"Darry, I told you, I'm sorry," I muttered for the thousandth time. Those words had stopped being genuine about ten minutes ago. Darrel Curtis loved to overreact. Honestly, I was doing him a favor by giving him something to worry about.

"Not sorry enough," Darry shouted and pulled the glass of whiskey out from in front of me. I shrugged and reached across the Curtis's counter for the bottle and took a swig out of that instead. Soda and Steve laughed from the corner.

"Aw, relax, Dare," Soda said, "He just got out of the slammer, give him a break."

"He was in there for being a stupid drunk in the first place!"

"Drunk, yes," I said with a planned cheshire-cat grin, "Stupid, also yes. I see your point."

Soda and Steve roared with drunken laughter.

"Get the hell out of my house, Two-Bit," Darry said, "Pony will be home soon and I don't need him to see you like this."

"C'mon Darry, Pony missed Two-Bit," Soda complained, "Let him stay."

I had to stay. I couldn't go back to my mom and sister like this, so I put down the bottle and held up my hands in surrender. "No more booze, I promise not to have any more fun ever again. I'll join a monastery and everything."

Darry scoffed, took the whiskey and poured it down the sink. I screeched and tried to lunge for the bottle-I had bought that with my own money. Darry dropped the bottle into the sink and the glass shattered. I fumbled with the pieces and considered sipping the remaining drops from the shards, but when I noticed Soda and Steve's looks of shock, I restrained myself.

I pasted a smile to my face that made Darry, who was a good four inches taller than me, shrink in fear. "Great. Thanks for that, Darry."

I stalked off into the living room and flung myself onto the couch and waited for my brain to realize I had unlocked its chains. Soda and Steve quietly poured over a car magazine on the floor while Darry started dinner. It was all so fuckin' domestic.

Pony came home around 26 minutes and 42 seconds later-my brain couldn't stop counting.

"Two-Bit!" He exclaimed in surprise, his voice jumping to pre-puberty octaves.

"Hey kid," I said without opening my eyes.

"Move, you bum," Dally said, slapping my legs off the couch.

"Nice to see you too, Dal." I squinted around. Johnny now sat next to me on the couch, looking uncomfortable as always. "Johnny-Cake," I shook his hand, which I knew he liked because it made him feel like an adult.

"Are you alright, Two-Bit?" Pony asked. He was so goddamned empathetic sometimes.

"Darry's, uh, cutting him off from the happy juice," Steve explained with an overdone hand-gesture of drinking alcohol.

"I'm fairly certain Pony wasn't talking to you," I snapped, "No, kid, I'm not alright because your brother is a twat."

"What's a twat?" Steve asked.

"You wouldn't know, you've never seen one," I retorted.

"Don't use that word, Pony," Darry called from the kitchen.

"Thanks Mom!" I called back to him in an excellent impression of Pony.

"That was Two-Bit!" Pony scrambled to defend himself as Darry appeared in the kitchen doorway, hands on his hips, looking even more terrifying in a pastel apron.

"How about you do some homework, Ponyboy."

Pony grumbled a bit as we all laughed at him. He pulled out some calculus and began struggling with a simple problem.

"Tell you what, Pony," I said after a minute of sweating and trying to shut down my brain, "I'll do that homework for ya."

The whole gang roared with laughter, "Let's see it, Two-Bit," Steve and Soda chorused. I think they expected me to treat it like a huge joke. I was only thinking that if I couldn't distract my brain, I had to dump my thoughts somewhere.

Pony handed the textbook to me with a mistrustful expression. I began scribbling out my answers. It was easy, just u-substitution for solving definite integrals. I finished the chapter too quickly and handed it back to him. The gang had forgotten all about our little bet until Pony said:

"I don't get the joke."

"What'd he write?" Soda pulled the sheet from Pony's hands, "Two-Bit, this is just math."

"Yep, well spotted, Sodapop."

"And it's correct," Pony noted, "You never took calculus. You dropped out before that."

"It wasn't hard to figure out," I said. They were all staring at me. I hated it so much. Light. Visible light. Wavelength 390 to 700 nm. Hitting retina. Light absorbed and reflected. Cones and rods. Cornea. Optic Nerve. Electrical impulses. Energy to- "Stop." I said too loudly.

I stood, stumbling a little even though I wasn't drunk. God, I needed to be drunk. I had an idea to sneak out the back door, forgetting that Darry was in the kitchen. He closed the kitchen door behind me and stood, guarding the back door.

"Sit."

"Move," I countered, but my voice sounded desperate rather than forceful.

Darry pushed me onto a stool. I sprawled my torso across the scrubbed-wooden counter and rested my head on my arms. Darry placed a drink in front of me. It looked like whiskey, but as I sipped greedily, I realized it was apple juice.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Matthews?" Darry asked more gently than before.

I shook my head. There was so much wrong with me. I was completely broken. "I-" my voice broke, which was embarrassing as hell. Then again, I had seen Darry blubbering and insane after his parents died. I had been the one who finally convinced him to come out of his room. He had only done so to punch me, but I considered it a victory anyway.

"You...what?"

"I need a drink," I mumbled into my own arm.

"Have the apple juice then, that's good enough."

"No. I need to stop thinking."

Darry sighed wearily, like I was a petulant child. "Two-Bit, what's 87 by 645?"

"56115."

"Good. What's 547 divided by 421?"

"1.29928741-"

"You can round to a couple decimal places," Darry sounded amused. The sadistic fucker.

"Alright. What are the enzymes in glycolysis?"

"Hexokinase, Phosphoglucose Isomerase, Phosphofructokinase, Aldolase- that makes glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate and dihydroxyacetone phosphate- then there's..." I continued listing and describing all of glycolysis. I could feel my headache subsiding a little, so I didn't even wait for Darry's prompt to begin explaining the Kreb cycle.

Darry just listened with an impassive expression and periodically refilled my apple juice.

"Alright," He finally said when I had been silent for longer than a minute, "Well, that's interesting. Thanks for teaching me that."