I couldn't tell the next morning whether I had actually slept or not. It seemed like I might have, but I awoke in exactly the same position in which I had fallen asleep, which, for me, was unheard of. Normally, I toss and turn all night and when I wake up my covers are tangled all around me. My brothers find it amusing that I rarely have any free limbs with which to fight back when they dive on me to wake me up each morning. They actually started calling the process of waking me up 'demummifying' me. I could hardly believe I hadn't stolen all the sheets from Darry and gotten kicked out of the bed and back to my own room. Yet my head was still on his arm and his eyes were closed. I guess neither of us had moved.

I instantly felt the ache of my neck having been in a strange position all night (though I didn't want to move it, for fear of waking him) and wondered how he could have had my head on his arm all night and not have had it fall asleep. Maybe it had something to do with the size of his muscles? God knows, his arms were easily the four times the size of mine. I couldn't really imagine Darry being little… he had always been big to me. Sure, I had seen pictures of him at my age, even as a baby and a toddler, but in my mind I just couldn't reconcile those images with the Darry I knew. He had already been six by the time I was born.

I looked at him in the dim light. I couldn't remember the last time I had seen him sleeping. He used to share a room with Soda and once in a while I would wake up first and be sent in to rouse them for breakfast, so I had seen him sleeping at some point, but he looked different now. His features hadn't changed – he was still handsome, with a chiseled face that was sharper than any of the rest of us possessed, but I noticed the stubble on his chin, the hint of wrinkles yet to be revealed on his face. Suddenly I realized he looked more like Dad than I had ever thought. People always said they looked alike but I had never really seen it before now. Before, they had been in different categories in my mind – Darry was a boy, Dad was a man. I realized that, from now on, whether he wanted to be or not, Darry was going to have to be a man.

I remembered his words from the day before: "I'm gonna do the best I can." I knew he meant it. While we shared a love for sports, Darry was by far the most competitive one in the family. He never wanted to be second best at anything. He could never understand why I didn't get more upset when my basketball team lost, even if I knew I had done my best. I knew that he must already be putting so much pressure on himself to do right by us, to be the best. Yet he had to know that filling my parents shoes completely was impossible.

Sometimes I used to get so mad when my brothers got to do things I didn't, and would wish that I had been the oldest, but if something had to happen to our folks and leave us without them, Darry was definitely the one who had the best chance of keeping the family together. I thanked God for leaving me three brothers to look out for me. At least I wouldn't be alone. I often wondered how Johnny's life would be different if he had a sibling. At least he'd only get beat up half as often…

Somehow Darry must have sensed that I was staring at him because his eyes twitched and then flickered open.

His eyes looked blank for a moment and then focused on me. He stared back.

"What are you looking at?" He was teasing.

I tried to smile. It wasn't easy, with everything going on in my head.

"Scout?"

"Yeah?"

"You're killing my arm." I immediately sat up. "I'm sorry," I said. I felt like he probably wanted me to leave. Last night with the circumstances it had seemed OK, but now he probably found it pretty annoying to have his kid sister taking up half his bed.

"Thanks for letting me sleep in here," I started to get up.

"I was kinda glad you came in, actually." He pulled me back down.

I laid back on the bed and replaced my head where it had been, Darry having shifted positions.

"I just thought you might be mad, I mean… I know you don't really want us in here," I admitted. "It's just…. Pony and Soda have each other. I felt kinda scared being alone."

"I have a feeling that might change," he said. I wasn't really sure what he meant, which part of what I said he was talking about. "Have you heard the boys up?'

"Not yet. I think we're first." Normally that would mean one of us would go tearing in to wake them up but neither of us seemed to have the heart. I think we both felt the weight of the day ahead of us, waiting for Monday when we would bury our parents. Darry told me they don't like to do funerals on Sundays because it interferes with the regular church services. I could not imagine how we would fill the space between now and then. I was sure the funeral would be terrible. But the waiting felt even worse.

"You still tired?" Darry asked. I honestly didn't know the answer.

"No." I don't even know if I lied.

"Want to help me with breakfast?" As little experience as the boys had with cooking, Darry had helped our Dad make Mom breakfast in bed at least every Mother's Day, so I was pretty confident we could pull it off.

"Ok, I guess." As I walked out into the kitchen I wondered if Darry's room would become off-limits again soon. I had actually really enjoyed being alone with him. Pony and Soda had always been close, as well as Darry and Soda - and Soda had always been my "go-to" brother as well… I was glad to have had private time with Darry. As for Soda, I knew he was always there for me, but Ponyboy? We just didn't get along that well. I kinda wished I could have the same time with Pony as I had just had with Darry. Pony had hugged me that first night on Darry's bed, taken over for Soda when he was going to keep tabs on Darry with the cops… Pony and I…we just have so much in common, it was weird to me that we had such trouble getting along. Things seemed to be changing though… we'll see, I thought.

I wandered into the shower, washed up and put on clean clothes, realizing I had been wearing the same clothes since my parents tucked me in two nights ago. I brushed my teeth and hair and looked in the mirror and stared. I had seen the same face looking back at me for my whole life, but suddenly I looked different. An orphan, I thought. I felt like if Social Services had come, they would have removed me from the house just on the basis of my looks. I was strikingly separate, as a Curtis. My brothers all had golden-brown hair, like my Dad, and Dad's height. As for me, I had dark, almost black hair – my Mom's, and was small for my age. I was just over five feet, while both Soda and Darry had already topped six feet, and Pony was rapidly approaching it. Darry and I had the same blue eyes – Mom's, again, and Soda had Dad's brown eyes. Our parents had said that Pony had my mom's mother's - my Irish grandmother's green eyes. It had never bothered me before that I didn't look like my brothers, so much – I had always looked so much like my Mom. But with her gone, the contrast between my brothers and me seemed even more striking. I felt sadness for a moment that my parents would never see me grow up. I was at that age where my body was just beginning to change; yet my parents would never know me as a teenager, or an adult. I tried my best to get the thought out of my mind. I parted my hair and braided it, in two long braids down each side of my face. Then I just tied them behind my head. I hate having my hair in my face, and it is almost always either braided or pulled back in a ponytail.

I dragged myself into the kitchen to find Darry making pancake batter. Between the two of us, we managed to make a pretty respectable breakfast. To be honest, I had no desire to eat, but I appreciated the opportunity to stay busy, to keep my mind off everything. I considered just staying in the kitchen, cooking all day long, but I knew that would just be a waste of food. The truth is, we already had a backlog of frozen foods from people in the neighborhood, the high school booster club, Darry's football team parents, and a whole bunch of other people who thought their best expression of sympathy would be a casserole or a lasagna. Even Two-Bit's flighty mom had followed through with some sort of soufflé-looking thing. We would be pretty well fed for a while, which reassured me quite a bit after my original irrational fear that we would all starve in the absence of my mom.

Eventually I could hear Pony and Soda talking, and while Darry finished up the eggs I headed down the hall and knocked softly on the door. I guess I am the only one who knocks that way, because they knew it was me.

"Come in Scout," Soda said.

I stuck my head in the door. "Darry and me made breakfast." The minute I said it I thought 'ugh, bad grammar. Pony's gonna correct me.' Pony was always on my case about grammar. I never wrote things wrong, it was only when I talked. That's what happens when you hang around with a bunch of hoods who talk like that, I kept telling him! I saw him look at me but he must have seen in my eyes that I just didn't have the patience for it right then. I was pretty surprised. Soda can tell what I am thinking a lot of the time, but with Pony and I, we are just constantly crossing signals and getting into arguments as a result. Again, it's so weird that we don't get along, because Darry and Soda both are always telling us how much we are alike.

Everybody eventually wandered into the kitchen and we sat down hesitantly for our first family breakfast without our parents. In the past, Mom would always serve us breakfast and after we were all at the table Dad would wander out of the bedroom, still reading the paper and giving us all pop quizzes about whatever homework he had helped us with the night before. Even Soda did OK on Dad's quizzes, though he never could seem to pass his tests in school. Pony and Darry and I would compete, each of us trying to answer each other's questions. Of course mine were always the easiest, but every once in a while Pony or I would answer one of Darry's and Dad and Soda and would egg us on to get Darry upset. Like I said, Darry is the most competitive.

I was sitting, pretending to eat by moving food around on my plate, when the doorbell rang. The first time after the cops came, I had felt a chill at the sound. Since then, the bell had announced the arrival of a million casseroles. It almost seemed normal now.

Soda was closest to the door. He pushed his chair back and walked through the living room to the door. I heard a Soda-ish friendly greeting and the obligatory "Thanks." I knew whomever it was would have been expressing their condolences.

"Scout!" I was surprised to hear Soda call me. I looked at Darry and Pony questioningly and pushed my chair back from the table, actually a little grateful that I didn't have to eat anything. I walked into the living room to find my best friend and neighbor Ben. I ran to him and he put down his bag and held his arms out to me. As close as I am to the guys in the gang, Ben is my age and he pretty much knows what I am thinking all of the time. Unfortunately he had been away with his family for the weekend when my parents' accident occurred. I hadn't expected him back until later that night.

"We got the paper there and came right back." Ben's Mom and my parents had been friends. Ben's Dad had died shortly after he was born and it had been just him, his mom, and his brother Kevin since. Kevin was a year younger than Darry and they had been on the high school football team together. His Mom and our parents were good friends, and had gone to watch Darry and Kevin's games together. They went every fall to visit his grandparents in Florida, and had left the night before my parents' accident.

I grabbed Ben's hand and dragged him into the kitchen. "Darry, It's Ben. Can I be excused?" I probably could have just left but I really felt like even without Mom and Dad I should still follow protocol.

"OK." Darry looked slightly pleased to see me with another outlet for my grief. "Stay in our yards." Ben's backyard and ours backed up to each other. I cleared my plate, stuck it in the sink, and headed out into the yard. Ben stayed a second to talk to Darry, handed off his bag with the obligatory food item along with his family's condolences, and then headed out the back door behind me. I was sitting with my back against the fence that separated our house from the one next door. Ben came over and sat down next to me. He didn't say anything.

"How was your trip?" I was trying as hard as possible to be cool about everything, I really didn't want to cry again. It was exhausting me, mentally and physically.

"Scout… come on, it's me." I was hoping he wouldn't play that card right away. Ben was more like my twin than my friend. He knew I was a mess, he knew how much the loss of my parents would have hurt me. He could read me like a book, even knew every detail of how I related to the other guys in the gang. He probably could have put how I felt into words better than I could have.

"You don't ring our doorbell!" I said. It was the truth. Ben usually just walked in, and hollered "hey," like everyone else. I'm not sure why I was so upset about him ringing it today, though.

"I wasn't sure who would be over or what would be going on." Sometimes some of the gang gave Ben a hard time, because Kevin had once stolen a girl from Darry. Darry himself was over it- he had been only fifteen- but a few of the gang insisted on holding a grudge, against not only Kevin but Ben as well. Ben and I had been trying to rise above this idiocy for years, with Darry's blessing, even. He and Kevin got along fine, though Kev mostly hung out with a different bunch of guys from the neighborhood. The girl had long since moved on from both of them. In Darry's eyes, as my oldest brother, any person he could enlist to help look out for me was OK with him, so Ben was cool. In fact, Ben was pretty much universally accepted by my brothers. It was mostly Steve and Dallas who gave him a hard time. I didn't much care about what those two thought of him anyway.

We stood up and walked out into the backyard. I felt like a disaster, and could already feel my eyes welling up, so I gave up on the playing cool nonsense. Ben would never have bought it anyway.

"You know how it happened?" I asked.

"The paper said drunk driver?"

"Yeah." I didn't know what else to say. "The funeral's tomorrow."

"I know. We'll be there."

"This sucks." This had been the general sentiment of the whole gang, our best effort to put into words what we had been feeling. We were all so angry and feeling the pain of the loss but there was no way to release it. I'm sure Dallas had gone out and roughed someone up, while Two-Bit probably made a good college try at drinking away his sorrows, but the fact was, none of us knew how to make the hurting go away for real.

"I bet it does." I was glad he hadn't said "I know." I felt like the only people who truly knew how it felt were my brothers, and, to a lesser degree, the guys in the gang. Ben had lost a parent, but he had been just a baby then. He had been close to my parents, but at the end of the day he had his own home and family. He hadn't needed our folks as much as the guys in the gang did.

"Do you want to come over? We can watch TV or something."

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. The thought of getting out of my house for a while was pretty appealing. On the other hand, I wasn't sure what more would need to be done at home for the funeral, if anything. I imagined whatever might have to be done, it probably did not involve me.

"Honestly Ben, I have no idea what I want right now, except to have everything back to how it was before. I just want my Mom and Dad back."

"If I could give you that, you know I would." Ben looked at me with an expression that proved he meant what he said.

I didn't respond. Nobody could give me that, I knew. We stared at each other and shared a few minutes of silence – not so much an uncomfortable one, more of a meaningful silence. I didn't feel like talking and he didn't want to make me. He put his hand on my shoulder. "I totally understand if you want me to leave you alone," he said.

That wasn't what I wanted, either. Ben was the first person I had been around in the past two days that was not totally consumed by grief.

"I guess I'll come over," I finally said, knowing I would probably feel just as terrible no matter where I was. "I have to ask Darry, though." Then I added, realizing Ben didn't know, "Darry's gonna take care of us now."

He looked surprised. I was ready to defend Darry if Ben even hinted at the idea that he thought he wouldn't be able to handle it, but he didn't. "Oh." Was all he said.

"I'll be right back."

I headed back into the house and found Soda and Pony collapsed on the couch staring blankly at the TV and Darry in the kitchen doing dishes.

"Darry, is it OK if I go over to Ben's for a while?" He didn't even look up.

"I guess so. Be back by 2, I have to go drop off that stuff at the funeral home and go pick up Uncle Pat at the airport and I don't want to make Pony or Soda stay home alone." This was funny in a "things are so wrong around here" kind of way. Usually Pony and Soda would give anything to get some time alone at home. Soda'd have a girl over in no time and Pony would do whatever it is Pony does when he's alone, with nobody bothering him. Read books or draw pictures, or something, I guess. Pony didn't seem to care so much about girls, yet. But Darry knew that none of us wanted to be alone right now.

"I thought you said Uncle Pat was coming alone."

Darry turned and looked at me funny. "He is."

For a minute I was completely confused, wondering why they couldn't all go to the airport, until I remembered we no longer had a car. Just Darry's truck. And it was a tight squeeze to get three in there, let alone four. For a moment I let my mind wander to think about what had become of our family car after the accident, but as quickly as it had come I banished the thought out of my mind.

"Oh. Right." I felt stupid. Darry went back to his dishes.

As I headed through the living room I heard him call me. "And Scout?"

"What?"

"Use your manners." I stopped short and almost cried when he said that. That was always the last thing Mom said to us whenever we went over anyone's house, along with "Be safe." I suppose Darry didn't think I had to worry too much about being safe just going to Ben's house, so he had omitted that part. I saw Soda and Darry look up towards Darry and I knew they were thinking the same thing I was, that we wished it was Mom's voice that we heard saying it instead.

I couldn't answer so I just walked out the door. Ben was waiting where I had left him, kicking idly at the dirt and destroying a sizeable anthill that it had probably taken an ant family a full week to make. "Yard" was kind of an exaggeration for the space surrounding our house. It was pretty much just dirt and weeds. Every once in a while the weeds would really get out of control and we would haul the crappy old lawnmower out of the garage and mow them back into submission, but that was about the extent of our landscaping.

"Lets go," I said, and Ben followed. There was a fence between our yards too – nearly all the houses in our neighborhood had fences (and a good deal of them had mean-looking dogs inside the fences, too) but years of Ben and his brother and my family climbing over it had finally caused one of the metal support poles to work its way out of the ground and become detached from the wire mesh. As we continued to climb over it the whole middle of the thing had collapsed and now it hung limply about a foot from the ground, forming a makeshift metal bridge between our two yards. This actually came in pretty handy when it rained and huge puddles formed in the gulleys where the fence had originally been. The bridge ushered us dryly over the puddles. On the flip side, I was constantly scraping my legs on the sharp ends of the wire stepping up to the broken fence, and had torn several pairs of pants in this manner.

"Is your Mom home?" I asked as he pulled me up onto the fence. I was dreading the condolences. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of people pitying me and my brothers. Anyone but us, that is. Plus, the whole "I'm sorry" thing felt so insufficient to even make a small dent in the way I was feeling.

"Yeah," Ben said. "That OK?"

"Yeah. Just wondering." I was going to have to deal with it sooner or later, it might as well be sooner. I tried to assume Darry's feigned stoicism.

The door to Ben's house opened directly into the kitchen. His mom was at the table with a stack of papers in front of her, presumably going through the mail that had come since they were gone. She jumped up as soon as we walked in. Her look was not so much pity as genuine sympathy.

"Oh Scout," she said. "I am so, so sorry." She was tall for a woman and she came over and knelt on one knee to hug me. "I'm so sorry," she said again quietly, right into my ear. She smelled nice. I remembered how Mom used to hug me when I was hurt or upset and I ached at the fact that she would never comfort me again.

"Thank you," I whispered. Crying again. Jeez.

"Honey, if there is anything, I mean anything I can do to help you our your brothers you just say the word. I know your Mom and Dad would have done the same for Ben and Kevin." She was right, they would have. Our Mom probably would have had them living with us by the next week.

"Thanks, Mrs. Cummings." I truly couldn't think of a single thing she could do to help, which actually made me feel sort of bad. "I'm sure we'll let you know."

"You tell your brother Darrel I said that."

"Yes, ma'am, I will." She really was a nice lady. Ben and I had both been blessed with great mothers. We stood there for a second in silence – this time it was kind of awkward, until Ben grabbed my hand. "Come on," he said, and led me out of the kitchen.