Chapter Seven

Grim

"If this continues to go smoothly," the grey-haired woman shouldered her purse, "then maybe you'll have more visits to look forward to in the future, Elizabeth."

So I'll be permitted to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family, I wanted to spit at her, but kept my lips pressed together in an obviously forced smile, as she walked out onto our porch, and down the front steps. She was older than the social worker I was assigned in Murfreesboro, and less understanding. I thought of Missy Vaughn, the overweight, blonde, mother of two, who would bring me homemade cookies every month when she came to check up on me.

When I turned around to face my brothers their expressions were ones of relief, except Ponyboy, whose features remained inquisitive.

"That went well—right? You think it went well?" Soda unbuttoned the checkered shirt he had borrowed from Darry's closet, then threw it on the armrest of the couch. Darry swatted the back of his head.

"I guess."

Darry shoved Soda toward the hallway to the bedrooms once he started unzipping his khakis. "All I heard was a lot of ifs and maybes."

I snorted and ran a hand through my hair, effectively ruining the half-up-half-down style I attempted that morning. "Well, it is the state." I sat down on the cushion closest to the door.

Darry studied me. "You should get a job."

"Why?" It's not that I hadn't thought about it.

"You heard what she said, you show 'em that you're working hard and responsible while you're here, we'll get to see you more often."

"But not for good, right?"

He placed his hands on his hips at the angry curl of my voice. "Eventually maybe, the more they see you doin' well here…"

How many years would that be, two, three? For all his determination, I couldn't help but wonder if Darry was secretly relieved he didn't have another kid to raise. If he was, he never showed it, but deep down I suspected he was immeasurably grateful that it was his sister the state took away, and not his brothers.

"Yeah," I replied, my tone sounding forlorn even to my own ears. "I guess there's that to look forward to." I pictured the next couple of years I would have to spend away, with Don, in Don's house. I couldn't imagine I'd last more than one.

Soda came back into the room wearing a beat up pair of blue jeans, and a white t-shirt, which I suspected he put on grudgingly. "What's so bad about goin' back an' forth? Murfreesboro's a farm town, ain't it?"

"Pretty much." I really wished they would just drop it. My dreams were full of shadowy figures and hospitals the previous night. After the third one, I didn't bother trying to lull myself to sleep again, and ended up chain smoking on the back steps. My eyes felt puffy and tired, and I was very much aware of the painful zit forming on my chin.

"Hell, you can't complain, you don't even got socs to deal with." Soda plopped down on the couch beside me with a sigh, and slung his arm around my shoulders. "Maybe I'll visit, so you can introduce me to one of them well-to-do farm girls."

"See, we could work out a weekend off work an' come visit you."

"Yeah, great, Dar, this is all gonna work out." I stood up and headed away from them, toward my bedroom. My attempt to brighten my voice must've seemed out of character to them, because Pony and Darry turned to watch me walk away. "I'll visit for Christmas next year, and then maybe I'll even get to live here senior year, everything's great."

"Everything OK?" One of them called after me.

"Why wouldn't it be? I just didn't sleep too good last night, I'm gonna lie down." I closed the door and walked straight over to my dresser. My favorite skirt was in need of a wash. I had worn it for a week straight. I tugged it on without changing out of the Easter egg colored frock I had put on that morning. I was supposed to meet up with Angela later that night, if I stuffed a shirt into my purse Darry wouldn't be suspicious, and I could change later on.

The more desensitized I became to the Shepard's illegal activities, the more I sought them out. Part of me hoped we would get caught, and instead of being shipped back to Don I would be taken to a halfway house, or even jail. It was nothing really, was it? Drugging and stealing from those socs, it meant nothing to me. I had lost myself, I had lost sight of what was over the line, it was far away in the distance, behind me.

I staggered out of the black double doors, out of the kitschy office like all of the other kitschy offices we plundered on the west side, all with the same sharp-cornered mahogany desk. The sound of Curly and Angela's voices travelled down the hall to me, and Tommy—I could still hear the horrible noise leaking out of his throat. I had the urge to run, jump out of the window and into the bushes in the front yard, anything to get away from the scene that I had just left.

I moved my legs to walk further down the hall, but they felt cold and heavy. The icy sensation crawled up my abdomen and into my mouth, which watered suddenly, and I knew that I would be sick.

"Liz, Liz," Angela's hysterical voice was close to me suddenly, and I felt her long fingers dig into my triceps. I was then aware that she had stepped in front of me, but her features were indistinguishable, blurry. "Where are the towels? We need to get towels, he's bleeding all over the carpet," she practically screamed at me, and then she was sobbing, and gasping and whimpering, more upset and panicked than I had ever heard anyone be before. She held onto my shoulders, her pretty blue eyes quivered as they stared into mine.

"Is he up yet?" I asked, and thought, of course he isn't up. I looked back toward the doorway, I was closer than I thought.

I didn't want to go back inside, but anywhere away from Angela's heavy breathing seemed attractive. The light from the office seemed stark compared to the darkness of the hallway. I could see Tommy's tattered sneakers before I walked fully into the room.

He kicked his legs weakly, not as urgently as before, and pushed his hands against the oriental rug, like he was trying to push himself into a sitting position, or away from the blood spreading around him.

When he first hit his head, his eyes darted over to Angela's, a wordless way of asking for help. Now they were glazed, the only sign that he was still with us was the high-pitched wail emitting from his lips. I had heard a sound like that once before, when my elderly neighbor Mary Ella ran over the lower half of a stray cat, it lay dying in the street for half an hour until Dad shot it with his hunting rifle.

My stomach lurched, I looked over to where Curly stood a few feet from Tommy's body, his face a sickly white, his brown eyes wide.

"What…what do you need me to do…Tom, what do you…you're alright, c'mon…"

Margaret stood in the corner, shielding the owner of the house, who crouched beneath her with his head between his legs. "Just end it Curly, just make it stop!" She shouted at him, then plugged her ears with her index fingers. Mr. Byarlay shook visibly below her.

I walked closer to Tommy, to get a better look at his face. For a moment his eyes focused on me, they were faint and bleary, but I understood. I couldn't let him lie there any longer, his mouth had begun to flap open and closed, like he was trying to form any coherent word. I peeled off my shirt, if I took the time to go and get a pillow from the den then I would lose my nerve.

Even though I was sure it was what Tommy had asked of me, he began to thrash and jerk his limbs as much as his central nervous system could still manage. I held the cotton tightly over his mouth and nose, but I underestimated how long suffocation took. I could hear Angela's crying come back into my immediate surrounding, and Curly mumbled something from my left. I couldn't bear to look into Tommy's eyes for more than 45 seconds, I had no idea how much time passed before his limbs eventually went limp, but it felt like a lifetime.

I looked up at Curly, who continued to mutter, "What are you doing…what are you doing…"

Margaret still stood in the corner, her ears covered, her eyes squeezed shut, but Mr. Byarlay stared at Tommy's body in horror. The top buttons of his shirt were still undone, the skin around the cut on his lip was angry and red.

"He needs to go to the hospital." Curly's voice echoed around the room, directed at no one.

I looked back down at the teenage boy I had kneeled next to. His eyes were vacant, his features still, as were his arms and legs. No breath rose in his chest, spit bubbled from his parted lips. I'd never forget the look on his face, not for the rest of my life. There was no serenity, no peace in the slack muscles of his cheeks. He wasn't anything anymore, just a lifeless casing of fat and muscles and dying organs, he wasn't a person, he was a thing, an object.

I had no idea my legs could move so fast, but the next thing I could process, I was hunched over the toilet in one of the hallway bathrooms, coughing up the toast and eggs I had eaten earlier. I continued to wretch once I had emptied all real food out of my stomach, until all that poured out was water, booze, and stomach acid.

I rested my head on the seat of the toilet once I was finished, and tried to ignore the persistent sound of Angela's crying. I closed my eyes and saw Tommy's face, I opened them and I saw his writhing legs, I saw his bloody scalp, and I heard his animalistic moaning.

My chin trembled, I should have just stayed home.

I wanted to tell Tommy what a waste it was to be in love with Angela Shepard, I wished that I had. It was only a matter of time before he did something stupid because of her.

Margaret was the distraction, Margaret was supposed to be the irresistible piece of ass, but who could look at her—or anyone—when Angela Shepard was in the same room. Margaret told us that we wouldn't need to drug Mr. Byarlay, that we could slip some silver and candlesticks out from under his nose if we just gave him a couple of hits from a joint.

I didn't know how we ended up in the office, we started off on the back patio. Curly shoved a roll of 20 dollar bills we found in a desk drawer into the waist of my skirt. Mr. Byarlay shoved his hands into the back pockets of Angela's short-shorts. She wriggled in his grasp, Tommy saw, with his vodka goggles on, and the confrontation exploded.

He got a good hit to Mr. Byarlay's mouth, but he was more off balance than the older man, who grasped Tommy's throat. It only took two well aimed hits to the side of the desk, before Tommy was lying on the ground wide-eyed.

Mr. Byarlay stood over him cursing, and took slow steps backward. "Shit, I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to."

Angela knelt beside Tommy and brushed the sides of his face. "C'mon, baby, he didn't get you too bad, get up." He whimpered, blood spread underneath his neck and head. "Please get up, Tom, please."

Angela became more frantic, Mr. Byarlay continued his mutterings once he backed into the corner, Margaret screamed at Curly, and Curly stood still. It was too much, the noise, the look on Tommy's face, Angela's gut-wrenching pleads, it was too much.

I found Angela in the den, sitting in the checkered armchair next to the phone. Her eyes were puffy and red, and she stared expressionless at the powder-blue carpet. There was blood on her hands and knees.

"Call Tim." I moved further into the room when she didn't respond. "Angela, get on that fuckin' phone and call Tim."

She shook her head, her voice sounded thick and tired when she spoke. "Can't call Tim."

I walked over and crouched in front of her, but she still wouldn't meet my gaze. "We got to call somebody." She shook her head again. "Who else is goin' to be able to handle this-this…"

"Tim can't know."

I cursed and stood up, there was no sense in trying to reason with her after she had watched a boy die, I wasn't quite sure how my mind was still running rationally, maybe it wasn't. My vision was hazy and my pulse pounded, I was functioning on nothing but adrenaline.

Curly hadn't moved. When I walked back into the office, after taking three deep breaths outside of the doorway, he was still staring at Tommy's body. I couldn't bring myself to look, I kept my eyes on Curly's face, which hadn't regained its usual color. I walked toward him until my body pressed against his, and I grasped his jaw, turning it toward me.

"You need to snap out of it." I shook his face, and he finally looked at me.

"Wh-when…when is…he's…" His hands found their way to the bare skin of my stomach, searching for something real to help him make sense of it all.

His eyes began to drift away from mine again, so I smacked him lightly on the cheek, once, twice, then grasped him by the shoulders and shook him vigorously. "He's dead, he's dead alright? He ain't wakin' up, so quit standin' around like he's going to." My voice sounded unhinged, maybe I was as unequipped to deal with the situation as Angela.

His eyes seemed to focus, and his face collapsed. He brought his hands up and ran them down his cheeks, and cleared his throat to regain some composure. "Fuck, fuck, Liz."

"Call Tim."

"Fuck." He sobbed, hunching down so severely that I didn't think he would be able to hold himself up much longer.

"Call Tim, Curly!" I shouted.

"H-he can't know, I…I'll take care of it, just give me a fuckin' second, Tom…Tom…" he wobbled over to the chair behind the desk, and put his forehead down onto the wooden surface, his shoulders shuddered.

I turned to leave. "Five minutes, then we got to sort this shit out."

I held my head high as I walked back out into the hall, keeping my gaze up and away from the body. Once I was out of Curly's sight I leant against the wall, grasping my abdomen, which felt twisted and clenched. Was this how Johnny and Ponyboy felt, I wondered.

I sat in the den with a still shell-shocked Angela, and smoked the rest of my pack of kools. It was full when I left my house at the start of the night. I bit my nails down to raw stubs once I finished the last cigarette, then jumped, nearly taking off my whole thumb nail, when four loud knocks reverberated from the front door.

I didn't hear Curly's footsteps exiting the office, so I made my way out of the den and into the foyer, and opened the door.

Had I experienced any other kind of night, I would have laughed at the man standing in front of me. He couldn't have been much older than Darry, with a wide hooked nose and dark, coppery skin. The abundance of smoke emitting from the cigar held between his full lips, camouflaged much of his face. I made out black eyes, that narrowed at the corners so it looked like he was laughing even though he wasn't. He could've been handsome if his nose wasn't so big, and his eyes weren't so close together.

He wore a tuff blazer, and a white button down that exposed his hairless chest. He held himself the same way Curly and Steve held themselves, proudly, like it was privilege for me to be able to look at him, only he had the expensive clothes to skyrocket that arrogance to another level.

"Pretty tan lines," he studied my scantily clad chest. "Don't ever let yourself get pasty like those white girls."

"I'm white."

He smiled, his crooked teeth a dazzling white. "I know how to spot a native, sweetheart."

"My dad was."

He shrugged. "Like I said…now, you didn't strip just for 'lil ole me, did you?"

"Did Curly…"

He stepped into the doorway next to me, pressing himself flush against my body so that I blinked in surprise. His breath was stale. He flicked away the stub of his cigar. "Said there was trouble, here I am on sweeper duty."

He pinched my waist before heading further into the house. I followed after him, in case he needed directions toward the office, but he managed to get their fine on his own. He paused in the doorway once he caught sight of Tom's body, then looked mockingly toward Curly, who had lifted his head to stare vacantly at him.

"This why you called, Curly, you afraid of getting some blood on your crisp white t-shirt?"

Curly stood up and walked shakily toward us. "I couldn't call Tim, you know, and-and…I've never had to deal with…"

"A corpse?" The man snickered. "Least you had the good sense not to get your big brother involved, that would have made our relationship real sour, wouldn't it?"

"Uh, ye—"

He walked over and nudged Tommy's foot, I flinched. "Who did this sucker in?"

"Guy who owns the house, listen, Steele, I didn't want to bother you on a weekend, I'm—"

Steele shook off his jacket and handed it to me, then began to roll up the sleeves of his shirt. "Go on and clear out, I'm going to call a team over here, and the less high school kids around, the better."

"Wha—"

Steele seemed to have a habit of interrupting people. "Go and wait for my call, should be sometime tomorrow." He looked at me. "Doll, put that on, Curly go and take her home, keep girls out of this from now on."

The blazer swallowed me, and I was grateful for the abundance of fabric to wrap around my exposed body. With the domineering energy of Steele in my presence, the dregs of adrenaline left my system, and I finally felt the ache in my temples. The questions I should've had about Steele stayed on the backburner in my mind; what was his connection with Curly, what was the relationship he referred to, why would he bother cleaning up a murder scene for kids he'd never met? They were wonderings for another day.

Curly parked the car in the lot outside of the Ribbon. I didn't look at him questioningly, but he said, "I need to blow off some steam." Angela and I didn't respond, Margaret, who had decided to walk home, probably would have stayed silent too.

The three of us parted ways once we stepped into the bright lights and exuberant noises around the bars and race track. The people who did look our way were taken aback, we must have looked like hell, I sure felt like it.

Curly headed straight to the track, Angela wandered off into the crowd aimlessly. I shifted from my left foot to my right, unsure of what direction to take. Part of me wanted to step in front of one of the racing cars, and let it all be over, part of me wanted to knock a few back in the nearest bar.

My eyes shifted through the bodies in front of me, laughing and swaying and alive. Would Tommy have been among them if Curly and Angela hadn't asked him to tag along that night? My gut twisted again, Tommy, the skinniest and most timorous Shepard hood I'd ever met. He hadn't even dropped out of high school yet. I knew then that his family would never know what happened, I had it easier than Johnny and Pony did. Tommy was no soc, the cops would easily believe that he simply skipped town. Tears pricked my eyes. Nobody would care to search for the shallow grave Tommy would be buried in, if Steele didn't just toss him in the lake.

"Lizzy?" A sweet and light voice broke through my thoughts. "You've got blood on you." Sandy stood in front of me, her sun bleached eyebrows furrowed in concern.

"Are you OK?" She asked.

I couldn't hold it in any longer, the moment her words registered in my brain and I really looked into her kind blue eyes. My face twisted in anguish. She had pulled me into a tight hug before the first sob escaped me.

"I'm not."

She held me tighter.