I woke up to the sound of something thumping to the ground. In another neighborhood, that might've been the signal for the man of the house to grab his shotgun, but there was nothing in ours to steal, so I rolled my eyes and headed for the living room. How drunk were Steve or Two-Bit, Lord, that they didn't even remember we kept the place unlocked?
... Well. Turned out the answer was 'Ponyboy' and 'uncertain'. I stood over his prone form with my arms crossed, the way Dad used to when the boys came in at two AM, and wondered where the hell he'd gotten the fringed vest he had on from. Those sure weren't in style on the East side, was he out burglarizing on the West? "Next time, just use the back door," I said conversationally. "I always keep it pretty well-oiled."
He got up with as much dignity as he could muster, trying not to put weight on his busted leg; the moon was full that night, providing enough illumination for me to see his face without turning on a lamp. "Sorry, Mom." Then he limped over to the couch and flung himself onto the cushions, with the air of an injured combat veteran. "Is Darry waitin' up?"
"Do you hear him hollerin' at you? He's probably tryna get his sleep in before the baby comes." I stifled a yawn behind my palm. "Where you been?"
"Mind your business," he shot back, the little smartass. He didn't look drunk on second glance, which reassured me, but his eyes were red and scrunched-up like he'd been crying... or smoking up.
"Well, I'm sorry, but when you're keepin' every grass-pushing operation north of Guadalajara in business—"
"Again, you ain't Mom." He'd gotten tougher, my kid brother; I'd never been able to assert the same authority over him that Darry or even Soda could, but in addition to shooting up a damn foot lately, he'd also gained a whole new attitude. "You ain't exactly got room to talk, either."
For a single horrifying second, I considered telling Darry, or at least threatening to. What had I become? "Look, I don't care if you want to drag race or drink at Buck's or whatever. You know I don't care, so if you're lyin' to me, you must really be up to some shit. What happened?"
"All my friends are dead," he said as he leaned his head back against the couch, and my breath caught in my throat. "Or in the slammer, I guess. Tell your boyfriend thanks for that, by the way."
"Jesus Christ—" I was not going to get into a fight with Ponyboy over Bryon, I was not going to get into a fight with Ponyboy over Bryon, I was not going to get into a fight with Ponyboy over Bryon... "You been sneakin' Cathy out to Lovers' Lane, then?" That was the simplest possible answer, though I was still a little perplexed about the whole pot thing— she didn't seem like the type to be caught dead with a joint, considering what had happened with M&M, but maybe she'd unclenched since she'd started dating him.
"No!" he shrieked, then slapped a hand over his mouth; fortunately, that hadn't woken Darry up either. "We ain't doin' nothin' like that!"
I stared at him suspiciously. "Wait a minute, you ain't?"
"How is this your business?"
I continued goggling. It wasn't like I wanted to picture my baby brother getting down and dirty, okay, but they'd been an item for months now— on this side of the tracks? He wasn't that young, he'd be sixteen at the end of July, and Cathy was a full year older. "Darry gave you that talk about puttin' a condom on a banana, right? Birds and the bees?"
He flushed strawberry red. "Dad did, sheesh, I was thirteen before he died, not three." I stifled a cackle behind my fist at that; from what I gathered, the old man was not exactly the most euphemistic delivering those lectures. "He didn't have to, though. Cathy and I are waitin' until marriage."
"... Excuse me?"
"We're waitin' until marriage," he said again, with no small amount of irritation. "The way you're supposed to."
(No, it still didn't click for me. I assumed he'd taken our mother's sermonizing a little too much to heart— far more than she herself ever had— or that he'd been scared shitless by the Soda and Sandy situation. Both of those seemed like far more reasonable assumptions, at the time.)
"And you better not start spreadin' that around," he went on before I could get a word in edgewise. "We got somethin' real special and deep, okay, it's not some cheap physical deal that'll be over once we get bored. I don't need to take any static about it."
All right, I got the message, Cathy had found the only guy on the East side who didn't so much as want a handjob out of her. "Yeah, I understand the concept, Pastor Ponyboy—" the look he shot me was about enough to kill me stone dead— "that still don't answer my question, though. You ain't smokin' grass with your girlfriend, you must be smokin' it with someone else. They got a name?"
"Look—" he must've felt guilty enough to try to console me— "Jas, I'm not up to any trouble, okay? I mean... the criminal kind, anyway. Besides the grass, and that don't really count."
"Can't you hang out with Steve and Two-Bit?" Sure, they were pretty wild themselves, but I trusted them to watch Pony's back, more than some mysterious strangers I'd never met. "They're both your friends... and alive, last I checked."
"They're Soda's friends," he said dismissively; I couldn't really protest the point when I'd made it myself before, "they don't want me hangin' around like some kid brother Mom made them bring along. And my new ones ain't criminals, for the last time. You just wouldn't get them."
"Fine, you know what, I give up," I acquiesced, taking a look at the grandfather clock and noticing just how late it was; I didn't have work the next day, but I didn't want to field questions about the bags under my eyes at breakfast, either. "You're right, I'm about the last person who should start lecturin'. But if Darry catches you on anything harder than grass and makes you cut a switch from out back, that's not gonna be on me."
"Oh please, even Dad never made us do that." He had Darry pegged there, he took Dad's parenting philosophy of 'all bark and no bite' to even more ridiculous heights. "I fucking hate this place," he added so quietly I had to strain to hear him, thought maybe I'd misheard him at first. "I just.. Christ, I don't belong here at all. I'm not gonna live in this shitty neighborhood my whole life."
"You? The folk hero?" I asked, trying to play it off; the bitterness in his voice spooked me, reminded me of Steve, whenever he spoke about his father. "You couldn't be more of a celebrity on the East side, hotshot, and you think you don't fit—"
"Do you always have to turn everythin' into some kind of joke, Jas?" I didn't have an answer to that; I hadn't even realized that he'd wanted to confide in me. Before I could say anything, apologize, maybe, he stood up and was heading back down the hall, to the room he'd once shared with Soda, that now lay empty.
Curly was sprawled across the couch on his cousin's lawn when I approached.
Like all the Shepards, he was too attractive for his own good; his cheeks had thinned out and he had shot up a head over the last few months, threatening to grow taller than Tim soon. He didn't look so much like the reckless kid my little brother had trailed after growing up, the one who'd fallen off telephone poles and tripped over his own feet in rumbles. Here with the crew he'd been managing, he almost looked like a man.
Luckily for what remained of my brain, he also gave off the indisputable aura of considering himself hot shit. Tim and Luis had cruised down to Ciudad Juárez for a grand total of two and a half months, and you'd think he'd been left in charge of the Federal Reserve, not a pack of JD's that was already half-decimated by Nam, the state pen, and overdoses.
"Hey, Jasmine," he said, cool as you please, as he took a swig from the beer bottle he'd set down; I realized, with the sixth sense I had for this sort of thing, that while his boys were in various phases of unconsciousness, he hadn't had much at all. What else was he starting to mimic from Tim? "Ponyboy ain't here."
My eyes still caught that ridiculous stick-and-poke tattoo on his bicep, Jasmine, the one his cousin Cisco did when they were too drunk to see straight; his stepdaddy had howled with laughter when he noticed it, said he sure didn't envy him the task of explaining that to his next girl. I hadn't anticipated that there would be a next girl. "I know," I lied, "he and Bryon are drag-racin' tonight."
I wouldn't have called Curly the possessive type, the way Dallas had been— he wasn't into leaving hickeys, didn't feel the need to always have his arm around my waist or hand patting my ass— but he was still a guy, at the end of the day, not a hippie into free love. I knew going steady with Bryon Douglas would piss him off. Judging by the way his eyes flashed at the mention of his name, I wasn't too far off the mark. He raised his hand and stood up from the couch, had the good grace to lead us over to the side of the house, half-shrouded in shadow and away from his boys' eager ears.
"He's usin' you for sex," he tried to say boredly, but he'd never been able to lie to me so well. "That's his MO, in case you haven't noticed."
"You got any lines you ain't already worn out when I was runnin' around with Dally?"
"He threw his own brother into the state pen," Curly said, and his jaw clenched with a cord of muscle that hadn't been there before. "That tells me everything I need to know 'bout him. Snitch ain't no fuckin' kind of man."
"You're right," I drawled. "I should've stuck with a real man like you, who jumps eighth graders."
I thought he might try to defend himself again, like he had before, futilely, but instead he just pulled his switchblade out and started twirling it in his hand. "Why are you here?"
I wanted to confide in him, about what Luis had asked me to do, but that wasn't what came out. "Heard you were at Jay's with Ximena Lopez, a couple weeks ago." I tried to keep my voice as noncommittal as possible, like I'd heard he'd picked out a blue shirt to wear that night, but it was a futile attempt from the start. I was lying. I'd seen them myself.
"Uh-huh," he said. "What about it?"
"That's... real weird, Curly." Out of all the problems I had with this situation, that wasn't my biggest, but it was the first one that sprang to mind. "You're... dating your brother's girlfriend's sister?"
"What'd you think, Jas?" He smiled like a knife, sliced through my pretense. "I'd stay hung up on you forever, waitin' for you to finally pick me? Just because we were each other's firsts?"
The truth lurched up into my throat the way vomit would— I barely held it back. "You changed—"
"Changed?" He snapped the switch into itself again, shoved it back inside the pocket of his cargo shorts. "Hell, Douglas might be a better bet, if that's what you're holdin' out for. Or a West sider. This is who I've always been."
I didn't understand what had gotten into me— I'd certainly never tried to reform Dallas, and I would've been hard-pressed to say any of Curly's moral transgressions were worse than his. Shit, Ponyboy had said it himself in that theme of his, that he was a tough, cool, hard-as-nails Tim in miniature. But I couldn't shake it, you ain't a thug, Curly. This ain't you.
"You sure you want to come here?" Bryon asked; I cracked open the car door, felt humidity seep into my skin from the warm summer night. He was looking at me funny, his brow slightly crinkled. "You never want to come to Buck's."
"My brothers don't like me or Ponyboy comin' to the roadhouse," I said, the lie slipping off my tongue as smooth as butter— Soda was long gone, and Darry's disapproval had never stopped me from doing much worse. The real reason why I didn't like Buck's was that every time I turned around, I expected Dallas to be there. I smoothed my skirt over my thighs and laughed, already a little buzzed from the whiskey we'd polished off on the drive. "You afraid of them now?"
"Nah," he said, cracking a rare but easy grin, "you know Darry's a big fan of mine." Not that it was exactly an uphill battle, to win his approval. All Darry had wanted to hear was that Bryon didn't sell drugs, didn't have a criminal record, and didn't slap me around, and he dug him okay.
My plans to knock back a few, however, were dashed about ten seconds after I walked into the establishment— Grace Mathews had sure grown up from the twelve-year-old kid I used to babysit. Dressed in a jean skirt and a top that barely ended below her breasts, she bounded up to me, then surreptitiously tried to hide the lace of her bra where one of them had fallen out. I wanted to put a sweater on her.
"Jasmine!" she squealed, spilling some of the beer in her hand down her wrist; lifting it up, managed to spill even more onto the grimy floor. One of her false eyelashes had come loose. "I didn't think you'd be here!"
She swayed to the music, some Nancy and Frank Sinatra song that was popular this month. "Didn't think you'd be, either," I said, but the sardonic quality of my voice sailed right over her head. I lowered it and turned to Bryon— "shit, should we take her home?"
"She's fourteen or somethin', ain't she? If I dragged M&M home every time I found him—" He cut himself off abruptly. "You know what, on second thought..."
We were spared the responsibility of making a decision when Two-Bit himself sauntered over to us, a vodka shot in one hand, already unsteady on his feet. "Keith!" Grace shrieked as she caught sight of him; I stifled a laugh behind my fist at the face he made at his given name. "You look funny!"
That would be the glitter sparkling in his auburn hair and sideburns; he grabbed a wooden beam on the ceiling to steady himself, blinked twice, and got a good look at her. "What the hell are you doin' here?" he demanded, and I tried not to snicker again. Big brothers were the same any way you sliced them. "Wearin'... is that supposed to be a top? Christ, I'm takin' you home."
As drunk as she was, Grace had enough low cunning to know how to get her own way. "Mama's gonna be there, she don't work tonight," she said. "Do you wanna go home?"
"I'm almost twenty years old, I don't have no damn curfew—" She arched an eyebrow at him, and he caved. "Fine. Stay somewhere I can see you, at least—"
She was off like a shot, and he didn't even bother to pursue her, just turned his attention over to Bryon. "So you're that kid who got his brother sent to the state pen."
"That'd be me, yeah," Bryon said less drily than I'd expected. "And he wasn't my brother."
Two-Bit looked him up and down with thinly-veiled hostility. "I liked Dally and Curly, so I cut them a break, but I don't know your ass from a hole from the ground and I don't like what I do know. I grew up with Jasmine, she's practically my sister, so you wanna try to cop that same attitude with—"
"I swear to God, Two-Bit, if you don't drop the big brother act—" I groaned, my cheeks tinged with red, and not from any of the alcohol I'd had or the heat of the crowded room. One side effect of growing up in a house full of boys? They all thought it was their God-given right to threaten the hell out of any guy interested in me.
"It's fine," Bryon said, again with more good grace than I'd expected him to have, though the irritated twitch of his mouth said otherwise. "I'm gonna go say hi to Terry for a minute, okay?"
I strongly suspected the guy he flagged down from across the dimly-lit room was an acquaintance, at best, not that I blamed him for high-tailing it out of there. The second he was out of earshot, I turned on Two-Bit. "What's got you in such a pissy mood tonight, huh?" You could fault him for a lot, but not his bad temper, usually. "Can't just be findin' Gracie here."
He didn't answer me before he'd shuddered down another shot, his lips pursed from the straight vodka. "Kathy broke up with me."
"Hell, I'm sorry," I said, and meant it— she and Two-Bit had been on and off for a couple of years now, but out of all his many blondes, she was the one he'd held onto the longest. "What happened?"
"I got drafted." He took his lighter out of his pocket and flicked it over and over again, though he was wasting the fluid. "I guess I should be glad she was honest with me, military guys always get cheated on the second they deploy anyway. Could've come home to her six months pregnant and still claimin' it's my baby."
"Fuck."
"Yeah." He took a shuddery breath, like he was inhaling through a straw. "Don't tell Grace or my mama yet, I'm still workin' on my delivery." He tried to crack a grin. "So, Ma, you always were buggin' me to finally get a job— and now I'm moving outta your house, too—
"Don't, don't try to make it funny." Was this going to be the rest of my life? Watching the boys I'd grown up with get plucked away one by one, sent home in a casket? "Can't you... aren't you gonna try to dodge somehow?"
"Nah, doll, I don't really see any way out." His eyes were full of sympathy as he reached out to touch my arm, like I was the one who needed to be comforted right now. "I ain't got a felony charge, and seems like knockin' some broad up is more trouble than it's worth... no offense to Superman, but I sure ain't ready to be nobody's daddy yet."
I exhaled heavily and told myself I wouldn't cry, not here, not when Two-Bit was facing a one-way ticket to Nam. He still noticed, though, before I could blink the tears away— he was more observant than most of us gave him credit for. "Don't be upset, Jas, Soda's doin' fine, ain't he?" I didn't have the heart to tell him that we hadn't heard from him in months. "And what does everyone always say, chicks dig a man in uniform." When I didn't look any happier, he sighed himself and stared down at the empty glass in his hand. "Hell, I don't even believe what I'm sayin'. You want to do shots?"
Part of the reason I left the house so early Sunday morning was so that Darry didn't catch me hungover as a fucking dog— he was long past the point where he accepted 'migraine' or 'food poisoning' as cover stories. The sunlight blared into my eyes; I fought the urge to vomit into the bushes as I got off my bus and walked along the bodegas and graffiti-marked walls, the left side of my head pounding like I was being attacked with a sledgehammer. Christ, fuck Luis with a tennis racket, I wanted at least a sixty percent cut of the profits from this.
The search involved less effort than I'd anticipated, though— I figured that if we had plenty of hippies in the parks on the East side, the North shouldn't have been much different. I found Cliff outside a pale green Volkswagen bus, a joint in hand; I knew he was the leader without being told, just by the way he carried himself, even sitting slumped on its steps. He blew out some smoke as I approached; he really did have a flower crown resting on top of his braids, the kind Sylvia and I made at recess as kids. "Hey, sister," he said, his dark eyes surprisingly clear and lucid as he examined me. Eyes that looked like they understood me, without us having to have exchanged a single word. "You ever had your palm read?"
I didn't even know what that was. "My friend Nate—" I tried to mimic the airy, vacant lilt of his voice and only succeeded at sounding trashed. "He said you had some magic mushrooms?"
He tilted his head at me. "Are you an Aries?"
I had to do some quick mental calculations. "I'm an... Aquarius, I think?" That was what I had gotten in the Tiger Beat quiz Sylvia made me take, anyway.
"Huh," he said, flicked some ash onto the long grass at our feet. "Took you for a fire sign, maybe earth. Definitely not an air. You're real direct, ain't you?"
Well, he had me pegged there— I'd always been known for favoring the direct approach, which made me, in hindsight, a damn poor choice for infiltrating a hippie commune. I must have shown my consternation on my face, because then he smiled at me. "Hey, I'm just messin' with you," he said gently, and that smile made me want to leave my weapons at the door. "I know Nate, he's a cool cat. You should come inside, yeah?"
The interior of the bus was larger than I expected— dreamcatchers hung all over the walls, a kaleidoscope of light and color, bright rugs covering the floor. The scent of marijuana smoke and something different, sharper and more acrid, clung to me like a dense fog; a ring of hippies in tie-dye shirts were lounging on the floor as someone played the ukulele— shit, was that Randy Adderson? Ponyboy's weird friend? At least he'd shaved off that mustache/beard combo he had through '66, he'd looked like he had an otter nesting on his face.
And when I gave the scene a slightly longer look, there was my baby brother on a worn mattress, a flower painted onto his left cheek, looking stoned as hell as he sang along to Sunshine of Your Love. Oh, Christ hell.
He grinned at me sheepishly, too high to feel any real embarrassment or trepidation. "Hey, Jas," he said with a little wave. "Uh... guess I won't tell if you don't?"
