I'd been back for all of five minutes before they were threatening to call the fuzz on me, and I hadn't even done anything worse than try to find the classroom they were stashing us rejects in. "I don't know if you kids call this 'casing the joint' or what, these days," Mr. Rhodes rumbled next to my ear, "but I'm getting security if you don't head right back out that—"

"What exactly in this school do you think's worth stealin'?"

Teachers in 1967 were under very little professional obligation to be nice to us, which went double for teachers stuck on summer school duty; Mr. Rhodes hated my smart-assing brother from the second he started pointing out mistakes in the history textbook, and was no more thrilled to meet me four years later. "Shepard, how old are you?" he barked an inch away from my face, pinning me against the row of lockers by both arms.

If he thought I was intimidated by him and his clip-on tie, breath tinged with the coffee and menthol cigarettes he needed to get him through the day, he had another thing coming. I could've choked him out with one arm against his windpipe, easy. I wouldn't even have to try. "Seventeen," I lied.

"At least I can rest assured that this time next year, you'll be drivin' some drill sergeant to drink outside Saigon."

My mouth slid into a sneer like melting rubber. He had one thing right: I was too fucking too old to be here. I felt the way I did whenever I played tea party with Luis's eldest daughter, Claudia, trying to jam my fingers into the handles of the little pink teacups. Or, worse, like Two-Bit Mathews, who was about to find out if 'current high school student' was a valid reason for draft deferment. "Least I didn't drive my wife straight out the—"

It was a lucky guess— I was friendly with one of the front office secretaries, Hazel, and she had a mouth that wouldn't quit— but the way his hand shot up like a mouse trap confirmed it. And I might've just gotten myself escorted out in cuffs, thus ending my sorry academic career altogether, if Ponyboy hadn't chosen that exact moment to walk on by. "Mr. Rhodes? Everythin' okay?"

He let me go as fast as he'd moved to strike me. "Nothin' for you to worry about," Mr. Rhodes grunted in his direction, the blood coming back into his face, "just fixin' to take him down to the principal's office and see what he has to say about all this."

Oh, hell no— if they already wanted to beat my ass in there on day one, I was heading home and taking my chances. When Tim hit me, he at least didn't call the fuzz if I hit back. Before I could make my speedy exit, though, Ponyboy had arched an eyebrow and put on his best confused expression. "I don't understand, sir, I'm sorry— Curly's with me, I just dropped my bus pass on my way in, I told him to go on ahead."

I wasn't convinced he believed him, but he also seemed to like Ponyboy enough to swallow his bullshit whole, at least as much as he liked any East sider. The last time a teacher had looked at me with anything resembling fondness, Miss Taylor in kindergarten was real proud of me for going all day without shoving paste up my nose. "I'd suggest you find some better friends, young man," he said as a parting shot, "because I'll tell you this one's future: the Oklahoma penitentiary or the draft board."

Oh, didn't I know as much— I flipped the bird at his retreating back, which at least made me feel a little better. "What are you doin' here, Boy of the Year?" I scoffed, crossing my arms over my chest. "Don't tell me you been failin' classes all of a sudden."

I was embarrassed, that I'd had to be rescued in the first place and that I'd let some lousy high school teacher rattle me, and embarrassment made me mean. Ponyboy didn't bother taking the bait, though. "They're holdin' SAT prep classes in the gym over the summer, Darry's makin' me go." He held up the big green book he had nestled in his arms, his eyes tinged bloodshot. Too many late-night study sessions? "Give it to me straight, you actually plottin' something? I don't think the typewriters are gonna go for all that much, personally."

"No, I don't go in for nothin' less than liquor stores these days." I kicked my foot up against the locker grate and grimaced, but even though I considered myself a good liar, I couldn't come up with any way to explain this without the truth or implicating myself in a burglary. Besides, Ponyboy was the only greaser in town who had no right to give me static. "I flunked last year. Tim says I have to make up the credits."

His reaction was a predictably noisy hoot. "We're talkin' about the same Tim Shepard here, right, the dropout? He gonna start checkin' homework once you get home from school, too?"

Yeah, yeah, he could laugh all he wanted, really yuk it up— he was still under the delusion that Darry was stricter than Tim, which was the real gas. I rolled my eyes, and the laugh stuttered to a stop, and then we both jammed our hands into our pockets. I just couldn't bring myself to apologize, extend the olive branch. I missed him, sure, but loyalty to my family was etched into my bones like runic markings, something that bound me tighter than any judgement about right and wrong; Angela might've shot him point blank in this hallway and I would've helped her stash his corpse. Ponyboy had everything— every teacher's pet greaser, a star athlete, blazing towards his bright and glorious future like a comet— and she had nothing and nobody, besides me and Tim.

"Thanks," I still made myself say. I was halfway down the stairs before I realized that the stink of pot was stuck in my nostrils— too many late-night study sessions, my ass. He might've offered me some.

Suzanne was crunching a fistful of blonde curls in one hand and messing with the cash register with the other, when I walked into Jay's. Every post-pubertal greaser in town wanted to take a stab at her, but her tastes only ran to vaqueros and other stars of the rodeo circuit; I suspected she had something going on with Buck, who might've been ugly as shit but did meet the horseback riding condition, but had no way to confirm it. She wasn't the reason I was there, though. "You'd make a lot more money behind the bar," Suzanne said, looking up and down Jasmine's body like a madam appraising a hooker. "Margaret won't care you're underage, you mix a better Old Fashioned than I can."

"I got three brothers, and two of them are big ones, remember?" Jasmine shook her head briskly, as she mopped a patch of spat-out chew off the floor. "Darry doesn't give me the third degree if I'm out late no more, believe me when I say that's a pleasant change. I don't know if I want to throw his trust away for some extra tips."

"You're earnin' his trust, at a joint like this?"

"At this point, he's just impressed I ain't workin' on the pole." She wiped a strand of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand, as she straightened up, and the second she let herself smile as she saw me was all genuine. "Hey, Curly, what are you doin' here?"

She looked real cute, even with suds smeared across her face— Margaret stopped making the waitresses wear dorky uniforms with name tags after she took over, which probably helped, but it was just her too. "Heard this place got a relaxed attitude towards minors and alcohol."

Suzanne propped her elbow onto the surface of the bar and gave me a stare as hard as a coffin nail. "You want so much as a light beer out of me, you better tell me why you need it."

"My big brother's makin' me go to summer school—" I mimed fanning myself, like Vivien Leigh on the set of Gone With the Wind— "and turns out the district ain't springing for any air-con, even though you could cook hotcakes on the hoods of them cars outside. That good enough?"

Suzanne rolled her eyes, unmoved, but she fished a Falstaff out of the icebox under the bar and tossed it at me; I wasn't about to push my luck enough to ask her for a glass, or friendlier service. Jasmine sloshed the mop back into the bucket and sat down on the barstool beside me. She knew I had access to more free booze than there was rain in Seattle. "I ain't helpin' you out with no more homework, so don't even try it."

"I didn't come here for no free labor, maybe I just came lookin' for sympathy—"

Now she was the one rolling her eyes at me, but the corner of her mouth twitched as she did it. "You ain't gettin' none of that, neither— you wouldn't last ten minutes bein' raised by Darry Curtis, if you think havin' to make up the grade you flunked flat is rough."

I could've asked her about a million things— Angela, that guy Cliff she'd been handing out pamphlets with, when Ponyboy had gotten that hooked on the devil's lettuce— but what left my mouth next was pure shop talk. "You heard anythin' about Billy Reynolds lately?"

She could play the good girl all she wanted, and she might've managed to sneak the act past even Darry's gimlet eye, but I just knew her too damn well. There wasn't a dangerous man in Tulsa whose pulse she didn't keep a finger on, even now; if Cliff's only angle was spreading the good word of pacifism, I'd eat an entire tube of Brylcreem. "Not much," she demurred, crossing one leg over another at the thigh, but she couldn't hide the way I'd gotten her undivided attention. "Just that—"

"Jasmine? You ready?"

Oh, not him.

Her eyes flickered to mine apologetically, but then they were fixed on the clock hanging above the door, as Douglas strolled through it. "Yeah, this place is dead, anyway," she was already untying the apron strings around her waist, "let me just grab my purse from the back—"

She darted off, leaving the two of us to circle each other like lions on the fucking savannah; I let myself indulge the fantasy of shattering my beer bottle over his head, how each individual shard of glass would embed itself into his skull. Suzanne snapped her gum, loud enough to regain my attention. "Y'all fight in here and break nothin', you're gonna wish I'd let the fuzz handle it. We still ain't done with the insurance claim from last time."

"We'll be good, Suze, I promise." Douglas threw out flirtations like other people threw out used tissues, without thinking or caring, but even she let it drop with a slight toss of her hair. Ladykiller, they called him at school, a real hustler; what did they all see in him? What had both Jasmine and my sister seen in him? He wasn't that handsome, and he wasn't that tall. "What are you doin' here?"

I took my time unscrewing the cap and made sure to take a sip right at him, like I couldn't have given less of a damn that he was there. "Havin' a drink."

"Yeah, thanks, unlike you, I got an IQ above room temperature." He propped one knee up on the stool Jasmine had been sitting in, the vinyl still creased from the imprint of her ass. "Listen, I know you were sniffin' after her when she was with Winston, which makes you a real fucking shithead, by the way—"

I could've wrecked their entire relationship with a couple of well-placed words, if I wanted to, by telling him exactly what she and Dallas had been getting up to— but as tempting as it was, if he decided to drop a dime on her, I'd never forgive myself. "I'm a real fucking shithead."

Tim could've pulled a drive-by from here to Brooklyn, defrauded a senior living home, and the thought of narking on him never would've crossed my mind.

"You think you came up with somethin' original there?" I was good at reading the subtle shifts in people's expressions, revealing what they didn't want to give away, but you could've put Douglas on Mount Rushmore, the way his face was carved out of stone. "Mark drove Cathy's brother insane with the shit he sold, his folks just had him committed to a hospital upstate— he thinks there's spiders crawlin' all over his body when the risperdol wears off. Not that I'd expect M&M to be tuggin' at your heartstrings."

Jesus fuck, would anybody ever let me live that little wannabe-hippie down? "Should've known better than to charge for grass he couldn't pay up for—"

It sounded pathetic even to my own ears, and it was a lie, my uncles wouldn't have given me that much static over some two dollar pot deal. I'd tried to whup that kid's ass because I was bored, and sometimes when I got bored, it was like electric wires were fraying inside my brain. "I'm not even gonna threaten you off: she don't want you in the first place, and you know why?" He splayed his palm on the surface of the bar, leaned in closer to me. We had one thing in common: a talent for going in for the kill. "Because you're a fuckin' playground bully, Curly, no matter how much you try to throw your weight around. Big mouth, but too chickenshit for any fight where you ain't bein' backed up by your brother and his flunkies, or beatin' up on little kids. You think I'm afraid of you? Your whole family's nothing but cowards."

Rage simmered in me like the kind of fever that unraveled your proteins. We would've probably been the cause of a second insurance claim, if Jasmine hadn't come in again from the back room, clutching her purse in her fist. "Sorry, Margaret was talkin' my damn ear off, wants me to work a double Saturday and won't take no for an answer." She tilted forward to give Douglas a brief kiss on the mouth— he wrapped an arm around her waist as she disengaged, easy, possessive. She didn't look at me at all. "You parked outside?"

Tim knocked me in the shoulder with his, and not too gentle, either. "Eat your damn food, you got any idea what groceries cost these days?"

Somehow I suspected the rice-a-roni he'd ladled up wasn't bankrupting him, but I kept that little observation to myself, before he put me in charge of cooking. "Ain't hungry," I muttered, the bowl clamped between my knees as I listlessly pushed my spoon around. Like any good American family, we were eating in front of the TV, watching a Gunsmoke rerun; other than the pair of tits on Kitty, nothing else about it was holding my attention, and that was kind of involuntary.

"What are you, sick?" Yeah, lovesick, in the particularly pathetic way Tim got whenever Gabi told him to go kick rocks: curtains drawn, smoking grass, blaring the most sentimental parts of the Beatles' discography until he wore grooves into the record. It was settling in my throat like the beginnings of strep. "Somethin' happen at school?"

He was asking less out of concern and more as a trip wire— he wanted to know if I'd actually shown up, if I'd jump at the question. "School's fine, I guess. Same ol' shit in the summer, 'cept the air conditioning's broken." I made a valiant effort at shoveling another spoonful into my mouth, though it felt like chewing on boiled glue. No way I was mentioning Mr. Rhodes, or Ponyboy, for that matter— Tim, who considered him a good influence, would've never dropped it. "Ran into Jasmine today."

Tim gave me a look that could've withered the garden of Eden. "Ran into, or went looking for?"

I cussed as I splattered hot sauce down the front of my shirt. There went the last one that still passed the sniff test, and trying to do laundry in this neighborhood meant taking the hamper on a goddamned bus ride. "What's the difference?"

"What have I been sayin' all this time: you are way too goddamned desperate." He started shaking through the couch cushions for loose change, his nightly ritual; the laundromat wasn't free, and neither was the bus. "Pantin' after her with your tongue hanging out, Jasmine, why won't you pick me once and for all, c'mon, Jasmine, I'm such a nice guy— chicks hate that junk, and for good reason, because it's pathetic. You want her back, you need to act like you don't give a shit either way. Play it cool."

"Yeah, I tried your shitty reverse psychology advice, it wasn't working." Like I should've been listening to my brother in the first place, whose strict 'hit it and quit it' strategy towards his hookups had made him a notorious asshole even on the East Tulsa dating scene. "And you're one to talk, when you was climbin' a trellis to—"

This time, he jabbed me hard enough to push me into the armrest, and almost overturned the bowl into my lap— yeah, he could hit me all he wanted, but I saw the thorn pricks on his hands afterwards, like he'd picked a fight with a rosebush and lost. "Shut the fuck up, that's completely different. Gabi's a serious girl."

"So's Jasmine!"

"Cabrón, you're lucky that little chick ever gave you the time of day again, after you told half of Will Rogers you popped her cherry. You got no idea what a serious nothing is." His snort made him sound like he had a raging sinus infection. "And you don't appreciate how lucky you are to have a big brother givin' you all that shitty advice, neither. I had to get my sex ed from Tío Luis takin' me and Dally down to the 'adult' movie theater to learn about technique."

Call me naive, but I didn't actually know those existed up until that moment, and I sure had a lot of questions. Namely, one banging against the wall of my skull like a tennis ball against a garage door. "So do you, like, whack off together in there, or—"

He slapped a hand against the side of my head, cutting off my line of questioning at the pass. Probably for the best— I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer, anyway. "Listen to me for once, and grow some damn self-respect along with a set of balls. Don't chase after her no more, and especially don't go chasin' down to her job, where she can't get away from you. Let her make the next move." I still wasn't sure how much sense he was talking, but then he shifted gears like he was fixing to go up a hill. "Heard you been gunnin' for Billy Reynolds."

On screen, Marshall Matt Dillon cocked his pistol, for about the millionth time per episode. Paralysis spread out from behind my breastbone like a starburst, but if he'd known about the heater, he would've already killed me dead where I sat. "He beat the absolute shit out of one of my boys."

"One of my boys. I jumped him in, last I checked." My teeth ground against each other like a piece of faulty machinery, though Tim was the one who was supposed to be wearing a mouth guard at night. "I don't want you involved in none of this, whatever half-crocked scheme you got in mind. Let me handle it."

"You reckon I can't take him?"

There was a point, from maybe fall of last year to right before he left for Mexico— after Gabi had turned him down flat, and Rafa's Jerry Lee Lewis-style love affair with Angela got rid of his last friend, and he'd run out of all of his other options, anyway— when I thought Tim had finally realized I was grown, not just some loser kid always begging to ride shotgun. That between landing in the drunk tank together and forming a tag team to kick Douglas unconscious, we could act more like brothers now, rather than him playing at the kind of dad we'd only ever seen on sitcoms. Ha. Fat fucking chance. The minute I saw him lounging around in his drawers in here, I tried to tell him that Billy was trouble, and he'd blown me off like I was a toddler weighing in on the Johnson presidency. And now that he'd figured out even a broken clock can be right twice a day, he was shipping me off to school while he—

I couldn't have anything. Not one fucking thing, with him around.

"I know you can't take him, Curly, you're three years younger and his bicep's the size of your head," he said, before he leaned forward to squint at the screen. "Christ, ain't there nothin' else to watch besides this shit?" Nothing worth getting up and messing with the dial for, apparently; he slumped back against the cushion. The blueish light from the TV illuminated every crevice of his face, the fine lines starting to form around his forehead and mouth. Tim was twenty, he wouldn't be old enough to legally drink until November, but he was already tired. "Besides, you can't shoot, and word around the campfire's that he's strapped. Stay out of it before someone's hosin' your guts off the sidewalk."

Tim had a solid thirty IQ points on me, but his fatal flaw was that even when he understood what made somebody tick, he thought it was beneath his dignity to have to take that into account. He couldn't have made me want to get Billy Reynolds between the eyes more if he'd offered me a cash bounty for it. "You ain't been here," I started, cautious like I was starting to walk across splintering ice. "You don't know the score."

"Been gone long enough, I guess you forgot your place on the food chain." Another skill Tim never saw fit to cultivate: subtlety. He dug into my shoulder blade like he wanted to scoop it out. "I wasn't asking your opinion, and I wasn't even asking as your brother: I'm in charge of this outfit, and if you so much as whip it out to piss without my permission, there's gonna be hell to pay. I got hundreds in profit and people's lives to consider, before your hurt fucking ego."

He released me, and I rocked backwards— there'd be a bruise tomorrow, from the imprint of his fingers. Then he let out a dry laugh as he shook his hand out. "Remember it used to be you, always tryna hold me back? The fuckin' angel on my shoulder. Now look at you."

I couldn't tell if he was proud or regretful. "Tim—"

"It'd kill me," he said. "If somethin' happened to you."

I took my bottom lip between my teeth, any response halted before it could leave my clamped-shut mouth. Tim and I didn't have brotherly Kodak moments like those Curtises, make tearful speeches about how much we cherished each other; I had no ready script for this, no frame of reference, especially for the slight catch in his voice. "And pick up your goddamned underwear," he added with a swift cuff upside my head, which marked the fifth time he'd hit me in about five minutes. There was a pair knotted around the leg of the couch. "Do I look like your fucking maid?"

I'd feel terrible about it later— hell, I was already starting to feel terrible, and I hadn't even gotten the chance to act on my worst impulses yet. But what I realized, as I hunched down to untangle my briefs, was that power wasn't something I could beg him to give me. It was something I'd have to take for myself.