Good sense, innocence, crippling mankind

Dead kings, many things I can't define

Occasions, persuasions clutter your mind

Incense and peppermints, the color of time

— Incense and Peppermints, Strawberry Alarm Clock

May 25th, 1967

School had just let out a week ago, the summer stretching out hot in front of me like the Mojave Desert, and I was rereading a crumpled letter for what must've been the millionth time. Soda wasn't especially verbose, so it never took me too long to get to the end and start from the top again, like I'd discover something I'd missed before.

Hey Jas,

Boy am I glad Dad took us hunting 'cause some of the motherfuckers in this platoon couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if there lives depended on it. Should of gotten Steve to enlist with me with that buddy deal so we could be here together. It's not all that bad though even if the food is shit (worse than your pot pie). Theres all sorts of crazy animals here like elefants

(The letter cut off to some very bad doodles of elephants, but I knew they'd come from the heart.)

I LOVE YOU ALL— this took up about half the page— and I can't wait until I'm out of this shithole and home with y'all. Make sure Darry and Pony ain't fighting okay. And tell Curly if he breaks your heart I'll break his neck. They taught me a lot of ways to do it in boot camp.

Love (again),

Sodapop Curtis

His information was out of date, as was the letter— it was dated February, about a month after he'd shipped out from boot camp to Quảng Ngãi province, and we hadn't heard a word from him since. I tried to tell myself to stop worrying over nothing, that if he'd been injured— or God forbid killed— we would've received word by now. That Soda was notoriously flighty and forgetful, and that military correspondence from Southeast Asia wasn't the fastest delivery the postal service had to offer. I kept telling myself over and over again, like repeating the Lord's Prayer, until I'd halfway convinced myself it was true.

"Jasmine, can you do me a favor?" Judy's shrill voice carried all the way out to the porch, and I groaned. Leave it to her to interrupt my brooding— in fact, I wasn't sure I'd had a single uninterrupted thought since she moved in.

Darry and Judy's marriage was about the most mercenary thing I'd ever seen, and I used to sell drugs; in the pictures of me at the wedding, I was wearing some lilac mess that washed me out bad, trying not to look too hungover on camera. It was three weeks after Soda's deployment. Pony got best man by default. Before I could so much as blink, they'd cleared out Mom and Dad's old room and sent their stuff to Uncle Gene for storage, and Judy's makeup was on the bathroom counter, her dresses— excuse me, frocks— slung over everywhere, and her attitude all up in what used to be my turf.

Darry's motivations were pretty obvious— not only did he figure out that once Ponyboy turned eighteen, it'd be open season on him from the draft board, but Miz Edwards was still making not-so-subtle comments about how him getting married would finally get the state off his back re: my urgent need for a female role model (apart from my Aunt Rose, who, last I'd heard, was responding pretty well to electroshock therapy). As for Judy, she was harder to read, but she was one of those spoiled rich girls who'd always had a taste for danger— as long as she could come back to her safe West side house at night— which had made high school Darry her perfect match. Now that she'd actually run off for good and was stuck living in our neighborhood, with its rundown furniture, refrigerators and couches on the lawns, and odd shootout, we'd long since lost most of our charm.

"Jasmine?"

If I waited any longer, she'd come outside, and I definitely didn't want that; I heaved myself up with a sigh, brushed the dust off my ass, and pushed the screen door open. Judy was lying on the couch, her eyes shut though she'd closed the blinds in the living room, a damp towel pressed over her forehead. "Yeah?" I replied, in a way Mom would've scolded me for— she liked hearing 'yes, ma'am', didn't want strangers to think she raised her kids in a barn— but Judy sure as hell wasn't my mama.

"Can you go to the corner store and pick me up some ginger ale and saltines?" she said, her voice breathy and weak— I could hear the million men she'd used it on in that voice, to do her a million little favors. "You're not doin' anything, are you?"

I fished around for an excuse, couldn't come up with one in time, and settled for sheer intransigence. "The store ain't far from here, you don't even have to drive, don't you remember where it is?" I'd been worried she might mess up the little domestic routine I had going, but my fears turned out to be unfounded, because Judy was the laziest person I'd ever met— and I'd met Two-Bit. Having grown up with two rotating housekeepers, just the task of pushing her own dirt from one end of the place to another seemed to tax her reserves of energy.

"I told you, I'm not feelin' good—" her voice had now slid into a decided whine— "I'm real nauseous. Can't you just do this one thing for me?"

She was usually more subtle than that, which made me think that she was actually sick, not just putting on a display of learned helplessness. As much as I didn't want her around, I doubted she was more thrilled about having to share her husband and marital home with two teenagers, who came with the package. She wasn't quite malicious in the way Rose could be with me, her mind a collection of schemes like a Rube Goldberg machine— she didn't have near enough going on upstairs for more than petty sniping. That was why I reluctantly said "all right" and grabbed my silver purse from the arm of the couch.

"Thanks, Jasmine, you can be real sweet when you want to be," she said, and I accepted the backhanded compliment in the spirit it was intended— Judy was the kind of southern girl who never insulted anyone without prefacing it with 'bless her heart'. Still, I hauled ass. At least this gave me an excuse to get out of the house, out of my head.

I had good intentions, really, of coming right back with Judy's ginger ale. But you know what they say about those... I ran into Bryon at the store, he was working the register that day, and in the time it took him to ring me up, he'd convinced me to wait around long enough for him to clock out and drive me home.

I didn't love Bryon and I was reasonably certain he didn't love me, either— he'd had a reputation around school as a ladykiller, a real hustler, which was fine by me, because I had a reputation for being fast myself, despite only having slept with two guys of my own volition. I knew once we finished school, or he got drafted, or he met someone more his type, another 'classy' Cathy Carlson, he would move on from me and whatever we had would be over; I'd just been trying to piss Curly off in the beginning, if I was really being honest with myself. But he had a certain sweetness and vulnerability that endeared him to me, the air of an overgrown Saint Bernard puppy with his dark eyes and hair, especially with Mark gone. Things seemed so solid in Bryon's world, black and white, right and wrong; I'd found it refreshing, back then, when I'd spent so much time wrestling with questions he found had self-evident answers.

What could I say. Getting fucked over by the Shepards really had a way of bringing two people together.

He pressed me up against the side of his car once we were in the parking lot, one hand cupping my ass, the other twisted up in my hair; I'd started flat-ironing it now, letting it hang down to my mid-back, a fashion I swore started overnight. "I missed you," he said, and the less cynical part of me wanted to believe he meant it. "Been workin' so much I can't remember which way is up."

"How's your mama doin', then?" I asked as I slid into the passenger seat— the car was a junker, a pale blue '54 Skylark that was barely street legal, but he was proud as hell of it all the same. She had a pretty bad case of Crohn's disease; she'd been back in the hospital for yet another surgery, getting half of her large intestine removed. I'd come to like her well enough, though she happened to be easily one of the least engaged mothers I'd ever met.

"She's better, she came home a couple days ago— they decided against givin' her an ostomy bag this time, which is good," he said. "Already wonderin' when you're comin' around again, you know she's been real lonely without—"

Without Mark around— it always seemed to come back to Mark, in the end, and Bryon's voice trailed off into ribbons of smoke. I wanted to broach the silence somehow, but nothing seemed right, until he opened up the console and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. It was half-empty, which surprised me, Bryon didn't have much of a taste for boozing; he unscrewed the cap, and the scent, sharp in its sweetness, filled the hot interior. "Want some?" he asked as he tipped it towards me, having taken a solid gulp himself. I did, and I almost spilled some down my front as he hit the gas.

"Guess who came by the other day," he said once we were circling Hunter Park.

"Who?"

"No, guess."

I rolled my eyes. "John Wayne. Natalie Wood. Sean Connery. I'm on the edge of my seat here."

He let out a low whistle. "Miss Angela Shepard herself. Or, excuse me, Mrs. Hernandez."

A violent nausea rose through me at her name, like I just drank a bottle of drain cleaner, and I fought the temptation to crack open Judy's ginger ale. "Huh," I said, thankful that my heart-shaped sunglasses shielded my face from view. "What'd she want, then?"

"She gave me the usual, started goin' off about how I could snitch on my own brother—"

"Bet you just loved that."

"Told her she looked real good with short hair. If that didn't shut her right up..."

I stifled a laugh behind my fist, and he gave me a scolding look as he shifted into second gear, or, well, tried to shift into second gear and scraped the side of a mailbox. Like he was counting on me to fill the role of his malfunctioning conscience. "Figured you'd have called me an asshole for that by now, I thought you two were real good friends."

"Me too," I said shortly, "until she decided to break a bottle over my brother's head. Things change." I pushed my hair back with my sunglasses, in a neat wave, and examined the result in his rearview mirror. "I'm sure Princess Shepard considers herself en vogue with the Twiggy look, anyway, I ain't worried about her vanity."

The vitriol coming from my mouth surprised even me, and I was the one saying it, towards a fifteen— no, she must've just turned sixteen— year-old girl who was married off right after her quinceañera. But I'd told her to get an abortion back when she got knocked up in the fall, like both her grandmother Niamh and Tim had wanted— she'd insisted on going through with it, hitching her star to Rafa's wagon. At this point, I really didn't consider her marital happiness or lack thereof my concern, I'd tried to do more than enough for her.

A mean sort of smirk formed around the side of his mouth. "You tore out half her scalp in the parking lot last fall, guess I shouldn't have expected you to be too fussed."

I remembered that with some grim satisfaction, even all these months later, even considering all of the trouble it had brought me. "She should've been rolling around on the floor with her brothers growin' up, the way I was. At least then she'd be able to throw her own right hooks."

Bryon took another sip from the bottle, like he was trying to work up enough courage to say what he thought. "Someone messed with my locker, last day of school." His voice was as flat as soda left out for a week. "Carved 'snitch' onto the front. Guess it was one of Mark's old friends."

"Yeah?" I didn't like what he'd done, it didn't sit any better with me a couple of months after the fact. But I didn't quite have the strength to condemn him, either, not when the rest of the world and his own mind were already working overtime on that.

"People expect me to be happy about it, like I put some kingpin in the slammer," he said. "Or be flagellating myself from guilt. But I'm just... runnin' on empty, I guess."

I reached out to touch his forearm; when he looked at me, his eyes were a brown so dark I found it difficult to distinguish between the iris and the pupil. I had never liked Mark much, though he and Ponyboy were good friends before he got arrested— there was something about him I found deeply unsettling, a kind of careless criminality that reminded me of Luis, the certainty that his actions would never have consequences that didn't glance off him. I liked him even less for the hold he still seemed to have on everyone, a way of monopolizing the room even from hundreds of miles away.

"Seems like the only time I feel anything at all is when we're riding around together," he added, and then I cranked the window down, lit a cigarette to avoid saying anything in response. I should've been pleased that Bryon Douglas, heartbreaker of heartbreakers, was falling for me, but instead a vague sense of unease coated me like the first snow falling in winter. I wasn't so good at being any man's better half.

"Jasmine," came Darry's drawl as I walked through the front door, "you really do give 'fashionably late' a whole new meaning."

I was surprised to see him seated at the dinner table, with the amount of extra shifts he'd been picking up lately— dressed not in his usual dusty work clothes, but in a starched button-down and... chinos? Seeing Ponyboy was another shock, he was never even home anymore, and weirdly enough, I had no idea where he went all day. Probably his girlfriend Cathy's place, if I had to guess— no, I couldn't believe I'd seen the day he got one either— or at track practice or debate practice or something, but the months I'd spent pushing had taught me how to sniff out when someone was up to no good, though you didn't need the nose of a bloodhound to get on this case. He'd had a taste for pot since our parents were still alive, you could smell it on his shirts as he came home red-eyed and with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth. How Darry hadn't noticed yet was beyond me.

(The gang was more accurately described as 'Soda's friends', and though Dally and Johnny's deaths hadn't quite managed to splinter them, Soda's deployment was the final nail in the coffin; Steve and Two-Bit had split off into a tight private twosome, carrying on drag-racing and rumbling and drinking hard in his absence, but while Darry might've still been half a kid when he first took our guardianship, he was a full-grown man now, and was starting to look ridiculous street fighting or hollering at broads with them like some disaffected teenager. As for Ponyboy, without Johnny or Soda around to tether him to the others, he'd spun out of their orbit entirely.)

"Sorry," I said half-heartedly as I slapped the grocery bag down on the kitchen counter; I'd had to stay out later than I planned, in part because Bryon had pulled over for a pretty heated makeout session, in part because I needed to sober up before I came home. In my defense, Judy seemed more awake and with-it now, sitting beside Darry with a gleaming smile on her face, clutching his arm. "What are you all doin' home, huh? I forget about some national holiday?"

Darry ducked his head and scratched the back of his neck, looking sheepish. "Okay, we found out a month ago, technically," he said, and I already had the sneaking suspicion I knew what he was going to come out with next. "We were waitin' to tell everybody, but—"

"We're havin' a baby," Judy burst out before he could finish the sentence. She was already the kind of girl Steve or Two-Bit would refer to as a real doll— a natural blonde, pale green eyes like flower stems, lips pink without lipstick and teeth straight without braces. What I'd attributed to the new shimmer blush they'd started putting out at the drugstore, might've just been pregnancy glow after all. She cupped her stomach like there was anything to cup yet.

"Wait, seriously?" Ponyboy slapped a hand over his mouth, but that wasn't enough to cover up his grin, which was threatening to reach both of his ears. He loved Judy, had embraced her from the start— the mama's boy of our family, I'd always suspected he felt snubbed by how Rose considered him and Soda as interesting as the upholstery. Considered her sophisticated, even, because she knew the difference between types of forks and could play piano like Mom used to. "That's amazing— what do y'all hope it'll be?"

"Boy," Darry said immediately. "Jasmine's more trouble than you an' Soda put together."

"Girl," Judy gushed, "oh Lord, I just can't wait to dress a little girl up, there's so many cute bows I've got to buy for her—"

Ponyboy got up from the table, and then the three of them were huddled in an awkward, sprawled-limbed hug, one that I should've joined. Something hot and heavy had settled in the pit of my stomach, though, like the first time I'd gotten my period, and it lurched into my throat as I spoke up. "Speakin' of Soda—" Ponyboy and Judy were still oblivious, but Darry caught the edge in my voice, and judging by the slight arch of his eyebrow, he wasn't a fan. "Exactly where's this baby gonna sleep?"

"It's a four bedroom house," Darry said, "in my old room, I guess. We ain't that lackin' for space."

"And where's Soda supposed to go? When he comes home?"

The arch was rapidly getting higher; now Judy registered my hostility too, was watching me with a wary expression. "Well, he can share with Ponyboy again—"

"He ain't some kid no more, what are they gonna do, share a bed too like they did when Pony was fourteen?" I was being unreasonable and childish and unfair; I recognized it even at the time, that I should've kept my mouth shut on what was supposed to be a happy occasion, but panic was rising inside of me like a wave from the Gulf of Mexico, swallowing up all my good sense. "What are you tryna do, replace him or somethin'?"

(He'd been gone for six months, and I still felt his lack like a phantom limb. Half the time I woke up and expected him to still be there, hear him clattering around in the bathroom, singing something off-key, mediating yet another fight between Darry and Ponyboy.)

"I wasn't exactly expectin' you to throw a baby shower," Darry said, his tone now threatening dire punishment if I didn't shape up, "but last I checked, I didn't need your permission to reproduce, lil' lady."

"Yeah, I guess you don't need to ask us nothin' at all," I said, and stalked down the hall to my room. If I stuck around, I was going to either get grounded into '68 or start crying, and I didn't know which one I preferred.

I'd only managed to lie facedown on my bed for about two minutes before Darry burst into my room. He didn't bother to knock, but I begrudgingly had to admit I hadn't earned much consideration from him, either.

"Jasmine, I don't have time for this," he said, tapping his foot against the floor like a particularly nervous metronome. "Are you fucking serious right now? You're seventeen years old, throwin' a tantrum like some little kid."

"You don't have time for this?" I demanded as I sat upright, hugged my knees to my chest. "Who do you think's gonna be raisin' this rugrat, huh?"

"Excuse me?" He knelt down and rested his palms on his thighs, which, as condescending as it was, still worked to intimidate me a little. "You know what, I've tried to be patient, but you just keep pushin' me every time you open that mouth—"

"She can't even boil a pot of water, Darry, I had to teach her how to use an oven." Of course he didn't see the problem here, as the father, it wasn't like he was going to be dealing with the baby once it came out. "You think she can look after a whole kid by herself? Unless you plan on hiring a nanny, that's gonna be my job, same as when Mom brought home all them kids for her daycare—"

"Don't exaggerate," Darry said. "She can make pot pie okay." Then he ran his hand through his hair, hard enough that his cowlick stuck up like he'd jammed his finger into an electric socket. "It ain't your decision, this ain't up for debate, Jesus. I'm the adult here. What do you think you are, the lady of the house or somethin'?" That one stung a little more than I wanted to admit. "We're havin' a baby and you're just gonna have to deal with it."

"You don't even love her."

I expected him to put up a token objection, but Darry had never been much good at peddling bullshit to anyone. "I really, really don't want to go to Nam, and I'm perfectly draft-eligible after Ponyboy turns eighteen," he said from between gritted teeth. "It's this, committing a felony, or putting on a pair of lace panties before my medical examination. I picked my least painful option here."

Some of my indignation vanished at that, and I felt selfish and immature; the last thing I wanted was two brothers in Nam. "You could've at least waited to knock her up until Pony and I moved out," I offered as my final protest.

He rolled his eyes. "I hope you wait a little longer than Mom to get hitched, it's 1967 and all." A year ago, he would've stormed out of the room, and I would've gone back to screaming into the bedspread, and we both would've stayed pissed for a good long while— but we'd come to a better understanding of each other lately. He sat down beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulled me into his side. "Soda's gonna be so excited to be an uncle, trust me, he loves babies. I don't even know where you got all that junk from."

If I confided in Darry, about how I swore I could sense something wrong with Soda even from thousands of miles away, he would've just told me to quit talking nonsense— we had enough real worries without fussing over a premonition. But I still couldn't shake the terrible, haunting feeling that this baby was meant to be a replacement for him, a sick sort of deal made with God.

"I'm real nervous about this too, okay?" The way his teeth dug into his lower lip belabored the point. "I don't know how to be a dad—"

"You sort of raised us," I said, trying to be halfway helpful.

He snorted. "That's what's got me all worried."

As much as that was to process, my real troubles didn't begin until I showed up at Jay's the next day— I'd started working there last summer, though whether to prove to Darry or to myself that I could get into legitimate employment, I wasn't sure. I hadn't expected to last longer than my first week, when some greasy little creep reached for my ass and I poured hot coffee all over his hand, but as I was untying my apron and preparing my resignation speech, my boss Margaret just cackled, slapped me on the back, and poured me some of the Jack she kept in her office— she was a feminist before Ms. magazine ever put out its first issue, and had gone through three husbands to boot, so we got along just fine. Despite the monotony, I liked the job all right; what it lacked in excitement or decent pay, it made up in not having death threats as an occupational hazard, either.

That is, until I spotted Luis sitting in a corner booth, his face obscured by an old newspaper but still unmistakeably his— unlike the other rough characters that came through Jay's, of which there were a fair few, the black teardrop under his eye would set him apart in any crowd. I froze, couldn't move or speak for a moment, like I was having an episode of sleep paralysis; he looked up from an article about Elvis and Priscilla's wedding, gave me a smirk. "Fancy seein' you at a joint like this," he said. "You mind gettin' me some scrambled eggs, nenita?"