Apologies, for the wait, thankfully I have a bit of time before my adventures abroad begin. I had it in my mind where I wanted this chapter to go for so long, but couldn't find the right mood to execute it.

In regards to the conversation on the review page: There are plenty of survivors who make the brave decision to come forward, and there are plenty of others who do not. It is no one's business but theirs, the circumstances that lead them to keep their trauma a secret, and they honestly don't need a reason, whether it be stigma, further threat of violence, embarrassment, etc. I don't mean to patronize the Guest who initiated this conversation, in fact I think it is an important one to have, especially in this social and political climate. Lizzy is a wounded young girl, who has lost her trust in the state, following the occurrences of the death of her parents, and I am grateful to anyone who has related to her experiences, for sticking with this story. I know it can be triggering and challenging, thank you.

Chapter Nine

Endure

When I heard gravel pop beneath the tires of the car tailing me, I immediately assumed it was a mustang, or corvette, or something clean and shiny with a boy just as clean and shiny behind the wheel. Angela had told me socs didn't like cruising around our neighborhood anymore, not after Johnny killed that rich kid; but the engine was too quiet, no greaser would be caught dead with a car that purred so sweetly.

My hand slid down to the middle of my purse strap, I drew my shoulder blades back, and swung my left arm in a longer arc in time with my footsteps, refusing to let myself appear scared. The car inched closer, slowly, but I wouldn't look behind me, kept my chin tilted up and ahead.

I heard the familiar squeak of a freshly washed window cranking down, and braced myself for the usual insults, "greaser, whore, bitch, white trash". There was a dark haired boy sitting in the passenger seat, closest to me, that much I could make out from the corner of my eye. He wasn't the one that spoke first, but the voice that did reach my ears made my head snap to attention.

"Need a ride?" Steele looked me up and down disinterestedly, his eyes lingered on the blood-stained blouse draped over my purse. His tanned skin glowed warmly in the late morning light, and his dark eyes made something curl and tickle in my stomach when they met mine. "Get in the car."

I blinked, and shifted my gaze to Curly. I had never seen him so deflated, his face was still as pale as it was the night before, the dark circles beneath his eyes stood out starkly against his skin and made him look frail. He met my gaze for a split second, but his eyes flickered away quickly, I took a step back.

"I didn't say anything." I blurted out, before I looked back to Steele. My voice sounded desperate, defensive, I expected him to laugh at me, but he rolled his eyes, and rested an arm on the steering wheel.

"Get in the car."

Blood throbbed in my throat, and my conscious waded blearily inside my own brain, looking for some pocket of common sense. I let out a silent puff of air and looked back to Curly.

"Lizzy, please." He stared at the dashboard, and I heard a derisive snort from Steele.

To this day I don't know why I climbed into the backseat. Sometimes I rationalize that it was because Curly, looking so weak and pathetic, asked me like that, in that tone of voice I had never heard emit from his mouth, that would have made his older brother spit in embarrassment. Sometimes I tell myself it was because I was being noble, protective, that I actually cared about the middle Shepard more than I'd let myself admit. I lie to myself too much to give that a second thought.

That was the moment, a cataclysm for every rock fall I experienced for the rest of the summer, why I am where I am now. I didn't know it as I pressed my legs together, sweat from my thighs causing my legs to stick uncomfortably to the leather upholstery in Steele's car, as his eyes lingered on me in the rear view mirror. I didn't know, but I should have.

"What'd you get up to last night?"

"I-I…nothing—"

"Nothing?"

"Drank, partied, nothin' really."

"Why were you out all night?"

"I was drinkin'."

"Where's Tommy?"

"I don—"

"Where's Tommy? He was with you when you left your house at ten."

"I don't know."

"How can you not know, he was with you all night, wasn't he?"

"No."

"No, what?"

"He wasn't…he wasn't with me…"

"Then where was he?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? Your friend disappears, he doesn't tell you where he's going?"

"I don't know."

"Curly."

"I don't…"

"Curly."

"I don't know!"

"What did I tell you? Say it."

"He said he had been fightin' with his mom, he got too drunk, hitched a ride with some trucker at Buck's, said he was headin' to Vegas for a while."

"Folks going to corroborate that he was at Buck's?"

"Yeah."

"Even though he wasn't?"

"Yeah, yes, alright? Everyone there drinks all day, they'll say they saw us, so the cops won't know they was shootin' up." Curly lifted his head, from where it was rested on the car window, to glare at Steele.

Steele's head remained turned toward the road, he took a quick right into a gravel alleyway on the industrial side of town. "What'd you get up to last night?"

Curly groaned. "Christ, give it a rest."

"What'd you get up to last night?"

"How long are you gonna keep this up?"

Steele put the car in park, and killed the ignition in front of the garage door of a run-down storage unit. "Until I know there won't be any cops tailing my car, asking around town about some Hatchet-Packer, just because you can't remember some half-assed story to cover up your buddy's little tumble." Steele partially opened his door, then turned to look back at me, hand still gripping the handle. "Follow me."

I leaned in closer to the front seat once he clambered out and shut his door, before Curly had opened his, and hissed. "What the fuck is going on?" He didn't answer me.

Steele opened the right-side door for me, but didn't offer a hand. Once I had both feet on the patchy gravel of the parking space, he snatched my blouse from where it was draped over my purse. I flinched away from him, and furrowed my brow when he crumpled it in one fist. He jerked his head toward the garage door, and I glanced once more at Curly, before following the older man inside.

There was nothing special about the interior of the space, it was just as rusty as the outside, with a four-legged-iron table in the back corner, lawn chairs seated around its circumference. I shifted my gaze to the other corner as we moved further inside, studying a lopsided wooden table, with an assortment of screw heads, a rubber mallet, and a saw resting on top. When I saw the tin bucket of questionable fluids on the ground next to it, I wrinkled my nose. It wasn't until I heard a squeaky-rustle beneath my feet, that I looked down to find myself standing on a large sheet of plastic.

I whirled around to where Curly was shutting the garage door behind us. He turned and noticed my alarmed expression, then his eyes drifted down to the floor beneath me. His eyes widened to circles. "Woah, man, what the fuck?"

I started to take a few steps backward, thinking that the closer I was to the door, the safer I would be. I heard a jarring click as Steele drew a pistol from the waist band of his suit. I was such an idiot—I should have known he'd be strapped. He pointed it toward my abdomen, and raised his free hand, curling two fingers back toward him. The message was clear, don't even think about running.

"Curly…what did you get up to last night?"

"You said we were just going to tell her what to say to the cops." Curly didn't move from behind me.

"What did you get up to last night?"

"C'mon, drop the gun, man." There was no authority in his voice, his tone was as shaky and frightened as a child's.

"I'm gonna ask you one more time," Steele pressed the hammer of the pistol down, the heavy click vibrating up my spine and pinballing between my eardrums, "what did you get up to last night?"

Curly stammered, "Uh-uh-I—I got drunk, I was partyin'."

"Where?"

"M-my house, and Buck's."

"Where's Tommy?"

"He fought with his mom, got too drunk, hitched a ride to Vegas."

Steele looked back to me then, his eyes imploring me, like there was something I was supposed to know. "Where's Miss Curtis?"

"What?"

"The Curtis girl, where is she?"

By then all color had drained from my face, I could never understand why, but my hands flew up to grasp the base of my throat, soothing the skin around my collarbones. I remembered a choking sound leaving my throat, my chin trembling.

"Sh-she…she's—"

Steele scoffed. "Oh c'mon, Curly…we found her wandering around in broad daylight, with the shirt she used to suffocate him—for fuck's sake, his blood's still on it. Loose ends only need tying up when they're unraveling."

"Bu-but-but—"

"B-b-b-b-but," He mocked Curly, when he looked back to me his eyes twinkled. "If she's gone, I don't have to worry about her cracking."

"She ain't gonna tell nobody, Steele! I swear, we won't tell the cops about you, alright? It was all on us, you were never there, it was all us!" Curly sounded borderline hysterical, his voice thick with tears.

"I was never there?"

"You were never there."

Clint nodded, an easy smile spreading across his face, he tucked his pistol back into the waistband of his pants, looking at me with an almost apologetic expression. My hands hadn't left my neck. "C'mon, sweetheart, quit looking like you're about to dig your own grave, I just had to make sure."

A strangled, "what?", left my mouth.

Steele grinned bashfully at me. "Nothing personal."

I looked back at Curly who was crouched, shaking, his head hung between his legs. I walked toward him without thinking, he jumped when I pressed my hand between his shoulder blades. "What the hell is wrong with you?" I said loud enough so that Steele would know it was directed at him, but I didn't turn to look at him, I would've burst into tears.

"Curly, mosey on over to your big brother, you know the way. I'll drive you home, sweetheart."

The garage door opened, the brightness and heat from outside bathing Curly and I in warmth. I looked up to Steele's silhouette, framed in the doorway. His features were obscured in darkness, stark against the white of the afternoon sky behind him. He held out a hand to me, and I imagined he was smiling, the one that made something sickly sweet bubble in my chest.

After about a month of living with Don, I stopped being afraid of death. When I was a kid, I would lay awake at night, trying to picture what it would be like to stop existing. I could only imagine darkness, loneliness. My mother still took me to church every Sunday, even until her death, but I never believed that there was a heavenly realm in the sky, where everyone lived happily ever after; it became even harder to accept after my parent's accident, and after enduring my hellscape in Murfreesboro.

Most of the times Don or his friends would force themselves on me, my mind would go blank. After the first few, I became skilled in that particular sort of disassociation, and everything outside of my own head would go bleary and colorless, like the sound of someone's voice when you drift off into a daydream. There were times, which occurred later on in my stay, that I would think about death, and think about how inviting the concept seemed. I could taste it, swish the idea around in my mouth; it was syrupy and relaxing, the thought of falling into nothingness.

So I couldn't shake the feeling I had when Steele pointed that gun at me, the chill that festered just above my sternum.

Steele cleared his throat from where he sat across the table, I tore my gaze away from the traffic light across from the drugstore he insisted we stop at. "You're not touching your food." He said in a commanding sort of way, like I was supposed to reflexively obey.

I didn't answer, so he sighed, and leant back in his seat after wiping off his greasy fingertips with a napkin. "I was never going to hurt you."

"Kill me," he raised an eyebrow, "you were going to kill me."

He smiled. "I was never going to kill you, I just needed a way to get inside Curly's head."

"Why me?"

"Your fucking him, aren't you?"

I felt my ears start to turn red. "The fuck does that matter?"

"Yeah, sweetheart, why don't you go try to find me any guy who wants to see the girl he's fucking hug a shot from a pistol."

"Curly doesn't give two shits about me, you should've picked Angela."

"It worked didn't it?" Steele considered the untouched bag of fries in front of me, before reaching out and sliding them to his side of the table. "And the Shepard girl? That little thing is downright feral, probably would've stabbed me in the neck before I even got her to my storage compartment."

"So—"

"So, I needed someone tame, and...you know, she's just his sister, doesn't make much of a difference that she's prettier than you." He shot me a patronizing smirk when I glared at him. "I needed to give you a run down anyhow, I mean, jeez, you were walking around with the shirt—"

"I was walking a mile back to my house, in my neighborhood, not yours." I snapped.

He straightened up, pride showing in the stiff set of his jaw. "The neighborhood with the highest police presence, as I recall Curly telling me. Doesn't matter if it's a mile or a skip, the five-o sees you wi—"

"I would've said my boyfriend got into a fight, I would've said my stepdad liked to whoop my mama, I would've said whatever the fuck I liked, and—"

"And," he raised his voice, his neck red and blotchy, I crossed my arms in front of my stomach, feeling uneasy when I noticed he was gripping the table edge so tightly his fingers were turning white. "They would've pressed you, hell, maybe taken you down to the station, because they're bored, redskins are easy targets to pick on."

"I ain't a redskin."

"Sweetheart, you're darker than me." It was an exaggeration, but I had always known I took after my father's native roots, always to my mother's dismay. "You would've been in deep shit, and therefore so would I, and I've got priors that even Curly's big brother would raise his eyebrows at."

I raked a hand through my hair and drew a raspy breath through my teeth, irritated but too drained to argue any further. I could tell Steele didn't like to lose. "Fuck, I need a cigarette."

"How about a stick of gum instead?"

"Fuck you." I heard him chuckle, and forced myself to swallow the next temper outburst I felt bubbling up. "Alright, I'm not gonna say nothin' to the cops, can you take me home now?"

He propped his elbows on the table, and leaned forward, his shoulders drew up closer to his ears, and he studied me. I felt the heat return to my face. "How old are you?"

In my discomfort I did what I always did, resorted to my sharp tongue. "Are you going to tell me what this business-bullshit-deal is you have with Curly, or why it is you threatened me at gunpoint?"

His shoulders shrugged in a silent laugh. He narrowed his eyes in what seemed to be a habit of his, like there was some joke only he was in on. "I know you're young, despite all that makeup. So what is it, hm, 16…17?"

"15." He whistled lowly. "Tell me."

He tilted his head, seeming to consider my demand. "I might, if you agreed to see me again."

I scoffed. "Very funny."

"I'm serious, what do you say?" My horrified expression seemed to amuse him, he got up out of his chair, and ran a hand down the front of his dress shirt. He came around to me and held out his hand, the old woman standing at the cash register narrowed her eyes at us.

I stood up without taking his hand, which made him grin, and walked out of the store ahead of him.

I directed Steele to two houses that weren't mine, before he finally convinced me to let him drop me off on my real street.

"Why would I want the guy who threatened to shoot me, to know where I live?" I muttered, annoyed, as Steele turned onto my road.

"How else will I know where to pick you up for our date?"

I opened the door before the car came to stop, and Steele only eased into the brakes, a last jab to provoke me.

Had I not stormed down the street, blinded by my temper, I would have seen the figures standing on my porch, watching me walk away from a stranger's car in different clothes than I left the house in. Anticipation tempted me to run straight past my address, and keep going until I was far enough away to never face my brothers again, but then I remembered what I had seen, and what I had done less than 24 hours before that, and I felt myself harden; afterall, the worst had already happened, long before that. It was the strangest feeling, like aging ten years in only 15 seconds.

"You were never at Evie's last night." Soda stared at me stonily, Ponyboy leaned on the porch railing next to him, puffing on a cancer stick.

"No, I wasn't." I replied to him, not bothering to halt my stride toward the door.

"Well, where the hell have you been then?"

I paused before I reached for the handle of the screen, mulling over what sort of truth to tell him. I looked up to meet his eyes, his brow furrowed at my calmness. "With the Shepards."

Ponyboy narrowed his eyes at me, most likely surprised at my honesty. Soda spoke again, "Whose car was that?"

"A stranger's, I hitched a ride."

"From where?"

"Sandy's."

Soda blinked, his lips parting slightly as his jaw went slack. Ponyboy went red, and looked angry enough to shove the butt of his cigarette down my throat, his cold, green, eyes flickered to Soda, and softened.

I didn't feel particularly angry, or vindictive, at least not toward either of my brothers, so I have no idea why the next words out of my mouth were so poisonous. I fingered the collar of Sandy's shirt I was wearing, then said, "This is hers, you can take it back to her if you want to say, hi."

Soda winced, and I felt nothing. I felt nothing.