I strike on Curly as soon as the right opportunity presents itself. "Y'all got your report cards today, didn't you?" I say when both he and Angela clatter through the front door, Curly hurling his bag into the foyer as usual— I'm surprised they walked home together, they're usually with their own friends. "Hand 'em over."

Curly makes a noise like when something gets caught in the garbage disposal— Angela gives him a smug smirk, no sympathy there, and takes hers out. "At least you know my grades are good."

I look it up and down, all A's and B's, except— "What happened in history?"

Angela pulls another face. "It's borin', the teacher's just there to coach the football team, he doesn't even make his own worksheets." I'm about to tell her that those teachers use the same tests year after year too, but she interrupts me before I can say it. "Besides, you really gonna fuss at me for gettin' a C when you got Curly over there?"

I raise my eyebrow at him, he shrinks even more. "Hand it over. Needs to be signed by a parent or guardian, anyway."

"You ain't neither," he whines, "and ain't like I can't forge the signature—"

He's my main target, and he knows as much as I pull it out of his bag and unfold the crumpled paper. And now I know why he's being so shifty, though to be honest, I expected no better. "Pendejo, you're literally failin' every class?" Excuse me, he's somehow passing auto mechanics and homeroom. A real outstanding class rank. "How is this even possible?"

"You expect me to be some brain like Ponyboy now? I wasn't exactly toppin' the class since kindergarten—"

"Curly," I say slowly, jabbing at the line, "how the fuck are you failing Spanish?"

"Señora Smith is a fuckin' racist, she says I don't talk right, that my grammar's bad, and I don't know how to write nothin'."

"No shit, she says you don't talk right, she's teachin' Spanish from out the textbook and you're givin' her Spanish straight from the barrio. You write in your English essays that something's real tuff or use double negatives?"

Judging by the look he gives me, that's a pointless question to ask in the first place— it's not like he's turned in an English essay all year. "Man, you know I'm dumb, don't you?" he just says with a resigned shrug. "Didn't your daddy say as much? Curly still don't know his times tables, guess that retard ain't my son?"

"They're gonna hold you back again, you ain't figured that out by now?" I stir the pasta I'm making, try to keep myself from feeling sorry for him. From remembering my daddy, the favorites he played without an ounce of shame. "Fool, you ever want to see the ninth grade, you better start gettin' your act together."

"Oh, you ain't heard his master plan yet," Angela says with a loud giggle behind her hand. "Curly, didn't you say you wanted to pull a Johnny Cade?"

"Pull a what?"

"He's been held back twice," Curly says defensively, "he's fifteen and in my grade, ain't he? If I hold out until I'm sixteen, don't matter what grade I'm in, they have to let me quit. It's state law an' all."

"Let me get this straight." I can already feel a migraine rolling onto the horizon, I massage my temples in preparation hearing Curly's latest piece of foolishness. "Your life plan is to get held back long enough to drop out of middle school."

(Honestly, it's not as crazy as it sounds on the surface. Ma never finished eighth grade, farm girl that she was— 'the munitions factory was about as boring as school, but it paid enough for lipstick and Kotex'— and Luis walked through the door the first day of ninth and never came back. "Them motherfuckers tried to put me in agricultural science," he loves to tell us the story, "'cause Mexicans, all we're ever gonna do is pick blueberries for ten cents an hour, right? And that's when I really learned school is for fools.")

"Don't remember you bringin' home no straight-A report cards, Einstein, before you dropped out of high school." Oh, fantastic, so now Curly's in the mood to challenge me. The worst part is, it's a fight he has a good chance of winning. "Don't remember you showin' your face there much past freshman year, actually, so why don't you step off—"

"This ain't about me," I snap, though I recognize the futility of the argument on some level— my siblings follow my example, not my words. "You think I care what you get up to in there? I just got your social worker—"

"I have another one?"

"I got your fucking social worker, she made it clear she's workin' with juvenile justice about you, crawlin' up my ass the other day, tellin' me that your PO's about ready to remand you back into custody." He doesn't even flinch, not that I expected him to. He spent damn close to all of seventh grade in the pen, because he got caught up in one of our uncles' drug stings and the court thought he showed an eerie amount of pre-meditation for his age in the process; if he survived being one of the youngest kids ever sentenced to Tulsa juvie, I'm sure he thinks he can survive anything. And I don't want to see the day that sense of invincibility gets shattered. "So unless you really been missin' prison food and them pointy mattresses, you better start askin' Ponyboy if his tutoring rates come on a sliding scale."

Curly's never been famed for his maturity. "You're such a fucking hypocrite, you never understand anything," he yells as he storms off into our room, probably to perform his perfected routine of flinging himself, facedown, into his pillow, cussing my unfairness. "And you ain't my dad, neither!"

"Look, that's already an SAT vocabulary word you're breakin' out, might be hope for you yet," I call after him, and school my expression as I turn to face Angela. Sure, it stings, but I'm doing the right thing here, keeping Curly's sperm donor off the premises. Even if it means I'm always the bad guy. "Go wash your hands, lady, if you want supper. Church bank had some canned meat for once."

"For the last time, that shingle's crooked, that ain't how I showed you." Darry waves his hammer at me like he wishes he could bring it down on my skull; I've been a little too busy trying to not fall off the damn roof to perfect my construction skills yet. Fortunately this house is only a story high. "Maybe you're fine with doin' a half-assed job, but I actually care what our customers think about us, believe it or not. I don't need a reputation for shit work 'cause Dad took you on as a charity case."

I should let it roll off my back, but my thumb's killing me where I smacked it with my own hammer a few minutes ago, and my back, come to think of it, is killing me like I'm a man twice my age; it's pretty brisk weather for late November, and I'm still sweating. First of all, I'm not used to being bossed by anyone I don't call tio, and I ain't so much a fan of taking orders from either Darry or his daddy— I'm a shot-caller, and that's how I like it. Second of all, I'm actually terrible at roofing. I lift weights and punch sandbags and everything on my uncles' and cousins' lawns, but I never had close to enough to eat growing up to get their linebacker builds, and it's physically a lot harder than I imagined it'd be. And I'm good at everything I do, or as a general principle, I quit doing it. You see my issue.

So I sweep my sweat-stained bangs off my forehead and turn to take him on. If he wants nasty, hell, I've never been much of one to walk away from a fight. "Yeah, you sure got a lot of practice hammerin' shingles, years and years of it, huh?" I pretend to bang on one just for emphasis, and I'm rewarded by muscles tightening in his cheeks. "You ever have bad dreams at night about gettin' hired to fix up one of your old friends' houses?" Then I really go in for the kill, just so he knows not to cross me again. "Nah, they'd be too busy with college and their own lives by now. Doubt they'd even remember that desperate lil' suck-up they knew in high school."

He grabs me the moment I close my lips after finishing the sentence— we're damn lucky we don't fall straight off the roof. "I'm supposed to be ashamed, according to you?" His grip is tight enough on my collar to tear. "Of what, tryna get ahead in life? Even if I haven't made it yet, at least I gave gettin' out of here my best shot. You were born an ain't-shit hood, and that's exactly how you're gonna die, too. But I guess you think that's somethin' to be proud of."

Darrel doesn't see exactly all of this go down, he's been talking rates with the guy who owns this place, but he shoots his eyes up at us and is none too happy about what he's witnessing. I'm pretty sure at this point, he's cursing whatever impulse led him to offer me a job, period. "Y'all want to fight, get down them ladders and do it on the ground," he snaps as he scribbles something down on a clipboard. "I ain't fixin' to fill out no more workman's comp reports this season, you hear?"

"Yessir," Darry calls back, but he's damn reluctant to let me go, nearly cracks a shingle in half when he turns back to his own work. As for me, there's a dull ache that's settled beneath my breastbone, one I don't even know how to dislodge. I don't give a flying fuck what some washed-up nobody clinging to his high school glory days thinks of me. But something about that's exactly how you're gonna die, too hits me right where it hurts.

Darry and I are drunk off peppermint schnapps, which is about as nasty as it sounds, and exactly the kind of thing you get drunk off of when you're thirteen and almost-fifteen and stealing all your liquor. Darry's old man still has five months left on his sentence and his old lady's long since lost any control she ever had over him, especially since she's working two jobs and ain't never home. I have my jacket folded up under me, lying down in what'll become Darry's crew's abandoned car lot, but right now it's just ours. My head spins when I close my eyes, like I'm on a carnival ride that I can't get off.

"Don't you ever just want to... get out of here?" Darry splits the silence with. "I dunno, get in a car and drive in the other direction?" The moonlight illuminates half his face, shrouds the other half in shadow. "I've never seen anything but this lousy neighborhood my whole life— well, I mean, I was born in Lubbock, but I don't remember that. And Dad took us to the rez once, but that was a million times worse than here, that don't count either."

I've never left Tulsa either, except to visit the state pen in McAlester or my meemaw in Shawnee. I can barely imagine anything outside the few square blocks that contain my own lousy neighborhood, no matter how hard I try. But my cousin was shot dead all over me a few months ago. I feel so many things I can't contain them, and nobody knows how to handle me anymore, neither. I want to run away and hit stuff and drink until I forget and sink so deep into the earth that I can't be found. If I could steal a car and drive off in another direction, I would.

I don't say that, though, I wouldn't know how to even if I wanted to. I sit up, let the gravel dig into my elbows, and take another sip of schnapps instead and laugh. "Yeah, maybe one day I'll get out to California, visit Disneyland." At this point in my life, I'm even proud of it, that I'm from a real bad neighborhood, not like some of the dumb suburb kids from Brumly who are always trying to act hard.

The joke falls flat, I've always preferred taking refuge in sarcasm to getting real, opening up. Darry snatches the bottle from me a little too fast, then keeps his trap shut. And more than anything, when I think of how our friendship died, I come back to this.

By the time Friday night rolls around, Curly's lost all of his undying hatred for me, or at least enough that he's back to begging me for favors. "Please, why can't I come along?" He digs his toes into the cracks on the tile floor as I lean closer to the mirror, try to comb my hair up without leaving any flyaways— I'll never approach Steve Randle's complicated swirls, I swear that motherfucker's up at six AM to get it fixed before his shift at the DX, but I take some pride in it all the same. Ain't like we've got much else to be proud of, around here. "You never let me do nothin' with you, you won't even notice I'm there, you could just drop me off on the Ribbon—"

"I ain't takin' you out on no date, Curls." I pick up the tin of Brylcreem again, but not before I give him the finger; instead of retreating, he sits himself up on the bathroom counter and gets comfortable, daring me to remove him. "Pretty sure that's illegal." I can't help but hide a secret smile, though. Like I didn't bug our cousin Cisco the same way, when I was his age, to let me tag along on jobs and dates, anything that would make me seem more grown up. In so many ways, and more than I want to admit, he reminds me of myself.

"A date? I thought you was just goin' out." Then he puts two and two together. "Wait, since when do you take broads out on dates? Mr. Comes and Goes—"

I pelt my comb at him, he ducks easily and smirks. "Gabi's a nice girl," I say, tweaking a curl at the front, "high-quality, y'know? Like... middle class, I guess, she ain't our kind. Yeah, I take her out."

"You know her name? Pretty sure I remember the last girl was 'blonde hair, big tits, shaped like a coke bottle'—"

I'm out of things to throw at him that wouldn't cause bodily harm, so I settle for flipping him off again. Last time I let him in on no bull session where any real action's getting described. "Are you gettin' serious?" he asks like it's any of his business. "I mean... she your girlfriend or somethin'? Never heard you say a word about her."

Not... really. Not yet, anyway. But I guess we're serious enough now that my eyes ain't straying anywhere else— I mean, there's looking, and there's looking, you know? "You never talk about no serious girl with nobody, even if you're just hoping for a round two. Valuable life lesson for you." He told tíos this summer that he slept with some girl from his grade, which I know is a lie, because if Curly didn't breathlessly recount every detail to me, it didn't happen. This kid keeps me up until two in the morning just telling me who in his little group of JD's beat who in a game of chicken, he expects me to believe he hasn't told me all about the biggest moment of his life?

Besides, Christ, he's fourteen. He reeks like body spray that he thinks is a substitute for showering, he's got zits breaking out on his jawline and a few stubborn hints of baby fat in his face. Any girl his age willing to cash in her v-card, it sure ain't gonna be to him.

He just rolls his eyes at me. "Is she a Salvi? Tío Alberto says she is."

"Don't call her nothin' rude," I make sure to say before anything else. I haven't bothered to ask, quite honestly, it's not the most polite conversational topic I can think of. "She's Colombian, ain't quite the same region."

Curly's in the mood for giving me some of his own two cents, his forehead creased with unusual lines of anxiety. "Tío Luis is gonna hit the roof, when he finds out you're runnin' around with some girl darker than you."

"Then he doesn't have to be findin' out any time soon, does he?" I give him a look that should make my intentions clear, one I'm trying to swallow my own anxieties in. I'm sure having a lot more of an attitude towards Luis than I ever used to. "I'm gonna be back late. Wherever you go, I better not beat you home."

I'm awful at date ideas and rapidly running out of them, no matter how I tried to spin it to Curly. All Bonnie and I did was fuck and argue, or the thrilling sequel, her arguing with my mama while I not-so-subtly egged her on— as long as I kept her loaded and smoked up, her only expectation was anniversary dinners at Jay's. A middle class girl probably expects to go out dancing or be taken out to eat, but I'm both uncoordinated and broke, so now we're driving around back roads while I try to come up with some kind of plan.

I just like talking to her, I guess, maybe because it's such a novelty to me, all the stuff that goes on with her. Her Catholic school, with its surprisingly different from porno video uniforms and prayers every morning and how she apparently won an award for her modesty last year, her after-school job typing at Our Lady of Grace, where her mama used to work and she's fed-up with some girl there, Nancy, who keeps busting the photocopier, her friend Lainey who just got engaged. She doesn't talk about her brother, or her family much at all. I don't ask why.

"What's that?" She looks over at me, as I light up out the window, strains against her seatbelt. "I didn't know cigarettes could be... dark."

"It's not a cigarette, it's mota— you know, grass," I say after the inhale. Internally curse myself for lighting it up at all in front of her, it's against the law and I'm sure she won't approve, though I'm also pretty sure she knows what I do for a living by now. "Takes the edge off."

"Can I try it?"

Hell, I wasn't expecting that— but it's indica, I remember, or at least it was sold to me as indica, it probably won't make her have a paranoid fit. I feel a familiar heaviness spreading across my limbs, from what I smoke up before I fall asleep, and I figure the description was correct. "Here," I say as I pass her the joint, and of course she immediately inhales too deep and starts hacking a lung out. "If only the nuns could see you now. Winnin' all sorts of awards—"

"Shut up, I was just about the only girl at that school who didn't roll her skirt up to her behind, it wasn't hard." She winks at me. "Nuns never caught me smoking on the roof."

"Lucky they never found out you had a boyfriend, neither. They'd have to revoke your chastity award."

I regret bringing him up the second I do, but she just gives me a confused look. "Tenoch and I didn't sleep together."

I let out a sputtering laugh, because she's blown my sluttiness scale clean out of the water; I figured he was just bad in the sack, or that they didn't get the chance to do it much. A virgin at eighteen? An all-the-way virgin, at least? They sure make them more innocent away from the East side. "How... long were y'all together for again?"

"Since the start of freshman year." Now she looks at me like she's daring me to say something. I'm absolutely about to say something.

"You sure his love of Jesus was the only thing drivin' him towards the priesthood?"

"We were waitin' until marriage, like you're supposed to—"

"And succeeded?" What stops me from keeping this going is the horrifying realization that I popped this girl's cherry. With all the subtlety and care of a Mack truck. "Why didn't you tell me? Didn't it hurt?" I don't think I've ever deflowered a broad before in my life, but I would've been real slow and gentle with her if I'd known, at least tried to pull out my limited supply of romance.

"Ain't it supposed to?" She squints her left eye. "I thought it'd be worse, those nuns made it sound like gettin' shot. Guess I should've realized none of them had any personal experience with it."

"Nah, baby." I feel terribly, inexplicably sad, reach out to tuck some hair behind her ear and end up cupping her face. "I wouldn't try to hurt you."

I don't expect anyone else to be up when I finally get home, but Ed is, and I stiffen when I see him in the living room, prepare for the inevitable fight that'll come from this. He leans towards me, takes a sniff, though it's pretty obvious from my bloodshot eyes and unsteady gait that I've been smoking up. "Are you... high?"

"Yeah," I say shortly, as I pour myself a glass of water and drain it in one gulp— my mouth is so dry my tongue is sticking to the roof. It'll be a cold one in hell before Ed gets a 'yessir' out of me. "You could say that."

He visibly chooses his next words. "Not gonna tell your ma," he says, like that's any kind of threat, like she's been able to do anything to me since I was about twelve and got too big for her to belt. Like me getting high is her biggest issue with my behavior, for that matter. "She has enough to be gettin' on with, don't she?" I hate the knowing wink he gives me, hate even more how he gestures at the other armchair and points at the TV. "I got a good feelin' about Norm Smith this season, as a QB. Sooners are comin' off a winning streak—"

He knows that I'll sink into the armchair across from his, take the beer he passes me— he's not planning on making it past the red chip any time soon, I see. "He's too cocky, he's due for a loss," I say easily, and fall into our old habits, again all too easily. Football is about the only thing Ed and I can do together it without devolving into a fistfight, other than making fun of Curly.

Except tonight, Ed's attention isn't entirely focused on our flickering black-and-white TV with one busted antenna, he's looking at me. Sizing me up, I think, until he opens his mouth again. "I'm tryna change," he says, "get off the hooch for good this time, you know?" I don't even bother to hide the fact that I'm staring at the beer bottle in his fist, and he has enough shame to flush, not just from the alcohol. "I mean, the hard stuff, anyway. Your mama and I been talkin' and we really want to start makin' this family work again, we're all gonna have to put some effort into it. Y'all boys need a father in your lives, you're off the damn rails whenever I ain't around, 'course no single mother can handle the two of you."

If my real daddy heard some slack-jawed gabacho refer to himself as my father, in any capacity, he'd pop a cap in him. More than that, I know he's full of shit. Ed's been 'getting off the hooch' and 'focusing on his sobriety' ever since I was thirteen, and, like clockwork, he falls off the wagon and starts throwing plates at our heads again soon enough. But instead of remembering that, I think about all the times he hasn't always been so bad, taking me and Angel and Curly out swimming at Skiatook, bringing us home presents after he managed to hold down a job for longer than a month, even the time he chased me around the house with a belt after I dropped out of high school, said I didn't realize how fucking stupid I'd been. Want to pretend there was some concern there, some hope.

What I hate the most about my stepdad is that I can't always hate him. I'm as dumb as my mama, that way.