I'M SO SORRY THIS TOOK SO DAMN LONG. Wish I had a better excuse, but I've honestly been busy with work/school/friends/life, and for a while I hit a massive block with this story and couldn't figure out how to continue it— this chapter has been written for a couple of weeks now and I was so reluctant to edit and post. I'm back on track now and have the better part of the next chapter written, though, and I promise I'm never abandoning this.

(Alternate explanation— I didn't have the heart to kill Dallas) :(

We met in a quiet, unobtrusive corner of Jay's, in a booth close to the back, but not so close it would look like we had something to hide. I'd instructed him to wear plain clothes, God forbid not pull up in a squad car, and pretend that he fit in on this side of town without trying to arrest anyone. Judging by the way he eyed the junior high boys twirling Baby's First Switchblade around, it'd be more than a bit of a learning curve.

I took an obnoxious sip out of my chocolate milkshake, one my mama would've scolded me for, just to fill the silence. Lord, if Mitch's hair really wasn't red like carrot shavings— it made him look younger than he really was, and maybe that was the reason why I'd taken the leap and trusted him. "I'm not gettin' beat at home. That ain't what happened to my face."

"So what did?"

"Got pistol-whipped."

A city cop shouldn't have been naive enough to let the onion from his burger dribble out his mouth, but he was. Poor bastard— I assembled his entire life story on the fly, a childhood spent in Broken Arrow or a surrounding suburb, ice cream trucks and riding his bike in the streets, joined the force because he wanted to 'make a difference in the community'. "I'm so sorry," he said in the same voice I'd heard from Miz Edwards when I'd first met her, a couple of days after my parents' deaths, the obligatory empathy you gave to a stranger. "Who did it? Are you still—"

"I don't like the fuzz," I cut in just to stop the stream of questions, though it wasn't the wisest thing to say. "On principle. If anyone from this part of town found out I was talkin' to you right now, they'd have my head— and I mean that real literal. All the gangbangers I know just ain't fixin' to help me, and it's a little urgent."

He didn't bristle and ask who the hell I thought I was, disrespecting an officer; instead, he wrinkled his brow ever-so-slightly, in a way that pierced my heart with the memory of the same expression on Johnny's face. "What's your problem with us? You seem like a nice enough girl—"

The operative word in that sentence being 'enough', huh? "You and your buddy were both right, back at the station." I traced patterns in the leftover milk on the sides of the glass with my straw. "My daddy was Indian, my mama was white— my brothers pass okay most of the time, guess you know by now I don't. We all got tribal ID cards in a drawer somewhere, though, we got blood quantum."

"Was?"

"They were in an auto wreck, last January." I could just sniff out what he was thinking, that my daddy had been yet another drunk Injun driving his truck into a tree and taking his wife with him. "But before he died, swear a week didn't go by without some cop treatin' him like a criminal, askin' what he was doin' goin' around with a white woman." I took another thoughtful slurp. "I mean... he was a criminal... but they didn't know that on sight."

"I didn't like the way Harris talked to you, down there," he said with more social consciousness than I'd expected from him. "I didn't like it at all. If that's what you're worried about... I supported Robert Kennedy. His civil rights legislation."

"They ever tell you 'bout my daddy? At the station?"

"No." He shook his head for emphasis. "Figured out soon enough that you were related to that Curtis kid, though. You ain't so slick."

Despite the seriousness of the situation, my lips flitted into an approximation of a smile. I'd never known a pig to have a sense of humor before. "He was a dealer, big one, on this side of town— Pony ain't nothin' compared to him. He did some time back in the day."

He stared at me like he expected me to reach the point where my story made any kind of sense. "My brother Soda's in a gang too now— he joined up to protect me from a hit." I performed a cold calculation— Darry by far had the darker skin and hair, but apart from being a towhead, Soda's entire face made his Indian heritage obvious. I needed to rack up the sympathy, he wasn't some white boy Soc who could play the 'wrong place at the wrong time' card. "Lord, I could've been killed." I let tears well up along my bottom lash line, blinked so a couple would spill over onto my cheeks. "But I can't let him stay in a life like that. Please, just tell me you can do somethin' to help him—"

"I wish I could." Hearing that hurt me far worse than Luis clutching his dick, laughing in my face. "But there's no magic solution that's gonna get him out, especially if he doesn't want to leave himself—"

He was parroting social worker lines, about personal responsibility, being accountable for your own actions, but the situation was far too desperate for me to fold my hands in my lap and play along with his charade; he wasn't nearly as innocent as he was pretending to be, and neither was I. "Do you know Joe—" God, I'd never even heard his last name before, despite the indelible impact he'd had on my life. "Joe, the leader of the Kings?"

Mitch tilted his head a couple degrees south, and a new sharpness entered his eyes as he scrutinized me. "The one who owns all them brothels? Yeah, might've heard of him before. But I don't see how—"

"Soda's in the Tigers." I swirled the melting ice around in my glass. I didn't have the money to buy him out, I didn't have a charge for him to take, but I could offer this up. "And I know where his warehouses are, who's in his outfit, how he operates. I know he's got a big, fat bullet hole in his leg right now, he ain't runnin' very far from you."

"... I'm listenin'."

I should've gone back to Rose's place, not shown up at my own, a house that felt like a foreign country at this point. I told myself I wanted to see Ponyboy, see how he was holding up, but that was a lie too obvious even for me to believe. I wanted to make an entrance.

Darry shrieked with laughter as I walked in, too far gone to even register my presence. "Soda... Jesus fucking Christ, if you're in a gang, you can't live here. I don't care how many reasons you're spittin' at me to justify your asinine behavior, you need to get out, and fast."

"Would you calm the hell down?" Soda said, his voice thick with irritation. He was wearing a blue bandana wrapped around his bicep; I was surprised Darry let him stroll around with it on, but God knew Darry had long since lost control of everybody's behavior. "We're in a gang, last I checked, even if it's just fightin' Socs. This whole damn neighborhood's in a gang. Maybe the state's gonna be more willing to let us stay if we can pay the electric on time for once."

"I don't want gangbangers showin' up here and puttin' a bullet through Ponyboy's skull when one of your buddies decides you been 'disrespecting' him." Darry bit down on the web of skin connecting his thumb to his index finger. "You think you're grown enough to join the Tigers, I ain't washin' your boxers for you like you're some kid. Ain't like it's even up to me, the second the state hears about this, they won't give a damn how much more dough you're bringin' in all of a sudden— you'll be in prison and he'll be in a boys' home."

I waited for Soda to give him the real reason for his sudden descent into delinquency, or at least one of them, but he didn't even consider selling me out— if I'd questioned before whether or not any of my brothers loved me, I had no doubt now. Darry opened his mouth again, then snapped it shut.

"What?" Soda taunted. I didn't like the fresh look of taunting on him, it must've been something he'd picked up from his new 'brothers'. "What are you gonna say? You wish that Dad was here? That he could knock some sense into me? Ain't like I never heard that before."

"Fuck Dad." Darry didn't spit on the ground, but I could tell it was a close thing. "I thought you was young enough that you didn't remember nothin', but I guess I was wrong. You was old enough to learn all the wrong lessons."

I cleared my throat then, afraid that they might end up fistfighting without my interference, and that wasn't something I wanted to watch go down— not when their fights had taken on a steely edge of seriousness they'd never had in the past.

"Jasmine." Darry's face was smooth like one of the plates in Mom's china cabinet, but the slight flare of his nostrils revealed the emotion lying dormant. He always thought he was so hard to read. "What are you doin' here?"

... Well, Jesus, if that didn't hurt like a stab wound to the stomach, but I'd be damned if I let it show. I put one hand on my hip, gave him an equally defiant glare back. "Got some clothes in my room." My old room. "Thought I'd pick them up."

"Rose know where you're at?" he demanded. "I ain't havin' her show up again with the cops in tow, askin' a million questions, like I have the first clue where you go no more."

"You never had the first clue 'bout much." Dammit, I'd really had empathy for my brother, seen the error of my ways, and now that it was time to put my money where my mouth was and humble myself, my mouth snapped right back to its usual. "I can always get back out, what the hell."

"God, you really don't give a damn about this family, you don't ever think about anybody but yourself." I remembered the words from the day I strolled in late for Miz Edwards's visit months ago, how I'd rolled my eyes hearing them— they struck a lot harder now. "You just hopped in Dally's car and took a little joyride with him, huh? Ain't like Ponyboy was already MIA or somethin', ain't like we'd be stuck here worryin' you're dead in a ditch—"

"Might be nice to feel like part of your family for once," I bit out, years of resentment leaking into the phrase. Get a grip, I tried to exhort myself, but I couldn't shake the sense that this might be the last time I'd get to tell him anything. "Not, you know, the maid. Or y'all's second mama. Or the one who shouldn't have been born at all."

"Don't be such a drama queen," Darry said; Soda hovered silently near the wall, either thankful he was out of the hotseat or hesitant to interfere in Darry laying into a younger sibling again. "Of course I want you around—"

"You want me around to do what?" I shouted the last word loud enough that my voice cracked on it; if we'd lived in a ritzier area, the neighbors probably would've called in a noise complaint by now. "Wash your dishes, iron your shirts, keep Ponyboy outta trouble? What the hell are you gonna miss, exactly?"

"Well, definitely not your mouth," Darry said, never much of one for sentimentality.

"Fuck you!"

"Excuse me?" He stalked over to me and tilted my chin up— funny, how he only really felt parental towards me after I'd been removed from his custody altogether. "Hell no, you don't get to talk to me like that, little girl. You wanna walk that one back?"

Furious tears stung the back of my eyes, my temper coiled up inside of me like a Jack-in-the-Box about to go off. But the only thing I could think to say was, "Don't call me that. I ain't nobody's little girl no more."

"Well, you're just actin' like you're six years old right now, ain't you?" He tapped his foot against the floor, a menacing staccato. "Cool it, I swear to God—"

"No, I never should've shown up here." Desperate for him not to see me cry, to not break down at what our family had become, I bolted for the door as rapidly as I'd swung in. "Rose don't know I left."

"You get back in here, Jasmine." I reluctantly unfurled my fingers from around the doorknob, an amateur mistake. "You ain't gonna just make some smart comment and flounce off 'cause you ain't gettin' your way for once. I'm sick to death of puttin' up with that shit."

"Go to hell," I said, because I'd never quite had enough sense to quit while I was ahead.

He slapped me on the ass before I could get another word out, the sound like a thunderclap. "I'm not gonna listen to this anymore, you better shut that mouth, I mean it."

Caught between the urge to slap him back and the urge to make a run for it, I burst into tears.

"Man, great job, Darry," came Soda's sardonic drawl, "you smack Pony right into the door, now that he's back, you can move on to the next one, huh?"

"You know, you always got somethin' smart to say about my parenting, don't you, but I don't exactly see you offerin' me no solutions." Darry looked away from Soda to stare me down again. "You gonna watch yourself now?"

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand quickly, swallowed the remaining tears that were fixing to come out. I didn't so much care about what he'd done, Dad would've given me a lot worse and a lot sooner; I just didn't want an audience in the form of Soda, who was examining the patterns on the wallpaper with far more thoroughness than they deserved. "I'm sorry— she showed up at school, said she was gonna take me home with her for good. Me and Dally, we had to floor it pretty fast."

I tensed up as he reached out to hug me, our bodies like two puzzle pieces that didn't fit together, but part of me still appreciated the olive branch. "You really want to stay here?" His breath tickled the hairs coming out of the top of my scalp. "That bad? 'Cause I never quite got the vibe."

"Yeah." I rooted my stance against the ground and exhaled, mostly swayed by the knowledge that no matter how badly I wanted to flee, I would end up following myself anywhere I went. Darry's shirtfront smelled like Dad's old cologne; I pressed my cheek against his chest for a moment before pulling away from him. "I do."

"Okay." Darry knit his hands over his ribcage and stepped back from me, as taciturn as ever, but I understood what he meant. "I want y'all here too. We just... need to get through the rumble first, kick them Socs out of our territory. Then I'll figure out what to do."

"That's still on?"

"You bet it's still on," Soda said, stepping back into the fray. "Got some heads I'm lookin' forward to smashin', Ponyboy too."

"You're still goin' to the rumble?" Darry picked one of Soda's plaid shirts up off the couch. "Ain't that gonna be like Muhammad Ali hittin' up a high school boxin' match?"

"Yeah, what the hell, for old times' sake." Soda grinned at me, the kind of grin I didn't know he still had enough innocence left to give. "We're havin' a rumble all right." He nudged my shoulder with his. "Maybe you can fix us up some sandwiches for when we come back."

Dallas swept by the house in Buck's T-bird later that night and found me smoking on the porch, more out of anxiety than any real desire for the nicotine. I should've been more surprised than I was when he honked the horn, but he'd already jumped out to approach me before I could subject myself to the indignity of responding to that.

He gave me a long, deep kiss and squeezed my ass— Pony made a retching sound next to him as he climbed out of the passenger seat, showing his age, I guess. Where the hell had he come from? "Dally, what are you doin' here?" I asked, my attention fixed on his wounded arm, Two-Bit's black-handled switch clutched in that hand. This whole scene was like an acid trip. "Why ain't you in the hospital?"

"Staged a prison break." He grinned at me, but it was a hard, brittle grin. "Wasn't about to miss the rumble of the century, not with Shepard ridin' my ass about it."

"Tim came to visit you?"

"Nah, Luis." He rolled his eyes. "Said he couldn't believe my mug was in paper without 'wanted dead or alive' written above it. Man, that fuckin' guy. I woulda fought my way outta the hospital with a paperclip after listenin' to him go off on me."

"Did we... win?"

"Yeah, looks it, dragged the kid outta there before I could see the end of things." Though the night air was unusually balmy, he still shivered, his tattered sweatshirt revealing large portions of his upper arms; he'd never looked smaller to me, more confused. "We're gonna go see Johnny, gonna tell him we kicked them Socs' asses straight across the Arkansas."

His entire demeanor reminded me of Soda in the ICU, when he'd clung on to the delusional hope that Mom might snap out of her coma any minute now, like Lazarus rising from the dead. I couldn't acknowledge the thought, I buried it deep in the recesses of my mind before I could say as much out loud.

"Y'all already seen him?"

"Yeah, Pony and Two-Bit already did, his bitch mama even came 'round askin' for a visit, can you believe it?" Dallas spoke in short, clipped syllables, like rounds from a machine gun. "We oughta hurry. C'mon now."

I honestly forget most of the details of how we ended up back at the hospital— some cop had pulled us over on the way, asked why Dallas treated the speed limit as a bare minimum at best, and he'd spun some bullshit story about Ponyboy bleeding out in the backseat, which he'd not only accepted but used as justification to providing us with a police escort to the hospital. I had to hand it to him; he didn't have the Ramirez charm, never would, but he'd learned how to mimic enough of it, and I doubted the speedometer had registered less than ninety the whole time we'd been on the road. "You better let us see him," Dallas demanded when I snapped back into awareness, the hand holding up Two-Bit's switch even shakier than his voice as he held up the doctor in front of Johnny's room. I wanted to scream at him to put that fucking thing down, that there were problems you couldn't solve by brandishing the biggest weapon you had, but my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. "Or else I swear you'll end up on your own operating table."

"You can see him, but because you're his friends, not because of that knife." The doctor was maddeningly calm; I didn't have enough energy to appreciate that he hadn't called security, or even the fuzz, until we were in the room and I realized that escorting us out would've been the kindness.

"Hey, Johhny," I croaked, and almost vomited— so much of him was covered in ugly, peeling burns, I could neither quite look at him or look away, like watching a crash on the Indy 500. He twitched in response, his body crawling with wires; even the thought of replying to me chafed at him. "They treatin' you okay in here?"

"Yeah, it's been okay." It took an eternity for the words to pass his lips, like the rustle of dead leaves. "My mama— I didn't wanna see her." He sounded unsure and hesitant of the decision, still, though he must've made it hours ago. "Why didn't I see her?"

"We kicked the Socs' asses, Johnnycake." Dallas just barely managed to refrain from talking shit about Mrs. Cade. "You shoulda been there to see it. It was beautiful, man—"

"Don't matter no more," Johnny said, like some kind of holy sage casting down pronouncements. The pit of my stomach froze into icy crystals; he was trying to make his last words count. "None of it— none of this matters no more."

"'Course it matters," Dallas said with a stuttering laugh. "Once you get outta here—"

But Johnny was long past the point where he was capable of entertaining even his hero's delusions, though he did give him a small smile. "Stay gold, Ponyboy... stay gold."

Then his eyes closed. All three of us looked wildly around at each other, not daring to believe what we knew was true, but they didn't open again and Dallas broke out of the stupor first.

"Never could keep that hair back—" He smoothed Johnny's dark bangs across his forehead, covered up the livid scar carved in it. "That's what you get for caring about people, you little punk, that's what you get—" He turned around and slammed his fist into the wall, trembling like he had a sweating sickness, tears falling down his face; I would've tried to reach out and comfort him, but in the rabid state he was in, I was half-afraid he might sink his teeth into my hand. Ponyboy blinked at us both, his face even chalkier than usual, like a consumption victim's. "Dammit, Johnny, don't die, please don't die—"

So even Dallas had a breaking point. His eyes roamed around the room again and then hung back in their sockets, seeking some desperate sort of relief, but there was nothing in front of him except a corpse. "Please," he said again, and the word echoed down the sterile hall and hit him right back in the face. "Please, God, please—"

Looking back, I wish I would've said something. 'I love you', maybe. At least 'goodbye?' But he sprinted out of there, and I had no idea that was the last time I would see him alive— my attention was entirely focused on Johnny. He looked younger, in death. Far more at peace than he had ever been in life.

Dallas took the car with him, we quickly discovered— I didn't have enough emotional energy left to worry about the safety of his driving. Pony was all for wandering into the parking lot and sticking his thumb out until we caught someone's eye, but my care-taking instinct managed to override the numb exhaustion that had crashed into me like concrete. "You're bleedin'," I said, swiping my thumb through the deep wound in his forehead and cringing when the blood leaked through my fingers, "c'mon, we'll go to the nurses' station. They'll call us a cab."

"We ain't got no money—"

My laugh sounded strange and distorted; when I fanned my hand out in front of me, the patterns of dark blood against the tan skin blurred together, seemed to float onto the walls. "Johhny oughta get us the sympathy vote, don't you think?"

Turned out, he did. I wish I could say the tears welling up in my eyes were just good acting.

"Dad didn't look that—" I barely remembered how Pony and I had ended up bundled into the backseat of the cab at all, drunk off of sheer exhaustion, slumped against the vinyl seats. God, couldn't he stop talking for a minute? "Dad didn't look like that, did he?"

I'd gone with Darry to the morgue, to identify the bodies, he hadn't. He hadn't looked like much of anything, after the eighteen-wheeler got through with him.

I scrabbled around in my purse, sifting through the detritus of old crumbs and tissues and lip gloss caps, until I dug up a Valium tablet. "Here." I shoved it into his clammy palm, traced it down the heart line. "Don't ask what it is, just take it. And be quiet."

"You oughta come home." He put his hand over mine, though he was staring out the window, his eyes glassy and far-away as he dry-swallowed the pill. "Everyone's gonna be there, after the rumble... you shouldn't be by yourself. With her."

I don't want to tell them myself, was the underlying subtext. "It ain't my home anymore, not accordin' to the law." I ran my hand up and down the seatbelt I hadn't bothered to fasten; I didn't remember half the time, cruising around in Dally's suger-laden truck, and he'd never pressed the issue. "I'll be fine."

"Ain't nobody's home 'cept Darry's, is it, if we're usin' the state's definition?" His voice was as bitter as the hemlock that had killed Socrates. "You don't belong no less just 'cause you're a girl, you know."

"Rose is gonna be wonderin' where I am." I leaned forward, tapped the cab driver (who'd been assiduously avoiding commenting on our situation) on the shoulder. "We ain't goin' to the same place, you gotta drop me off on the West Side."

I'd been alone through so much, what was the difference now?

"Where the hell have you been?" She was even tapping her foot on the floor as I crept inside, her arms folded under her ample breasts— I wanted to tell her to give it up, that she wasn't nearly old enough to have half the intimidation factor of my mama (who was scary enough to make Dallas mind), but lost my nerve halfway through. I leaned against the wall, my legs buckling under me. "Do I have to tie you to your bed at night? Never let you outta my sight? Is that what it's gonna take, at this point?"

"Johnny died— my friend, Johnny, he died," I said numbly, like saying it over and over again would cement the truth of the words in my mind. "The burns were too bad, he didn't make it."

He'd wanted to die, hadn't he? Wasn't that what he'd always fucking wanted? So why did I feel so sick to my stomach?

"Oh, baby." She pulled me into her chest, but before I could hope to relax into it, she'd extracted herself and poured me a glass of whiskey. Not the cheap stuff my daddy drank, either, Tennessee Honey, at least six dollars a bottle. I knocked back half of it before she could change her mind and take it away from me. "It's that kind of night, huh?"

It sure was. I finished the glass and looked her straight in the eye as I poured myself another one. She didn't even twitch before she poured her own. Then she pulled out the bourbon.

Angela showed up— it wasn't that much later, maybe an hour, it just felt like it because of how stupid fucking drunk I was. I hadn't been this hammered since the night I'd shot Joe; I didn't know what had gotten into Rose, maybe some of her animal cunning had figured out that alcohol might be the way to my heart, but I wasn't about to turn down the opportunity to forget before she changed her mind. "Jasmine... Jasmine, get up." She was shaking my shoulder roughly, when my eyes snapped open, the lights in the living room were dim and I had a crick in my neck from having fallen asleep on the couch. Rose was nowhere to be found, had probably long since retired to her own bed; in the sleepy half-second upon awakening, when you'd forgotten all the terrible things that had happened to you, I was irritated that she'd left me like this.

"What is it?" I sat up too fast and rubbed my eye with my knuckle; I feared I might be sick all over the floor, but I just barely managed to get a hold of the contents of my stomach. "Angel, this ain't such a good time—"

She threw herself, sobbing, into my chest— inexplicably, ridiculously, I thought her dripping eyeliner was going to ruin my white top. I patted her on the back with an awkward, mechanical rhythm, her arms so tight around my neck that I choked under their weight. "What happened? Fuck, Angel, what happened?" I tried to mimic concern. In reality, my muscles were so weak and my mind was so gone, I had a hard time realizing that she was there at all.

"It... it wasn't loaded, the heater. They still shot him anyway, God, nobody could do nothin' before it was too late."

"Who are they? Who did they shoot?" I demanded with the awareness of someone who'd had a bucket of ice water poured all over them, though I already knew. Of course I knew.

"He just... I heard it from Ponyboy." She trembled against me. "Dallas— he stuck up a convenience store— when the fuzz caught up to him— they didn't wanna ask no questions, you know? Not some dirty hood from our side of town."

When I still blinked at her, uncomprehending, she spelled it out for me. "Dally's dead."

I was thirteen when JFK was shot— we fell over each other crowding around the television set, Walter Cronkite's eyes watering as he announced the assassination, how his head was blown clean off. Later came the iconic photograph of Jackie Kennedy, still drenched in her husband's blood, as Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One. She did not cry.

I thought I could understand her now.