A/N: I couldn't remember if Darry drove a truck or a car. I'm pretty sure that it was a truck, but I put car down anyway.
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Chapter 12
Being able to get outside as often as I pleased was fun for the first little while, but then things really started to bother me. I hadn't even been out of my room a full day yet and already I got the feeling that everyone knew something I didn't. It was obvious that Darry was trying to be nice to me, because there was a forced pleasantness to his voice every time he spoke to me. Even Sodapop, who liked to treat me like I was his baby sister was talking to me like we were the same age. And Ponyboy, I couldn't believe him. He actually invited me to go out with him to the movies. Pony never invited me anywhere, least of all the movies! I would have gone with him too, except that he said Mary Alice couldn't come with me.
"She never says anything," he commented, and I could have pointed out that he wasn't the most talkative person in the world either. "And she stares at me all the time too."
"That's because she likes you," I sighed. I had been telling him that Mary Alice had a crush on him since she first met him, but he always just blushed and laughed nervously.
"Please Pony," I begged. "Please let her come." I clasped my hands together in front of my chest, but he still wouldn't take her. I don't think he was trying to be mean or anything, but Mary Alice could be a little creepy around him sometimes.
I decided against going with him only because I had promised to meet up with my friend after lunch, and if I told her that I was going to the movies with my brother instead she would probably have felt a little left out. Still, I didn't hold back what had happened when we did meet up.
"I don't get it," I said to her as we sat on my front steps, sucking on a bag of penny candies that her mom had bought for us. "Darry's being extra nice around me, and Ponyboy asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with him."
"Are you gonna go?"
"Nah. It's some stupid love story. Who wants to see one of those?" I didn't really know what kind of movie it was, but I couldn't tell her the real reason why I hadn't gone.
"I think something's going on," I said to her quietly. "Maybe the social worker's coming and is gonna try and take me away. Remember when I had to stay back in the office the other day? Mr. Roberts asked me questions about my family, like he was trying to figure something out. Maybe I said something wrong so he told on me."
Mary Alice shook her head right away. "You said yourself that if you get taken away they'll take Pony and Soda away too. How come Darry would tell them they're getting taken away and not you? Wouldn't he want to tell you so that you'll be really good?"
"You're right. But if that's not it then there has to be something else."
"What else could it be? Maybe they just decided to be nice to you."
I gave her the look that all kids up to a certain age have for their friends. It's the "how can you possibly be that stupid" look, where you basically look at the other person in the ugliest possible way you can.
"I'm just saying," she muttered. "It's not like they're always mean to you. You seem to get along fine whenever I'm around."
"Well, that's just because they want you to think we're normal. They aren't going to act the same way around you that they do when you aren't here."
It was her turn to give me the "how can you possibly be that stupid" look. "Lily! I've been here a million times when somebody was mad at you! Darry even yelled at me before, remember?"
"I know," I admitted. "But I don't understand what's going on. Darry wouldn't even look at me without making me want to cry a couple days ago, and now he smiles whenever I'm around! It doesn't make any sense."
Then I got an idea. I had been pretty sure that the only time I ever got bright ideas was when I was around Kathy, but I was quickly proving myself wrong on that one.
I leaned in closer to Mary Alice and whispered in her ear, "Let's spy on them."
"Spy on who?" she asked loudly, pulling away from me.
"Shh!" I hissed, clapping my hand over her mouth. "On my brothers. I know they're up to something and I want to know what it is."
She looked a little confused, but didn't argue with me. After all, I don't think either of us thought that we could get into any trouble by following someone around, especially if the person didn't know they were being followed.
The first place we thought to go was inside of the house to see what everyone was up to. The place was pretty quiet, except for the distant drizzle of the shower running in the bathroom. Pony and Soda's bedroom door was left open and we couldn't see anyone in there, while Darry's door was shut. I assumed that Soda was the one in the shower, and, knowing that he rarely emerged from the bathroom fully clothed, I decided to take Mary Alice into my room to wait.
"How are we supposed to spy from your bedroom?" she hissed as I shut the door behind us.
"Just trust me. We can listen to what people say from in here. Nobody's going to say anything if we're out there."
"But there's no one out there," she said like I was an idiot.
"I know that! But somebody's gonna be out there soon, and if they don't know that I'm home then maybe they'll start talking. Jeeze Mary Alice, don't you know anything about spying?"
"I know that you have to have someone to spy on before you can even call it that," she said, using the same voice that told me she thought I was going about thing the wrong way.
We weren't standing in my room with our hears suctioned to the back of my door for long though, because we heard the bathroom door open after only a couple of minutes.
"Darry!" he called. "Do you have any socks?"
I heard another door open and Darry's voice suddenly sounded close. "I just put a bunch in your room a couple of days ago. You can't be out yet."
Soda laughed. "You sure? I never saw any."
"Go check again little buddy. What time do you have to be at work for anyway?"
There was a slight pause, then Soda answered, "In about seven minutes."
Darry groaned. "Steve picking you up?"
"No, he's already there. Told him I'd walk."
"Well get dressed and I'll drive you."
I didn't get to hear the rest of what he was saying, because Mary Alice started talking.
"They're going in a car," she said. "How are we supposed to spy on them if they're not even here?"
I had seen enough spy movies to know how to get through this little predicament.
"Come on," I said, and went over to the window. I shoved it open as quietly as I could and looked down at the dirt below.
"We have to jump," I explained, just in case she hadn't caught that.
Mary Alice came up next to me and looked down. "I'm not jumping out of here. It's too high."
"It's not that high. The jungle gym at the park is closer to the ground than this."
"But I never jumped off the top of the jungle gym." Actually, she had, and I knew this for a fact because when I first met her it was after she jumped off and started to cry because these boys were telling her that they had seen her panties.
This was no time for arguing though, because my brothers were bound to leave any second, so instead I grabbed a pillow off of my bed and leaned out the window far enough so that I landed directly below us.
"All we have to do is jump on the pillow," I informed her. We didn't even need the pillow, but I wanted to get outside without being noticed, and if this was the only way to do it then this was how we would go.
The only reason I knew that I could jump out of my window was because I had done it before. Once, when I was seven. I had been sent to my room by my mother for something or other, and was bound and determined to get out of there. My father caught sight of me crawling out though, and made me promise not to go through it again. I hadn't planned on doing it again for awhile either, wanted to say it up for a special occasion, on account of the fact that Darry didn't know I could do so. But this seemed as good a reason as any, and besides, I didn't think that I was going to be able to fit through there much longer anyway.
It was only after we got outside that I realized there was no way I could get the pillow back inside. I tried throwing it back in once, but my aim was off, and I was too concerned about other things, like not being seen to worry about an old pillow.
Mary Alice and I snuck along the side of the house and over to the car, where Darry and Soda were due any second, and opened the back door. We hopped in and climbed over the backseat into the trunk, where I was surprised to find a blanket. I had never really noticed it there before, but didn't want to question things because we really needed something to hide under.
Soda and Darry came outside just after we had covered ourselves up with the blanket, which wasn't as big as I had originally thought it was. The knee in my jeans were sticking out, I could feel it because it was the only part of my body that felt a little bit cooler than the rest. Thankfully, neither of my brother's came near the back as they climbed into the front, so they wouldn't have seen us.
"Why is there a pillow on the ground?" Darry asked as he started the car.
Soda laughed. "It's not like it's the first time you've seen things like that around here. Lily probably dropped it by accident."
The was silence for a second, before Darry commented, "How do you accidentally drop something like a pillow outside?" Then he changed tones quickly. "You're gonna be late."
"Steve'll cover for me till I get there," he assured Darry, and they both left it at that. If it had been me who was going to be late for something, Darry would have had an entire speech ready for me on how you have to be on time for things, especially when other people are counting on you to be there.
I never thought that Darry was a bad driver until I found myself lying down in the trunk huddled up next to my friend under a blanket. He kept swerving from side to side for some reason, and going over more bumps than I ever knew we had near our house. I didn't help that Mary Alice had her elbow jamming into my spine, but I couldn't very well say anything about it.
I knew that he must have been in a hurry to get Soda to work, but I didn't see why he wasn't saying anything. They did have the music playing pretty loudly, but neither of them were speaking to each other. Darry and Sodapop got along better than anyone I knew, and yet they were completely silent the entire ride there, except for the couple of times when Soda sang along goofily to the radio.
My position in the trunk was so uncomfortable that I thought I might scream, and it didn't help that neither of them were talking. Wasn't much fun being a spy when the subjects I was spying on kept their traps shut the entire ride.
I had never been happier in my life than when we got to the DX, and things only got better when Darry parked the car and told Soda that he had to make a phone call. I was only able to wait about ten seconds before lifting the blanket from my face and sitting up.
The sunlight in my eyes was blinding, but I became used to it after a couple of seconds. Mary Alice sat up next to me, and rubbed her own eyes.
"I didn't hear them sat anything," she stated, like I was supposed to have heard something.
"We're not done yet," I said, and looked out all of the windows to make sure no one could see us. I could see Darry talking on a payphone just at the side of the station, standing there with his back to us, so I decided to take that opportunity to climb out. I grabbed Mary Alice's sleeve when she didn't follow, but she took the hint and soon we were sneaking along the back of the gas station, trying to avoid being seen by anyone and everyone.
"How are we supposed to get home?" she asked. "Look, Darry's leaving!"
"Don't worry," I said, trying to calm her down. "It's not that far, we can walk if we have to."
"But my mom doesn't know I'm here."
It only took me a second to come up with an assurance on that. "Darry probably thinks I'm at your house, because he never mentioned anything about not being able to tell me he was driving Soda to work. So you mom probably thinks you're at my house."
"I guess if she asks I could tell her we decided to go to the park or something."
"Right," I said happily, knowing that she was all for being at the DX now. Darry had already driven off without us anyway, so she probably realized that even if we wanted to go back it would be a little while before we got there.
The best part about spying on people on a Saturday was the fact that there were a lot more of them around than there were on Fridays. Now, not only did we have to search around for Soda, but we were busy avoiding anyone else who happened to be around as well. That part didn't work as well, and a lot of tough looking guys and rough looking girls looked at us like we shouldn't have been hanging around there. Some looked at us like they thought we were entertaining, while other just looked away like they didn't want us to know they had seen us.
As we snuck around the opposite side of the building that we had hidden by, I realized that all of the teenagers around that place looked the same. The girls mostly wore makeup and tight skirts, with low cut shirts that left nothing to anyone's imagination. The boys wore tight T-shirts and jeans, some of them in leather jackets, but all of them had their hair done the same way.
I had never spent much time around the station except to stop in for a minute or two, and even then I was with one of my brothers. The kids hanging around there though, were the type of people I saw all the time, in my house, on my street, on my way to school. I was so used to seeing them around, but now some of them looked scary.
Mary Alice didn't seem bothered by them at all thought, and I realized that she wouldn't, not when she was dressed the same way as them, in old looking clothes. I completely forgot about why we were there for a minute then, and understood why no one was really going out of their way to make comments about our being there. Maybe we were younger, but we were just the same as them. Looked like them, spoke like them, lived like them. It's not as though those girls had dressed like that when they were my age. They probably walked around in stained jeans and old T-shirts too.
"Look!" Mary Alice said, pointing towards the gas pumps. "Soda's over there." I followed the direction of her finger over to where Soda was busy pumping gas. It wouldn't have bothered me terribly that he was surrounded by a group of people, but I didn't like that that group of people was all girls. And he was grinning at them like he knew that they liked him.
It shouldn't have bothered me, after all, he was my brother, and I wasn't supposed to be jealous if he talked to other girls, but it did. Not only that, but those girls weren't exactly the nicest looking. "Broad" was the only word I could think of to describe how gross they were. All of them looked like they had spent a long time getting their hair to stand up the way it did, and their skirts were shorter than something a toddler would wear, and the couple of them wearing pants were wearing them so tight that I was sure they were too small for them.
"Why is she leaning over like that?" Mary Alice asked about one girl, who had bent over so far that she might as well have been laying on the hood of her car.
"I can see down her shirt!" I said disgustedly. What bothered me more than that thought was the fact that Soda didn't seem to be bothered by it one bit. If I had a chest like hers I would have been trying to cover it up, not show it off.
Mary Alice and I didn't make an attempt to hide ourselves. Even if we had been standing right in front of Soda, he probably wouldn't have noticed us, he was so busy showing off to those tramps. I even wanted him to spot me. Maybe then he would stop talking to them and pay attention to me.
As mad as I was that Soda was showing off that way, he wasn't the only one I was jealous of. Steve had his own little gaggle of gals standing around, and even that bothered me. I was so sure that I hated him, and yet hear I was getting angry because he was talking to other girls. I guess I thought that I was the only girl he ever saw aside from maybe his mother and his girlfriend, but it had never bothered me until I actually saw him with other girls.
"I want to go home," I said to Mary Alice.
"But we just got here."
"I don't care." I stared to walk across the parking lot. Not the back way we had come but right out front where Soda could have seen me. I wanted him to see me too. I wanted him to see how angry I was and drop everything to check on me.
"Lily wait!" Mary Alice called, coming right after me. "What's wrong? I thought we were just playing a game!"
"We can play at my house. Darry's easier to spy on anyway. There's too many people around here."
"But-"
"Lily!"
Both of us stopped walking and turned around, to see Soda looking at us. It wasn't just him either. The entire group of girls was looking in our direction as well.
"What does he want?" I wondered out loud.
"Probably to know what you're going here," Mary Alice pointing out, obviously missing the fact that it was a rhetorical question.
"Lily!" Soda called again, even though I was looking right at him. He motioned for me to come over, but I just shook my head. Even thought it was what I had wanted, all of a sudden I just wished that I could be at home again, confined to my bedroom, and not here with all of these people.
Soda motioned to me again, and this time gave me a look that said if I didn't do what he said he would come over to me. It wasn't so bad being embarrassed in front of just my brothers or a couple of friends, but if he approached me in front off all those big kids I would have been mortified.
I grabbed Mary Alice's arm and pulled her over with me. I'm sure that she would have followed anyway, but I didn't think that I could go over there on my own. I could have easily ignored him and walked home, because deep down I knew that Soda wasn't the type to embarrass me, or himself for that matter, in front of people who respected him.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, but he didn't exactly sound surprised to see me.
"Walking around," I said quietly.
"Are those your sisters?" some girl with a ton of dark eye shadow on asked.
Soda grinning almost proudly, nodding towards me. "This is my baby sister Lily, and that's Mary Alice, her best friend. She might as well be my sister though, she over all the time."
"They're so cute," another girl said, like she was looking at a newborn baby. I rolled my eyes and looked over at Mary Alice, who seemed just as thrilled be talked about that way as I was. If I wasn't so angry at Soda I wouldn't have made such a rude gesture in front of those girls, but I didn't really care what they thought about me at that point, or even how he felt.
I did think that it was nice that he had said Mary Alice was like his sister, but the fact that he had called me his baby sister cancelled it out. He couldn't have called me his younger sister, or even his little sister. No, he had to call me his baby sister. And in front of a group of girls that were making me feel like a baby anyway.
One of the girls made some comment about me, and they all laughed, but I didn't exactly understand what she meant by it, so I decided that I was going to get out of there.
"Sorry," I said to my brother. "Mary Alice has to get home now."
"No I don't-" she started to protest, by I had already grabbed her again and started heading towards the road by then. She didn't look that happy about being taken away, but I didn't care. I could feel myself starting to cry, and didn't need to being hanging around a bunch of teenagers when I did.
All of those things that Soda had said to me over the last couple of weeks flooded into my memory. What he had said about not wanting me to wear makeup because I would look trashy, and no baby sister of his was going to look like that. Yet there he was, hanging around those same sort of girls, and loving every moment of it. Why wasn't I able to look like that? And why did he have to talk to me in front of them like I wasn't old enough to understand what they were saying? Only a couple of hours earlier he had treated me like he actually liked me, but now I was just a baby again.