"You know each other, Ponykid?" Cliff leaned against the wall, almost knocking one of the dreamcatchers off. His slight smile said that he was in on a joke we didn't understand.

It startled me, to hear Dad's old nickname coming out of this hippie's mouth; I didn't need Ponyboy himself to tell me that they weren't meeting for the first time. "Yeah, she's my big sister," he said with bright enthusiasm— more enthusiasm than he'd ever exclaimed that with before. He waved his hand around and almost toppled over, face first. "I mean, a real one, not one from here. Jas, you want to sing too?"

My smile was better described as a rictus. "I'd rather not."

"They're your real sisters," Cliff told him. "Spiritually, anyway."

I didn't even know how to respond to that; Mom told us that when Uncle Gene had his delusions, we had to strike a balance between feeding into them and upsetting him more with denials, so I decided to take a similar tack and just ignore him. The mingled smells of incense and grass were only exacerbating my headache; I pressed my fingertips up to my temples. "This is Blossom," Ponyboy said, pointing at a girl with blonde hair like gossamer, "and you've met Randy already—"

I tried my damndest to make that smile look less like a grimace; he just tipped his ukulele at me. What was his angle with my brother? What was a rich white guy like him doing here, in the poorest part of Tulsa, getting stoned on the floor of a grimy VW bus with colored people? I couldn't read him at all, not when he looked up at me through eyelashes too long and pretty for a boy's, and the mildness of his expression maddened me even further. He took in my anger and reflected it back at me, like a mirror.

I couldn't afford to rage like a bull in a china shop, though, and more than that, the role of nagging big sister weighed uncomfortably on me. Okay, hell, Ponyboy was a hippie now— so he sat around, smoked grass, and sang shitty protest songs. If I was really being honest with myself, as corny as I found all this junk, it seemed pretty harmless compared to his surrogate brothers' brand of trouble, the kind that carried the promise of hard time with it. "You said you wanted some shrooms?" Cliff reminded me. "How many?"

Shit, like I even knew what units they were sold in. "How much are you chargin' per... ounce?" I gave it my best educated guess.

His Cheshire cat grin only widened. I'd guessed wrong. "I don't sell anything." Excuse me? "I don't believe in commodifying a plant that came from the earth." Excuse me? "How many do you want?"

"... One?"

Ponyboy laughed in my face. Randy had enough Soc-bred manners to refrain from that much, but the way the corner of his mouth twitched, ever so slightly, annoyed me even more. "Yeah, that'll do it," Ponyboy kept on cackling. "Ain't you supposed to be the expert on this kind of stuff?"

Cliff cut him off by raising his hand; Ponyboy snapped his mouth shut, like he was obeying the instructions of a preschool teacher. "I didn't know it was your first time," he said with kind concern. "Listen... if you're gonna trip, you're better off doin' it here, with us. Psychedelics, they can be pretty intense. It's not a journey you should be goin' on alone."

That seem like the brightest idea, princess? Dallas materialized in front of me, my mental image of him was so strong— his arms crossed over his chest, the tip of his nose turned up, as elfin as always. Takin' some plant you don't know the effects of, in front of some weirdo you ain't known a day in your life, either? Boy howdy, and Darry said Ponyboy was the one who never used his head.

I'd been furious at him for dying, but in his own way, he was protecting me even now. I didn't so much like the sound of I don't sell anything— in my world, there was no such thing as not expecting quid pro quo. If Cliff didn't want money from me, well, there was really only one thing I had left to offer. But if he'd intended to have his way with me, he probably wouldn't try it in full view of multiple eyewitnesses, including my kid brother, either— he didn't seem unintelligent, he'd have a little more finesse than that. And if I was going to gain their trust, it wouldn't be the smartest move in the world to already telegraph my suspicion.

Cliff took my silence as tacit agreement; he pressed a few shriveled, beige somethings into my palm, that might've been a mushroom a glass of water ago. I stared down at it. "Blossom, get her some of them Oreos from the kitchen," he commanded, and she hopped right up; I was surprised a cookie with that many preservatives and artificial flavorings would be allowed in their compound. "You eat that with it, one right after the other," he said once Blossom dropped two on the carpet beside me. "They don't exactly taste good."

They were all staring at me with glassy-eyed eagerness. I raised my hand up to my mouth, feeling like Eve in the Garden of Eden, like Persephone eating six pomegranate seeds. Like after I had taken the bite, I would have done something that couldn't be taken back. Crumbs sprayed all over the front of my blouse.


"Wow, I feel good," I said for what must've been the millionth time, spinning around in a circle the way I had as a little kid, just for the pleasure of getting dizzy. "I feel so good. Pony, why didn't you tell me 'bout this stuff before?"

My entire body was as warm and smooth as a pat of melted butter on a pancake; my limbs moved like liquid, no resistance to them at all. I couldn't stop giggling, the edges of the world dulled and fuzzy. Randy was trying to translate one of the songs off that brand new Beatles record, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, onto the ukulele, which he wasn't doing particularly well. I didn't even mind.

"I never knew you could see so many patterns." I elbowed Ponyboy, hard, when I plopped down next to him, then rolled onto my back, like a turtle that had been flipped over onto its shell. "Look. The tapestry's moving." I was transfixed; I'd never seen anything more interesting than the way its threads swam around. "Was it movin' before?"

"No," Ponyboy said with the exasperated amusement you used on kindergarteners, "it ain't movin' at all." He was sucking on the end of a roach, the thin rolling paper dissolving in his mouth. "Man, I told you that six times already."

"He always such a buzzkill?" I asked the sprawled, broken circle of hippies. "I thought he was only like that at home."

"Awh, we don't mind havin' him here." Randy wrapped an arm around his shoulders, smushing him into his side. "I always wanted a kid brother."

Ponyboy scowled more deeply than I thought anyone could that stoned, ducked his head before Randy could ruffle his hair. "I ain't some kid— wait, what time is it?"

Cliff glanced at the cuckoo clock hanging on the wall; it had probably once been as bright and gaudy as anything else in the caravan, but the paint was all faded now, like a circus prop left out in the rain. "Five or somethin', I reckon? Think that clock's always off by half an hour..."

"Shit." Ponyboy stood up abruptly. "Cliff, listen, I gotta take her home. We shouldn't have stayed out this long."

"What's the rush?" Cliff asked as he pulled the blinds on one of the windows open; sunlight streamed in and illuminated half of his face, like he was an angel in a Renaissance painting. "She just got here."

"I don't want to go home," I said, though I wasn't sure why— the thought didn't fill me with any particular trepidation. The whole world seemed placid and good in that moment, like floating in a pool on your back, eyes half-closed, on a hot summer day. "Why would we go home?"

"Snap out of it." He actually snapped his fingers in front of my face— that was about enough to knock me out of my trance. "We still live with Darry, remember? Darry, who ain't exactly what I'd call a hippie. Who's gonna wonder where we're at."

"Darry used to smoke grass on the porch with Dad all the time." I was talking to myself more than to him. "When'd he become such a buzzkill?"

"I know," Ponyboy said as he hauled me up by the arm— since when could he do that so easily? "Darry got to do everything with Dad, even though he didn't want to." He sounded less upset about it than matter-of-fact, maybe a little wistful. "C'mon, we gotta go, okay? Maybe I can get you into bed before he makes us have dinner."

"How'd you get here?" Randy asked, turning his head behind his back to face us.

"I don't know how she did, I took the bus—"

"You can't take the bus," he said with firm conviction, "not when she's still trippin' so much... come on, I'll drive y'all home."

So Ponyboy bundled me into Randy's backseat, which stank of patchouli and had some terrible folk music playing on the radio. I figured it'd be pretty rude to ask him to change the station, though, since it wasn't my car and all. "You can buckle your own seatbelt, right?" he asked a little more sarcastically than I thought I deserved. If I'd been any less high, I would've flipped him off, but as he crawled into shotgun and Randy pulled away from the park, I almost fell asleep, my head lolling against the window as north Tulsa faded into the more familiar landscape of the east.

"... She's good people?" woke me back up, maybe twenty minutes away from home.

"She's my sister, ain't she?" Ponyboy said like that made it self-evident, and a small stirring of love gathered beneath my breastbone. "I didn't invite her— I don't even know how she found us."

"You know this is illegal, right. If the wrong person finds out and narks—"

"No, man, I had no idea—"

"Well, you already knew you're a smartass," Randy said, but with a touch of fondness to it. "And don't smoke those cancer sticks in my car."

"This car smells like you've got a whole grass-growin' operation in the trunk, my cancer stick's practically an air freshener."

"Grass—" I got the sense they'd had this argument before— "is harmless. You choke down more cigarettes a day than a fifty-year-old emphysema patient." Ponyboy scoffed, but he still stubbed it out on the window and shoved his pack back into the pocket of his shorts. "Cliff sure liked her. He would've sent her on her way if he didn't."


I was about sober enough to sit up straight at the dinner table that night, but not to make coherent conversation. Fortunately, Darry was too busy with his favorite target to waste any energy on me finding patterns in the light refraction off our water glasses. "You said you'd be home by three, kiddo—" he tapped the handle of his knife on the table. "I was gonna time you around the track, remember? And where were you, nowhere to be found."

"I forgot," Ponyboy said without any apology— when had he lost his fear of Darry's disapproval? Lied smooth as a bowl of cream, too, when he added, "I was with Cathy, helpin' her look after her kid siblings."

Darry heaved the lengthy sigh we both knew was the precursor to a good lecture. My fork felt like it was melting in my hand, I struggled to remember how to twirl spaghetti around one. "Cathy's a real nice girl, and don't I know lookin' after kid siblings," he started, "but she's distractin' you from what's really important— your future. I don't like you runnin' around the streets all day, anyway, nothing else goin' on, gettin' into trouble. If you won't bother to train for track, you should be workin' through that new SAT book I bought you. What happened to it anyway?"

At least five of its pages had been turned into paper airplanes by Two-Bit, last time he was over at our place— and I swallowed bile remembering the news he'd given me last night. Did either of them know yet? Was I going to have to be the one to tell them? "Awh, Darry, lay off," Ponyboy said between chews on a meatball— Mom never would've let him get away with that, but her standards for table manners had long since vanished from this house. "They say you can't really study for it, and I did pretty good already, didn't I?"

And there it came rushing back, the old insecurity in his voice. "Yeah, hell, you did better than me, little buddy," Darry said, cracking a rare grin— even calling him by Soda's nickname. "Doesn't mean there ain't still room for improvement, though. If you score well enough, you could get a real good scholarship, maybe even a full ride."

I didn't mention that I'd taken it, too, that Mr. Anderson had pushed me to a few months ago and gotten me a waiver for the fee— that even if I was sure I was going exactly nowhere in life, I could at least humor him once. I'd felt nervous and antsy sitting in the auditorium the whole three hours, there weren't half as many girls as guys there, even more nervous and antsy intercepting the mail to make sure I didn't field awkward questions from Darry. My heart nearly burst out of my chest when I read the results, saw the score I'd gotten on the math section. I'd outdone them both.

"Jasmine, are you okay?" Judy was scrutinizing me with a new alertness, one I didn't particularly like— what was this, early-onset mother's intuition? "You look real... out of it."

Pony gave me a panicked stare, Darry turned to look at me like it was the first time he'd noticed me at the table. I swore I saw an octopus floating in Judy's glass, many-limbed and small, twirling around and around—

"Jas?" Darry, this time, sharper and more insistent. "Maybe you should go to bed, you don't look so good. Are you comin' down with somethin'?"

He didn't have to tell me twice; I got up from the table, pushed my chair in, and went down the hall to my room, where I crashed on the bed fully dressed and fell asleep. I didn't wake up for another twelve hours, after having vivid dreams I couldn't recall the next morning. But Nate was right, before I passed out, I lurched with the strangest sensation, like I was looking at the world through a sheet of the clearest ice. Nothing hurt, but not in the numbing way alcohol or barbs took away the pain; when I stared up at the ceiling, I felt the most settled and at peace I had since my parents died, maybe ever, like I'd found the hidden meaning in all the things I'd gone through. If I'd had any sense in my head, a single brain cell still operating at full capacity, I would've been alarmed by that.


When I woke up again, the first thing I registered was how absolutely exhausted I was, the kind of fatigue that penetrated right to the bone; I didn't know at the time that this was a pretty common side effect of hallucinogens, and for a moment I was paralyzed with the fear that there was something really wrong with me, that I had managed to make myself as sick as M&M and that Darry would wring my neck. Once I got up and realized that I would live, I remembered two things— that I had work that day, and before then, I needed to go see Luis.

"Remind me how you know where I live?" he drawled at me from his kitchen table, tilting a cup of black coffee down his throat with the green tinge of a hangover. His living room had clearly seen better days, perhaps when he first moved in, before they'd started growing marijuana on every available surface— I couldn't make out much else from the decor. "Do I need to change the locks again?"

"Curly took me here a few times, when we wanted to smoke up," I said as I stepped over a pile of dirty boxers— Luis was thirty and kept house worse than any of my teenage brothers.

"Curly thinks he's too big for the chancla now, huh?" He said it without any real heat, though, as he took another sip. "Don't know how many times I've had to tell him to keep his paws out my product, guess the same's gonna have to go for you."

"I did what you asked, yesterday, went over to one of those hippie buses on the North to scope the place out."

If I'd expected him to jump with excitement, I was to be disappointed; he took his sweet time even turning his head towards me. "And what'd you find out, then?"

"You're wastin' your time," I said. "Their leader, Cliff, he wouldn't even charge me for the mushrooms I took with them. They're not like you, they're not serious about any kind of market."

"Am I payin' you to have fun on the clock?" Another joke, he'd become a regular comedian in the time he'd been gone. He walked into the kitchen and fiddled with the coffeepot. "Don't fall for that hippie bullshit. Shouldn't take a genius to figure out why he'd get a pretty girl hooked with free drugs first."

"I'm not on your damn payroll," I insisted, sounding pathetic even to my own ears. "I'm not up to none of that. I'm eatin' magic mushrooms in a shitty bus and then tellin' you all about it. I'm a middle man here, at best."

"Okay," he said with maddening calm, then walked back over to his cluttered kitchen table with another mug. For some reason, that irritated me even more than if he had denied it outright.

"If you've got somethin' to say, then say it—"

"I'm just gettin' a little tired of your moral dilemmas," he said, reaching out to put his fingers around my wrist; they easily overlapped. "Tryna figure out why you're drawn to all this, pretendin' that you're better than the likes of us, somethin' special— it was boring in your daddy and somehow it's worse in you. I could tell you why you're still here."

"Yeah?" His pupils were dilated, I watched him like a snake entranced by a charmer. I wanted to shake free of his grip— I knew how, from the point where his middle finger met his thumb— and somehow couldn't. "And why's that?"

"Because I take you seriously." He let go of me, I stumbled back, still dazed, still watching him. "You gonna drink that coffee before it gets cold? I didn't put rat poison in there."


Ponyboy walked into the bathroom while I was showering that night— I wish I could say this was an uncommon occurrence, but that would be a lie. "Can any of y'all ever wait for longer than ten seconds before you come crashin' in here—"

"You always take forever shavin' your legs, I need to brush my teeth," was his less than polite rejoinder, as he turned the faucet on. That was another lie, because he jumped into the real reason anyway— the sound of running water obscured what we were saying. "You ain't gonna tell—"

I squeezed a quarter-sized amount of shampoo into my palm and lathered before I bothered to answer him. "For the last time, no, I ain't gonna tell him anything. That'd just be mutually assured destruction, I don't need Superman on my case again."

"I didn't mean for you to have such a long trip," he said, "Cliff neither. They're kind of a wild card, you never know what you're gonna get. He shouldn't have given you so much for your first time... we shouldn't have made fun of you."

"You tryna look after me now, baby bro?" I asked as I rinsed my hair out, but with more gentle amusement than I thought I would. "I don't need your babysittin', last I checked—"

"Yeah, you do," he said with enough seriousness to make my ears perk up like a German shepherd's. "Listen, Jas, promise me that you won't drop any of that stuff by yourself. I mean, shrooms are bad enough, but especially acid."

I was just arguing to be contrary at this point, one of my worse traits. "Please, I saw funny patterns in the walls and couldn't stop laughin'— Darry didn't even figure out something was up—"

"I saw somebody walk into traffic once." That stilled my hand as I rubbed soap onto my washcloth. "Aisha thought she had spiders crawlin' all over her body, she ran out into the street like a toddler that got loose from her mama—"

"Okay, okay." Suddenly I didn't need to hear anything else; despite the scalding stream of water from the shower, I still shivered. I rested the back of my head against the slick tile of the shower wall. "I miss Soda. He'd find all this stuff a real gas."

Ponyboy hesitated, long enough that I could try to find meaning in it. "Yeah. Me too."