Just wanted to thank everyone for being so amazing and supportive :) And now to thank you some more, here's the next installment of the Curtis family soap opera :)
"Be quiet."
"You said there ain't nobody home," I whisper-hissed at Angela, my hands on my hips as we slipped through the back door. I wasn't sure which member of the Shepard clan I wanted to bump into the least, but none of them were an attractive option— especially considering what we were here for.
"Ma lyin' in bed with a hangover don't count as somebody," came her infinitely wise response. "So long as you don't wake her up, so keep it zipped."
I should've felt a prickling of conscience about robbing Angela's mother blind. Maybe about how I was spending more time out of school than in it, lately. But my biggest issue then was how I'd stocked our operation's slim coffers with enough uppers to keep us in business for a good long while, thanks to Rose's conviction that my extra five pounds required urgent treatment, and I still had to sneak around... almost empty houses to fill them up further.
"We're gettin' out of here in a minute— Jesus," she added with a hard nudge to my ribs. "I just wanna sweeten the pot for Eddie."
"He's a Brumly. He wouldn't notice if you sold him Tylenol 'stead of heroin."
"Then go back to school, if you're so scared of my drunk mama." She didn't even look at me as she said it, already making her way over to the bathroom. "Shit, you're such a drag sometimes. You prob'ly wish we was really doin' algebra there."
I was so sick of this girl my kid brother's age talking down to me, manipulating me like I was a puppet in her and Dally's little revenge plot— like I was lucky she'd chosen to pay me any attention at all, a privilege that could be fast revoked. And maybe I would've marched myself right back for second period out of sheer spite, if—
"Lil' girl, last time I checked, your ass was supposed to be in school on weekdays."
— hadn't happened.
"Tiiiim," Angela started to whine, ducking behind me as a human shield. "We was just—"
"There was a gas leak," I said, feeling a stab of pity at her deer-in-the-headlights expression. "We got sent home."
He looked at me with more disdain than it's possible to describe; I wilted right beneath that look. Worth a shot. "How fuckin' stupid do you think I am, exactly? Trust me, I know playin' hooky when I see it." He took a menacing step forward. "If you two was Ponyboy and Curly, I'd knock your empty skulls together, swear to God."
"You ain't my boss!" She clutched her schoolbag closer to her side, spitting venom at him with her eyes. "You don't even live here half the time, you can't tell me what to do like you own this place."
"Do I have to walk you down to Will Rogers and chain you to a desk every morning?" he demanded, his Adam's apple threatening to pulse straight out of his neck. "Why can't you just act like a normal girl and do what I fucking tell you for once?"
"Thought you didn't want me to be a girl." She stomped her foot at him— I would've sooner aggravated a full-grown grizzly, but I supposed he wasn't as terrifying when he was your brother. "You never used to shut up 'bout how it's a shame I didn't come out a boy, 'cause I'm tougher than Curly."
"Yeah, well, shame or not, you didn't," he said. "And if you keep pretendin'—"
"The hell's the holdup, Timmy?"
A tall man— dark, shifty-eyed— emerged from the bathroom, shoving what were undeniably bottles of Valium into a bag. He looked a lot like Tim on the unscarred side, except for the teardrop tattoo on his left cheekbone, but he carried himself with the easy grace of someone who'd cracked plenty of skulls open with a baseball bat. "What's Angelita gonna do with school?" he said, and came over to wrap an arm around her waist; she pressed herself into his side and gave Tim a smug smirk. "She's pretty and she cooks good; we'll just hook her up with Miguel and that'll be the end of it. She'll make any man a fine wife."
"This is my uncle Luis," Tim told me with a sullen jerk of his mouth, like that explained anything. "And he don't seem to get that when Angelita ain't in school, she's out causin' trouble."
"Doin' what, showin' her little friend her Barbies?" He pulled her even closer to him. "You're more paranoid than Carlos was, Timmy, goddamn. Get your ass outside already an' leave her alone."
An ugly, splotchy blush spread across Tim's face, a humiliated one. "I ain't got time to babysit you, Angela," he hissed as a parting shot, slinking away. "I really don't. Whatever shit you're gettin' yourself into now, you're on your own."
"Be a good girl an' go back to school, or at least stay outta the house from now on," Luis said, giving Angela a pat on the head like he would to a Golden Retriever. "'Else I'm gonna have to listen to your brother bitchin' at me all day, and that's worse than listenin' to your mama."
Angela flounced out, probably to go yell at Tim some more, but Luis caught me by the arm before I could follow her. "What's your name, sweetheart?"
His breath lapped hot against the shell of my ear, crashing down on me like a wave. "Jasmine," I said, all of my smart-mouthed comments falling out of my brain. "Jasmine Curtis."
"You look just like Darrel," he said with a breathy laugh, "you didn't have to tell me. He's dead now, ain't he? Got in a wreck with your mama?"
"Last January, yeah."
He pulled a bottle out of the sack and handed it to me; blindly, as though I was in a dream, I shoved it inside my skirt pocket. "Your daddy was a drunk and an Injun," he said, his hand snaking down to squeeze my ass. "That got him into a lot of trouble. Hope you learn to tell better lies than 'there was a gas leak' fast, for your sake."
I'd seen Sylvia hold court with a lot of girls over the years, banishing them and allowing them back into the inner circle at her leisure, but I'd always been watching with detachment— always her right-hand woman. So I'd missed the inevitable conclusion of rejecting her— becoming the next pariah.
"You can't sit here anymore, Jasmine," she said, tossing her hair imperiously from her place at the head of the lunch table. I was beginning to regret coming back to take my Spanish test and not doing shots with the Brumly guy, like Angela was right now. I'd wanted some normality, some girl talk to distract me from Luis's parting words (he knew my father, he recognized my father's face on mine, he worked with my father), but that was looking like a lost cause. "I don't think you can be trusted not to steal someone else's steady."
I narrowed my eyes, searching for a sympathetic face and finding none— not that I really deserved or expected sympathy. They were Sylvia's friends, not mine, when it came down to it. "Don't need another, now that I already got one, do I?"
"You can't sit here, Jasmine." Sylvia slammed her tray down, raising her voice enough for the entire cafeteria to hear her. "Does anyone have a problem with that?"
They, in fact, did not. Linda took a delicate bite of her salad and tried to avoid looking up at me. Pam picked at a stray thread sticking out of her skirt. Barb was suddenly very preoccupied with adjusting her headband.
"Maybe you can go sit with Curly," she continued, pointing to where he was stabbing a penknife between his fingers to impress his equally unstable friends. She smiled then, her lips unfurling like a flower. "Give him some more company."
It took me about 0.5 seconds to realize that Curly had told half the school all about how he'd managed to get some tail.
It took me another 0.5 seconds to realize that my reputation had already been in the toilet, anyway, so what did it matter?
(Incidentally, the toilet was also where I spent the rest of lunch period.)
Khrushchev and LBJ had nothing on me and Darry, when it came to waging a cold war. And to think family dinner used to be fun, back in the day.
"Do I get to eat any of the food I put on the table?"
"Sorry, Darry," I said sweetly, ladling an extra serving of potatoes onto Two-Bit's plate. "But I only cook for people who want me around, you see, that's the thing. Why don't you turn on the oven and practice what it's gonna be like when I'm gone?"
He didn't explode, not yet— instead, he gave me a matching serene expression and turned to Pony. "Well, looks like you two won't have to fight over who gets shotgun in the morning anymore," he said. "'Cause I don't drive mouthy little brats to school."
"... I feel like I'm missin' something," Two-Bit said, in what constituted the understatement of the century. "Anyone wanna fill me in—"
"If we ain't kowtowin' to him, Darry feels like his sacrifice just ain't bein' appreciated enough, so he's throwin' me out," I said. "Can't wait to make Miss Edwards's wettest dream come true and tell her he's finally sick of runnin' this daycare service."
There was a cord of muscle twitching in his jaw as he stared me down. I'd seen that muscle quite a bit, lately, and it no longer intimidated me. "You wanna live here so bad, you can pretend to respect me for one damn minute, or there's gonna be hell to pay. I've heard enough of your lip to last me a lifetime."
"I failed my math test," Pony blurted out. I had to admire his kamikaze effort to save me, but Darry's gaze didn't even get a chance to flicker in his direction before Soda piped in.
"You said what to her?" For a second, I really thought Soda was going to reach across the the table and slug him. "You told her to get out? Are you fucking serious?"
Darry swiveled around to Soda now. "Don't you start. You're always on me, sayin' how you're a grown-ass man and I can't treat you like one of the kids, and then all you ever do is join 'em in gangin' up on me. I guess you think it's okay that she's hookin' up with Dally? You know how he's makin' the money in his pocket, and it ain't with that rodeo gig of his."
"This is worse than dinner with my old stepdaddy after a few whiskey sours," Two-Bit muttered. No one paid much attention.
"What?" The last time I'd seen Soda look this confused, Mom had been trying to get pre-algebra through his head. "First Curly, now Dally? But he's practically our brother."
"You been gettin' it on with Curly too?" Darry demanded— great, this really was shaping up to be the biggest family shitshow since we found out Dad was selling crank. Pony and Two-Bit both looked like they'd rather be having root canals with no anesthetic right now. "And then you wonder why I told her to go to Rose's— because she's out of control, that's why," he directed back at Soda. "Maybe she'll be able to handle her better."
"I didn't even do nothin'!" I said in my own defense, though it was a pretty bad lie. Man, if he was this pissed without knowing half of what I'd really been up to... "So I got a boyfriend you don't like, even though he's supposed to be a brother to y'all—"
"Please," he snorted, "you think I'm blind and deaf? I been lettin' shit go 'cause the accident was hard on everyone, but I should've brought the hammer down on you from the start. You sneak out of here at night dressed like you're gonna go walk Sunset Boulevard, I can smell the nicotine on you from here, you been pickin' the worst kinds of hoods to date—"
"So after I'm out, where are you gonna send Pony and Soda when they start gettin' on your nerves, a boys' home?" I smiled, deep and ugly, going in for the kill. "Dad was right— you're uppity. You wish you could dump us on the side of the road, so you can get your college degree and pretend you never came from all this trash."
Darry scoffed loudly, twisting his napkin in his massive hands. "If Dad could see you right now, he'd die all over again— of shame. He didn't raise you to act like some two-dollar whore."
The room settled into an eerie silence, with us blinking at each other. It only broke when I threw my plate on the ground, letting it shatter into a dozen messy shards that shot across the kitchen floor.
"Pick it up," he said, all of his parental authority hanging in the balance. He was pleading with me, begging me. "Jasmine, pick up the goddamn—"
"Go to hell," I said, and walked right out.
"He's just worried about you," Two-Bit said, joining me on the porch a moment later. I could hear the three of them yelling back inside— Ponyboy trying to defend me, Darry trying to defend himself, Soda trying to defend what was left of our fractured family. "Shit, I'm the same way with Grace— I don't let her ten feet out the door 'less I know exactly where she's goin'."
"Your sister's twelve." I dug my nails into the soft wood beneath me, trying to steady myself. A whore. A two-dollar whore. "And Darry's not my fucking father."
I liked the way fucking rolled off my tongue, reverberating on the hot night air. The hardness stiffened my spine, and something inside of me snapped like a broken guitar string.
"You're pretty messed up," Two-Bit said, his voice filled with prissy, big-brotherly disdain— a note I was used to hearing from all of them. "Jas, shit, he's just— where are you goin'?"
I'd already risen to my feet, wiping the dirt and dry leaves off my ass, and started walking. "I'm gettin' out," I called, drunk off the simple, stupid joy of defiance, the same way I'd felt after I shoplifted a compact when I was twelve. Like I could do anything in the world I wanted, Big Brother asleep at his desk. "Don't wanna follow his rules, so I'm gettin' out."
He didn't follow me.
I wandered over to Buck's as the sky had just begun to darken above me, filling the streets with shadows. I wasn't afraid anymore, hadn't been afraid all of this long, hazy summer— roaming around drunk at five in the morning, tiptoeing over cracks in the sidewalk, lazily ducking behind buildings when I saw a deal going on or a gang of Socs beating the shit out of some homeless guy. Untouchable.
The worst had already happened to me, and I was still alive. Anything beyond that was background noise.
Dally's room looked like a cross between Soda's and a drug den— dirty clothes flung all over, water stains spread across the ceiling, needles and half-smoked joints littering the top of his drawer. I knew he'd be lying on his sagging mattress, taking the edge off. I'd counted on it. "What are you doin' here?" he asked in a low, teasing voice, along with a mouthful of smoke. "Thought Darry gets y'all together for family dinner, like on Father Knows Best."
"I want you to fuck me."
He dropped the cigarette; cussing, he smothered the flame before it could burn more than a tiny hole in his blanket. "You drunk?"
"No." I pulled off my cardigan and raised my chin, goosebumps beginning to prickle my upper arms; I was only wearing a camisole under it. Then, before I could think twice, I took off the camisole too, leaving myself in just a lacy brassiere I'd borrowed from Angela.
Make the memories go away. Please. Make the ghosts go away.
"C'mere, then," he said, his pale eyes dark with desire; when I approached the bed, he pulled me on top of him and reached up my skirt, shoving my panties down my thighs. "Thought you'd never ask."
We didn't talk much, after that.
"You didn't like that."
The tip of another cigarette made shadows play around his face; the sun had set fully by now, cloaking the room in darkness. I fumbled with my bra clasp. "Don't bullshit me," he said before I could protest, inflate his ego. "I've fucked a lot of girls. I know you faked it."
God, I was an idiot.
Dallas didn't love me. I wasn't even all that sure if he liked me, beyond being a notch on his bedpost. And here I'd been thinking that fucking him would make angels fly out of my cunt and start playing their harps.
It'd still hurt, though he hadn't been rough, not like Graham's brutal grabs or Curly's clumsy elbows jabbing me. And when it hadn't, I'd felt the same bleak nothingness I'd felt for the past endless stretch of months. Maybe it'd been physically pleasurable at points, his stubble scraping against my face and his fingers between my legs and him talking dirty, saying I was hot and wet and tight and everything I should've wanted to hear, but I'd been somewhere else the entire time— staring up at the ceiling, robotically performing the motions.
"I'm good at sex, dammit," he said, breaking me out of my reverie, and gave me a wolfish smirk. "You ever gotten head? That's about the only reason Sylvia kept comin' back to me."
He ducked between my legs, but I pushed him away before he could. "It ain't your fault," I said in a thin, reedy voice, wrapping my arms around myself. "It ain't... about you."
He turned away and silently lit me a cigarette. "What happened?" he asked, waiting for me to take a few shaky drags.
"Nothing," I said, gagging on all the smoke in this room. I'd never been real big on hotboxing.
He didn't push, shrugging me off, and then I opened my mouth. I still don't know why I told him; maybe because it'd been holed up inside me for months, fighting its way to the surface, maybe because he was the first to ask. Either way, the truth crawled up my throat, impossible to hide any longer. "A Soc raped me back in January, after Mom an' Dad died," I said, trying to sound tough and cool. Like it didn't bother me none, didn't permeate my every moment, didn't creep up on me when I least expected it. "At a party. Happy now?"
I'd never called it rape before. Messing around. I was drunk. He hurt me. A thousand objections swirled around my brain— you led him on, you didn't fight, you wanted it, he knew you wanted it, you just have no self-respect— but I couldn't bring myself to walk the words back. Not when rape felt the most truthful I'd been in a long, long time.
"Some fucked-up shit happens in prison." He took a draught so long on that cigarette, I was afraid his lungs would inflate to bursting with smoke. "When you're a kid. You just have to live with it."
"Dally—"
"Shut up," he said as rapidly as he'd confessed, grabbing me by the wrists. "Shut up."
He looked as lost as I was, his thousand-yard stare striking through me like an icepick to the skull. I thought about the boy he'd been, back in Bed-Stuy, running with gangs much too old for him and getting put in jail at ten and living with it, and I felt the urge to vomit.
"I'll take care of you now, baby," he said, brushing a possessive kiss against the nape of my neck. "Don't worry. Them fucking Socs can't just do whatever they want to our women without payin' for it."
I started shaking, then, like my mechanical body was finally about to fly apart; he pulled me against him, and when I still didn't stop, he pressed a little yellow pill into my palm and told me to just dry-swallow. The painkiller put me into a twilight sleep, my head lolling on his bare chest, and I examined the cobwebs on the walls until they'd burned themselves into my retinas. I sank.
