Know Your Place
It was a frosty Wednesday night in the middle of November. The streets were basically empty with the exception of a couple of people, and I expected the drive-in to be the same once I got there. The bitter cold had kept most inside. Soda was with this new chick, Karen something or other, Darry was out for once with a friend from work, and I just didn't feel like calling Two-Bit or Steve. Sometimes you just want to be alone, ya know? Just take in the sights and the sounds. I had been warned to never be by myself, to always have a comrade with me --especially since the beating--, but I needed to be alone for a while.
There wasn't anyone I felt like talking to nowadays since all I do is talk. The doc'll come over every once in a while and ask me how I'm doing. If I just say fine, he doesn't leave and makes me talk about my feelings. Yes, a Greaser talking about his feelings. Darry'll try to get me to talk sometimes, but I would tell him to shove it and stop bothering me. He normally got very tight-lipped about it afterwards. Soda tried not to irritate me, but he still asked how I'm coping, particularly when it came to Johnny. He didn't question me as much as Darry or the doc which was a bit better. Two-Bit tried to get my mind off it even though he knew that talking about it was what was "healthy" for me. Steve…well…Steve was Steve and didn't really talk to me at all.
The only person I kinda wanted to talk to is Cherry. I just missed talking to her. She wouldn't talk to me about how I'm feeling if I spoke to her that night. She would speak about something, anything, anything but Johnny and Dally. I knew that she was hurting, too with Bob and all. Maybe her friends were doing the same thing to her that my friends were doing to me. Maybe instead of talking about some of the important things we normally chat about like Socs versus Greasers or why were are different or how we are alike, we would talk about the show "The Fugitive" or go get some Pepsis.
Before I knew it, I was at the drive-in. I was right when I said that it was going to be virtually empty, but there was a good amount of people there for a night that was so icy.
I went up to get some popcorn, and I saw her. Her as in Cherry Valence. She was with Marcia and another blonde-hair girl I didn't know. Although I always knew that Cherry was a looker, at that moment I saw how beautiful she really was. The way her flaming red hair curls slightly at the ends. The way the skin around her eyes crinkled slightly whenever she really laughs, not a fake "Oh! That was so funny" laugh, but a real, full blown laugh. The way she tilted her head to the left slightly when she was thinking, and the way her sea green eyes sparkled when she smiled.
"What are you looking at, Grease?" A voice questioned from behind me.
I turned around, and I saw a silhouette of a girl. She was a Greaser girl. That I could tell immediately; too much of her leg was shown to be a Soc and a cigarette was dangling out of the side of her mouth.
"Huh?" I mumbled, dumfounded. "What are you talking about? Who are you?"
"My name ain't important." She took another drag of her cigarette, and the face was lit with an orange glow. "And you know what I'm talking about. Yous was looking at that nice looking Soc, the redhead. You fancy her dontcha, Grease?"
"So?" I muttered defensively in a pathetic attempt to sound like I didn't care what she thought.
She gave a low laugh.
"You're the hero Greaser, right? With the boys who died?" I nodded, and I felt a knot tie in the pit of my stomach thinking about Johnny and Dally. There was a long pause, and she was staring at me. I shifted uncomfortably. Then, abruptly, the Greaser girl made a motion with her pointer finger to come near her. I moved hesitantly towards her, my hands in my pocket.
"What?" I mumbled.
I looked up at her. She was a good-looking girl, no doubt about that, but she had that same look that Dally and Randy had: cold and hard. I suspected that she was around Sodapop's age, sixteen or seventeen, but she could easily pass for a woman in her mid-twenties. Her light blue eyes looked dead like they had seen too much suffering to even bother to look sprightly, yet they looked like they could pierce into you and see everything, even your innermost thoughts.
"You're a Greaser. She's a Soc."
"What does that matter?" I muttered. She gave another hollow laugh.
"You need to know your place, Grease. You're the type of guy that the good girls spit upon. You're the type of guy that isn't accepted by them. You're the type of guy that isn't good enough for them. Get your head out of them clouds and take a good look at the situation. She would never go for a Greaser like you. She is nothing more than a fantasy, so grow up." Her eyes looked alive for a moment, but only for me to see pain. "You'll just wind up hurt, so, for your own good, forget her. Live your life, not a daydream."
She fumbled with getting something out of her pocket. It turned out to be a pack of Winstons. She took one out of the pack and offered it to me.
I took the weed. I didn't realize it at that moment, but in the future, I grasped what me taking that cigarette meant. That was me accepting that I will just be a Greaser, nothing more and nothing less. That was me saying that I'm not good enough. That was me in essence saying that I shouldn't give a damn about myself.
They say that all things happen for a reason. That gave me a little bit of comfort knowing that Johnny's and Dally's deaths might have had purposes. Maybe I just wasn't enough family for Johnny, and he needed something more than I could give him. Maybe Johnny was Dally's real life line. Whatever the reason was, it gave me hope that there might be a reason for the deaths, that they weren't just pointless losses of life. But taking that weed, as I look back on it, I see no reason. I had a cig in my pocket, and I could have easily taken it out instead of accepting hers. That was one of the moments that I truly regret since that was me living up to all of the Greaser stereotypes. I didn't even try to say that I was better than that. I didn't even fucking try. And at that moment in time, I was me being the exact opposite of who I wanted to be.
AN) This is my first attempt at an Outsiders fic, so please be lenient. Also, I would appreciate if you could tell me what to do to improve my writing.