So, yeah, it's an OC-heavy fic. But it's all in the name of experimenting with feminist theory. Hinton owns The Outsiders. Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain, but I wouldn't own that, either.

Chapter One

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single greaser in possession of a good switchblade must be in want of a fight.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering the East (not the North) side of the neighborhood and slashing an arbitrary set of tires, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding gangs that he is considered a threat until the biggest, coldest, and meanest gang member stomps him into the ground to show him who is the proverbial boss. In the meantime, of course, he may be considered the rightful property of some one or other of their sisters.

That afternoon, the sisters and some of their friends sat at their regular lunch table in the high school, gossiping freely about the rumble that had taken place between their brothers and some of their friends. Rumbles held different but equal significance to both the young men and the young women on the East Side. For the young men, it was a chance to show one another their physical prowess and domination—to settle scores that had long been uneven. For the young women, it was a chance to admire the young men's physical prowess and domination—to dream of what it would be like to experience all that man in the comfort of their own homes.

"Johnny's got two black eyes," Lilly Cade spoke of her elder brother with abject fascination. "It's almost like he's got two holes in his face where his eyes should be. It's just awful."

"Poor thing," Katie Mathews mused over her bologna sandwich. "That's the good thing about Two-Bit. He's so drunk, even if he gets beat to a pulp, he can barely feel it."

"How's your brother, Sadie?" Carrie Shepard leaned over the table and asked the girl one seat down from the head of the table.

"Yeah, Sadie, have you spoken to Soda?" Jane Randle asked. Both girls had slight twinges of worry in their voices. Sadie Curtis folded her hands in her lap to keep from sighing.

"You could talk to them, you know," she said. "Or you could ask your brothers. It just so happens they were there last night, too."

"That's what I'm worried about," Carrie said, for her brothers fought against Sadie's brothers much of the time, including on the previous night.

"Yeah, besides, Steve won't talk to me about Soda," Jane said. "He says it's none of my business."

"Maybe it's not."

The rest of the table went quiet. Sadie turned her head to the left to smile faintly at the girl at the head of the table. Slowly, the other girls began to frown.

"You're never any fun, Lucy," Katie said. "Just because you don't like any of the boys in town doesn't mean we can't talk about them."

"See, that's the problem," Lucy said. "That's all you ever talk about. You don't want to talk about music or books or what we're having for lunch today, and I know you all listen to music, read books, and eat lunch. And you're telling me all you wanna do in life is ask Sadie about how her brothers are digging after the rumble? I don't think so."

Lucy Bennet had always felt out of place in her group of friends at school. A transplant from all around the country (most recently Detroit), Lucy and her parents had moved to Tulsa three years earlier after her father, an English professor, had been offered a new adjunct position at the local university. He had never been up for tenure, and as a consequence, Lucy moved around for as long as she could remember. Her father came from a rich family once, she had heard, but the moment he expressed interested in literature, not medicine, his family had disowned him. Lucy felt adrift in a neighborhood where the dropout rate was higher than the graduation rate. It was all her father could afford, but it was far less than what he wanted for his favorite bibliophile.

She began to feel more at home when she met her best friend, Sadie Curtis, whose penchant for silly paperbacks and classic novels alike was enough to keep her grounded. When she had moved at the start of high school, she hadn't realized how lawless Tulsa could be. Even Sadie's brothers, some of the nicest young men Lucy had met in her travels, were getting into and starting fights with other guys on the streets.

More than anything, Lucy didn't understand how violence was more attractive to her friends than were books, films, or music. Why was a punch in the nose dreamy, but the ability to recite whole passages from Shakespeare was boring? Why were bruises such turn-ons when there were love songs to be sung? It didn't make a difference to dwell on it. Lucy knew, from the age of fourteen, that even if she were to fall in love with a guy from the neighborhood, it would be the one who got into the least amount of fights and rarely, if ever, turned up drunk. Now that she was seventeen—approaching eighteen with ferocious speed—she was beginning to think it was too much to ask.

The idea that her friends could talk about more than boys was beginning to seem like too much to ask as well. Immediately after Lucy criticized the girls for talking about nothing but the boys, Lilly's dark eyes flickered over to her in coy suggestion.

"You know what I think you need, Lucy?" she asked.

"I don't know why, but I'm really afraid you're gonna say an enema."

Sadie nearly snorted. Lilly turned up her nose in confusion.

"A what?" she asked.

"Doesn't matter," Lucy said. "Go on, Lil. What do I need?"

"I think you just need to go on a date!" Lilly said, nearly throwing her arms in the air. "I heard a rumor Johnny's figuring on asking you out today."

A choral ooh took over the lunch table, though Sadie's ooh was admittedly more sarcastic than the others'. Lucy did not reply. In the most bizarre of ways, she cared for Lilly Cade like her own sister. Someone needed to, after all—the shouting that went on in that house was enough to chill Lucy to the bone. But despite her young age—fifteen, in a group filled with seniors—surely Lilly would have understood that Johnny wasn't Lucy's perfect match. Certainly, he had no police record, and Lucy had never seen him drunk, but his never-ending silences and nervousness never seemed to attract Lucy. After Lucy had discovered that Johnny was keen on her, she told Sadie that she didn't feel the same way. Sadie rolled her brown eyes and said, "Shoot, Lucy, sometimes I think you're writing a script for us, but we don't know any of the lines."

"I'd pay to see that," Carrie said.

"See what?" Lucy asked. "Johnny ask me out?"

"Well, that, but I'd also pay to see you go on a date at all."

The rest of the girls—this time, even Sadie—had a good laugh. Lucy straightened out her shoulders and puffed out her bust to disguise the fact that she actually wanted to sink into her chair and become invisible.

"Lucy," Katie said. "I hope you never go out on a date."

"How come, Katie?" Lucy asked, though she thought she knew the answer.

"Well, if you did, I'd have to die of shock," Katie said between laughs. "And that'd be sad, since I was always figuring I'd get hit by a bus!"

She burst out laughing. It ran in the family.

"Have you been trying to get hit by a bus, Kate?" Sadie asked.

"Only on the weekends."

Suddenly, Lilly stood up from her chair and made her way over to Lucy. Though she was shaking—she always shook when she spoke to Lucy Bennet one-on-one—she managed to get the right words out.

"Listen, Lucy," she said. "I don't really mean that stuff about not buying you on a date. You're real pretty. Any of the guys would be lucky to have you."

Lucy swallowed a bite of her sandwich. "Well, thank you, Lil, but that's not really what I…"

"Come to the Dingo with us tonight? Some of the guys will be there, like Johnny, and I think it'd be a good idea for you to just give him a chance."

"Lil, that's kind of exactly the opposite…"

"You can have all the popcorn you want."

Lucy's blue eyes lit up, and she saw, for the first time that afternoon, Lilly was truly connecting with her.

"I'll be there," Lucy said.

Lilly beamed and took her seat again. As she sat back down, Lucy had to shake her head and laugh. Lilly might be the youngest at the lunch table, but she was a clever little one. After all, she knew that Lucy Bennet could be bribed into just about anything if someone offered her popcorn first. To this point, it had always worked. That night, Lilly would put it to the test.

Sadie was the only one of Lucy's friends whom she trusted completely. She had always been interested in more than parties, fights, and boys, which Lucy assumed was because her elder brother, who looked after her after her parents were killed, was overprotective, and she taught her younger brother to read when he was three. That night, before they headed to the drive-in, they headed up to Lucy's room and discussed the matter of Johnny in a way that Lucy dared not bring up in front of the others.

"I don't understand why Lilly thinks that would be a good idea," Lucy said, putting on her lipstick. Sadie stared at the tube of lipstick on the dresser with envy. The Bennet family had just a bit more money than the average family in the neighborhood, so when Lucy brought out "Cherries in the Snow," Sadie bit her own lip in envy, hoping the pressure would turn her lips as red as they would be if her brothers let her buy Revlon.

"She thinks it's a good idea because she's fifteen," Sadie said. "She thinks that you've gotta like anybody who likes you. Tell you the truth, sometimes I don't think she's wrong."

Lucy never understood such a line of thinking. When she was a little girl, her father used to tell her that once she was old enough to be married, being married wouldn't matter anymore. Though she never quite understood what in the world that could mean, she took it to heart because she did not like what she saw of most people who were married. Lilly and Johnny's parents were married, and she'd seen them. What made her think that a relationship she was in would be any better? A marriage? Her father always told her she would be hard pressed to find that someone who could keep up with her (for she talked too fast and thought faster), and at this point, she was sure he was right.

"There has to be more for me than this," Lucy said. "You know, like that book I just read, where the girl rejects the marriage proposal from the clergyman because she doesn't like him, and she wants to do what she wants to do, without anybody's influence."

"Pride and Prejudice? Lucy, Elizabeth marries Mr. Darcy in the end. That's the point."

"Not that one. The other one—the one that Pride and Prejudice stole from. You know, the one with all the letters that was written in America. I brought it up in English class, but Mr. Syme said he'd never heard of it. Title's gone and jumped out of my head."

"Oh, I know that one. The Coquette or something. Ponyboy was reading it, same time you were." She paused, and then:

"Lucy! That girl died in the end because she used her heart and not her head."

"There was blood involved, Sadie, but I don't think it was blood in anybody's heart."

"Aww, shoot, you know what I mean. Is that really how you want to end up? Dead because you can't afford to take care of yourself?"

"I…"

"I know. You've never thought of it that way. But consider for a second that some of us have."

Lucy became quiet for a moment or two. It felt much longer. Sadie put a lot of thought into finding someone to marry almost as soon as she finished high school, but it wasn't always clear why. Sadie was every bit as book smart as her younger brother, Ponyboy, who'd skipped a few grades in school and was on the fast track for academic and athletic scholarships to college. She could have done the same thing if she'd just gone out for the girls' track team like her older brother, Darry, had encouraged her to. But Sadie didn't always see things the way she ought to see them. She saw things the way she thought her brothers wanted her to see them.

"Well, I'm going to figure out a way to make money on my own," Lucy said. "Hopefully by writing a couple of books people like and not by turning to a life of thievery."

"Oh, I don't know," Sadie laughed. She tossed her long, dark gold hair over her shoulders. "It could be fun to be dangerous."

"Oh, yeah, I plum forgot. I've always wanted a dangerous man."

Sadie laughed at Lucy to keep from tearing into her. She flopped down on Lucy's bed, the softest pillows she had ever felt, and looked up at the ceiling.

"You're a mess," Sadie said, careful not to look Lucy in the eye. "One of these days, you're gonna get your act together, and you're gonna see how silly you were before. 'This guy's too quiet.' 'This guy's too mean.' 'This guy's too nice.' 'This guy's too violent.' Glory, but you sound like Goldilocks, Lucy. And that's just silly."

"I'm not silly," Lucy said, firmly planting herself on the bed and forcing Sadie to move over. "I've got… I don't know, I've got standards, is all."

"Mmm-hmm. And you know what they say about people who let their standards get in the way of perfectly good friendships."

Sadie knew Lucy wasn't worried about any standards. She was thought to be arrogant, but neither would dare say so aloud. To say it would mean blood on the floor.

"What do they say, Sadie?"

Sadie sat up and looked Lucy dead in the eye. To that point, she was the only person Lucy knew who could stand to look at her that closely.

"They end up dead, like that girl in that story. Or like the girl in that other story you made me read. What's her name? Daisy Miller?"

"Yeah, I know. What's the difference between 'em?"

"I don't know. Hundred years or so."

Lucy smirked to keep herself from laughing. She looked up at the ceiling as though it would offer her something more than protection from the cold, and in those last moments before they left for the Dingo, she and Sadie contemplated how Lucy might react if Johnny found the nerve to ask her for a date that night.