Warning here for a lot of victim-blaming and guilt and shame surrounding sexual assault, institutional and internalized— and a pretty big spoiler for On Edge, though I did technically intend for that to be a prequel :/

I exhaled, let a cloud of smoke escape my narrowly-parted lips, and tried to focus on the in and out of my lungs instead of anything else. I was always smoking on the porch; I'd give myself lung cancer, at this rate, and the thought startled me far more than it should've. For so long, at least the past eight months, I'd been incapable of envisioning my future beyond the span of a few days, a few weeks at most; I refused to say it out loud to my brothers, but ever since Graham had attacked me, I'd assumed I'd kill myself sooner or later. Jump in front of a passing car or cut my own wrists or step into a noose, maybe overdose on purpose, like Angela had, or by happy accident. Grappling with the fact that I was still alive, that I was just too fucking stubborn to end everything without a fight, it shook me to the core.

Soda approached me silently, so silently that I started when I noticed him creep up. He looked like he hadn't slept all night, his eyes ringed dark like a raccoon's, and he probably hadn't. "Hey," I said, coughed a little on the third cigarette I was choking down. Even if girls' sports were halfway funded at Will Rogers, I still wouldn't have been bringing home any medals. "Sit down."

He gestured for a smoke of his own as he sat beside me on the stoop; I held my lighter up to his mouth once he'd clenched it between his teeth. "I only do this shit when I'm stressed," he half-heartedly said, like he needed an excuse. "I've sure been stressed a lot lately, huh."

"No kidding." When he raised it back up to his lips, I saw dark lines of blood under his nails, and the nausea I felt had nothing to do with how much I'd smoked on an empty stomach. "We're gonna need to check ourselves into an asylum for some R&R after this is all over."

When would it be over, though? The damn thing would continue as long as it liked.

"Why didn't you tell us earlier?" I'd been expecting the question, but after the millionth repetition, it grated on my nerves like a mosquito's whine against my ear. He looked so betrayed as he asked it, too. I couldn't stand to watch that particular emotion paint itself across his face. "It happened last winter, Jas—"

"Because I figured y'all would think it was my fault, okay?" I stubbed my cigarette out, made an ugly smear on the boards; I sounded ugly, too. "Let's not pretend half the country wouldn't call it as much, and say I never should've gone upstairs with him. I got a working brain."

I remembered, unbidden, the vile shit Brenda had spewed in the school library, weeks ago— that Angela should just kill herself, that she must've liked it, and she'd been some twelve-year-old kid, the victim of her mother's awful taste in men. Me? I was so far down on the totem pole of sympathetic victims, I flat-out didn't register at all.

"I'm not some fucking caveman, Jas." He said it as a cold snap, but I knew him well enough to sense the defensiveness beneath his posturing. "Even Darry ain't. How could you have thought we'd blame—"

"I'm the one who was raped, not you, last I checked." I wanted it to come out authoritative, but instead my bottom lip wobbled, I was afraid I'd start crying for the millionth time; I hugged a knee to my chest, couldn't meet his searching eyes. "Though you seem to think you get to call all the shots about it."

He could've snapped back at me, but instead he just looked hurt and young. "I did it for you."

"And I needed you here." Tears spilled down my face despite my best efforts; I wished Dally was still around, though I knew without a doubt that he would've joined the revenge faction. "I needed you here, Soda, not nearly becoming a murderer because I opened my fat mouth—"

He cut me off before I could finish my train of thought, wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me into his side; I was too startled to do anything else but give in. "I'm a Tiger, honey," he said, all grim resignation, but he felt as warm against me as he had when we were kids, still innocent. "I've... done some shit like that before. You don't have to worry 'bout how I'm taking it."

"Carvin' people's faces up?" I didn't want to hear the answer, I still couldn't process the fact that he'd become a Tiger on my account at all. "You done shit like that before?"

He didn't offer me the kind of comforting lie he'd lob at Ponyboy, and I had to respect him for that. "I'm worried 'bout you." He squeezed me even tighter. "I was worried 'bout you. It gonna stop now?"

"You ain't Dad," I said, a weak whine at best. I rested my head against his chest, felt the thump-thump-thump of his heart. "You ain't even Darry."

"Yeah, I'm your favorite brother, though." He brushed a hand over my shoulderblades. "You done gangbangin', or what?"

Probably not, I should've said. Probably not, realism struck like a lightning bolt straight through the meat and electricity of my heart; I was too much my daddy's daughter for that. But at least for now, I was tired, I wanted to rest and believe in the illusion of safety. "I'm done," I promised, and he made a satisfied noise in the back of his throat.

He didn't say anything about himself, but he didn't have to worry. I was already on that.

The interrogation room looked about how they usually do in the movies, two-way mirrors along the wall, a bench on the other side of a long table. The lighting was awful, the kind of fluorescence I associated with my underfunded public school and badly-maintained fish tanks. If I kept counting every time the lamps above my head flickered, maybe I could forget where I was.

Luis was in his element, though, leaned forward and clasped his hands together like he was some hotshot lawyer, not an unrepentant gangbanger with a teardrop under his eye. "I don't wanna impose, make no unreasonable demands early in the game," he said, smiling like a shark, all bared teeth. "But I hope the force will understand that once Joe's behind bars, I'll need the police presence on his old haunts reduced quite a bit." If anything, his smile just grew wider. "I'd really hate if we couldn't come to a... mutually satisfactory agreement, you know?"

I didn't know he had words that large in his vocabulary. "You want to be able to tear up the east side pushin' dope, and you want every car assigned to the district to be conveniently cruisin' around the south while it happens." A coup Brutus would've been proud of; Mitch turned to me next with a sigh. "And what kinda favor does the mademoiselle want?"

"I just want to not get arrested after I say all this," I said tiredly, wanting to slump in my seat but considering that somewhat rude. "I ain't really lookin' forward to seein' what Girls Town's like from the inside."

"Lord, we ain't even arresting him, and I'm pretty sure he's got more than one active warrant out."

"Hol' up." I pressed my fingertips to my mouth, paused for a moment. "I want Ponyboy off the hook. He didn't even stab that Soc, it was Johnny Cade—" in spite of what his delusions were telling him— "and it was self-defense, too. He doesn't deserve to do time... or even probation."

"This ain't exactly my jurisdiction," he warned, but his eyes softened when he looked at me. I'd stuck a fingernail in my mouth, bitten it to the quick when he was leaving me in the lurch. "But I can whisper in a judge's ear, I can suggest that this case get wrapped up with a slap on the wrist. The kid who did it is dead, let bygones be bygones, and he's an easier target to pin it on." He coughed delicately, and I had to brace myself for what was coming down the pike next. "You're sure Ponyboy. I mean, I'm not trying to be crude, but I was wondering if he's your half—"

Luis let out a loud, obnoxious laugh, like the braying of an ass. "Listen, officer, we used to have bets goin'. Over whether he was, and then who the potential daddy was."

"I don't think it's appropriate for you to be speculating about my mother like this," I said in my best imitation of Rose's upper-class poise, digging my nails into my thigh. I'd always known Luis wasn't shit, my gut instinct despite any of his pretensions towards kindness, and this just confirmed it. "About a dead woman?"

I was here to undo the harm I'd done, to save my brothers, all kinds of heroism and selflessness I'd never thought I'd have in me. I was growing as a person, dammit. That was about the only reason I didn't flounce out with the last scrap of my dignity. Luis looked suitably chastened when I reminded him of her death, though, and I settled more comfortably into my seat. "Let's start at the beginning, with you, Jasmine," Mitch said in what he must have thought was a concilliatory tone. "How did you first become familiar with Joseph Price?"

He pressed the button on the tape recorder he'd placed on top of the table; I swallowed hard, thought about the weight of a gun in my hand, the air thick with the smell of his blood. I thought about Miguel, stupid boy that he was, the Polaroids left on Tim's porch as a memento. I thought about Angela's neck most of all, mottled with bruising like an apple that'd been kicked around a schoolyard. "It must've been August, the middle of it." My voice cracked at first, worse than Ponyboy's when he got too excited, then finally steadied. "My girlfriend, she took me down to his place, he called it the House of the Rising Sun—"

Only sheer masochism led me over to Rose's apartment, after that interview, not any respect for my long-neglected custody schedule; lying to myself, I thought I'd give my key back, say my goodbyes. Maybe I wanted closure. Maybe I was just itching for a show.

Rose looked like absolute shit, and trust me, I had a pretty good idea by that point what 'absolute shit' looked like— she had deep hollows under her eyes from crying, her clothes wrinkled and uneven on her frame. None of that managed to affect the set of pipes on her, though. There was shattered ceramic at her husband's feet, a puddle of water and a few half-wilted flowers, giving off the smell of a funeral home. She'd thrown a vase. "I don't understand why you have to be like this," she said, voice cracked on a broken wail, "I don't understand any of it at all. We was supposed to be a family again—"

"The only reason I want to go to court is to serve you papers," Sven said, in a snap like a rubber band being pulled back too far. Unlike her, he could've just stepped out of a boardroom. "Lemme tell you, at this point, I'd rather support her ass than yours." He jerked a thumb at me, unfazed by my sudden intrusion on their scene. "Hey, honey, you wanna come home with me instead? I'll bring you over to your grandma's, let you play with your little brother."

Rose took the bait as spectacularly as I expected her to. "You don't know her like I do," she howled— I knew she was high on something, but I didn't enjoy speculating. She pointed at me, too, all dramatic— she'd put her wedding ring back on, I'd never noticed her wear it before. "You don't know what that girl is like, her own brother can barely keep a handle on her. She's been runnin' all over the city, I'm tellin' you, she sells drugs, she hangs around with gangbangers and thieves, she lies like the devil— why would you pick her?"

And now it finally hit me, like the proverbial bucket of ice water, that my aunt did not love me and perhaps never had— that it had all been an increasingly unhinged scheme to rebuild her family, regain everything she had lost. I'd failed to serve my purpose, was all. I could be sacrificed as quick as she'd tried to snap me up, and sheer jealousy had led her there in the span of a second.

"Yeah, sure, Rosie, some teenage girl's runnin' city-wide drug distributions," he scoffed— I'd never been more grateful for a man's misogyny in my life. "That definitely happened. For Christ's sake, I don't understand how you can pop every pill in the pharmacy 'cept the ones you're actually prescribed."

"You tell him." Her finger felt aimed at me with as much urgency as a pistol. "You tell your uncle what you told me and your brother that night."

"I have no idea what she's talkin' about, Uncle Sven," I said with faux-innocence that'd put my efforts around Miz Edwards to shame— fortunately, I figured I'd dress better than usual to roll up to a police station, wore a skirt down to my knees and enough makeup to not look as sick and drained as I felt. "I mean, I'm just some regular girl... maybe my daddy caused trouble when I was younger, but I didn't have anything to do with that stuff, he gave it up before he died..." I pouted a little, for effect. "I volunteer at the animal shelter on weekends, jeez."

Sven barely shot me a glance before he decided I was telling the truth, or just didn't care if I was lying. "Okay, so here's how things are gonna go, Rosie. I'm gonna tell that court that I never heard a goddamn word about this until you came here, that we were practically divorced, and that a new fifteen-year-old baby won't put a band-aid on it. If you're lucky, that's where I'll stop." He rolled his eyes at her trying to rip the buttons off the front of her blouse. "I'd say you'd wreck that kid, lovin' her too much, but it doesn't even seem like you want to give her the Kevin treatment."

This should've been my moment of triumph, the point where I got everything I wanted; Rose managing to hoist herself by her own petard, all her schemes unraveling before her eyes. But when she looked at me again through wet eyelashes, I felt some pity at what she'd turned into, this desperate, grasping creature clutching at the upholstery with both fists; part of me, though I'd never managed to feel affection, much less genuine love, for my aunt, could at least handle that. My parents' marriage hadn't been the happiest one in the world, especially in the period before my daddy went to jail, but I had to give them credit for never producing scenes like this.

That pity didn't extend nearly far enough for me to defend her, though. Like my father before me, twenty years ago, I walked out of that apartment, out of her life.

I came to the Shepard house looking for her, but before I could get past the kitchen door, my eyes darted over to the sycamore tree growing out of their scraggly backyard— I saw a flash of a plaid skirt. Angela had kicked off her pumps onto the grass below, was maneuvering more adroitly than I'd expected her to. She settled on one of the highest branches, high enough to look down on the entire world.

My mama had never liked me climbing trees when I was younger, not when I tore my blouses, especially not after Ponyboy fell out of one and broke his arm. That was probably why I darted up after her.

"You do this a lot?" I scraped my palms against the rough bark as I scooted myself next to her, clutched at the branch to keep from crashing back down to earth.

"I used to all the time when I was a kid," Angela said, her face tilted up into the wind, and I could see the tomboy she used to be, smiling with a mouth of missing baby teeth. "My mama and daddy—" I didn't bother to ask which one— "they was always fightin', throwin' plates, you know the score. I couldn't hear them from all the way up here."

Violence followed us both around like a stray cat, the more we fed it. That was why I had the courage to say out loud, into the void of the air, "I told Soda what happened to me."

"Oh, I bet pretty boy took that real well," she said, but despite the acerbic words, her brow was furrowed with genuine concern. "Is he okay? He on lock or...?"

I felt a warm, burning sensation in the center of my chest, like when you swallow food that's too hot, at her automatic assumption that he'd gone out for bloody revenge. "He ain't, he didn't get caught or nothin'." I considered detailing what happened last night, but I'd already compartmentalized it, locked it away in a box inside my head— I could no sooner go through that than I could think about Dally's death, right now, process that and keep going. "Cut his face up, some." Stabbed one of his eyes out. Left him the other one. Made him live with it.

She curled her long fingernails into the bark, moved over to make more room for me. "You always got an angle," she said, and I could've laughed from the irony. "You still tryna convince me to talk? You ain't gonna get nowhere, I don't even care if Luis is singin' like a canary now. This shit's personal."

"Don't be so self-absorbed," I chided, but it was half-hearted— Angela had an uncanny ability to slice through anyone's bullshit, even when they barely knew they were peddling it themselves. "Maybe I just like to keep you updated on what's happening in my life."

She let out a faint puff of air from between thinly-parted lips. "Tim ever tell you how he got his scar?"

"Yeah, everyone knows, he was fightin' a tramp and got whacked across the face with a beer bottle." The story had grown more embellished over the years, depending on how young and gullible the audience was, but the core details always remained the same.

"He's lyin', he just came up with a good cover when he was in the pen." She closed her eyes and pitched forward, like she wanted to jump. "He caught my stepdaddy feelin' up my tits in the middle of the kitchen."

"Oh, God." The breath knocked straight out my lungs, like when Curly had broken his arm crashing off a telephone pole. I tried to picture the scene and didn't want to, any more than I wanted to cut out my own tongue.

"He pulled a switch," she said mechanically, "my stepdaddy, he was the gangbanging type, he had his own... they was hollerin' like hell, Tim said he was gonna kill him, gut him like a goddamn fish... and what does my idiot mama do? She goes and calls the fuzz, that's what, and then they locked Tim up for five months 'cause he was on the better end of the fight." She stopped long enough to take a ragged breath. "And the social worker they brought 'round our place after, she asked me if I'd been havin' thoughts about my stepdaddy that I shouldn't, if my mama had told me that nice Christian girls weren't supposed to let men touch them down there. Like we didn't have enough religion in our house, that was the problem."

"She shouldn't have said that." Fire licked at my insides, fury at myself for thinking that she'd somehow been dealt an easier hand than me; at that social worker, looking at a broken child, asking what she must've done to bring it onto herself. "Angel—"

"Ain't much worse than my mama askin' me why I had to go sniffin' after her man." When she spoke again, her voice was cold enough to burn. "That's what happens when you tell people. That's what happens when you tell cops."

I couldn't give her platitudes— I refused to give her platitudes, it was something she didn't deserve from me. "There's a lot of girls at the Rising Sun," I said instead, quietly. "Girls like you were. If you said somethin', testified 'bout what goes on there—"

"So you're sayin' it's my fault now." I was afraid that she might slap me again, like she had the last time I'd broached the topic. "I didn't talk, and that's how Joe's kept the haunted house goin' for so long."

"It ain't." I paused to consider my words carefully. "But you could help put a stop to it... even if it don't work, at least you'll know you tried, you did somethin'. You won't have to live with knowin' you could've done more."

She didn't speak for a few moments, before she gave a hard sniff, and I realized she was crying. "Goddammit," she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand, and that was when I knew she'd do it.

I got my first glimpse of Randy Adderson that afternoon, when I spotted him coming out of my brothers' bedroom. He didn't impress me at the time, though he'd continue to disappoint me much more in the near future.

"You're... Ponyboy's sister?" he asked, clearly puzzled; I wasn't surprised, we looked nothing alike, but after the crude jokes I'd had to overhear earlier, it hit me harder than usual. "I didn't know he had one."

"Who are you?" I asked out of idle curiosity— Pony had had quite the entourage of his middle class friends around for the past few days, so I wasn't too surprised to see another one. He looked better coiffed than most of the middle class boys, though, with expensive loafers and a George Harrison-style haircut I knew was professionally done, not by a mother over the kitchen sink.

"Randy Adderson," he said, which was unwise of him. "I'm... I was Bob's friend," was his second mistake. By "I was there, at the fountain, when that kid Johnny Cade stabbed him," I wanted to toss him out of my house by that gelled-stiff hairdo.

"Maybe you shouldn't have told me all that," I said, the edge of my voice cold enough to burn. I wrapped my hand around the strap of my purse to steady myself; weren't Socs supposed to be real emotionally repressed, the cool cats of Tulsa? I'd expected Bob Sheldon's second-in-command to be better at keeping things close to the vest.

"Yeah, well, I did it," he said with helpless openness, "there's no point in pretending otherwise, is there?" He straightened up, stiffened his spine and got some of his pride back. "I'm gonna... I'm gonna try to make things right for him. I'll testify at the hearing, say that he had nothin' to do with it, that he was the victim in all this."

I wanted to throw his efforts back in his face like a fistful of sand, tell him there was no fucking need for it, that I'd already gotten a crooked cop on my side to make sure this trial went my brother's way— but I wasn't that girl anymore, I never would be again. I felt like I'd long since lost the right to pass judgement on anybody. "You owe him as much," I said, less coolly than I would've liked.

He just gave me a curt nod, but after he turned to go, he stopped to face me again. "Your brother... he's messed up in the head, I don't know what's goin' on with him, but he thinks he's the one who killed Bob. I couldn't snap him out of it, either."

Guilt ate at my stomach like a tapeworm— I'd been so preoccupied with grief over Dallas that Johnny had slipped my mind entirely, just too much for me to process in the midst of all this chaos. The boy I'd once called my favorite of my brothers' friends, sweet, quiet Johnny Cade— and a murderer, too. I couldn't forget that aspect of him.

Even if Ponyboy had.