Well, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to review, to even read this story, really I appreciate it so much. I was actually in Tulsa last week for a shower, so I got to drive through some neighborhoods I'm sure Ponyboy would have deemed soc-y, and others he would have felt right at home in if it was the 60s, which have since been gentrified.

Something that I think is necessary for me to say about chapters like these, is that there is some material included that could be triggering. I understand how painful it can be when a personal trauma is triggered when reading or watching certain things, so I always try to keep my writing about such things vague, but even so, read at your own discretion.

Chapter Six

Mute

They didn't tell us until we had hauled ass down to the hospital. Mom was gone immediately upon impact, they kept dad in the ICU for about five hours, after which they pronounced him brain dead. We all sat in the waiting room, Ponyboy chewed his fingernails down to stubs, Soda bounced his knees and cracked his knuckles so constantly it drove me crazy. Darry was still, his elbows propped up on his thighs, his icy blue eyes stared unblinkingly down at the tiled floor. None of us had cried yet, the loss of mom was washed out by the hope that dad might make it.

The doctor didn't need to say anything. We watched him push through the double doors, his hands stuffed professionally into his lab coat pockets. He met Soda's eyes first, and we all saw it, a face poisoned by death, by watching a family lose their parents. Soda broke first, and Ponyboy followed, like he always did. Darry grasped the two of them in a tight hug, and made a good attempt at keeping his voice level as he muttered to them that everything would be fine. The doctor and I watched them, the perfect example of what brothers should be, holding onto each other in the middle of a tempest.

I didn't join them. I had been an outsider to their trio my whole life, and that wouldn't change even amidst tragedy. I didn't cry either, I couldn't. None of it was real, was it? Mom and dad dead? It was some kind of joke, some kind of nightmare. I didn't believe it, I couldn't.

The rest of the week felt like we were floating through life. None of us went to school, we hardly left the house. The gang only stopped by if they had to, as did the neighbors, I guess everyone needed to process it in their own way.

I hated being in our house, it felt like mom and dad's ghosts had followed us back from the hospital. If I let my brain wander enough, let myself finally register that I would never sit with mom in our kitchen again, that dad would never come into my bedroom to kiss me goodnight, I'd spend the next hour hunched over the toilet, dry-heaving.

One day I had been leaning against the wall in the hallway to our bedrooms, just wishing I could melt into the wallpaper and stop existing. I heard a thump from my parents' bedroom, followed by a stream of curses. I looked into the doorway, Darry must've been rummaging around in their closet, a couple of mom's shoeboxes lay at his feet. He had stooped down to collect them, and didn't notice me until he straightened back up to his full height.

"What are you doing?" My voice sounded far away, I think it was the first time I'd spoken since we got home from the hospital.

He stuffed the boxes back onto the top shelf forcefully, then started sifting through the clothes hanging in front of him. "Well, we need suits for the funeral don't we? Mom never let us keep 'em in our room."

"The funeral…"

"Yes, Elizabeth, the funeral. We can't just leave mom and dad down at the morgue, we need to get them plots, and caskets, and find a funeral home we can even afford, and then we need to call up dad's sister and whoever else can be bothered to come, so we can ask 'em why the hell dad never wrote a will," he had flipped through all of the hangers, their suits weren't there, "and I guess we need new fuckin' suits, because mom never bothered to tell me where the fuck she put them."

I watched him grasp the flimsy door of the closet tightly. "Darry."

He turned to look at me then, and in my haze I felt a dull rush of shock spark my nerve endings. I had seen my brother angry, annoyed, exhausted, I had seen him sick to the gills the time he dislocated his shoulder during a football game. But I had never seen him broken, I had never seen him cry. He had put up a good front to Pony and Soda, and the gang, but as I looked at him I saw just how young he was. His eyes brimmed with tears, his shoulders trembled, and his breath came out raggedly through his nostrils; even after everything, he was still trying to keep it together.

He sat down on the edge of the bed once I took a step toward him, and held his forehead in his right hand in a further attempt to control himself. I wrapped my arms around his neck, and held his head to my chest. A shuttering sob escaped him, and he gripped the front of my skirt like a child, anchoring himself to his mother.

"I know where they are." I could feel a wet spot forming on my shirt from where he was crying, but I didn't pull away. "I'll get a hold of Neenah, dad's buddies down at the plant, mom's girlfriends from the office, anybody else..."

He drew in a quivering breath. "I'm…I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"

Light filtered through mom's white curtains, and the two of us focused on the sound of each other, the sound of life, heartbeats and expirations. It was one of the few instances of that first month that I felt like myself, alive.

We stayed like that, both of us afraid to let go and face the turmoil beyond the doorway. Sometimes I wished I could've stayed in that moment for a lifetime.

I should have felt comfortable. There were enough blankets beneath me to provide a decent buffer for the lopsided mattress. Curly had already stood up to pull his jeans back on, and went to sit on the windowsill, holding a lit cigarette out the window. My back ached, and my heart beat too rapidly for me to relax. I lifted my index and middle finger up, with tremendous effort, and pressed them to the side of my neck, just below my jaw. Thump, thump, thump, thump, yeah, definitely too fast. Anxiety gripped my attention, and worries flitted across my conscious. I had never heard of weed inducing a heart attack, but my pulse was racing so fast that I was sure I might die.

"Did we already go?" I could hear the stickiness in my mouth, I needed a glass of water.

"Jesus," I turned my head to look at Curly. He furrowed his eyebrows at me. "Should'a known you had too much."

"That's not what I meant, I remember bein' at—fuck, whatever soc's, uh…house. Where are we now?"

"Buck's." He climbed back onto the bed and straddled my torso. "You can get as loaded as you want, Curtis, so long as you keep a low profile."

I examined the details of his face, mesmerized. The only light emitted in the room came from the lamp positioned on the dresser next to the bed. It shone across the left side of his face, emphasizing the fine grooves on his forehead, the deeper crease between his eyebrows, and the smile lines running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. He had a dusting of freckles across his cheekbones, and a cluster at the base of his hairline. His brown eyes were lighter than mine and muted, like tree bark after a heavy storm. In the haze of my drug-tainted mind, and the dimly lit space, I took in the light reflecting off of the tips of his eyelashes, and tried to cement the memory in my mind. My heartbeat had leveled out, and Curly looked down at me with an expression I could only interpret as fondness. I could love him if I let myself.

"Have you done it with Margaret?"

He nodded and smirked. "'Course, jealous?"

"Why are you keepin' her around?"

"She's our in."

"But we've hit four houses, ain't that enough?"

He got a defensive look in his eyes then, which he covered up so well with his exaggerated arrogance that I only narrowly caught it. "I've got big plans, 'Lil Lizzy, you'll see, plans bigger than anything Tulsa's seen yet." I wondered if he had disclosed these plans to Tim. He must have been tired of being bossed around by his older brother after so many years, hell, I'd only been enduring it for a few weeks and my tolerance was close to nonexistent.

I smiled up at him and nodded. "That'll be pretty tuff, Curly."

He smiled back at me, then leaned down to kiss me, sweeter than he ever had before, like I was a person and not just a warm body. But it was all surface-level, just like his attraction to me. He didn't kiss me out of affection, but because I had told him what he wanted to hear.

Angela offered me two shots of tequila, which I took without hesitation, and then Curly offered me a ride home, which I also took without hesitation. It was almost three in the morning by the time we left the roadhouse, and I was almost as blitzed as when we arrived. I nearly fell asleep in the passenger seat on the way back to my house. Curly had to elbow me awake once he stopped the car.

"Lizzy, c'mon, get up—there we go." I straightened up in my seat and rubbed the side of my face where it felt numb. I turned my puzzled expression toward him when I saw we weren't in front of my house. "You think I want Heavyweight Curtis seein' you in my car, wonderin' why you've been out so late?" I blinked at him, I hadn't thought of that. "Just sneak in the back door, or a window, or somethin'."

I took off my heels once I was out of the car, swaying heavily as Curly drove off into the night. I walked through Mary Ella's backyard, trying my best not to step on any stray pieces of glass.

I was lucky that Curly had the good sense not to bring the noise of his engine in such close vicinity of my sleeping brothers. I had told Darry that I would be sleeping over at Evie's that night, so if he heard me tiptoeing back into the house, he'd ask questions, and it'd take him a grand total of ten seconds to pinpoint the glossy redness of my eyes and the stagger of my form.

The lights in the house were off, so I bit my lip in concentration as I made my way over the chain link fence separating the two houses. The fence wasn't even five-feet high, but I collected one hell of a scrape on my inner thigh in my effort.

The back door was locked, so I began to run through every possible location Darry might have hidden the spare key, when I noticed the window to Ponyboy's room was ajar. He was barely visible from where I stood, I wouldn't have known he was up had I not smelled the burning tobacco and detected the pungent smoke curling into the sky.

He didn't look surprised at my approach, and had probably spotted me from the time I snuck across our neighbor's yard. He didn't make a sound, but I still held a finger to my lips, then stuck my hand out above me, silently asking him to clasp my grip and help me up and into our house.

I couldn't make out his face, but his pale hand reached out for mine, and I was hoisted up past him with enough force that I fell onto my elbow once I made it over the windowsill. I hit my funny bone, so I clutched my arm and contorted my expression into one amusing enough that Ponyboy had to bite a knuckle to keep from laughing out loud.

Once the unbearable tingling in my elbow subsided, and the only bodily distraction was the negligible sting from the torn skin of my thigh, I propped myself up across from my little brother. Pony's hair was disheveled and greaseless, he wore his favorite faded t-shirt and pajama pants. Soda was in his and Darry's room, thankfully.

"What are you doin' up?"

He took another drag from his cigarette. "Couldn't sleep."

"More nightmares?" His green eyes studied me, they were harder and colder than they used to be. He looked more and more like Darry every day, acted like him too. When he didn't say anything, I murmured, "I've heard you, the past couple times," barely above a whisper.

"You were up then too, huh?"

"You've been havin' nightmares again because of me, right?" He avoided my gaze. "I know, Pone," my throat thickened, "I know I'm messin' everything up."

"It's not tha—"

"I ain't myself."

He sighed and reached for his pack of kools. "You're drunk, I can smell you from here." He paused after lighting the cigarette held between his lips. He seemed hesitant, which was foolish, I would have answered any question he had in the state I was in. "I mean…it was only a year…how…how could things change so much?"

Should I tell him, I asked myself. I couldn't deny that it was something I had greatly desired. All of the things about mom and dad, about Don, that had been festering inside my psyche, that I had never voiced aloud. The reasons why everything had begun to feel distant and grey, why I couldn't have sex with Curly sober, without having the urge to be sick. I couldn't hold it in any longer, like the first time I got the stomach bug; I was so scared to throw up that I thought I could will the vomit back down my throat.

"Ponyboy," something about the tone of my voice made his eyes snap onto mine. Maybe he had been waiting for that moment, maybe he already knew and just wanted me to confess. My voice sounded nasally, and shook violently. I could feel tears well up in my eyes but it all felt strangely far away, like I wasn't the one who was crying. I didn't feel like crying. "Something…something's h-happened…"

It wasn't the first time, or even the tenth, but he had never brought his friends around before. When I had walked back to the house after school that Friday, dragging my feet the whole way, I felt a small amount of relief. I found the four of them sitting around the kitchen table with a couple of beers, and thought, maybe, Don would be too preoccupied hanging out with his buddies. I would finally get a break from him.

But I should have known. Jeanie had picked up the night shift to help out one of her girlfriends, and the four men had already polished off five beers each by the time she left. Later on that night, I would find myself wishing that I had accepted when they offered me a sip.

I hadn't gotten up from the carpeted floor in the den. Once they were all thoroughly spent, they settled in on the couch to watch The Tonight Show. I took the chance to crawl out of their sight, behind one of the armchairs, in case one of them got bored again.

I lay on my side, the sound of their laughter drifted over me from behind my back. The ceiling fan was on high, goose bumps formed on the skin of my thighs and pelvis; my bottoms were still in a crumpled heap in front of the television. I should go upstairs, I want to go upstairs, I thought. But the fear of facing them overrode any rational thought my brain could muster.

I was distantly conscious of a stinging throb in between my legs, but I was somewhere far away, floating in a part of my mind unaware of the present. Another round of foul laughs erupted from my right, and I curled my legs tighter toward me and shivered.

A memory burst in my mind and broke my disassociation. "G-grab her!" I remembered one of them calling out through a fit of giggles, before they chased me out of my room. His words echoed around my skull, the image of the four of them tailing behind me down the stairs resurfaced in my vision. I looked frantically for a hiding place, or a room with a lock on the door. Had I tripped or was I pushed? I could never remember how I ended up on the floor in the entryway to the living room.

One of them hoisted me further inside by the belt loops of my jeans. Don went first, either because he was used to it or because the others needed to work up the courage. The whole thing could have lasted half an hour or five, I wasn't sure. It felt like a lifetime while I was in it, but as I lay there after, it seemed like some warped dream.

I didn't move from behind the armchair until the other three groaned, and stood up out of their seats, sighing out some drunken sort of goodbye before they headed out the side door. I didn't get up until Don walked over to my quaking form, nudged me with the toe of his boot and said, "Jeanie'll be back soon."

It felt like I never really did get up, that I was still in that room, on that floor, sensing a part of myself sink into an abyss. I felt that way every time Jeanie left the house, and Don would come to find me. I felt that way the next two times he invited his friends over, even when I took the booze they'd offer me. I felt that way even when I sat at the dinner table of my real home, eating meatloaf with my brothers, watching them tease each other and chew with their mouths open, the way mom hated.

Sometimes I'd jokingly think to myself that I was still there, stuck in that moment, huddled naked and cold, and all that came after was some sort of hallucination to keep myself sane. The more months collected between that past and the here and now, the less it seemed crazy to me.

The sound of mom and dad's bedroom door opening made both of us jump. We listened to the sound of Darry clearing his throat, then the bathroom door shut. Ponyboy turned back to me first, but the moment had passed.

I looked at him apologetically. "I'm…too drunk and-and tired." He flicked the rest of his cigarette out the window. "Darry can't know I'm home…could I stay in here a while?"

He paused a moment, and I prepared myself for an awkward rejection, but he nodded his head shortly and I followed him over to the bed. We settled in, facing each other, we hadn't slept in the same bed since we were kids. Mom and dad always saw us as a pair, we were Irish Twins, which was funny to me, considering we looked the least alike. Ponyboy with his light hair, rosy cheeks and green eyes, me with my dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes. People on the street would never guess we were family.

"I have nightmares too, that's why I've heard you."

He pulled the covers higher up on his shoulder. "About…"

"About…mom and dad, and…a lot of stuff."

"You remember 'em?"

"It's what I remember that 'causes them." I said, trying my best to keep my eyes open.

"Lizzy, I'm…I'm sorry, I'm sorry." He murmured, and I tried my best to smile at him, but I was already half asleep by the time he got the words out.