I lay on the kitchen floor until daylight crept in, at which point I showered, got dressed for school, and napped on the couch until Soda woke me up for breakfast.
"Why do you keep falling asleep after you get ready?" he asked.
"I'm just tired," I said. "I don't know."
"Well, come eat," Soda pulled me up. At breakfast, I managed to eat enough to make Darry happy, or at least to keep him off my back. I didn't want to get in any more arguments with him.
On the way to school, in Kevin's car, I was already nodding off again. Ben lifted my head.
"Scout, what is up with you? You're like a zombie lately." I just shrugged. I assumed everyone was correctly attributing my behavior to having been attacked, but nobody wanted to bring it up to me. I just played along.
The day in school was interminable. I was too exhausted in every class to focus at all on what was going on. It took every ounce of energy in my body to keep my eyes open. At lunch, I slept in the backseat of Kevin's car as Ben did his History homework in the front seat. As the final bell rang, I was on my way out to find Two-Bit or Kevin for a ride home to go back to sleep when I spotted Tim's car. He was leaning on the hood. He motioned to me, then slipped inside. Pony was just coming out the high school side door. I ran over to him.
"Pony, I have a ride. Tell Two-Bit and Kevin I'm all set." He looked like he wanted to ask me something, but I was already gone and hopping into Tim's car.
He peeled out as soon as I jumped in. I saw Pony looking and hoped he didn't recognize Tim's car, or that, if he did, he'd keep his mouth shut about it.
"Had enough of this place, huh?" I asked.
"Well, I did my time," he said.
"Did you graduate?" I hoped he wouldn't be mad that I asked.
"Barely," he said. "But yeah."
"That's great, Tim." I meant it. So many greasers didn't. Sticking it out counted for something. And I had a sneaking suspicion that, underneath his tough hood exterior, Tim was actually pretty smart.
"Where we going?"
"I got some stuff to work on with you."
That sounded fairly ominous. I was not altogether surprised to find myself in Buck's parking lot again.
"Are you trying to get me in trouble with Darry?" I asked.
"Nah. You think I want to be in trouble with Darry either? Nobody's here in the day anyway. I brought you here to practice."
"What?"
"I got you a sweet knife, kid. But you ain't getting it 'til I'm satisfied you know how to use it." He got out of the car and walked around to my door and opened it. The only other people in my life who had ever opened doors for me were Dad and Darry. Tim Shepard was just full of surprises.
"Thanks," I said, and he took my hand as I jumped out. I reluctantly followed him into Buck's. There were a few people at the bar- nobody I recognized. It was mostly older guys nursing their beers; I suppose all the wild young greasers are either stuck in school during the day or sleeping off their hangover from the night before. There was one pathetic-looking woman at the far end of the bar, leaning against the wall, who looked like she might have been propped up there since the previous night. She smiled a sickening smile at me and I looked down at the floor.
Tim sat down and talked to the bartender, who was also eyeing me. I'm sure he was wondering what the hell a twelve year-old kid was doing in a place like this, with Tim, no less… I was asking myself the same thing. Actually, the bartender looked vaguely familiar, he might have been one of the guys in Tim's gang, but I wasn't sure. I was starting to wonder if trusting Tim was such a good idea, after all. I was looking at the jukebox selections when suddenly he jumped off the barstool. He came over, grabbed my hand and started leading me upstairs. There was a whistle from one of the old guys at the bar.
"Ignore that," Tim said. "Those guys are all assholes."
"Get your minds outta the fuckin' gutter," he called back to them, "I ain't a goddamned pervert."
He got to the top of the stairs, pulled out a key, and opened a door to a sparsely decorated room. I remembered Pony and Johnny coming here to meet Dally, and I wondered if he had been staying in this room. I had no misconceptions about what normally went on in the rooms at Buck's, and I wondered with horror what Darry would do if he could have seen Tim bringing me into one now.
I wanted to trust Tim, but I was more than a little nervous. It didn't help when he shut the door and said, "Shut your eyes, kid." I didn't.
"Why?" I asked.
"Why not?" he shot back.
"'Cause I'm scared of you right now, in here," I admitted.
He grinned. "You got good instincts, little Curtis." He held out his hand for mine. I offered it up.
"Here." He placed something in my hand. As he pulled his hand away, it revealed a switchblade, a shiny blue handle gleaming in my hand.
"You trust me now?" he asked? "I ain't got a weapon. And you do." I didn't entirely believe him about that.
I closed my hand around the knife. "How much do I owe you?" I asked.
"My treat," he said. "You just slit the throat of that bastard who rapes greaser girls, and we're even. I got a sister too, you know." I still could not even make the slightest parallel between Angela Shepard and myself, but I got my knife. I was happy. Maybe now I could sleep.
"Thanks, Tim. Really."
"Oh, we ain't done yet, here. I ain't givin' a kid a knife without knowin' you can use it without killin' yourself in the process. With my luck you'll slit your own throat and Darry'll kill me instead o' you killin' somebody. You ever used a switch before?"
"No," I admitted. Though, I nearly added, I had been found with one used for a murder in my pocket…if that counted for anything.
"You told me you're scared at night. So, you're gonna be sleepin' with this thing, right?" My plan was to keep it under my pillow, and sleep with my hand on it. Nobody was ever gonna take advantage of me in my own bed again. So help me God. I would kill him first. I would.
"So, lay down."
"Why?"
"Lay down, little Curtis," he said. "We're gonna play-act. Then, when you convince me you're ready to kill that son of a bitch and not cut off your own arm, I'll take you home."
I lay down, and held the blade in my hand under the pillow.
"So that's how you're gonna sleep?" he asked, lookng over the situation. "Well, here comes trouble." He jumped on me and within seconds he had the knife back and pinned me onto the bed. I was pinned exactly the way Steve had held me, and was about to scream bloody murder but the moment he saw the fear in my eyes he rolled off.
"Jesus, kid. I ain't gonna hurt you." he said. "I'm gonna show you how to not let that happen. I'm gonna show you how to kick someone's ass. Trust me."
For some inexplicable reason, I did trust him. I had since that time he drove me home.
He showed me how to open and hold the blade correctly, how to hurt a guy where it counts, no matter how tall he is, and how to turn the tables to get the upper hand, even if you're smaller and lighter. After an hour or so of his tutoring, I knew why Angela was tougher than any guy in our gang.
Just as I was getting the hang of it, there was a knock at the door.
"I'm busy," Tim said, in a totally different voice than he had been using with me.
"You're not too busy for this," a voice answered, and the door opened to reveal a giant monster of a man, and suddenly I remembered where I was, and who I was with, and how eternally grounded I would be if Darry found out about this. This guy did not look friendly, and I froze.
"What the hell, Stokes?" Tim said, "I told you I'm fuckin' busy."
"We got a problem," the guy said, motioning him out, not looking the slightest bit surprised to see me sitting on the bed. I wondered if maybe I wasn't the first to get lessons from Tim during the daytime hours at Buck's.
"You sit tight, kid," Tim said. "I'll be right back. He went out into the hall and shut the door. I sat on the bed listening to them argue, though Tim never raised his voice.
"He says he don't have it, Tim," Giant man said.
"Well, you tell him he better fuckin' find it and he better have it back where it belongs by the time I get home tonight or he'll be waking up in the Intensive Care Ward." This Tim I was hearing was a completely different one than the one I dealt with.
I tried to figure out exactly what they were talking about, but I couldn't understand enough of it to catch on. I just sat on the bed, waiting. Eventually, the knob turned and Tim came back in.
"Sorry kid," he said. "Business."
I just nodded.
He worked with me for another half hour or so, and I felt like I was getting pretty good, but I wasn't sure if he was just making it seem that way. As we did our last practice round, he came at me from the side. I caught him head-on, nailed him full-on in the crotch (which, until now, we had been faking), dug my fingers into the sensitive parts of his underarms, concentrated all my weight on hitting him in the chest so I was on top of him, and whipped out the blade and had it against his neck.
"You're a fuckin' fast learner, kid." I had actually knocked the breath out of him. "You musta got that tackling talent from your big brother. You win. You're ready. Let me up."
I wasn't getting up. I wanted to see if I could take it a step farther. If you had told me a month before that I would be pinning Tim Shepard down with a blade to his neck, I would have said you were crazy for sure. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and here I was. I pressed the knife into his neck. Thanks to his help, I had him pretty much immobilized, unless he was gonna hit me, which I was almost completely sure he wouldn't.
"You know my name, Tim Shepard?" I gave him the tiniest nick with the knife. A pea-sized drop of blood appeared.
"Yeah, I do." He looked surprised, and, surprisingly, proud. After all, he had taught me this confidence, in just a few hours.
"So what is it?" I was pretending to be so much tougher than I was. But Tim played along.
"Scout Curtis."
"That's right. Actually it's Samantha Scout Curtis." I dug my knees into his pubic bone, a little something he hadn't taught me, but I had picked up from years of watching the boys fight. I felt a small tinge of satisfaction as he grimaced. I was playing with him, and he knew it, but I was testing myself as well, seeing how far I was willing to take it, how confident I really was. And God knows, if Steve ever showed up in my bed again, I was going to take it all the way.
A second later I felt guilty for hurting him at all and eased up. I owed any confidence I was feeling to him and he had no obligation to take any of this crap from me, but he was.
He must have felt me relax on him and in a single motion he grabbed me by the waist and turned me over, pinning me back down. He looked me in the eyes and winked at me. I thought I'd had him, but he knew how to take advantage of a second of weakness with no problem.
"You're ready," he said, "Miss Samantha Scout Curtis."
I smiled. "Well, you can call me Scout."
"Funny, kid," he said. "And you can call me Timothy." He pulled me up and sat next to me on the bed, dabbing at his neck. " I can't believe you really fucking cut me!" he said. "You got nerve!"
"Well, you taught me it! I was just practicing," I said. "So, how'd I do?" In a weird way I felt like I was representing Darry, and that somehow I might have earned him even more respect with Tim.
"Let's just say, I had no intention of you pinning me down, and if you hadn't eased up on me for a second, I never would have been able to turn it around on you without hurting you, which I had no plans to do. I don't need your brother up my ass. You're lucky you're a girl, or I woulda rang your bell for pulling that shit. You did good, and that knife is yours. Anyone ever tries to hurt you again, you go ahead and put a nice long skinny hole right through their chest, with my compliments."
For the first night in almost two weeks, I spent the whole night in my own bed.
A/N: Yeah, of course, Tim let her do that on purpose, to make her feel more confident. Like I said, he's a smart guy. No twelve year old can take Mr. Timothy Shepard. Please don't think that was serious, or this would be the Mary-Sue-est of all Mary Sues.
Happy inauguration day, y'all. Review away!