So, this story, which takes place in the 'Arrogance and Aggression' universe, is the diatribe to end all diatribes. It was going to be a super-long one shot, but I decided I'm not evil enough to do that. Since Lucy Bennet and Dallas Winston are the main ship in that universe, of course their fairytale-inspired piece is going to be the longest. Strap in. At least they're clever and entertaining together.

One thing is retconned from the original 'Arrogance and Aggression.' In that story, I imply (read: state) that Lucy and Dally don't have very much interaction until 1965. That was back when I didn't think there would be more than just that one story. So, uh, consider it the fault of the unreliable third-person narrator (AKA me).

Lucy Bennet felt odd in the fall of 1962, when she and her family moved from Detroit to Tulsa.

She had always been without a nation. She'd been born in New Haven, Connecticut when her father was finishing his dissertation, though she remembered nothing of Yale. The family lived for a few years in a suburb of Chicago, and the only thing she could remember about that her mother's fear of ever letting her out of the apartment. Needless to say, she didn't make a lot of friends in Chicago. When Lucy was ten, they moved to a tiny town in Northwest Ohio, where Lucy learned that she was the only girl within probably a seventy-five-mile radius who thought that girls deserved to be treated as well as boys. It was there she'd gotten into her first and last fist fights – separate occasions, though later on in life, she'd be more inclined to repeat the story of the latter. They told her that the kids would be nicer in that small town in Ohio. They lied. It was there that Lucy Bennet learned how to cold … distant … angry. If she'd been odd before then, she was odder after.

Detroit wasn't home, and she only lived there for a year while her father served as an adjunct professor in the English department of their only urban university. But it was the place where Lucy felt the least odd. It was the place that, years later, she'd be inclined to call her home because it was the first place where she felt she could have stayed and been something resembling happy. People there loved music and books like she did. People there were tough and didn't accept bullshit answers. No one in Detroit expected Lucy Bennet to choose between being smart and being tough. They needed her to be both. They liked that she was both. So, naturally, in August 1962, her parents packed up their Detroit apartment and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma for their first everything – Jack Bennet's first tenure-track job, the family's first house, and Lucy's first venture into friendship.

She met Sadie Curtis, who was a grade below her in school but had been double promoted to ninth-grade English, on her first day of school, not knowing that the first girl who seemed to want to be her friend came with a whole set of other friends. It was like buying that Barbie doll and getting a Ken doll, too, only nobody in Sadie's gang was anything like Ken or Barbie. They also weren't anything like her. Sadie's friend Jane Randle was a kleptomaniac who read celebrity magazines like they were the Gospels. Sadie's twin brother, Sodapop, looked like one of the guys in the celebrity magazines, and about a week into knowing them, Jane was horrified and impressed by Soda's getting into a brawl with a guy who spoke ill of her. Jane hadn't been very complicated then. Worst of all, they had this friend (though calling him a friend seemed rather like a fabrication) called Dallas Winston, who lied, cheated, and stole whatever crossed his path. In the very second that he met Lucy, he took it upon himself to ask her if she was easy. She'd never heard a boy talk to a girl that way in real life, and she never expected that it would happen to her. From that first day of school and on, Lucy resolved to hate Dallas Winston for as long as she should live, both in Tulsa and in the world. It would have been much easier to hate him, of course, had he ever left her alone.

Since she only got to walk the halls with Sadie after the last bell rang, Lucy spent most of her days alone. One afternoon in the middle of November, she was eating her lunch under a tree in the school's backyard, alone. It was then that she heard two girls (Sadie, Jane, and the younger girls from the neighborhood would have called them Socs, a word Lucy didn't hear a lot in the places where she grew up, where no one could afford to be one.) talking about some annoying girl from their French class. Strangely, it took her a few seconds to realize that they were talking about her.

"I don't understand why she's gotta use that accent of hers every time she raises her hand," the first girl said. "Is it just to make everybody else feel crummy about their accents? Does she really think she needs to show off like that?"

"Maybe," the other girl said. "I was listening to her talk to the teacher before class the other day, and she said that last year, she read Les Misérables in less than two months."

When Lucy heard the other girl say Les Misérables (and perfectly butcher the correct pronunciation), she flinched and finally understood that she was their target. Her heart sank. Even though she presented herself as the kind of girl who welcomed it when other people spoke ill of her so that she could show off her toughness, her first reactions were always surprise and sadness. Why did people find it so easy to make fun of her? Why wasn't she better at putting up a front? Every time she thought she was getting tougher, she could still feel a little bit of that pain – the pain that came from being odd – jab at her when she hadn't invited it.

"Have you ever seen how many pages are in that book?" the first girl asked. "There are over a thousand. I guess that means nobody's ever wanted to kiss her. It's probably why she shows off that accent. She doesn't have much else to show off."

After hearing that, Lucy glanced down at her chest, which had matured far more quickly than her mind, and frowned. She had plenty to show off if she wanted to, which she didn't.

"But I heard from somebody that she's shown off plenty to Dallas Winston," the second girl giggled. "And I don't think it was just a French accent."

Now, both girls were giggling, presumably out of nervousness and jealousy put together.

Lucy felt her palms turn into fists. Excellent. Thanks to that pig Dallas Winston, it didn't matter whether she wanted to be that kind of girl. Everybody already believed she was. She stood up from her place under the tree, scaring the living hell out of the Soc girls once they saw she'd been listening to their gossip, and she made her way to the bleachers.

If she'd been a little more logical and a lot less hotheaded, she wouldn't have gone after Dallas Winston. She would have been smart enough to know that he was reckless, lacked any sort of discernment, and while he hated everyone in the world, there was no one he hated more than a challenger. But Lucy didn't think that way. She thought like Dallas Winston, and that was why she didn't think twice about going to confront the bastard.

She climbed up the bleachers where he sat with his friends (who were more like Sadie and Soda's friends, since they were decent people who knew how to show loyalty to others) Two-Bit Mathews and Steve Randle and stood right in front of Dally, blocking the sunlight that had been hitting him before. She cleared her throat loudly and folded her arms across her chest. When Dally saw her standing there, he couldn't help but almost smile. Not only was Lucy Bennet right in front of him, presumably for the taking, but also, she looked real cute. She thought it was her way of scolding him. That wasn't even close.

"This must be my lucky day," Dally said. "And that's sayin' a lot, considerin' I don't think I've ever had a lucky day. Hey, 'm I dead?"

"If you're dead, I get your blade," Steve said.

"If you're dead, I get to date your sister," Two-Bit said at the same time.

Dally rolled his eyes and ignored the two clowns sitting on either side of him. He leaned forward and stared directly into Lucy Bennet's eyes. If he'd been a different kind of guy, he probably would have been impressed by how beautiful and blue they were – how they were hot with anger, and that was what made them beautiful. But he wasn't that guy. He was the guy who started rumors about her just because he wanted to.

"Can I ask you something?"

"I'm listenin'," Dally said.

"Where do you get off?"

"Well, I don't know, sweetheart. You point anywhere, and I'll show ya."

Lucy turned an embarrassing shade of scarlet. She should have seen it coming. No, he'd be able to manipulate that the way he wanted to hear it, too. For a moment, she wondered if it was bizarre to edit even her thoughts to save them from Dallas Winston, but then she remembered that he seemed to be able to hear her thoughts. She could tell by his thousand-yard smirk and stare.

"There are Socs girls over there who think I've flashed you," Lucy said. "I want to know why."

"I don't believe it."

"Well, it's not true, so …"

"No, I don't believe it. When I started talkin' about you, you were doin' a lot more than flashing. Can't believe they fucked it up like that."

Of course, he hadn't actually said anything about her. He knew better than to mess around with Sadie Curtis's friend, since that meant screwing over his whole outfit. But it sure was fun to mess with her.

Lucy, unaware that Dally was lying, was appalled that someone who claimed to be attracted to girls could hate them so much. She was appalled by everything Dallas Winston did, but now that it was about her body, she hated him more than she ever had. She narrowed her eyes at him and noticed she was trying to suppress a smile. In spite of her burning hatred for him, she had to admit he knew how to play with his words.

"You realize we're fifteen years old, don't you?" Lucy asked.

"Yeah. What are you tryin' to say?"

Lucy rolled her eyes and waved her hand at him in dismissal. All the while, he was laughing at her. She interpreted it as ridicule. After years of being ridiculed (especially by boys), she never knew that a boy could speak to her in any other way.

"Ya know what I like about you, Bennet?" Dally asked.

"I hope the answer's nothing."

He winked at her. She wasn't sure if he knew what else nothing could mean, but judging by the look in his eye, she figured he was smart enough to guess. Smart? What gave him the right?

"Yeah, nothin'," he said. "Nothin' and the way you think you can talk to me."

"That's so funny. I hate the way you think you can talk to me."

"You're real strange, you know that?"

Lucy sucked in her breath. She wanted to look tough, especially because she didn't want to give Dallas Winston the satisfaction of knowing that he'd hurt her feelings.

"Real strange," Dally repeated. "What kinda book-readin' broad thinks she can walk up to me an' accuse me of talkin' shit about her?"

Lucy said nothing. She shook her head as if to inspire some sort of shame or regret in Dally (knowing, of course, that it would never work) and turned on her heels. He was snickering about something as she walked away, though she paid him no mind – at least, not anything that he could hear.

"I didn't say shit about you," Dally finally said. "But if I was gonna, it'd be that I think you're real strange."

She thought about his words later that night as she sat on her bed and pored over the English translation of Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast" tale. Originally, her French teacher had wanted to assign the text in its original French, but after the students complained that they just couldn't read that much French at one time, she gave up and assigned the English version. Lucy, who had wanted to be fluent in French since her father bought her a copy of Madeline, was vocally disappointed.

"I'm only saying that I've read the English version," she said. "And this is class in French. Are we not here to learn something?"

"No," some boy in the back shouted up at Lucy, who always sat in the second row (She didn't want to sit in the front row like some kind of nerd.). "I'm here to get laid and graduate."

"In that order!" another boy piped up.

Lucy rolled her eyes, both in class and on her bed as she remembered it. She took pride in her intelligence, or at least she told herself that she should. In some respects, she was sure it was all she had to offer the world. She wasn't slim like Sadie, nor was she cute like Jane, so she knew she could cross beauty off her list. Two years earlier, she'd been arrested for aggravated assault and ordered, by the court, to carry at least one book with her wherever she went until she turned eighteen, so she couldn't call herself demure, either. Smart was the only thing she knew how to be, and it made her bitter. It made her angry. It came out in condescension and in arrogance, and the one good part of her that wanted to control it always failed. It was worse now that she'd been thrown into a new town … again. Despite Sadie Curtis's kindness, Lucy still felt exceptionally odd and out of place in her new home. Dallas Winston calling her "real strange" to her face certainly hadn't helped.

She turned to "La belle et la bête," (or "Beauty and the Beast," as it was, after all, the useless English version) and read aloud for her own amusement.

"'My name is not Lord,' replied the monster," she read, "'but Beast. I don't love compliments, not I. I like people to speak as they think; and so do not imagine, I am to be moved by any of your flattering speeches.'"

She stopped and clicked her tongue, thinking that the Beast had quite a bit in common with Dallas Winston. Both were needlessly brutish and both were markedly cruel to a woman who spent much of her time reading books who only wanted to see some decency out of them. But where the Beast had always been something of a man underneath – someone capable of change – Dallas Winston was all beastly. There would be no saving him.

She thought for a moment that she would never be Beauty. She'd never be clever or kind enough for anyone to fall in love with. Even if the Beast had a good laugh at the thought of her body, he would only be interested in the taste of flesh – not in her, never in her. It almost bothered her, but then she remembered that she was supposed to be too odd to care. From that moment on, she'd renounce all the old fairytales. If she were too odd to fit into them, then she would destroy them altogether, beginning with that Beast.

Hinton owns The Outsiders. The original "Beauty and the Beast" tale is in the public domain. You can find it online. It's ... an experience.