Eve said.
"Maybe" was her stupid response. She followed it up with, "I have to go to the bathroom."
It took a few minutes to find the seats again, and Cherry began to think about what Eve, Lindy, and Pat were talking about. After Bob, and Dallas, quite honestly, she'd been wary of romance. Of course her parents expected her to marry and have kids, but she didn't think much about it anymore. Ponyboy as her…
He was alone when she found him. She couldn't imagine where the others had gone. Her face was a bit red now, from her thoughts, and when he glanced up, he looked at her a little too long as though he was wondering what was wrong.
He said nothing but, "Hey."
"Hi, again," she said, sitting next to him.
"Curly's not really a movie type," Ponyboy said, "he just goes there to get 'depressed girls without men'. His words, not mine."
"And that girl?" Cherry asked. "Was she a… success?"
Ponyboy looked back at the movie. "I think so. I looked up, and they were gone."
It was kind of odd to think that she was sitting right where two teenagers had been making out, but she couldn't do too much about it right now.
"That's not very nice," she said, preparing to start a conversation on what was really on her mind when he said, "No, I'm fine. I don't usually watch movies with other people, anyways. No one likes reading a book with someone over there shoulder, I'm not really fond of watching movies with anyone else either.
"But after Johnny and stuff… I try to go in numbers. And this movie was just me trying to get out of the house."
That sounded familiar. Cherry just looked at him quizzically before he said, "Soda and Steve are in 'Nam."
"Vietnam? Soda?" Maybe she did need to get out more. "And Steve?"
"Yeah." He kept his gaze on the screen.
"That's…" She looked down. "...I'm sorry. Ponyboy, I just wanted to say…"
He looked at her again, and she felt something excited in her chest, which she ignored.
"When I saw you at school, and you waved, I didn't mean to… be rude. It was a stupid idea."
"Oh." There it was. That hardness in his voice. "It's fine. I don't mind."
He looked back at the screen.
She tried again. "I don't want to be like the way I pretend I am…"
Dang, she was usually so articulate. He looked at her again, and her stomach did an unwelcome cartwheel.
"Ponyboy, last year, I told you that I act like this coolheaded cheerleader," Cherry said again. He nodded. "I pretend to love things I don't care about, and I pretend not to care about things I…"
Was he blushing? She went on.
"You know. One day I'll move somewhere else, where there aren't Greasers and Socs." She smiled a little, and he did too. "I decided a few months ago. I'll just go to a different college, and then it won't matter."
"...Right," said Ponyboy. "Well, good luck."
He picked up his soda can and empty bags of popcorn, then got up and began to walk to the garbage can.
Wait, he couldn't have thought that that was all she wanted to do, just rub in his face her inevitable success.
"Ponyboy?" Cherry called after him. "Wait!"
He stopped and turned to see her as she ran up to him, her heels painfully clicking with her. But right now, something else was more important.
Face to face with him, Cherry said breathlessly, "That's why I don't want to care anymore. About this, right now, because it won't matter in the long run. I'm already different now."
His confused gaze went down to her lips, then quickly back up to her own.
She ignored this.
"I mean, I already helped out the Greasers, I got Bob killed, I'm different, and if it's not going to matter soon…"
She hadn't realized how close they'd leaned in until she could feel his breath on her lips. She licked them, and then she- or he- or both of them at once closed the distance between them for a solid few seconds.
She hadn't been kissed since Bob, whose kisses had been hungry and hot and full of fire, and this kiss was the just the right balance between confusion, (because even with her newfound philosophy, jumping on him hadn't been part of the plan), tentativeness, and yes, a touch of hunger that meant he was more mature than she'd thought.
They broke apart and he apologized.
"No, you're fine," she said. "But I mean it. About us."
As friends, at first, they made a place to meet. The library on her side of town, owned by her grandfather and occupied for the most part by children and the elderly, who didn't have much to say on class warfare between kids.
"I'll drive you," she said, "If you can meet me at your bus station. I'll make sure the kids we pass don't give you any trouble."
"Sure," he said, "but I'll be positive to get back home on time."
On the walk home, Pat recounted how half of the audience watched a Soc girl and Greaser boy kiss in front of a trash can, their attention swayed from the movie's own big kiss, underneath the lamppost bright like a spotlight. And even if that was hyperbolized, the sentiment was pretty.