A/N: Hello, Josefin, thinking about you googling the car made me smile! (I agree, it's hideous!)
Thanks to all guest reviewers, I appreciate your taking the time to comment even if I can't reply/discuss things with you. I'm never going to write a 'perfect' Soda, because that's not how I see him, but funnily enough, the 'car' issue was already in the process of being addressed...
Soda
It was Steve turning eighteen that got the topic started, of course. 'The topic' being the goddamn draft. Not something to give the evening a real romantic groove, but that was okay. We were comfortable all the same, cuddled up in the Rambler, the radio on low and the lake all misty in front of us. Chicks dig mist, I've noticed. It usually reminds me of creepy movies but they reckon it's romantic or some such shit.
Yeah, we were in the Rambler. Steve had been fairly plain spoken about what he called my 'complete and utter dickness' in not going out in Jo's car. Told me she was prepared to sell it, for me. Well, first he told me it was 'cause she'd said it didn't match my eyes, but I called bullshit on that and he filled me in on the truth. I discovered that it mattered more to me that she was sad about it, than it did to be seen in what I still considered a pansy car.
Of course, I secretly thought Steve didn't really get where I was coming from, seeing as he already had his own precious cherried-out baby. I started saving again, to get my own wheels. I forget what I needed the last jar of nickels and dimes for, but I was starting over from empty.
So we were in Jo's car. I got to drive, so's I could pick a good spot. Joanne asked for us to come back to the lake, but I knew she didn't mean anything by it. She didn't have the same kind of code going on that a North side chick would've, how could she? She thought it was a nice place to go, is all. So I made no move towards the back seat and we didn't make out past a little kissing. And then we got to talking about Steve's upcoming party and then we got onto the draft.
Jo chewed her lip in a way that managed to be both shy and sexy, as she told me she wasn't worried about her brothers.
I mean, I knew her kid brother was only just thirteen, so she probably wouldn't have to think about him anyways, so I agreed it was likely the whole deal in Vietnam would be done by the time he finished school.
"You must think that for Ponyboy, too."
That shocked me. I had genuinely never made that leap in my head from Pony being the kid he was, to him turning eighteen. Not in relation to the draft. But I knew the answer anyway. "He'll be sweet. He's going to college." Done deal. There was a reason Darry sat up late at night, balancing check books and shit. Although, if even Mom and Dad couldn't get the money to stretch for him—and Darry had a scholarship, too—I wondered how it would actually work for Pony. Maybe that savings jar I had earmarked for my wheels would have to be redistributed. I could try for extra shifts, maybe.
"He's smart, huh?" Jo smiled. I knew I'd yakked on about exactly how smart Pony was. Probably bored her half to death.
I still didn't get why her older brothers weren't worrying her. Jo shifted slightly in my arms.
"Aw, it's kind of..." She looked almost guilty, smoothing the material of her skirt. "I feel kind of crappy 'bout it, 'cause of what we were just saying about Steve. And Two-Bit, he'll be out of school soon, too." And I'd be eighteen soon enough, her eyes said to me, plain as day. I waited her out and she explained, "Thing is, the draft panel at home, it's the mayor and our doctor. They were kind of...my dad's best friends. They grew up together. After he died, they told Mom she didn't need to worry about losing any of the boys."
"Christ. Can they do that?"
Jo shrugged. "I guess. Is that real bad? I mean, I know it ain't fair, but I'm still glad about it."
I didn't have to think about it long. "It ain't bad at all. I think any one of us would take that deal." I knew all the tricks people talked about, to get out of going after their name came up, but I never knew that it could work like that, to not get drafted in the first place. But, fuck yes, if any of us knew the right people, wouldn't we be happy to have a few strings pulled?
The six months between me and Steve had never seemed so big as it did when I thought about the fact that he'd be signing on at the Selective Service office before me. Maybe he'd been thinking about it too. Maybe that's why he'd agreed to this party his mom was hosting, because he wasn't usually the party type, not in his own honor anyway, and this sounded like it was going to be a blast.
I was real curious. Evie had let slip one or two comments that Steve hadn't exactly denied. He never let her use the word 'Soc', but it sounded pretty fancy down at his mom's pad, all the same. Plus I wanted to see his kid brothers, so bad.
I filled Jo in on the history between Steve and his mom, because it was a weird situation, for them to have only been back in touch a few months. I knew Jo would feel bad if she said something out of turn.
The way things worked out, that was the last thing I should have worried about.
xxXxx
My big brother has this look. Like he not only knows I'm snowing him – that part he got from mom—but like he's expecting what I just said to be only the tip of the iceberg. That's his own special variation. And boy, was he right this time, 'cause there was one hell of an iceberg waiting, once I got started on what exactly happened and why I was home a little soused because we'd had to do something to salvage the day for Steve, hadn't we, an' Two-Bit knew a guy who let us have some booze for cost—
"Wait. Stop." Darry closed his eyes for a second, as he held up his hand. "Are you telling me you weren't at Steve's mom's all this time?" Like it was late, or something. Well, it was a little late. But I was quiet getting in, I never woke up Pony or nothing.
I eased down from the couch to the floor and stretched my legs out. Sometimes it seems like the floor is more comfortable. Told Darry that we'd been at The Dingo, and the park, and a couple of other places after we dropped the girls home, because the party had been a bust and we didn't want Steve to go home without he was properly celebrated.
"How was the party a bust?" Of course he wanted to know. I groaned. How to even explain?
"It was freaky from the get go." I tried to do what Two-Bit would call 'setting the scene'. "I mean, man, the house was, like, real Socy. I mean like something on the TV. Like Samantha's house in the witch show, y'know? There was this dresser just for the booze. All kinds of bottles on show."
He rolled his eyes. "A cocktail cabinet, you mean?"
"Whatever. Booze and glasses all lined up. Yeah, cocktails I guess." I shook my head. "But it wasn't even just that." I was frustrating myself, with my inability to describe everything that was wrong with that freaking house. Only it wasn't the house, if I was honest. What the fuck did the house have to do with it, when the real issue was Steve and how they treated him?
Darry seemed like he was listening but how to make sure he was really getting it?
I took a breath. "Steve's mom seems like a real fancy lady." It killed me not to say 'Soc' but I was trying to lay it out, real careful. "An' it seemed like it mattered to her, showing him off to her friends. But she didn't dig the whole greaser vibe, looked down her nose at all of us, y'know?"
He was getting it. He sat forward in the armchair, listening hard.
"They invited these people. With kids our age. Like Socy kids. An' the one, William, he was all over Two-Bit's booze. I mean, he got totally crocked. They blamed us. An' the chick was a skank—" I had a flashback to how angry Jo had been. There was no other way to describe that Deedee, she was skanky through and through.
That's when Darry broke out another one of his looks, more along the lines of 'What the hell did you do?'
I held up my hands. "Swear to God, Dar'. I went to the bathroom is all, an' this chick followed me. Offered to go down on me right there." Darry's eyebrows went even higher. I nodded. "I swear I never touched her. Jo was right outside and this chick was still all over me, so when the old dude started in on the girls—"
"What?"
I gathered my thoughts again. "So first this dude, some friend of theirs, is perving all over Kathy and Evie, right? Then, when we're out front with the car—did I tell you they tried to give Steve a Mustang?" Darry shook his head real slow. Jeez. There was a lot to tell. "Steve kicked off. Said he wasn't a Soc an' his mom was ashamed of him being a greaser, and she was all, 'You can do better' and he was all, 'I'm happy with my life'. Then she's bawling, the kids are bawling..."
At that point, the look on Darry's face was a new kind of look. I wasn't sure what this one meant. He made a winding back gesture, "What about the old guy and the girls?"
I blew out a long breath. "Man, the skanky daughter bitched about our girls standing up to her and he said that Kathy was—you know Kathy? Two-Bit's Kathy?—he said she was white trash and dressed like a slut, and then, he starts in on Evie too, an' Steve went wild, so..." Truth be told, I wasn't feeling too great about the next part. My part. "So, we got Steve in the car but as we were booking it I told the guy he was wrong and his daughter wasn't no saint herself."
"You did what?" Darry's voice had got kind of small. For him.
I absolutely had to defend what I did. "Man, you had to be there. This old guy was basically calling our girls whores, I wasn't gonna let that slide. So I said his daughter wasn't no Snow White, on account of what she offered to do to me, an' he oughta think about that."
"Jesus, Soda."
"What? I shoulda let him run the girls down?"
Darry shook his head. "No. No way. But... this was out front of Steve's mom's house?"
I nodded, feeling kind of sick about that fact. "Aw, man. I can't even believe everything that his mom said to Steve..." I filled Darry in on all the shit she loaded on Steve. About how he was basically white trash too but she was offering him a way out of the neighborhood. I didn't expect Darry to have any excuse for it, nor any explanation, not really. I ended up just swallowing the last of it. "All this time they lost an' she still wasn't happy. I wanted it be really..."
"Perfect. You wanted things perfect for Steve."
"Not even that. Who believes in perfect, for Chrissakes? It was just so unfair. After he...I mean, he..." I found it hard to meet Darry's eye even though he hadn't gone ape on me for all I'd told him so far. But what I really wanted to say, what I was really feeling, was the thing that had started eating at me on the drive home. The thing that, under all the horsing around and defending our greasiness an' all, the thing that had really burned me and I probably wouldn't ever be able to tell Steve...I opened my mouth, but Darry got there first, his voice still quiet:
"He got his mom back."
I nodded. I knew he could see that I had tears in my eyes. I was going for a World Record in not blinking, though. "It oughta be a good thing. The best thing. But she..." I choked out.
Darry did me the favor of not looking at me any longer. He looked at the carpet between his feet, repeating what I'd said, "So unfair. You'd think we'd be used to that by now." And I couldn't bring myself to work out what that particular look on his face meant.
xxXxx
I'd told Darry, 'yeah, yeah' when he said I oughta hit the hay, then I must've fallen asleep on the floor anyway. When the phone rang, I rolled right over to it. It was Jo. She was talking kind of quiet.
"Can you come over?"
"Now?"
"Please, Soda?"
It was just after three in the morning. Darry would freak if he knew I'd gone out again. But the one and a half rings didn't seem to have woken either of my brothers, the house was still silent.
I went right over, what else would I do?
My language took a turn for the worse when I pulled onto Joanne's street and saw her on the sidewalk, standing a house down from her aunt's place. "The hell you doing?" I demanded at the same time as she explained, "I didn't want the truck to wake Uncle Jim. Back up the street a ways."
There was a kindergarten or something over the next intersection, so I pulled the truck up in the lot there, where no neighbor's windows could spy on us. I turned to Jo, hacked enough to snap at her, "You can't be standing on the street in the middle of the night! Any number of hoods coulda jumped you."
"I didn't see a soul until you showed up." Not the point and I still wasn't happy. She sighed. "I couldn't sleep. I keep thinking about this afternoon..." She sniffed me, suddenly suspicious. "Oh, Lord, Soda. Were you drinking? Should you be driving?"
Chicks! She called me over. Did she expect me to walk, at three a.m.? Just because the streets around her pad were quiet at night! I told her I was perfectly fine and truthfully, I felt it. Three hours' sleep and the hit of cold night air had sobered me up. "What did you expect? You call me, like some kind of emergency, should I just stroll along...?" I felt like a real prick when her lip wobbled. "I wasn't that loaded," I backtracked. "It's my shirt you can smell, I spilled a shot on it. Are you okay? Why'd you call me anyway?"
Joanne flung herself at me, hugging me tight around the neck. Then kissing me. Which was real nice but still didn't answer the question. Then it got real real nice, to the point where I almost forgot there'd been a question.
It was the fact that she put her hand on me that woke me up. I mean, on me. Over the fly but still on me. We hadn't done that yet. We'd got some kissing and cuddling going on, most usually up at the lake and I wasn't exactly unhappy with where I'd gotten, but she hadn't had her hands in my pants—I hadn't asked her to, hadn't expected her to. Yet.
"Wait a sec," I told her, moving us apart a little. "What's going on?"
"Don't you wanna?" she challenged.
I nearly laughed. "Here? In front of the pre-school?"
"Well, drive us somewhere. The lake. Wherever."
"What's gotten into you?" I was thrown by all this, it was almost like I was still sleeping, like it wasn't real. I liked Joanne, so much. I didn't feel like any kind of saint but I liked that she made me think about her, that when we were out I was thinking about her, not just how much I could get and how quickly. That used to be important. I remembered a particular bull session, way back, when Dally reckoned he'd timed some chick, from the first hello to when he got in her underwear—actually set a clock on her. I knew that I'd probably broken his record at some point in the last six months, only it didn't seem like anything to boast about now.
"Are you my boyfriend?" Joanne countered my question. "Are we going steady?"
Steady? Well, yeah. I hadn't looked at another chick since the first time I took Jo out. Well...Looking's kind of hard to define, ain't it? I mean, a person can't go around with his eyes closed, but there's looking and looking, y'dig? And I hadn't been looking.
Jo was still waiting on an answer. I nodded. "'Course we are. Steady. Yup. Don't you think?"
"So, don't you wanna? Like, what she said, this afternoon..." When I didn't catch on, asked her 'who?' Jo clicked her tongue, annoyed. "That...girl this afternoon." The way she said 'girl' was like it was a dirty word. Which worked for me, given the girl she was referring to.
"The skank? Didn't I say what I thought of her? Didn't I make it clear I thought she was disgusting?"
"But you've had girls who've done that."
There was no question there, so I wasn't real sure how to answer, whether to answer, to be honest.
"So, if I'm your girlfriend, why wouldn't we?" She was ticked off for real, but I still couldn't work out how to answer.
"Because," I tried, "you're not that kind of girl."
"What kind of girl? Kathy's kind? Evie's? Am I so different just because I never did it yet?"
Holy shit. HOLY. SHIT. The scale of sluttiness I'd been going by just got completely blown out the water. I'd thought she was kind of shy. I'd thought she was 'nicer' than the average North side girl—nothing bad against Evie, or even Lucy whateverhername an' the others—but North side girls knew the score at a way younger age than Jo. I just hadn't quite realized...At all? She never had sex, at all?
Back in the moment, Jo was still kind of pissed. "Sure didn't seem like I was any different to those people this afternoon, that man seemed to think we were all the same kind of girl."
"He was a prick! What he said was completely out of line."
"But what about your other girlfriends? Or any of the chicks I see, checking you out. They would...do those things. They would...go all the way..."
"Yeah, but I don't love any of them, do I?" I countered, thinking how adorable she was trying to sound tough and stumbling over calling it 'going all the way'.
Jo put her hand over her mouth, said, "Oh!" in a tiny voice.
I said, "What?"
Her eyes were about the size of dinner plates.
Oh. Yeah. I realized what I'd said. "Is that okay? That I said that?"
"Is it true?"
"That I love you?" I nodded at her, knowing there was now a huge smile on my face that I had no control over.
She said, "Oh!" again, just as quiet.
"So, here's the thing. I ain't gonna go off with some slutty girl 'cause she lets me...do whatever it is you think you oughta be doing an' I ain't gonna—"
"I love you too!" That was considerably louder and Jo looked even more shocked, this time at her herself.
"Well, alright." YesYesYesYesYes! I pulled her into a hug. Like a nice hug. Not a making out kind of grope, just a nice, comfortable, arms-around-each-other cuddle. "Then we're set. Don't need to be doing anything just 'cause anyone else does it, right?" Not if you never...not if you never...
Jo nodded against me and I felt like I'd done a good thing. I imagined Dally laughing at me, back in the day, back when we were mostly talk. Back when the idea of any chick offering us a blow job would have been our idea of heaven. Only Joanne wasn't just 'any chick'.
xxXxx
I am real good at sneaking in the house. Or out. But since this was my second time returning home that night, I made extra sure to be quiet. Right up until there was a movement in my room as I closed the door real slow and careful.
"Shit! Pony! What the hell?" I jumped about a mile. He was sitting on Darry's old bed. I shucked off my clothes and rolled under my own blankets, to get warm. "What do you want?"
"Where'd you get to?" Damn. Maybe the phone had woken him. I told him I went to see Jo and he pulled a face. "I hope she's worth it, if Darry finds out you were driving around half the night." Before I could answer he followed up with a mutter that sounded like 'I hope she's worth it, period.'
"What's your damage? You only met her once. She's real nice."
Pony gave me a hard stare. "You sure about that?" and for one second I thought he was going to tell me something awful that he knew about Joanne. But that was impossible so I waited him out. "Seems like you an' she are going pretty steady," he said. "Seems like she's got you hooked."
I let out a snort of laughter. "So what if we are?"
"Maybe you wanna slow down some?"
"Are you giving me advice about girls, kid brother?" Priceless!
A scowl joined the stare. "Soda. I'm just saying...it didn't work out so well last time you had a steady—"
"Shut up," I cut across him, sitting up to face him properly. "You shut your mouth. You don't know nothin' about it. That was different. Completely different."
"You said you loved her. You loved Sandy. You wanted to marry her. And she went and ripped your heart out—"
"Say what? You been reading too many romance novels, nobody ripped anybody's heart out—"
"Soda." My turn to shut up when he said my name like that, all quiet, calling me out for lying. He was still wrong though. What happened with Sandy was too complicated for me to explain to him, maybe too complicated for me to get my head around. But I knew, I knew, that Jo was different. Jesus, I hadn't even known how different, but now that I did...
I hadn't brought another girl home since Sandy, that was probably what Pony was worried about. Although he knew I'd been playing around in between. But those girls weren't important. It was easy to keep them at a distance. No one night stand ever ripped anyone's heart out.
"Would you rather," I asked Pony, "that I never had a steady girl again? That I spend the rest of my life in random hook ups?"
"The rest of your life? Fuck's sake, Soda, you're seventeen! But yes, I would rather you carry on screwing around, than see you hurt because you think you're gonna marry some chick who actually doesn't give a damn."
"Jo ain't like that. She's a nice girl."
Pony rolled his eyes. "Sure. An' you're gonna get married and live happy ever after..."
"No." I heard myself say. "No, I don't think so." I heard myself say it—hard on the heels of Jo and me telling each other that we loved each other, for God's sake—and I knew it was true. Because she was a nice girl.
Too nice for me.
Pony lay down, yawning. "Well, as long as you got your head screwed right." I figured he was going to sleep there, since his eyes were closing. It happened occasionally when we were talking, nights. I lay down too.
"Pony," I asked sleepily. "You even had a girlfriend yet?" But all I got in reply was a snore.
A/N: So, here's the thing. I don't think I want to just repeat scenes from Evie's stories. Did Soda talking about the party work for you, instead of experiencing the scene as it happened, from his POV? Opinions welcome! (and...just in case someone's reading this, who wasn't into Evie, it corresponds to Chapters 4 & 5 of Our One Rule, where the party happens! )
