Judy hiked her leopard skin purse (class of '63 graduation gift: she no longer wore the matching pill hat) higher up on her shoulder, marching across the street with grim determination. I followed behind her like a duckling that'd gotten grounded by its mama, all but dragging my feet. In addition to everything else, it was just too hot to deal with this bullshit. "Where are we goin' again?"
She turned around to give me the same smile Mom had used to coax Bobby Jenkins— Christ, I still remembered that little jackass, he must've been in second grade by now— into eating his graham crackers instead of smashing them into the carpet. (You better believe Mom hadn't been half as sugary getting any of her four children, who were not paying customers, to do shit.) "Anywhere you want, Jasmine, I'm all ears. I really want us to finally spend some time together."
She'd sprung this on me at the breakfast table, while Ponyboy and I bickered over possession of the crossword. At first, I'd figured she'd spotted me eavesdropping the night before and wanted to make peace, but the way her gaze kept flickering over to Darry suggested that she was really trying to prove a point to him— about just how great a surrogate mother and wife she could be, volunteering to wrangle his most difficult child by her lonesome. Likewise, it had taken me this long to realize that Darry hadn't been standing up for me for my sake, so much as using me as a pawn in his cold war with Judy. Thinking about how neatly this mapped onto my parents' marriage was depressing enough to make me want to start drinking before noon.
"I don't know." I wasn't being a pissy little brat on purpose, I hadn't had much occasion to spend time on the West side since Rose had split town, lacking Darry and Ponyboy's ability to make friends in high places— no Soc-y boys offering to take me out, no Cherries or Marcias inviting me for poolside smoothies at the country club. I wished I could just give her the slip, but I'd never hear the end of it.
She took a lock of my hair between her fingers, stretching it out like it was awaiting a pair of shears. I felt the same full-body creep as I would've if a cockroach had climbed onto my shoulder. "Maybe we could get you a trim," she said, squinting her left eye up as she examined me. "I know growin' it out long is the style these days, like those hippies, but I think it'd be more manageable if you kept it shorter, with your curls and all that texture—"
"I can't just cut it because I feel like it."
Every syllable came out clipped— I didn't want to explain why, either. Judy was chronically incapable of taking any hint dropped in front of her, though, tilting her head to the side like a confused shih tzu. She must have thought I'd lost my damn mind. "But it was kind of short when I met you—"
"Because people kept dying on us."
"Jasmine Eugenia—" Nothing good ever happened after my mama pulled my first and middle names out. She sighed and brushed a hand across her sweaty brow as she tugged me into the bathroom, then started rummaging through the medicine cabinet, probably counting down the days until school started and she'd have us out of the house again. "If you can't take care of long hair by yourself, I'm sorry, it needs to be cut. I'm not combin' out all these knots every day while you sit there and holler like I'm killin' you dead."
My hair was the bane of her existence; I'd inherited a cross between my daddy's color and thickness and my mama's loose curls, and the result frizzed to all hell in the summer and refused to hold a single styling product. Not to mention that with three brothers, the amount of twigs it contained after I'd been playing outside all day could've filled an arbotoreum. I wasn't about to make it any easier on her, though. "I don't want no haircut!"
"I'll give you a popsicle after," she promised, and I immediately fell silent, all too easily bought. "A grape one," and Soda always hogged those, too. I sat still on the lip of the sink, no wriggling, while she dug out a pair of shears from underneath a pile of dried-up mascara tubes.
"You ain't cuttin' that girl's hair."
Daddy's presence was always a surprise back in those days; not a huge one, but like seeing clouds when the meteorologist had promised clear skies. "Why not?" Mama asked, not really listening. "I'll do it neat at the ends, she won't look raggedy at all—"
"Because I said she ain't gettin' it cut." He crossed his arms, edgy as he leaned against the doorway, like he was trying to keep from falling off a high wire. "Quit fussin' with it."
"Well, I don't have time to look after it for her or try to make her brush a hundred strokes a night," she said briskly, "all the little girls on the block have a bob—"
"I let you raise them kids how you want. Do what you want. Take them to that fucking church—"
This was finally enough to get her hackles up. "Don't you cuss in front of the little ones—"
"It's sacred," he said, his voice as immutable as running into a stone wall. "You can't cut it. You're cuttin' off part of her."
"Okay, why don't you say it like that, make me sound like I'm about to chop her fingers off one by one— I didn't know." She slapped the shears back down, color high like she'd slathered her face in dollar store blush, and sucked in a sharp breath. "You want to raise them the way you please, Darrel, then you go on ahead, but don't you come down on me like this when you're never around to begin with. Like you've ever brushed that child's hair a day in her fucking life."
She left the room at a fast clip, jostled right past him. I got the feeling that she wasn't about to come back with my popsicle.
Judy was slower on the uptake than my mama had been, but she got there eventually, realization dawning on her face alongside the same pink-cheeked embarrassment. "We can't just do that," I said tightly, hoping that she wouldn't start apologizing next. "So thank you, but no."
What was I hoping for, if Darry had done what, exactly? Brought home a Shawnee, Choctaw, Cherokee girl from the rez, miracle of all miracles? She wouldn't be anything like us, either— for that matter, would probably find us just as foreign, with our handful of Apache phrases gathering dust in the back of our minds, my half-assed bead crafts lying in a tipped-over box in my closet, where Darry had told me to stash them before the social worker came. That didn't quite stop the hoping dead in its tracks, though.
Her obvious loneliness struck me all the same, the way coming here must've been the first time she'd felt at home in close to a year. She reminded me so much of my aunt— and no matter how much contempt I had stored up for her, a tiny part of me wished I could've tried harder somehow. Been the pliant little ballerina she'd hoped to find. Gotten her to stick around. "You want to go look at clearance dresses at Dillard's?" I asked, my desperate version of an olive branch. "I think there's a maternity aisle somewhere in there, too…"
Buck's roadhouse— which Dallas informed me a couple of weeks into our relationship was actually a refurbished whorehouse, explaining the prominent bar space and million bedrooms upstairs— had seen a hell of a lot wilder scenes than Sylvia, loaded off of three tequila sodas, trying to beat the brakes off her brother with her purse. She was really giving it her all, though. "You dumbass idiot motherfucker—" and she followed that with a heavy blow to the side of his neck— "why would you enlist on purpose?"
"Listen— ow— Syl, would you knock it off?" Nate said, in a voice that was altogether far too whiny for a future U.S. Army soldier. He tried to shield himself with his already-cracked glass, and only ended up with a face full of splashed whiskey. "The recruiter said me and Joel could be in the same platoon, that we could get sent to Germany or somewhere further out of the way, maybe—"
"And then you two jokers just signed right on the dotted line, huh, no more questions asked? Are you completely retarded? Did the shrooms kill whatever brain cells you had left up there?" I grabbed her by the arm to keep her from going in for more; I was afraid she might dislocate her shoulder, at this rate, the way she was swinging it around like a windmill. "Does Ma even know yet?"
"Ma knows that every guy in the neighborhood is fixin' to get drafted anyway, so she ought to at least be happy I made it easier on myself," he said, for the first time with a hint of bite as she clipped him around the ear with her purse strap. "Look," he added, downright sanguinely, as she paused to catch her breath, "there's tons of cool shit about the army, it's not all bad. You get to travel the world on Uncle Sam's dime— I ain't never been nowhere, besides Arkansas once, and that don't even count. The pay's good, too, and I heard if you marry some chick before you ship out, they'll move you out of the barracks and into family—"
"You understand that your job is gonna be dodgin' bullets in the jungle, right, not drivin' a damn forklift in Bavaria? That I seen your grades before you dropped out, that you ain't fixin' to score high enough on the ASVAB for nothin' else, no matter what that recruiter was sweet-talkin' into your ear to meet his monthly quota?"
"You reckon I ain't dodged bullets before, sis?" He licked a drop of whiskey off the side of the glass and gave her an indignant look. "I was in A-level English before I quit, too— Tim can tell you, we passed notes together in there."
I twisted a handful of my skirt as they picked at each other, a hunk of cloudy ice melting in a rum and coke I no longer felt like nursing. Soda had enlisted, too, enticed by a recruiter's pretty lies, too, and a lot of good it'd done him in the end. I'd stopped getting up early in the morning, waiting for the mailman like an overeager puppy, months ago— and started wondering if his final scrawled-out letter was the last thing I'd ever have of him.
When I swiveled around as the record player faded into Waylon Jennings, I found Angela slumped in an armchair, ringed by four filled-to-bursting trash bags. She looked so defeated, she didn't even notice that the cigarette between her fingers was a millimeter away from singeing her.
I left those two to it, and snatched the smoldering butt out of her hand and crushed it under my heel. "You decide to pursue a new career in waste management, Angel?"
"That useless sack of shit I'm stuck callin' my husband got us evicted, tends to happen when you can't hold down a job long enough to collect a paycheck." She huffed so hard, she had to spit out a piece of hair that'd flown into her mouth. "Well, technically, we got evicted at the beginning of the month. The landlord just now decided to throw all of our shit out onto the lawn and change the locks."
"And where the hell's your man during all this, huh?"
"At Mami and Papi's, obviously, where else?" She fumbled around her pockets for another cigarette and came up empty. "Oh, this must be makin' Marisol's entire year, she's been waitin' for her little hijito to come home with his tail between his legs ever since I got him to move us out— she can finally feed him up, make sure he don't have to lift another finger around the house, now that he's out of my clutches. Because I'll deep-throat a barrel before I go back there."
Years later was still too soon for me to hear her joke about offing herself. I pinched the side of my thigh, hard, trying to keep the room from spinning even though I'd only had half a glass. Spending too much time around any Shepard had a way of making the boundaries of reality seem far too malleable, they operated on a logic all their own, and that went double for Angela. "You tell Tim yet?" I was already starting to inch towards the payphone Buck had hung up in the back, with the number of his favorite dirt-cheap attorney taped above it.
"Stop right there," she said sharply, holding her hand up like she was crossing a busy street. "No, I am not about to head over to all my fucking brother's I told you so's, Curly says he's turned into a damn prison warden tryna impress Gabi. You think I want to go from married woman to dodgin' Tim's rules and curfew? Be serious."
Like I said: reality was melting around me like a bad acid trip. "I think you're gonna be sleepin' on a park bench unless you learn to live with them, real quick."
"I'll find someplace else to crash, okay, I just need a few days—"
"Do you even have enough money for a motel room?"
"Well, the nice thing about bein' a woman is that you've always got somethin' you can sell."
She gave me a brittle and daring smile, and part of me was tempted to turn on my heel and walk right out in response, once I'd yanked half my hair out of my scalp. Angela wasn't my sister or my problem, and she wasn't so much of a little girl anymore. She had options, could go home to her mother, her in-laws, her brothers, I doubted Luis would let her starve out on the street— she just didn't feel like taking them. If she wanted to go hunting for a landlord who took payment in blowjobs because she was too proud to admit that her marriage had failed, that the house she'd been playing had just gone up in flames, Christ, it wasn't my responsibility to save her from her fate.
Except I loved her, and that wasn't how Mom and Dad had raised me. "Come stay with us."
Her response was immediate and ungrateful. "I don't need your charity."
"Who said anything about charity? You're gonna be real busy fetching and carrying for Princess Judy, you better get ready to take a load off my shoulders." I felt a little bad wearing the top and skirt she'd bought me as I said this, but that feeling started to drain away after remembering that in her first trimester of pregnancy, Judy was already too weak to pour her own glass of lemon-lime Kool-Aid. "Not to mention how them boys think the place vacuums, dusts, and mops itself. I need backup."
Her face softened, ever so slightly, but that sure as hell didn't mean she'd let her guard all the way down. "Won't Darry have somethin' to say about all this?"
"We practically ran an orphanage for Soda's friends," I said with an eyeroll, "it's more than about time I got to bring a stray of my own home. Get your stuff."
"Absolutely not."
"But Darry!"
"Does this house look like an animal shelter to you, lil' girl?" Stirring a pot of macaroni made him seem slightly less menacing than usual, before he started waving the spoon around for emphasis. "We are at maximum capacity, and the baby ain't even here yet."
Like I needed Angela to know how much he loved calling me that; she did me the favor of politely examining our potholder collection. "Says the guy who keeps the door unlocked at night—"
"So Steve—" we tiptoed, as always, around the subject of Dallas— "can have a place to crash for the night when the old man kicks him out, or Two-Bit can sleep it off. What you're askin' for sounds like a hell of a lot more permanent arrangement."
"You let Sylvia stay here before—"
"Did Sylvia ever get one of her brother's goons to break a bottle over Ponyboy's head?" Darry's accusing stare found its new target, who had now moved on to examining the cracks in the plastic cups on the counter; we'd hit the crux of the matter. "Kid's about to come home even less than he already does, and that's sayin' something."
"I'm sorry."
We were both a little stunned as we turned to face her, me even more than Darry. If Angela had ever apologized before in her life, she certainly hadn't done it in my presence— to be honest, I always suspected she might turn into a pillar of salt like Lot's wife if she ever tried it, or burst into flame. "And I don't plan on bein' a burden on anybody, neither, I pull my weight." Hernandez by marriage or not, the defiant way she lifted her chin up, that was pure Shepard. "I have a job, I'm workin' six days a week at a boutique downtown, since school let out. Once I get my next check, I'll pitch in for the mortgage, groceries, whatever you need—"
It figured, that she was pretty enough to sneak her way into the kind of high-class job nobody hired greaser girls for, but I didn't have the heart to resent her for it; unlike her, I didn't actually need one. "I'm not takin' your damn money, Angela, you're sixteen." Darry wasn't glaring at her anymore, but you could still stick a penny into the grooves on his forehead. "What I'd really like to know is why your own brother can't put you up."
"Tim and I need some space," she said, in her typical fashion, cryptically. "Trust me."
He looked like he wanted to keep pressing her until he hit the right answer, then thought better of it. "You're still in school?"
"Yessir." Judging by Darry's barely-aborted eyeroll, she'd cranked the dial up a little high on her charm. "Needed somethin' to do all day that wasn't scrubbin' my suegra's floors, after I lost—"
She hadn't meant to let the sentence go on as long as it had— wasn't fishing for our sympathy, not now, not in the light of day. "After I lost the baby," she made herself finish matter-of-factly, her smile tightening like somebody was turning the screws on her face. "There wasn't any more point to me bein' at home. Or to my marriage, anymore."
It might've felt like an embarrassing miscalculation to her, but it must've been what tipped the scales for Darry, because his carved-in-stone expression finally slackened. "Fine, you can stay until you and Tim work out whatever bullshit's goin' on between y'all," he conceded with a sigh, "but." He held up a hand, before we could look too pleased with ourselves. "Listen to me, Angela— the inmates do not run the asylum here. I don't know what Tim allowed, but there's no boozin' in this house, no drugs, and you come home at a decent hour, you hear me? Or we're gonna have trouble."
Angela knew his parenting style was about as successful as a cowboy trying to lasso a bunch of half-broke horses, but managed to nod with a straight face, anyway. "Second of all—" he cussed as the pot boiled over and snapped off the burner, then jabbed the damp wooden spoon at the kitchen phone— "you call Tim up right now, you tell him where you are and what the plan is. I don't need the first ever charge on my rap sheet to be harboring young female runaways."
"Jasmine, what the fuck was that?"
I was already in bed, though it was still early evening and the sky had yet to darken, and I hadn't so much as kicked my boots off. My breath gathered at the base of my lungs like cement; dazed, it took me a moment to realize Darry had crossed the threshold into my room, one hand clutching the top of the doorframe. He almost filled it on his own. "Was he threatening you?" he demanded as I sat up and hugged a pillow to my chest. "Because I don't know when exactly lil' Curly reckons those balls dropped, but—"
I wanted to tell him to keep his damn voice down, before he dragged Tim and Angela into this mess, but judging by the muffled din coming from the hallway, they were still too busy with their own. "He didn't threaten me, Darry, Jesus." Embarrassment made me harsher towards him than he deserved. "Nobody asked you to swoop in there and start swingin' your fists around, we were just talkin'—"
About what? My memory was a vague, greasy smear right after our lips slid apart, and the blankness would've frightened me if I hadn't been so out of it; I held my hand out in front of my face and struggled to register that it was connected to my body, still part of me. I hadn't gotten so shaken in a long, long time, but I still knew that whatever had happened, Darry was overreacting. "I never liked that kid, even back when Ponyboy was first bringin' him around," he went on like I hadn't said anything, his modus operandi. "Neither did Dad. He's sneakier than a damn coyote, he's trouble, Jasmine—"
"Oh, please, you wouldn't like one of my boyfriends if I brought home Mickey Mantle—"
"I like Bryon," he said. I scoffed, exactly as loud as he deserved. "I like him more than any of your other selections, at any rate. So I reckon you ought to hold on to him, or at least not trade him in for that little punk."
Too bad I didn't. It wasn't that I hadn't tried, or that there was anything all that wrong with him, that'd justify the dislike. He just wasn't the one I wanted. That thought struck me like the spike that went through Phineas Gage's head, then remained where it was, solid and immovable.
Could Darry see right through me, the slight smear of lipstick down the side of my mouth, the stray piece of hair Curly had dislodged? There wasn't any accusation in his voice, no more than his usual chiding, wanting me to stay the good girl he'd deluded himself into believing I could be. Still, guilt made me the kind of nauseous you got from drinking coffee on an empty stomach, sickness swilling around the bottom of my throat. I hoped I wasn't letting it show on my face.
Darry shifted his weight from one hip to another, then looked up at my ceiling fan. "You know I love you."
We didn't talk about it, didn't know how to. We weren't an 'I love you' kind of family, either— dragged back to sulking in the bath while Soda insisted Darry secretly did, ages ago, made me wish he was here and glad he wasn't at the same time. Soda didn't know how to handle it any better, even if he thought he did. "Yeah, I do." Then I lobbed my other pillow at him, to lighten the mood. "Shut the door behind you, okay?"
Like I'd pulled my hands out of an ice bath, I was starting to thaw out, and with that came more and more horrifying memories of what'd just transpired. Jesus fucking Christ, why had I kissed him? Was I possessed? Hypnotized by his dick? What had gone wrong there, exactly?
I'd meant for us to talk business, briefly, in a professional manner. I had negative interest in mixing myself up with the King revival, but didn't mind passing along some of the rumors I'd heard— and one of the good things about working at Jay's, apart from Margaret's 'hands off the steering wheel' management style, was that you sure heard a lot around the campfire. Getting him away from the death match that Tim and Angela, two of the most hardheaded people I'd ever met, were fixing to stage was an added bonus. Too bad we couldn't sit on a porch swing for five minutes without clamping together like magnets.
He wasn't wrong, the same way Tim had my number when I rolled up to his porch and started shucking my bra, a guided missile towards revenge— I played with people, and then I was shocked when they played me right back. And he wasn't wrong, that this wasn't about Dallas, not really. Part of me still loved him, probably always would, but that love had shapeshifted into something weird and ghostly that couldn't be separated out from grief; I thought about him more kindly in death than I ever had in life, all his hard edges blurred and softened, but that came with the horrible awareness that he'd never have the chance to be the man I was imagining he could become. He didn't exist outside my memory anymore, even if I'd wanted him.
You can't just keep leading me on—
Or then what?
I knew he wouldn't hurt me like that, was just frustrated with all my bullshit and shooting his mouth off— knew that, logically, if I thought about it with the more developed parts of my brain. He was sixteen and pissed, I had, in fact, led him on, I got it, I got it. But my amygdala sure as fuck didn't, no matter how hard I tried to shut her up. How well did I know him, anyway? she asked, always the suffocated voice of reason. Graham had seemed like a real nice guy at first, too, I had it on good authority that Joe could charm the scales off a snake. Darry was right: I was playing with fire, and nobody would ever, in a million years, believe me if I got burned again.
Speaking of fire—
Of all the times and places. Feverish and delirious all of a sudden, my clothes chafed against my skin, eager to come off on their own accord. I'd had a lot of sex and hadn't liked much of it at all. I felt like I was going a hundred twenty miles per hour, exhilarated but powerless to stop myself from crashing into the guardrail, my own body spiraling out of my tightly-wound control— and I hated that. Sex was how I jerked guys around. It was a solid reason why we sure as hell couldn't work out, a solid, logical reason why—
Jamming the pillow between my legs and rolling over onto my side didn't smother the flame in the pit of my stomach, and neither did imagining myself inside a walk-in freezer. Flopping onto my back again, I slid a reluctant hand into my panties, stirring beneath my fingers; it felt like a surrender. I didn't really do this— for one thing, my mother had told me not to as a kid, which had stuck around as a thou shalt not in my consciousness even as I ignored everything else she'd ever said. I had for Dallas a couple of times, clumsily, but as both a performance and an instruction, too conscious of myself to enjoy it. I shouldn't have been—
I didn't care about sinning so much, anymore. I had far worse than this on my rap sheet, and not a lot further to fall. But it wasn't Bryon's face in my mind, shimmering like a mirage, when I closed my eyes.