A/N: Thanks for the reviews. I know that this is a short chapter but there should be more soon.
Chapter 29
I marched home being probably the angriest that I had ever been. I wanted to scream and kill someone and throw the temper tantrum of my life. Would that have been so wrong of me? I could have turned around and tried to fight those three little - I won't repeat what I was thinking of calling them - but I knew that it was three against one, and as delicate and girly as they seemed I knew that they could hold their own against me.
Our street was practically deserted seeing as school had probably yet to let out. I didn't care though. At that moment I felt as though the entire world had turned it's back on me. I felt like an idiot. How could I have thought that morning that my principal might actually care enough to ask concerned questions? He didn't care about me. He just thought the same thing as everybody else, and I couldn't even try to prove him wrong. I couldn't get a job, or move to a better neighbourhood. Even if I tried to work harder in my class he would still think the bad things about me that he always had, just because of where I came from. And how could he have expected me to tell on Kathy and her friends about hitting Mary Alice? Didn't he remember what it was like to be a kid. You didn't tell on other kids, whether they were from your neighbourhood or not. You just didn't do that.
I shoved through my front door and then slammed it shut behind me.
"Why the hell is that door always unlocked?" I asked myself angrily, knowing very well that it was because we didn't anything worth stealing. Why lock a door when nobody's going to try and come in anyway?
I walked all the way through the house and straight out the backdoor. I don't know why I did that but I had nowhere else to go. I walked all the way around the house to the front door and walked in again, slamming the door behind me just as I had the first time. I went to the kitchen then and opened the note from Mr. Roberts. I took a pen from the counter and wrote across the top in big angry letters "HE'S A LIAR" and underlined it three times just to get my point across. I threw the pencil at the window and left the note where it was for Darry to find.
The next place I approached was my bedroom, where I slammed my door loudly so many times that I thought it might fall off of it's hinges. Then I kicked the wall, but it hurt my foot more than anything else. I opened my dresser drawers and pulled all of my things out and threw them around the room. I never even wore those things anymore anyway. Once my drawers were emptied out I picked up my pillow and began beating it against my dresser top until finally the pillow came out of the case and I was left whipping the dresser with a sorry excuse for a piece of fabric.
I quickly became exhausted with my anger and leaned against the wall, finding it hard to breath.
"It's not fair!" I yelled, wanting to cry but was too angry to let the tears escape. "It's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair!"
I had to leave my room again, so this time I went to the living room and found myself looking out the front window. I stood there looking out as a few of the high school kids walked down the road. There were a couple of girls out there, maybe a year older than Ponyboy, who were laughing happily to each other. They both wore tight skirts that just barely covered their knees. Their hair was done nicely, and I wondered how they found the time to do it. One was fishing through her purse for something and stumbled on her heels. She caught herself on a fence post and then both girls exploded into laughter. I thought that they were just like Mary Alice and I, only older and dressed in things that I could never get away with wearing. They were both happy, at least for the time, but would probably feel sad later on. After all, kids in their grade probably called them greasers too.
That's when the girl who had tripped pulled out a pack of cigarettes from her purse and handed one to her friend. She took one too and then they lit them up. They leaned against the fence for a moment, like they just wanted to stand back and enjoy their smokes. It made me so sad. I could never be like that. How did they turn into that? What if they had been like me once too? What happened to them?
A moment later big smiles spread across both of their faces as a couple of boys showed up, each with cigarettes in their own hands. One of them kissed the girl who'd produced the cigarettes, only this wasn't just any kiss. This was the kind of kiss they didn't show in movies and it was right out there in the open in the middle of the afternoon.
I was disgusted.
I turned around and stared at the living room, feeling the urge to destroy the place in the same way that I had my own room. I couldn't though, and I knew that it was wrong. I could only imagine what would happen if I tried it, and I was already in enough of a mess to dig myself in any deeper.
I had to do something though, and I was so infuriated that I just wasn't thinking clearly. I stormed towards the bathroom and shut the door behind me and made sure that I had locked the door this time. Immediately I eyed what I wanted. I didn't know whose razor it was, but it was sitting on the edge of the sink just calling out to me. I grabbed the razor and a bar of soap then moved to the bathtub and then began running the water. I would have used the boys' shaving cream but I didn't want them to notice that any was missing.
I had seen my mother shave her legs a dozen times and knew that it was simple. I just had to wet my legs, lather the soap up, and then shave away. As I pulled my shoes and socks off and swung my legs over to the side of the tub I ran a hand along my left leg. The hair was so light and short that it was hardly noticeable, but I was going to show them that I could shave too.
I slipped one of my legs under the warm faucet and spread the water around it. Then I pulled my leg away and got the soap wet. After covering my leg in soapy bubbles I dipped the razor under the water quickly and then brought it to my leg. I started right under my knee. Don't know what I did wrong but all of a sudden there was a warm feeling, almost like a tickle. Then came the blood, turning the soap bubble red as it trickled down my leg, while the actually location of the slice looked almost purple.
"Oh no!" I cried as I quickly shoved my leg under the water to rinse it off.
"Ahh!" I wailed as the force of the water sent a sharp pain through my leg. I went to pull away but wound up slipping into the tub. I was really starting to cry now and just sat there, my bottom drenched and my leg gushing blood.
The blood didn't stop running from my leg though, and I really started to panic. I finished rinsing my leg off and winced through the pain, then jumped out of the bathtub, water dripping everywhere, to grab tissue. I held to my leg but soon there was more blood than it could soak up. I grabbed more and continually rolled the toilet paper to my cut. It did nothing to help and I was bawling, terrified of what would happen. I thought that I would never stop bleeding, I really did.
"I'm gonna die!" I sobbed to myself as I finally grabbed a folded white towel and pressed it against the skin. "I don't want to die. I'm gonna die. I'm sorry Darry, I didn't mean to be so bad. I don't want to die." I had myself in a rambling fit until finally I could speak no more for the power of my tears.
"Hey?" somebody knocked on the door loudly. "Lily you in there?"
"Go away!" I screamed at Ponyboy, who must have just come home from school. I wanted him to just disappear, and hoped that he hadn't heard me babbling to myself.
He knocked again. "What are you doing?"
"I said go!" I cried. How could I tell him what had happened?
"Will you open the door?"
"No!" I screamed, and buried my face between my knees to keep him from hearing my further cries.
I could hear a sort of clicking nose coming from outside the door but paid little attention to it. Next thing I knew Ponyboy was kneeling down next to me.
"How'd you get in here?" I asked, no longer screaming.
"I broke in," he said simply. I could see that he had gone pale and he asked, "What happened."
"I cut my leg," I told him, trying to swallow my tears back as I did.
"How?"
"Shaving."
"You shave?"
"No! That's why I cut myself."
He pulled the now blood stained towel away and examined my leg.
"How can one little leg have so much blood?" he asked himself, but I didn't have an answer for him.
He ran a clean part of the towel under the bath water, which I had forgotten to turn off, and then brought it over to my leg. I pulled away the second it came in contact with my skin.
"That hurts!" I cried.
"I know but it's not gonna stop bleeding unless you take care of it."
So I bit my lip and let him clean the cut up. I didn't say anything to him while he was doing it though, but was actually surprised at how much he knew about taking care of a cut. He assured me that it looked worse than it actually was, and it eventually did stop bleeding.
He helped me clean up the bathroom too but I could see that he looked kind of faint as he tossed the bloody toilet paper away. I had calmed down quite a bit too, but as we left the bathroom and headed into the living room it all started up again.
"What happened to you?" he asked as we sat down next to each other on the couch, and I knew that he wasn't asking about shaving.
"I got in trouble at school today."
"What did you do?"
"Nothing," I said, and I could feel sadness instead of anger piling up this time. "Remember how I said that Mary Alice got punched in the face yesterday?"
He nodded.
"Well her mom called the school and our principal made all of us go see him. But Kathy and her friends told on me and said that I punched one of them in the stomach, and that's why Mary Alice got hit. I tried to tell him that it was a lie, but he wouldn't believe me. He gave me a note, and I have to stay in at recess, and tomorrow he's gonna give me a real punishment. I didn't even do anything. Why won't he believe me?"
Pony didn't answer that, but I guess it was because we both knew the answer without having to say it out loud. He did put his arm around me though, which I thought was nice since he hardly ever even looked at me anymore. I might have really started crying again but I no longer had the energy.
"Darry will believe that I'm telling the truth," I asked, "won't he?"
"Sure," he said almost too quickly. "You didn't do anything wrong."
We were quiet for a minute. It felt nice just to sit there, and for awhile I knew that I didn't have to worry about Mr. Roberts. I did not have to care that girls had lied about me, or that I had been wrongly accused of something. I didn't have to care about any of that because I actually had somebody around who probably knew just as well as I did that things for people like us were just not fair.
Maybe Pony was older, and maybe we had nothing in common. Maybe he was a boy, and a smart one at that, and maybe he was in a gang, but for that moment I felt like we were exactly the same. We both lived in a place and had to deal with the fact that people didn't like us for any other reason than the fact that we come from there. And just like me, there was nothing Ponyboy could do about it.
"Hey Pony?" I asked, cutting into the silence.
"Yeah?"
"Please don't tell anybody that I was trying to shave."
"I wont."
"You don't think Darry'll notice, do you?"
"Nah. Besides it was Soda's toothbrush that you used."
"He wont notice that I moved it?"
I felt him shake his head. "You could replace Soda's razor with a toothbrush and he probably wouldn't notice."
For the first time that afternoon I laughed wholeheartedly.
