Remember Me
this time, she doesn't look back
They meet in the back of Buck Merril's roadhouse on a crowded evening in early July of '62; the kind when the air is heavy, crammed with sweat and cigarette smoke and whatever else someone just happened to smuggle in from Mexico, bodies crushed together in a sea of grinding. Hank Williams resonates around the walls at a constant thudthudthud of bass strings being plucked and incomprehensible lyrics no one bothers paying any attention to.
He's leaning against the bar; nursing off a hangover with the help of another beer, little strings of his blonde hair—so bleached by the sun it looks white—falling into a pair of eyes that is like staring into frozen ice.
His head is titled at an odd angle, the glaring flicker of a light bulb overhead highlighting the features of his angular face: pointed nose stuck up in the air, brow furrowed and pouted lips colored scarlet—the only contrast against his pale skin. Ears are perked up to silently eavesdrop on whatever shit Tim Shepard is arguing about (again) with one of his gang members. Apparently, someone won't shut the fuck up and listen.
He snorts, bored, looking over the mouth of his beer bottle as a torrent of dirty blonde hair—maybe brown, he can't quite tell—tears through the stream of people. And suddenly, she's right there, sidled up in front of him, so close that he can feel the temperature of her burning skin through the thin material of his tee-shirt.
At most, she's probably around five feet, womanly curves in all the right places—the type of body that is drooled over by boys and hated like fuck by girls. Long legs seem to stretch on for miles, almost like a fuckin' bar stool, barely covered by a black skirt he'd gladly like to tear to pieces.
He smirks down at her. Hey there, beautiful.
She doesn't even bother him a glance, just huffs and leans back against him. The sudden friction that buzzes between them is anything but ignorable.
Fuck you.
He wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her closer and closer until the scent of perfume burns his nostrils and he's swept up into the euphoria of arousal. For a brief second, her ass grinds against his crotch and he bites down on the inside of his cheek to keep from moaning. His jeans are becoming tighter and tighter as each minute agonizingly drags on.
She shivers as soon as his hand disappears underneath the waistband of her skirt, breath immediately hitching in her throat, his fingertips tantalizing, dancing across her hipbone. What time, doll?
The growl that emits from her puckered, cherry-red mouth soon forms into a small whine. He brings his other hand up to her chin and tilts her head backwards to study her face. Her hollow eyes are framed by long lashes, the color an odd mucky mixture of green and brown that probably looks pretty in the sunlight.
Without a warning, he presses his lips against her jaw line and trails his mouth up and down, fingers reaching farther down to tug at the lace of her underwear, nails digging into her thigh. He's getting restless, all the blood rushing from his head down to his balls, making him dizzy, and she's meowing so loud it is enough to get a few glares.
Stop it.
Or what?
He smirks into the crook of her neck, the tip of his tongue barely making contact with her soft skin. He's gonna end up inside her by the end of the night, anyway, so he doesn't really care which part goes in first: his hand, or his dick. But after a few minutes go by and she still hasn't say anything, just keeps staring off into space trying to act like she isn't even enjoying this, he asks again, this time letting his voice drop a few octaves to let her know that even if her boyfriend is around, he's still in charge.
What are you gonna do about it?
Her response is a simple ungh and less than five minutes later, he has her pressed up between him and the bathroom wall, her legs securely locked around his waist as his mouth does all the talking for them both.
Afterwards, as buttons are being re-snapped and zippers are being closed over sweat-coated skin, she throws him a one-eighty by telling him her name.
I'm Sylvia, she says. You must be Dallas.
He nods.
It all goes downhill from there.
000
Within two weeks, a system is established:
At night, they fuck like jackrabbits, and in the mornings that follow, she bitches to him about how all these nasty rumors are going 'round—he's hooking up with Ana Maria DeJesus behind her back; he got hauled in (again?); she doesn't understand why he's always looking for trouble; he doesn't understand why she doesn't put her mouth to good use for once—and, like always, mornings like these somehow end up in one of them storming out.
This time, he remembers to grab his jacket.
000
Every fight ends with a fuck. Every fuck ends with a fight.
He's learned his lessons.
000
In late August, he takes the blame for breaking a couple of windows at Will Rodgers High School.
(It's kinda funny 'cuz he hasn't been to school in months. He tells this to the holding cell officer, who just glares at him and tells him to shut the hell up, Winston.)
000
The only present she gets for her fifteenth birthday is a broken heart.
Somehow, she finds herself at Tim Shepard's house and gets fucked so hard that, afterwards, she can't move. Mentally and physically exhausted, she lets her eyes drift closed and tries to fall asleep, her head lying on the bare chest of a man she can only wish in her wildest dreams is the same one with bleached hair so sun streaked it looks white, chips of frozen blue ice melting around the edges, the left corner of his mouth curved up into a smirk…
Tim's snoring keeps her up all night.
000
The only present he gets for his sixteenth birthday is a personal invitation to join Tim Shepard & Company's gang—free of jump-in, immediate right-hand-man privileges—oh, boy.
He declines and spends the rest of the evening down at the quarry with Darry Curtis. They get drunk off their asses with some help from a bottle of whiskey Darry had stolen from his parents until they are both so numb he doesn't even feel the white-hot splitting pain of his ankle breaking.
He'd stumbled forward a little too far and tripped over a rock.
Darry freaks out at the sight of white bone tearing through skin and starts to unlike-Darry cry.
Pussy.
000
She misses him.
He thinks he misses her.
000
Today is December 4th.
They haven't seen each other since September 19th.
He's standing in front of his dresser, trying to find a pair of underwear that's clean enough to wear when she suddenly struts into his bedroom, a little bag dangling from her hand.
What the fuck are you doing here?
Only a towel hangs off his waist, wet hair sticking to his forehead. His face contorts into a repulsive sneer as he feels his dick begin to harden and he hopes she can't see it, hopes that she doesn't know he still thinks about her twenty-four-fuckin'-seven.
But her gaze has already found his and within seconds, they're stumbling onto his bed, a messy tangle of limbs and too many clothes conjuring together. She straddles him, the position so foreign yet familiar at the same time he groans.
Curious, he watches through half-lidded eyes as she opens the bag and pours out the contents of what looks like grass and paper onto the bedside table. She rolls up a cigarette and lights it, taking a long puff, exhaling a cloud of smoke into his face that he can only describe as Curly Shepard's cologne wafts into his nostrils—not pleasant but not bitter, either. Manageable.
He reaches for the cigarette and inhales, not expecting to feel a rush of burning down his throat. His esophagus bubbling, he coughs, and she laughs. He grabs the back of her head and crushes their skulls together—lips and tongues and teeth devouring—and then they melt, fuse together into this feeling that is neither right nor wrong, just as perfectly imperfect as something like this can possibly be.
000
Sometimes, he can't breathe.
It's an ungodly hour in the morning, the entire shithole of a house completely still besides the grumble of the refrigerator humhuming in the kitchen upstairs, and he's wide awake in the cold blackness atop a lumpy mattress, staring up at the violent burst of white that makes up his ceiling, tracing a crooked crack of plaster behind closed eyelids, feeling completely naked—exposed to the inner core.
Thinking. Chewing on the end of a Kool until it becomes soggy and the nicotine melts into his teeth. A howl of sirens coast past his house, and he thanks God that it wasn't him who'd caused that kind of commotion this late—or whatever fucking time it is.
Red, blurry letters of his alarm clock say it's 1:03 but he's pushing more towards 3 a.m. (Nights like these just tended to repeat themselves, anyway, blurred into one another—a horror show of red blue red blue lights dancing.)
Up the staircase leading from the lower level bedroom, down the hallway, out the front door, jump the three porch steps, across the lawn. Tonight the smell of fresh rain, the burning of dry grass beneath his stocking-clad feet and a twisted version of hope fill the air, hitting his nostrils with a fumble of sounds, drowning out the chilly whispers of another whiteout. The moon is full, hanging low in the midnight sky, a little ball of yellow exploding into a thousand pieces against a canvas of dark violet that make him want to burst at the seams.
He slides into the car and shoves the key into the ignition, twists the metal, and curses. Listens to the familiar churn of the engine roar to life before he finds himself flooring the pedal down. Rubber tires skid across the deserted, ice-covered road, and as each mile passes, he feels his body peeling like an onion skin, layer by layer, unraveling and then coiling around itself, only to do the same process all over again.
And sometimes, if rarely, she understands.
(The simple fact of knowing this is so surreal that it scares the absoloute shit out of him.)
000
Hey.
She doesn't bother to look up at him, only moves a few inches over so he has a place to sit down. The wooden step creaks underneath his weight. Like so many nights before, she will hand him a cigarette and he'll light it up and they'll share it, pass back and forth between chopped-up versions of stories that remind him that he hasn't lost his mind. Yet.
She's already shoved a Kool between her lips by the time he's made himself comfortable, the upper part of his body pressed against the porch railing, the rest dangling off the edge. In the process his shirt had ridden up, exposing the tender, pale flesh of his ribcage. Splinters dig into his side, stomach acid swirls up his throat, and blood pushes through his veins, hot and fast like sparks of lightning. His brain is about to ooze out through his eyeballs.
Fucking hell...
Sylvia's bare leg slides against his jean-clad thigh, blood-red painted fingernails hooking themselves into the dark blue material. She turns her head away from the darkness to face him, and he nearly chokes on the wall of smoke she blows into his face.
Ignoring her lame attempts at comfort, he focuses his burning pupils on the aura of glowing headlights sweeping across the gravel parking lot.
He thinks she would be pretty if she wasn't such a whore.
So, I heard Tim's gettin' out tomorrow. It's more of a question than a statement.
Yeah, apparently.
Exciting.
What the fuck do you think?
Without a word, he removes the cigarette from her lips and shoves it between his, inhaling deeply, wanting so badly to make the sharp stinging of the air around him stop suffocating his lungs. Stop time from continuing, seconds to minutes to hours—frozen. Stop her from fucking with all those chemicals in his brain, making him crazier than the Devil on smack.
A few minutes go by, him huffing and puffing on the now burnt-out Kool, her twirling a dirty blonde lock around her finger before she finally says, You're gonna be fine.
I hope you're right.
She frowns. Who the hell shoved their dick up your ass?
He wants to blurt out 'Tim' just for kicks (pun intended, of course), but the joke would end up falling flat and he'd feel more like an asshole than he already does. So he just shrugs and says nonchalantly, Fucker downtown.
Fucker downtown, she repeats, an eyebrow raised, lackadaisical. This reminds him of why he doesn't like his broad cussing. (From time to time, sure, it's a turn-on and all, but it brings back a memory of when everything in the world was still bendable, a forgotten place where you could look out your bedroom window and trace the patterns of snowflakes falling to the ground, a time when you could shatter every bone in someone's body to pieces and leave them lying in a gutter on a side street of downtown Manhattan, choking on their own blood that ran fuckin' blue.)
He cracks his knuckles together and spits the butt of the cigarette into the inky blackness that hangs like a noose around his neck just waiting to be pulled, red embers dissolving into the snow seconds later.
You know, she drawls, the agitated tone in her voice snapping him away from his thoughts, You're almost nice, Dally.
He snorts. Jesus fucking Christ, she has to stop blabbering about this religious bullshit or he'll cut her off from his life completely—or as long as it takes to find a good dealer and dissolve himself into a pile of crack.
If by 'was', you mean, then yes.
At this, she throws her head back and laughs—he doesn't know what is so fucking funny about any of this. Always fuming over what will happen and what won't, he's so preoccupied by the shit that maybe might not even happen tomorrow that he doesn't realize she's already stopped talking.
What the hell you want, anyway? he glares at her from the corner of his eye, disgusted. God, since when is he this bitchy around, what, three-oh-fuckin' clock in the goddamned morning?
She mutters something incomprehensible and shakes her head at him, entwining their fingers together. Her palm is cool and smooth against the flaming, calloused cells of his skin, her hand nearly two times smaller than his.
Grow up, Dallas.
Some place deep inside of him aches to tell her that he already has.
000
Get dressed. I'm takin' you on a date.
She stares up at him, mouth agape. What?
You told me to grow up. So I did, and now I'm gonna take you on a fuckin' date, Syl. Get your ass dressed and lemme inside already, goddamnit. It's fuckin' freezing out here.
He wiggles his foot in the door jam, shudders just for emphasis, tries to squeeze into the small slip of space between her elbow and the door.
C'mon, Sylvia, he whines, lemme in!
She frowns. No, Dally, not like this.
He doesn't pay attention to the door slamming in his face.
She doesn't pay attention to how many times he says the word fuck in a single sentence before his footfalls finally fade off into the distance.
The silence that follows has never seemed so loud.
000
Eyes swollen and bloodshot, dry knuckles raptaptap on the Curtis' front door. The knob twists and the door sweeps open, revealing a disheveled Ponyboy Curtis—she'd forgotten how late it was.
Is Dally here?
He nods, wordless, and turns on his heel, disappearing down the hall. From inside, the loud sounds of a regular Saturday night drift into the air: beer bottles clinking, poker chips being thrown, voices laughing, static blaring to block out yelled curses.
At the abrupt sight of her boyfriend standing in the doorway, glaring down at her in a mixture of pity and hate, her empty stomach jumps into her throat and she sputters out the only thing she's been repeating to herself for the past nine hours:
You said you was takin' me on a date, remember?
She braces herself for the impact that never comes.
He nods, fearless. Who said I wasn't?
She takes one step backwards; he takes one step forwards. They're dancing a wicked tango in the dim glow of light spilling outside through the window, a kind of game that only ends in broken hearts, but for now, he's cornered her against the porch railing—the left side of his mouth curving into the expression she loves to hate so well—and she can only wrap her arms around his neck and pull him closer, closer into this feeling of weightlessness, so close to feeling happy that she could drown.
000
For their first official 'date', he takes her to the movie theater and they pay fifty cents to see a special showing of Gone With the Wind, popcorn and cokes included. It's a fucking long-ass movie, nearing towards five hours; with too many words and a plotline he doesn't understand no matter how much she tries to whisper-explain it to him.
(He spends more time outside the building, pacing up and down the block rather than having his arm locked around her shoulders, but she can't complain for the effort he's tried to put into this—at least he tried.)
000
Winter melts into spring and spring blossoms into summer.
As usual, they meet in the back of Buck Merril's roadhouse on a swelteringly hot evening in September; the kind when the air is heavy, crammed with sweat and cigarette smoke and whatever else someone just happened to smuggle in from Mexico, bodies crushed together in a sea of grinding. Hank Williams resonates around the walls at a constant thudthudthud of bass strings being plucked and incomprehensible lyrics no one bothers paying any attention to.
He's leaning against the bar; nursing off a hangover with the help of another beer, little strings of his blonde hair—so bleached by the sun it looks white—falling into a pair of eyes that is like staring into frozen ice.
His head is titled at an odd angle, the glaring flicker of a light bulb overhead highlighting the features of his angular face: pointed nose stuck up in the air, brow furrowed and pouted lips colored scarlet—the only contrast against his pale skin. Ears are perked up to silently eavesdrop on whatever shit Tim Shepard is arguing about (again) with one of his gang members. Apparently, someone won't shut the fuck up and listen.
He snorts, bored, looking over the mouth of his beer bottle as a torrent of dirty blonde hair—dyed brown—tears through the stream of people. And suddenly, she's right there, sidled up in front of him, so close that he can feel the temperature of her burning skin through the thin material of his tee-shirt.
She grabs the bottle from his hand and tips her head back, watching him watch with lust filled orbs as her throat muscles work to swallow down the liquor. Then, suddenly, she drops the glass from her fingers to the floor and smacks him right across the face so hard his jaw damn-near dislocates.
Fuck you.
It's the last thing she'll ever say to him.
000
Two weeks later, she's clutching onto Tim Shepard's bicep for dear life, looking anywhere but everywhere. Avoiding how chilly the air has become around her, a breeze biting through her clothes and seeping into her bones; how the dead leaves crunch underneath the palm bearers' feet as white-gloved hands, veins popping from beneath, carry the casket to the graveyard; how the Father's words are muttered by the earth's greedy snarl, its muddy tongue swallowing the one boy who was everything she could never have.
This time, she doesn't look back.
Author's Note-
So, there you go—the story of Dallas and Sylvia. (The ending may have seemed a little rushed, but you can use your own imagination to figure out what happened in spring—basically, more of the same.) Dallas and Sylvia were supposed to remain nameless, hence 'he' and 'she' more times than usual. I originally began writing this in 2nd person, but switched over to 3rd. To me, it seems to flow a little easier, and you can put in a heavier amount of detail. The dialogue was purposely italicized, so if you got a little confused, there's no problem in re-reading over certain parts that may have been struck as confusing. That is just how I wanted to format Remember Me.
SE Hinton owns The Outsiders (no surprise there). If you managed to stomach Remember Me in one sitting, then thanks and congratulations. Let me know what you think by leaving a review—I'd love to hear your thoughts about this little project of mine. :]