Chapter 10

We were wandering around town trying to figure out how to get me back out of the story.

Out of the story.

With a heavy sigh, I sank onto the curb and crossed my arms over my knees. "I hate this."

Ponyboy, his hair still practically dripping wet from his shower, stood over me with a lit cigarette hanging from his fingers. "What's wrong?"

Nice of him to be so casual about it, I thought. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe that I'm leaving? Maybe that I'll never see you again?"

With a sigh of his own, Ponyboy crouched in front of me, took a drag of his cigarette, and put his hand on my arm. "What makes you think we'll never see each other again?" Little wisps of smoke leaked from the side of his mouth like an upside-down waterfall as he spoke.

I stared at his fingers, which were just as long and lanky as his legs. "This is just a story. You know?" I glanced up at him. "Just a goofy little story that doesn't even have a point."

He smiled. "I don't know about that. There was probably a point to it, if you think back."

And there we were again, back to analyzing my story. "I don't know. All I know is, I might never get back here again, and I've got nothing to prove to me later that I was even here. You know? It's like, what if it starts to fade away? What if even I don't believe someday that I was here? What if-"

"You still got that rock?"

"What?"

Ponyboy stood up, tossed his cigarette on the ground, crushed it out, and waggled his hand at me. "The rock. The one with all the colors you picked up in the tunnels."

"Oh!" I stood up and fished it out of my pocket to hand it to him. "Here." The iridescent swirls of color looked positively brilliant in the sunlight.

I watched Ponyboy take a permanent marker out of his back pocket and remove the cap with his teeth.

"Hang on," I said, "what're you going to do? I was going to give it to my grandpa when I get back."

He grinned through the cap, then took it out from between his teeth with the hand that held the rock and stuck it onto the back of the marker. "I think he'd be okay with you keeping one for yourself. Don't you think?"

I considered for a second. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess he would."

While I watched, Ponyboy wrote something on the smoothest surface of the rock. He re-capped the pen and handed the rock back to me. "There."

I read it out loud: "To Sarah Jean Curtis. All of my love, Ponyboy." I almost got choked up. "Thanks, Ponyboy."

He crouched down in front of me, serious all of a sudden, put his hand on my forearm again, and looked into my eyes. "Listen, Sarah: this is yours. Okay? No matter what, or where, or how, this rock is yours now. No matter what it's ever been, now it's me telling you that you were here, and that I was here, and that I'm glad we had a chance to become friends. Got it?"

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. I got it. I wish I could leave something here for you, though."

He stood up and smiled. "You already did." When he held his hand down to me, I took it and let him pull me to standing.

I notched my hair behind my ear and straightened my skirt. "So anyway, I'm sorry about the story."

"What about it?"

"You know. The way I never really did anything with it. I mean, I kept Johnny from dying, but you were right. It didn't accomplish anything."

"I don't know about that."

I squinted at him as we started walking. "What'd you mean?"

He stepped down off the curb to walk along the side of the street. "I heard you talking to Johnny this morning. I thought that was really nice, what you said to him."

My chest swelled a little. "Really?"

"Yeah. Really. I mean, it wasn't the way things happened, but maybe if somebody had told Johnny he was important, maybe he would have believed them, and maybe…." Ponyboy looked up ahead. "I don't know. Just, maybe." He shrugged and gave his head a little shake. "Anyhow. I think you're an okay girl, Sarah."

I sighed and ran my fingers over the swirls of color in my rock.

"What?" Ponyboy asked, slowing down to look at me. I slowed down too, and we both ended up slowing down so much that we were just standing there again. "What's wrong?"

"I guess I just…I don't know that I'm really an okay person. Maybe not as okay as you're giving me credit for, anyway." The top surface of the rock was warm under my fingertips.

A few seconds later, Ponyboy gave me a gentle tap on the arm, prompting me to keep talking.

I shook my head. "This is stupid. It's got nothing to do with anything." I wasn't even sure why I was considering telling him, other than that it felt like I really needed to get it off my chest, and we'd made this connection sort of thing over the past couple of days. I mean, how can you not have a connection with the person who joined you in following a duck around a bunch of underground tunnels? I shook my head, though. "It's stupid."

"It doesn't matter. You already started, and now I want to know. Spill it."

I rolled my eyes. "Fine. Remember how I told you my grandpa was a writer, like you want to be?"

"Yeah?"

When I sat down on the curb and wrapped my arms around my knees again, Ponyboy plopped down next to me. "What's wrong?"

I took a breath, swallowed, and cleared my throat. "I lied to him," I said. "I lied to my grandpa. I told him I'd read one of his books, even though I hadn't. I just, like, acted like I had, because I wasn't all that interested in reading it, but I didn't want him to feel bad." I gave Ponyboy a pleading look, as if he'd be able to wave away my sins.

He shrugged. "So? What's the big deal? You weren't interested in the book."

"No." I put my face in my hands and took in a deep breath. "That's not it. I actually did end up reading it, and when I did, I read the whole thing in one day. It was the day after Grandpa had his stroke. And it was amazing, Ponyboy. The book was amazing." When there was a pause, I ventured a glance at my pretend brother and realized that it didn't feel pretend anymore. Maybe he wasn't my real brother, but he was the closest thing to one I'd ever had.

Ponyboy narrowed his eyes, and for a second I was mortified, thinking maybe he'd read my mind, but then he spoke again. "Alright," he ventured carefully, "so the book wasn't so bad. But you read it, right? Why're you being so hard on yourself?"

How was I supposed to explain it to him? To explain the guilt and the shame that were swelling through me in growing waves? "That wasn't the only time," I admitted. "That wasn't the only time I lied to him." The sound of the rushing water flooded my mind, washing out the truth, finally, and I cleared my throat and let it all spill out. "Okay. It's just … I've got a big family. I mean, not huge, but some aunts and uncles, and they all have kids, so there's, like, fifteen cousins, plus my two sisters. And me, well, I'm the youngest of the youngest." When Ponyboy gave me a puzzled look, I explained. "My dad was the youngest kid in his family. Me, I'm the youngest in mine. And I'm talking, eight years between me and my next youngest sister. I was basically a surprise."

He nodded encouragement when I stopped again. "Okay. Keep going."

"I know. Okay, so remember how I told you before that my grandpa had taken all of my cousins on some big trip someplace when they were growing up?" He nodded. "Well, I was the last one. Everyone else was older than me, and they'd all gone on their trips. By the time I was old enough, though, Grandpa was getting some health problems and couldn't really travel so much, so I was supposed to go to his place and spend the week there." I remembered imagining sitting at a table playing cards for six days straight until I'd pulled out half my hair and wanted to puke, and I cringed at how shallow and short-sighted I'd been.

Ponyboy, waiting patiently for me to get on with it, picked up a twig and dragged it through the sandy dirt along the edge of the curb, making swirls and circles.

I closed my eyes for a second before continuing. "Remember how I said I couldn't go spend time with my grandpa, because I was sick?" I paused for a second to get some spit running through my mouth, which was really dry all of a sudden. I cleared my throat again, and my voice actually caught a little when I started talking again. "Well, the thing is, I wasn't really sick. When Grandpa wanted me to visit him last summer, I was totally fine. My friend invited me to go with her family on vacation to this huge water park, and I wanted to do that, so I told him I was sick. And then I told my parents that Grandpa had called and said we needed to reschedule because he was too busy with a book he was finishing After that, it just, like…never happened. I had camp, and then he was in the hospital for a few weeks, and then school started up, and it just…never happened." I gave a quivering sigh and waited for Ponyboy to tell me what a horrible person I was.

"You're horrible," Ponyboy said. "You're a real awful person, wanting to go and have a good time instead of hanging out in Boringville, USA with a smelly old guy."

I popped my head up and glared at him. "He's not smelly. And I am horrible, because he's my grandpa and I let him down." My throat tightened so much, my next words came out in a shaky croak. "And now I might never be able to tell him how much I really loved his book, and I'll never be able to tell him how much it meant to me, and I'll never be able to really get to know him, because he's dying, and it's not fair. I need more time. I need to talk to him. I need to get to know him." I wiped a tear off my cheek and sniffled. "But he's really bad. I mean, really bad. They don't think he'll make it. They don't think he'll ever wake up again. Too much of his brain was damaged from the stroke. This is so not fair, Ponyboy," I said, nearly pleading. "I don't want my grandpa to die yet." I took a deep breath. "Just want to talk to him. I am so stupid."

Ponyboy gave a lopsided grin. "You're not stupid, Sarah. You're young. I guess they seem like the same thing sometimes, but they're not." He stood up, stretched, and extended an arm to me. I took his hand and let him pull me to standing. "Take my advice on this one: don't let guilt weigh you down. You can't change the past, and you can't stop people from dying when it's their time. Best you can do is learn from your mistakes, and maybe help other people not make the same ones. I mean, when my parents got killed, it wasn't like I'd had a chance to say good bye or anything. In fact…."

"What?" When he didn't say anything, I reached out and set my hand on his arm. "Ponyboy?"

He averted his eyes before continuing in almost halting words. "That morning, when my parents died, my…my mom was kind of mad at me. She wanted me to help her clean the place up for some company that was coming, and I wanted to keep reading because I was almost finished my book."

"So did you end up helping?"

He shrugged. "Not really. She kept asking, and I kept telling her I'd be there in a minute, but by the time I finished the book, she was done." Ponyboy took a breath and gazed up into the sky for a second. "She never said she was mad or upset, but I could tell, you know? I could just tell."

"Hey," I told him, "I'm sure it wasn't really big deal for her. I'm sure she wasn't that mad."

He brushed his damp hair off his forehead, ran his fingers the rest of the way through to the back of his neck, hooked his thumbs in his pockets, and cleared his throat. "Yeah, well. It was a big deal for me. She just wanted some help, and I spent the last day of her life giving her a hard time. And you thought you were a horrible person."

"No," I said, and I meant it, "she was your mom. The last thing she would ever want would be for you to feel bad your whole life over something like that. She might have been mad for a little bit, but you both thought you had more time with each other."

The corner of Ponyboy's mouth raised in an almost-smile. "Yeah, well, guess what? You're not a horrible person, either. And I'll bet the last thing your grandpa would want would be you moping around because you thought you'd have more time with him."

I smiled. He really did get it. "Thanks."

#

We ended up deciding that the best place to figure out how to get me home would be the movie theater, where everything had started. After paying for two tickets, Ponyboy led me into the theater. It wasn't too busy, so we found two seats near the front.

Ponyboy stretched out his arms, one across the back of my seat and one across the empty seat on his other side, and looked down at me. "What's wrong, Sarah? You still look … I don't know, sad."

I sank down low in my chair and yawned, feeling suddenly, overwhelmingly, exhausted. "I just can't stop thinking about it. About him. There were things I should have asked him about." With effort, I tried to fight off the heavy feeling that was rapidly overtaking me. "Things I should have done with him. Like you said, it seemed like he would always be there, like there'd always be more time." I gave a tired sigh and gazed up at Ponyboy. "I should have gone to visit my grandpa, Ponyboy. I should have known him better. If not for him, at least for me. Because I'm finally realizing what an amazing person he must have been."

Ponyboy gave me an understanding grin, and for a brief second there was something deeply familiar about the gentle sparkle in his eyes.

A moment later, as the lights dimmed and the credits started rolling, I lost the battle with my drooping eyelids. "But now it's too late," I mumbled, sinking further into my chair. "It's too late to do . . . too late . . . ."

For an instant, Ponyboy's comforting scent wafted through me, and his warm hand wrapped around mine, pressing it gently against the rock he'd given me, when he leaned in close and whispered, "It's never too late, Des."