See end of chapter for content warning. A lot of things happen in this chapter. I strongly advise reviewing the warnings, if you have any sensitivities, before deciding to read.

Chapter Six

If someone had told me six months ago that it'd become a normal thing for me to be naked in a bed with someone - a guy, at that - in half a year's time, I'd have thought they were off their rocker. I thought back then that if I met a nice girl, I might not have to worry about sex until I was married. It's amazing how quick things can change and what you can get used to.

Mark's bed was up against the window. It didn't have curtains or anything, but it looked out onto a rotting wood fence.

Our bodies were draped only in daylight. I didn't mind being like this in front of Mark. It was exciting, to see and be seen. Besides, I thought I was pretty normal for fourteen. I spent enough time in the lockerroom to know I seemed about like everyone else, other than not being circumcised. That didn't bother me either. Don't get me wrong, I was insecure about a lot of things: my ears, my laugh, the face I made when I came … But you can't live your life hung up on all that stuff, if you want to have fun.

We were having a lot of fun, until ...

I scampered out from under him to the head of the bed, panicked. "Whatta you doin'?"

"I'm tryin' to fuck you."

Shock drew the blood back to my center. I was cold and limp. "You want to do that - to me - there?"

"Yeah, now let me -" He grabbed my calf and tried to pull me down toward him, but I ripped my leg from his grip. "Hey!"

"No, I don't want to."

"Well, I do." He reached for me again.

I flinched. Mark noticed. His face went pensive as he sat back on his heels, and I averted my eyes. I don't know why I flinched like that. He'd only gotten aggressive a couple of times since that night at the rodeo.

I tried to scoot further away, but my back hit the headboard. Feeling suddenly modest, I put his lumpy pillow over my lap. The air seemed stale and still now. His sheets were stiff and stained. He needed to wash them.

"I just - I'll blow you again," I offered, staring at my own knee.

"I'm gettin' real tired of being patient with you." His eyes were so cold, I got goosebumps.

I chewed my thumbnail. "We haven't even talked about it."

"You're such a fuckin' girl, Curtis. I might as well be with one, if you won't let me do anything." He huffed and threw his back on the bed.

Only Mark could make me feel like a faggot for not wanting to get fucked up the ass.

And I thought I'd been pretty generous. My jaw still ached with how generous I was earlier. I didn't understand why that wasn't enough for him. Mark was only a year older than me, but I sometimes felt young and foolish around him when it came to this stuff. He had already sex before with two different boozed up girls, at two different parties. He had told me about it, in more detail than I wanted. He called them 'opportunities.' It made me uneasy.

"I think I should go."

I got up and gathered my clothes as I went, leaving Mark sulking on the bed. I put on my underwear, then my jeans, and kept looking for my shirt. There had been no hesitation when I had disrobed that morning - kissing and walking backward with my eyes closed, tripping out of my jeans, but avoiding the furniture, not bumping into walls or the door frame. We spent a shameful amount of time together here like that lately. Douglas's mom was back in the hospital. She had gotten an infection. They had to take the rest of her foot. I thought that was horrible, but Mark didn't seem that concerned.

I found my shirt near a dead houseplant, then caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror from the hall. I stepped into the bathroom and looked at myself. There at the junction between my neck and my collarbone was a small red bruise. I buttoned up my shirt and adjusted the collar. It was nearly choking me. I was annoyed. I'd have to be careful for a week. It was late April. The weather was warming up.

Mark came into the bathroom unclothed and unfettered. I watched in the mirror as he stepped behind me, and put his hands on my hips. He was just a little bit taller than me then (by the end of summer I'd have an inch or so on him).

"You gonna get dressed?" I asked.

"Why, can't resist the temptation?" He kissed me behind my ear, real sweet-like.

"That's not it." I bit my lip, before telling him, "I asked you not to leave a mark."

"Come on, don't be like that, baby." He tugged my shirt down, and traced the hickey with his thumb. "People should know you belong to me." He pressed down on, massaging it. He was real good at that, mixing pain with pleasure. "You just get me so horned-up, baby. Can you blame me? Look at you." Chin on my shoulder, he aligned himself along my back. He was hard.

I reddened. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about having sex with Mark. I thought about it a lot. My imagination was relentless. Sex was no exception, but my fantasies were soft and unfocused. I was less sure about those things outside my head.

One hand traveled to my front. I stiffened, thinking he was going to reach lower. But I felt the pads of his fingertips beneath my shirt, lightly caressing below my navel. Mark knew all my sensitive spots.

I was afraid there was no turning back after anal intercourse - That's what it was called. I remembered the library book. - I'd be queer for real. I loved Mark. I wanted to be with Mark, but that seemed scary and irreversible. I wasn't ready to be a real homosexual. And I was also worried that he wouldn't like it as much with me, as he did with a girl. Then he might not like me at all. But maybe he'd get sick of waiting, anyway. Maybe if I just got drunk enough, we could get it over with ...

"You think it hurts?" What he had tried had hurt - a sharp, burning pain - but I wasn't expecting it.

"People wouldn't do it, if it didn't feel good. I'll make you like it."

"What if I want to do it to you?" It only seemed fair.

"No," he answered firmly.

"Why not?" I didn't actually know if I wanted to do that to Mark. He could improve his personal hygiene.

His reflection looked at me like I was dumb, "'Cause you're more of a sissy."

I was about to say something about going home, but he spun me around so I was faced with the real him.

He said, "Stay."

"I don't want to do that - I mean, not never, just not today, okay?"

"You're making it into too big of a deal. It's not like you can get knocked up."

"But I'd want to, you know, take a shower first."

He jerked his head. "Shower's right there." I shook my head. "Come on, you're the cleanest guy I know, Curtis."

"Mark … "

"Fine. Just don't go, baby. I'll be good."

He put his arms around me and I leaned into him, resting my face in the crook of his neck.

"Are you mad?" I asked, feeling oddly timid.

"Naw, when am I ever mad?"

"Will you put on pants at least, if I stay?"

"Ouch. You might hurt a guy's feelings, talkin' like that. I'd never ask you to put more clothes on."

I playfully pushed him out the door, before closing it.

I had to pee. There wasn't any soap near the sink. I pulled back the curtain and saw a sliver of soap covered in curly dark hairs. They weren't Mark's. All of his hair was golden. So I rinsed them off and scrubbed my hands under water for a minute and tried not to think about what I had put in my mouth earlier. My head hurt.

I opened up the medicine cabinet. There was a punch of prescription pills for Bryon's mom and a tube of some kind of ointment that was leaking on everything. "Mark!" I called, I didn't have to shout. You could get to any other room in his house in about eight steps. "You got any aspirin?"

"Uh, yeah, sure. I got somethin'. I'll get it." I could hear him rummaging around in his room.

I went out to the living room, where he met me in blue jeans.

"Here," he said, "take a couple of these." He handed me a tin of Tylenol, before walking to the kitchen.

I sat on the couch and popped open the lid. They looked a little different than the picture on the outside. A little off white, a little too small. I didn't normally take Tylenol, though. I didn't think much of it at the time. I dumped some in my hand. I didn't even count them, just threw them back into my throat. I honestly couldn't tell you what I was thinking. I guess I just wasn't. I never think.

They left a bitter taste in my mouth.

"Did you take 'em already?" He handed me a old jam jar filled with water. "Drink this, you'll upset your stomach."

I drank the water. I normally don't take pills with water, but I wanted to get rid of the aftertaste, and it seemed like a peace offering.

"Let's watch TV while I can. Bryon's talking about pawning it."

It was still early enough that cartoons were on. Mark liked cartoons, especially those Looney Tunes. I don't remember what was on exactly, but I remember how I had laid with him and rested my head on his bare chest. We shared a cigarette and tapped it on an ashtray on a metal TV tray table. He ran his hands over my back, chuckled when someone got flattened by an anvil. It lulled me into a trance.

As the news came on at noon, his heartbeat inexplicably grew louder and louder.

There must not have been anything too interesting going on in the world that day, because we went back to making out. He rolled us over so he was on top. I could feel each strand of his hair drag across my cheek as he kissed on my neck. It felt better than anything I had ever felt. Until he started sucking on my nipples. That was truly the best feeling anyone could ever feel. I was lava. I was a volcano about to erupt. I was going to - I was about to -

Mark lifted his face. His spit cooled on my chest.

"Please," I said. I wanted him to go back to doing that. I wanted more. I wanted everything. I wanted him.

"You're being so loud the neighbors might call the fuzz."

Was I? "Sorry."

"Don't be. You're being so good for me, baby. Don'tcha feel good?"

"Uh-huh." My heart was beating so fast. "I love you." It was the first time I told him.

He said, "I know you do."

A few seconds or an hour later, I had to grip onto the arm of the couch to keep steady. It was bobbing around, like a boat at sea.

"I feel funny," I said. I was sweating so much, it was running down my forehead and into my eyes.

"You're fine. Lift up your hips." He undid my pants and started pulling them down.

Something was wrong. I thrashed around under him and knocked over the metal TV tray table. It hit the ground with a clang. I winced. It was so loud. There were ashes all over the floor, the Tylenol tin had popped open too.

He was trying to get me to stay still, when something must have caught his eye, because he leaned over the edge of the couch. I grabbed at his arm, to keep him from falling into the carpet and drowning. He resurfaced holding the tin. He looked at it. He looked around the rug. He left me.

"Mark, come back."

He was looking under the couch. What was he looking for? Should I look too?

"Wait - How many did you take?"

"How many what?"

"Pills." He grabbed my face and looked me in the eye. "You're burnin' up."

"Yeah. 'Cause I'm lava."

"You're fucked up. How many pills did you take?"

I held out my hand and recalled what it looked like before I swallowed the pills. I took the memory and overlaid it on my palm. I tapped each spot I remembered one being, but I couldn't remember how to count them. "This many. Like this."

Mark laughed, but like he was trying not to. His lips were closed and I tried to pry them open them with my fingers and let the laughter burst out, because I loved his laughter. It made me so happy. I wanted it to leave his mouth and rush into mine, fill my lungs with gold. Or maybe I should keep his mouth closed and the laughter would spray out of his nose like chocolate milk like from Soda's when we were kids and Dad danced in the kitchen.

He lugged me over to the kitchen sink. I was having a hard time standing. The grip in my hair made me moan, as he forced my head up. He shoved his fingers into my mouth. His nails scratched the back of my throat. Nothing happened.

He took his fingers back and wiped them on his jeans. "Think I trained you up too good, baby."

"What?"

"Let's go to the payphone. I gotta make a call, and no one paid the phone bill."

"Why?"

"They weren't Tylenol, baby."

"What were they?" I asked, feeling nervous. "What did you do to me?"

"Don't get shook. It's just some sass."

I didn't know what sass was. "Why do you have it? Did you take any?" My heart was pounding outside of my body, and it was making hysterical patterns everywhere in the air.

"Naw, I wanted to see what it'd do to you first." He was running around, putting on a t-shirt.

"I don't understand."

He started buttoning my shirt, which I didn't remember unbuttoning. "You were all uptight, I wanted to loosen you up a little. I didn't think you'd take more than a dose. You're stupid for someone so smart."

"Can we go get Soda? I want Soda."

He slipped on his shoes and tried to put mine on me, but I fell into the counter. "No, but I'll get you a coke, if you come with me to the payphone."

A coke sounded good. I was awful thirsty.

At the payphone I got down to look at a swarm of ants that swirled all over the Pepsi bottle I dropped on the pavement. There were so many, and they were all talking over eachother in their funny little voices. I couldn't tell what they were saying. I got closer and brought my ear to them.

Mark looked at me. "Stop that. You're gonna get hurt." He turned back to the phone. "Not you … I told you I'm not sure, at least four … What do you mean you don't know? Where do you get it?" I stopped listening. I stood up and started walking south. I had something important to do.

Mark hung up the handset and caught up to me.

"You're gonna be fine. I just gotta make sure you don't run into traffic. Let's go back to the house."

I did not want to go back to the house. "I need to go to the cemetery. I need to see Dally. I want you to come too."

"Dallas Winston? He's at the cemetery? He waiting for you, buddy?"

"They all are. We got to go before the sun sets. Have you ever seen a sunset?"

"Yeah, the world goin' dark every night. I've heard of that before."

Taking Mark to see the sunset was the most important thing anyone ever had to do. He did not understand why this was so important, but he let me lead him there.

"Johnny told me to stay gold." My talking was tangled up. "He said, 'Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold.'"

"Stay gold, Ponyboy," Mark repeated, amused.

"So you need to see the sunset, because it's too late for Dally. But, Mark, maybe it ain't too late for you yet. I love you so much."

He sighed. "I'll watch the sunset with you, baby."

There was garbage everywhere. The first tornado of the year hit northeast of downtown earlier in the week. The sirens sounding woke us all up Tuesday night. It wasn't that bad. No one died or anything, but the streets were covered in branches and shingles and trash was baking in the middle of the road, even four days later. I hoped it wouldn't come back.

Oaklawn Cemetery was in the middle of everything. You could see the skyline and the water tower. Twenty acres of graves and oak trees strangled by road noise. The poor don't even get peace in death. I used to go there a lot and read right after we buried Mom and Dad. I stopped for a while. I don't know why. We had to jump the gate to get in. The groundskeeper locked up at four and you weren't supposed to be there, but I figured this was important enough to call for tresspassing.

I was energized with purpose, dizzy and fast. Mark was having trouble keeping up. I was trying to find Dally and Johnny, but couldn't. Maybe their graves were unmarked or maybe they had been cremated and hadn't needed graves. I didn't know. But I knew where Mom and Dad were so I went there, to the far end by the concrete wall that separated them from the people traveling on the highway.

"Oh no, their tree." I rushed toward it. It had fallen down, roots ripped from the earth. Had they heard it? It looked like it might have been struck by lightning, black at the bottom. I tried to walk the tree like a tightrope, but fell onto their grave. I crawled into their bed when I was much too old.

They shared one headstone nearly flushed with the ground and one plot. They were stacked on top of each other in their caskets, like a hand on top of a Bible or their wedding rings on their dresser. We saved them. They used to be shaded by an oak tree, but now they were bathed in light from the sun as it sank. I brushed moss from our name.

What did they look like now, underground? They wouldn't be clean skeletons yet, would they? Were they rotting? Would worms be able to eat their way into their caskets? Eat them?

"Man, you're pretty twisted," Mark said. I didn't know I was talking out loud.

"Are your parents here?"

"Dunno." He was looking around. There wasn't much to look at. We were cradled by a concrete wall and the fallen tree.

I sat down with my back against the trunk and Mark joined me. We watched the sunset over the Cherokee Expressway. It was the best one I'd seen yet. It sounded so beautiful. I wanted to hold hands, so we did. It was pretty private there.

He started kissing the side of my face and shifted closer.

"Just watch okay? Please, just really watch." - he was looking at me intently - "The sky, not me. Please."

It happened really fast. I didn't understand. He twisted my arm behind my back, so hard I thought it might pop out of the socket and pressed me face-down into the grass.

I yelped. More confused than anything. I tried to get out of the hold but couldn't. His knee jammed into the back of mine. I twisted. I wanted to see his face. "Why are you doing this?"

He forced my head down, and it hit something so hard I thought I was gonna black out.

"You need to shut the fuck up, if you don't wanna get caught like this," he hissed in my ear.

It was like a flipped switch or a chemical reaction. My whole body went rigid and I couldn't move.

He didn't have to do this. I would have put out eventually, probably pretty soon. I'll never understand why he did it.

It hurt.

Like being split apart at first. Then as he plunged in and out, it felt like he was taking my entrails with him. He was turning me inside out. The feeling got bigger and bigger, and when it was too big to be contained it snapped apart from me and floated away. Not far, maybe three feet from my body. Each time I was scraped across the dead grass and the soil, it got further.

My vision tunneled, then went white.

When he was done, I crumpled up like a discarded tissue - used and full of snot. He laid on his back on top of the grave.

"Fuck, that was good."

I pulled up my pants with trembling hands. The sweat was cooling on my back. I was afraid I could smell shit. I couldn't look up.

I was crying by then. Hot tears were leaking out my clenched eyes.

I heaved, hoping that I could expel whatever had been tainted out of me, but nothing came up. I was empty.

I felt a hand on my head, stroking my hair. "Hey baby, don't cry. You're okay."

I couldn't stop.

He gathered me in his arms. I clung to him, because I was terrified.

"It's okay," he said soothingly, as he rubbed my back. "It's just the drugs."

He grabbed me by the chin and made me look at a spot on the ground. "Lookit, you liked it, see? I told you you would."

It clung to the grass like some sort of disgusting spital from a terrible insect. Had I liked it? I hated myself.

I was humiliated.

I looked at the headstone.

"I think I'm dying."

"No, you ain't." Mark held me and repeated, "It's fine. You're fine. It's just the drugs. You're wiped out."

He kissed me. I kissed him back. We kissed until I quit crying.

I said, "I love you, Mark," because I wanted to hear it back. When he didn't respond, I prompted, "Do you love me?"

"Sure, baby, I love you. You made me really happy tonight."

He walked me home, or maybe just somebody who looked like me. I think I might have never left that cemetery, that night.

I was still seeing some spots like I'd been staring into the sun for too long. But I thought my head was mostly clear.

"Don't try to make conversation. Just get to bed. Go ahead. I'll watch you go in." We were at the corner by the vacant lot. "Wait," Mark said and fussed at my collar a bit, like it was my first day of third grade, just a summer between it and first. I wasn't ready.

I didn't look back as I made my way to the porch and let myself in. Just get to bed, don't make conversation.

"Get a load of that." I hated Steve so much. Wasn't it obvious I needed to get to bed and not make conversation? But now everybody - Steve and Soda and Two-Bit and Darry - was staring at me.

"Maybe we ought to ship him to a leper colony," Two-Bit said.

Suddenly, everyone was laughing. It seemed really loud. It sounded like how the funhouse mirrors at Bell's Amusement Park looked.

"Where were you, Ponyboy?"

"Hanging around town, driving along the ribbon." That seemed reasonable. Very reasonable. It was time for me to stop making conversation and get to bed.

"Who were you with?"

"Mark."

"You were with Mark?"

"Yup."

"Just Mark?"

"That's what I said."

Darry dropped his head and barked out a laugh. "I got to run into work. We're talking about this in the morning."

I said, "Sure, okay." I didn't know what he was talking about.

Soda straightened up from where he'd been hunched over and told me, "Pony, go look in the mirror."

So, I walked to the bathroom. I dragged my feet too much on the carpet, then I over-corrected and started marching. Was this normal? How do you walk? I started thinking about my arms and what the hell were they supposed to do? I didn't want them anymore. They were useless.

Then, I looked in the mirror and wondered if I was hallucinating. My neck was covered with red and purple hickeys. Completely covered. When had that even happened?

The guys were still laughing, as they squeezed into the bathroom with me. Two-Bit hooked his finger on my collar and peaked down the front of my shirt. "How far down does it go?"

I swatted his hand away from me.

Steve looked me hard in the eye, but didn't say anything. I looked away.

"Get out. I need to take a shower."

"I'm sure you do!" More laughter. Nobody should ever laugh like that.

Soda took pity on me and shoved the boys out. I locked the door behind them.

I breathed heavy through my nose, as I worked up the courage to undress. One button, two button, three button, four button … For some reason, my hands were shaking. I didn't want to see. I didn't understand what had happened. I just knew that he had changed me. I could feel it in every cell in my body. I was different now.

Somehow I stood naked in the incandescent light. Bruises were beginning to take shape loudly, lewdly. I looked down past that stupid traitor. My knees were red and raw, from rubbing against denim. I had to rinse my briefs in the sink and bury my clothes under the rest of the dirty laundry in the hamper. I wanted to take off my skin and run it through the wash cycle on hot. But I could only take a shower. I lathered the bar of soap and scrubbed the stickiness off my legs, then the stickiness not on my legs. I sat down and plugged the drain, letting water from the showerhead run hot over me, then cold. I wished I had the will to drown myself.

I didn't leave the bathroom until there was no noise coming from the otherside of the door. Towel wrapped around my waist, I hoped they had all left by now. It was Saturday night.

I jumped when I saw Soda, sitting waiting on the bed. He hadn't gone out with Two-Bit and Steve. He had chosen to stay home with me. I loved him so much, I could bawl. His eyes scanned over my torso. I wanted him to ask what was wrong, what had happened. I wouldn't have told him, but I wanted him to ask.

He let out a low whistle. "Looks like somebody had fun tonight."

Somebody had.

I put on sweatpants, though I didn't normally sleep wearing sweatpants. I also pulled on a sweatshirt that used to smell like Dad. Now it only looked like something that would smell like Dad. I swam in it and crawled onto the bed.

"You got a girl!" He pounded on my shoulder. "I should have known. Why didn't you tell me? Who is she?"

"I - can't say."

"Why? Is it somebody else's girl?"

I shook my head. "I'm tired." I wasn't tired. I didn't think I'd ever go to sleep again.

"It's too early. Come on, Ponyboy, talk to me." Curious excitement danced in his eyes. I wondered what he'd say if he knew the truth about what I had done. "Okay, how 'bout I hold up a finger and you tell me when to stop."

I stared at him. I didn't get it.

"First base?" Oh. He held up one finger. Then, he held up another. When he held up a third he gave an approving chuckle, but when I didn't tell him to stop, his smile fell and his eyebrows raised.

I wasn't sure if that counted as a home run. I wasn't sure if maybe he should put up his thumb, too.

"Huh," he said. I've seldom seen Soda struckdumb.

I put his pillow over my face.

He removed it and looked at me for a minute. "That bad? First times are always awful."

I think I nodded.

"I never told you about my first time."

"Yeah, you did." It was just a month or so after Mom and Dad died. He came home and he told me all about it, right in this same spot.

"I didn't tell you all of it." He told me the rest. It was private and embarrassing. But it didn't compare to what had just happened. He wanted to hear about my first time, but I didn't even want to think about it. I didn't think I ever would. (In fact, I wouldn't tell anyone for over twenty years.)

"I guess you're a man now, huh?"

I'm not sure what Mark had made me, but I was pretty sure it wasn't a man.

The next morning, Darry had to drag me out of bed. I had never been so tired before in my life. Everything hurt. Everything. But I couldn't let on. I shifted in my seat at the table in front of two disgusting hard eggs. I couldn't fathom ever being hungry again.

"You can't sleep all day," Darry started. But I hadn't really been asleep long.

Dawn flooded the room by the time I had actually fallen to sleep. Before that, I just listened to Soda's light snore and arranged myself into several approximations of a sleeping body throughout the night.

Soda and Darry were both looking at me.

"You told him?" I asked Soda.

He looked at me apologetically. Sodapop could never keep a secret. One time we accidentally started a small fire at the bowling alley with Steve, and Soda told Mom not an hour after we got home.

I buried my face in my arms.

"If you're old enough to have sex, you're old enough to look me in the eye while we have this conversation."

I lifted my head and stared past Darry to the kitchen window, where Mom's garden was left unattended, derelict. It was overrun with weeds and crabgrass. Everything precious in it was dead. She had loved her garden. She put so much fucking time and care and love into her garden. How did I let this happen?

At least she wasn't here to see it. Mom and Dad would never know what I was.

I was so upset and Darry was so serious. "Did you use a condom?"

I nodded though we hadn't, because it was the correct answer for Darry.

His whole body relaxed. "Good. If you're gonna do it, you need to use a condom every fuckin' time. Right from the start. If you can't afford a rubber, you certainly can't afford no baby."

At the time, a condom cost about the same as a single. You had to decide if you wanted to have intercourse once or listen to a groovy song a bunch of times. It wasn't a choice I had to make. I wasn't going to get anyone pregnant.

"You gotta use your head, for once. You got too much fuckin' potential to get trapped here." He kept going on like that.

I had a headache. I wished he'd quit yelling.

"Darry, ease up. He hears you," Soda said. "Look, Pony, it's just you're real young. And we just want to make sure you're careful. Savvy?"

I nodded.

"Did Dad ever talk to you about this stuff?"

I shook my head. Before he died, Dad still called me 'baby' and 'Daisy,' and would sometimes pull me into his lap jokingly and say, 'You ain't too big yet, 'cause you're the baby. You'll be thirty and you won't be too big to be held by your old man.' I wanted him back.

We sat around the table all morning, as my brothers told me about another thing I'd never get to share with Dad, but they did.

I put my head back down and distantly listened to them argue about the rhythm method. (Darry did not think it was reliable, Soda did.) They both agreed, though, that if I wanted to do it again I should call the girl today.

I nearly passed out on the toilet later that day. There was still blood on the toilet paper. I was afraid he'd done some real damage, that my insides were torn up, and my bowels would leach into my bloodstream, and I'd go septic or something and die. Then they'd take me to the hospital, do an autopsy like on a crime show, and be able to tell what had happened. What I was.

It was that fear that kept me from doing something permanent.

I went to go lay back in bed, but I stopped in the doorway. It was that bed where we used to roll around laughing, where he had teased me for being so ticklish, where we held each other. We used to kiss on that bed, until he'd pushed my head down, even if I wanted to keep kissing. I should have known.

I went to the living room and laid down on the couch instead.

I was just spooked, I told myself. I was being irrational, because I had sex, and I took it too personally. I came close to calling Mark a couple times that first day. If I called him, saw him, talked to him, maybe everything would just be okay. I wanted to see him, but I also never wanted to see him.

Maybe we should do it again, I thought, when I was more prepared. He caught me off guard. That was it. I could force my body to relax. I could take shower first. Clean myself entirely. Everywhere. If I assented, maybe his eyes wouldn't seem so callous next time. Maybe it would be sweet. If he didn't have to hold me down, I wouldn't be so bruised.

I had made up my mind that we would try again. I would make this right.

"Ponyboy! Phone!" Darry called from his room.

It was ringing right by my head, but I hadn't heard it.

"Hello?"

"Hey, hey, hey, Ponyboy!" I froze, again. "I had a real good time with you yesterday. I was thinkin' -"

Possessed by the recklessness of my father, I hung up the phone. When Mark called back, it was my mother's stubbornness that made me do it again. I was their child, just as much as Darry and Soda, even if I didn't always feel like it. Even when they weren't around.

There was a freedom that came with letting someone shatter your entirety. I figured there was nothing whole enough left in me for him to break.

I laid back on the couch, listless as marionette with the strings cut.

I was done being a queer.

Content Warning: nonconsensual drug use, sexual coercion that culminates in sexual assault, intitmate partner violence