... Well, finally back, two years later. I was massively stalled trying to figure out how to make all the moving parts work, and, uh, ended up outsourcing half the plot to another fic so Curly and Tim would quit chewing up scenery— I'm hoping it makes sense regardless, but the first few chapters of It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City give some more context to what's happening here. Thanks for bearing with me :)


The next day— or at least throughout breakfast, as I shoveled half-dissolved Cheerios into my sticky mouth— I kept waiting for Judy to lay into me, really let me have it for my pissy attitude the night before. Instead, I might as well have been the carton of orange juice on the table as she asked Pony what he thought of Dawn for a girl and Martin for a boy, completely beneath her notice. I should've known better than to get complacent, though; she just didn't want to waste her limited energy tangling with me directly. She told Darry as soon as he got home from work.

"I just can't believe her," drifted into my hearing range, as I passed by the living room; Judy was knitting something that might've been a onesie, before all the dropped stitches, while Darry shotgunned a beer in Dad's old armchair. Walter Cronkite was on CBS yet again, offering a story about how soldiers in Nam were getting hooked on some of the world's purest heroin. I jostled the laundry hamper higher up on my hip, flooding my nostrils with the combined stink of Ponyboy and Darry's dirty socks, and got ready to assess the amount of damage control I'd have to do. "The mouth on that girl…"

"Jude—" He sighed, picking up beer number two from the coffee table, after having crushed the first can in his fist. "I've been working all day, now I have to come home to you bickering with Jasmine? You're sayin' this happened last night?"

"No, you know what, you don't get to do this." Judy was speaking with a vehemence I didn't even know she had in her, but then again, I tended to have that effect on people. "Treat me like another kid around here… I'm not bickering with anybody, I'm concerned, and I think I've got every right to be. Your seventeen-year-old sister is comin' home drunk, I could practically smell it—"

"I mean, was she drunk-drunk—"

"Is that a serious question?"

"What do you want me to do, Judy, tie her to her bed at night? Trust me, she'd just gnaw at the ropes until they gave and climb out the window." Darry rubbed his temples. I wouldn't be surprised if he started to show gray sooner rather than later, though Dad had made it to forty with a full head of jet black hair— Darry had always taken life a lot more seriously than he did. "I'm tired of always bein' the heavy, especially with her, especially when it don't even work. I've done the whole 'come down like a sack of sand' approach— hell, I got more rules than either of my parents ever bothered to set. She was probably out with her boyfriend… I like Bryon, he seems like a nice guy, and believe me when I say that's a pleasant change."

"Do you know what my parents would've done, if they caught me actin' like this? Sent me to an all-girls boarding school."

Darry actually tipped his head back and laughed. "I look like I got 'ship Jasmine off to boarding school' money lyin' around here? Lemme know when you find enough loose change between the couch cushions, maybe I can finally get my truck fixed up while I'm at it."

"Another relative—"

I couldn't help the wry smile that spread across my face— if only she knew how close she'd come to achieving her dream. "I'm not sendin' her away," Darry's voice came swift and firm, "Jesus Christ, what kind of Cinderella shit is this? Wicked stepmother just moved in and she's already pushin' the original kids out?"

"She was incredibly rude to me, too," Judy persisted like she was complaining to management about my hospitality, or lack thereof. "Said that this wasn't my house, and that I wasn't her mother."

"Of course this is your house," he said, conciliatory, soothing. He leaned over and rested his hand on hers, a picture of domesticity. "But she's right. You ain't her mother."

She snatched it away like she'd just touched a cockroach. "Funny how you expect me to watch those kids for you like a mother, though."

"It's really puttin' you out to keep a seventeen and fifteen-year-old from lightin' the place on fire? I ain't exactly askin' you to change their diapers." Darry sighed again. A world away, a grainy soldier jabbed a syringe into his vein, blood flowing dark, his face orgasmic. "Listen, she ain't allowed to disrespect you, I won't have that. I'll talk to her, okay?"

He never did.


"I don't want you to keep seein' him."

I bit down hard on my lower lip, as I climbed into Bryon's passenger side and tossed my purse underneath the seat. After an eight-hour shift on my feet, the last thing I was itching for was a fight, but it looked like one was headed my way regardless. "I wasn't 'seeing him', so much as he just showed up."

He didn't answer me at first, just tore out of the parking lot a few other greasers had already started loitering in, loud as they elbowed each other and spilled out of the tops of cars. There was a half-drunk bourbon lemonade in the cupholder, heated up by the sun; I took a swig to calm my nerves, even though it tasted like complete shit and wasn't mine to begin with. Unbuckling my seatbelt and jumping out the door, the way I'd threatened to do once when Dally was ragging on me, was starting to seem more and more appealing by the second.

"He's a fucking loser, Jasmine, he's gonna be doin' five years upstate like Mark for rippin' car radios out sooner than later." He turned onto the road with a little more force than strictly necessary, but I'd had Alberto hold a knife to my throat in a moving vehicle before, and he was going to have to try a hell of a lot harder than that if he meant to scare me. "Or worse— you remember what he tried to do to M & M, over what, some two-dollar drug deal gone wrong? He's dangerous, a total psycho. It's like the whole family was born under a bad star or something."

It all spewed out of him like a baking soda volcano at a grade school science fair, his knuckles glowing white as he clutched the steering wheel. Worse, I couldn't even argue the point, accuse him of baseless jealousy— 'dangerous psycho' was my well-documented type, and no matter what Curly might've claimed when he found me handing out fliers with Cliff, I knew damn well he would've tried to put the moves on me today if he hadn't been interrupted. "I don't want anythin' to do with the guy who put you in the hospital," I said in a voice I hoped sounded both firm and reassuring. I didn't get into how Tim and Curly had jumped him for cutting all of Angela's hair off, try to find the starting point, the original perpetrator. Violence on the East side was as cyclical as a snake eating its own tail, no clear beginning or end. "He wanted to ask me about someone he was mixed up with, is all, sneak a drink somewhere that wouldn't card."

"He shouldn't be asking you about nothing." Bryon shifted gears with a noisy jerk of the clutch. "What the hell would you even know about some creep he got mixed up with, anyway?"

Now I was biting down hard enough to leave a mark in my lipstick, in order to keep my encyclopedic knowledge of East Tulsa's baddies to myself— I'd never had the particular misfortune of meeting Billy 'fucking' Reynolds, but I was damn well keeping an eye on him, in case he wanted to fulfill his old gang leader's promise to me. Fortunately (well, for me), he seemed a hell of a lot more interested in beating the brakes off any Shepard affiliate in his line of sight. "You afraid I'm ready to mess around on you, then just say it outright, instead of playin' it like you're worried about my safety." I'd already gone through this whole song and dance with Dallas, and I wasn't fixing to do the same jitterbug all over again.

He pulled over a few feet into a wooded area off the side of the road, and once he'd put the parking brake on, slid his free hand up my thigh, then up to the elastic of my panties; when I didn't protest or shift away, his fingers were inside me, penetrating me shallowly. I didn't want to admit it even to myself, that the brush of Curly's knee against mine had turned me on more than any time Bryon ever touched me, but that almost made it easier. Kept me in the driver's seat, let me remain the one in control even if I wasn't the one on top. "I'm sorry," he murmured into my ear, with more genuine remorse than I knew he was capable of. "It ain't you I don't trust, it's him. Them. I never even saw it comin' when Angela tossed me out like an empty pop can."

"We're over and done with, I promise—"

"I just need somebody in my life who's not gonna run right out of it."

My heart twisted like I'd been stabbed with a corkscrew. If there was one thing we'd ever had in common, keeping us together long after our spiteful fling should've burned out, this was it.

He was already reaching up to unhook my bra, in a way that betrayed an easy familiarity with women's undergarments. Slightly dazed as the alcohol enveloped me like a security blanket, armed with the knowledge that we were just warm bodies to each other, I could do this— except—

I unhooked the latch on my purse and fumbled for the foil-wrapped package inside, the rubber I'd stolen from the (unused) supply Darry had bought Ponyboy when he turned fifteen. I could be a slow learner sometimes, but I always got there eventually. "Here," I said, pressing it into his palm and leaving no room for protest, "I just don't want to take any more chances."

I didn't really want it, sure, but I didn't not want it enough to say no. Maybe I felt sorry for him, maybe I was just drawn to the hint of vulnerability he'd allowed himself to show me, when I would never let myself give him any in return. I let it happen.


I wasn't intimidated by Tim anymore— hadn't been, really, since I'd cried in a drunken heap all over the front of his shirt— but I still didn't quite leap at the chance to spend time in his company, either. Maybe it was residual embarrassment from my short-lived crush and clumsy attempt at seducing him, maybe it was because the more I got to know him, the more he reminded me of Darry. Regardless, when he came up to me at Steve's backyard beer blast, I fought the urge to turn on my heel and make a break for it. If I took off my high-heeled sandals, I might've been able to vault myself over the fence before he—

"There you are," he said, in a tone that brooked no disobedience. I hadn't expected him to be on the guest list, this far away from his own turf; the idea of him gatecrashing specifically to hunt me down was too horrifying to contemplate. "I've been lookin' for you… I want to talk."

"About what," I drawled over the tinny sound of Be My Baby (Evie's record for sure) and the much louder cicadas, though I damn well knew exactly what. He gave me an unimpressed look that could've been transplanted just fine onto Darry's face. He wasn't buying it neither.

"You're really runnin' around with that Douglas kid now, same one Curly and I took turns beatin' up last spring?" he asked. My nod was grudging and fractional. "You tryna make him jealous or what? 'Cause it's worked just fine already, I'll tell you that much. Lil' shit practically vibrates like a tunin' fork whenever your name comes up."

"Y'all Shepards think the world revolves around you, huh," I said, though without a lot of heat, my mouth sticky and damp from a passed-around joint and the vodka-heavy punch Evie mixed up. People had leveled similar accusations at us Curtises before. "It's that inconceivable I might just like him for everything he has to offer?"

Tim didn't even bother to hide his eyeroll as he threw back a shot. I wasn't even convincing myself. "Listen, you've made your point already, so now it's time to stop seein' him," he said, like this was a completely reasonable thing for him to say, and like he had the authority to ground me if I told him no. "That guy's bad news—"

"Please, Timothy, feel free to tell me some more about that when you go longer than six months without a bench warrant—"

"I don't mean my type of bad news." Somehow, I found out it was possible for him to stuff even more condescension into his voice— worse, there was genuine concern there, which was about the only thing still keeping me rooted in place. "I mean, the type of guy who does what they did to Angela, that kind of real twisted shit—"

A sudden chill passed through my body, though the night was still warm and humid. I picked up what he was putting down. "They cut her hair off—"

"Yeah. Sure. They cut her hair off." His smirk didn't hold an ounce of warmth. "They took a blacked-out girl they had a score to settle with for a drive— who, guaranteed, wouldn't remember anything the next morning— just to give her a little trim." The glance he shot me was downright pitying, like I was a kitten who hadn't figured out how to make all of my feet point in the same direction yet. "Listen to me, Jasmine, I got a real sixth sense for sniffin' out creeps, perverts, in my line of work. His brother Mark, whatever the hell those two considered each other, I can't even nail him to the cross for turning him in to the fuzz, that kid was a little psychopath even by pusher standards. But I wouldn't assume Bryon's cut from much different cloth."

A maniacal laugh bubbled up inside of my chest, threatening to burst. "You think I didn't know that bad, bad things can happen to drunk little girls before you decided to enlighten me? That men can be… dangerous?"

I felt like a gymnast sticking the landing on 'dangerous'. His glare reminded me all too well that Tim didn't like being talked back to, and especially not by women. "If you had the damn sense God gave a goose, you'd quit runnin' around with the worst ones Tulsa has to offer, and tryin' your luck."

"You're one to talk, related to half of them—"

"Is there something goin' on, between you and Luis?"

I inhaled through my nose and exhaled through my mouth, before draining the remainder of my plastic punch cup in one go. I'd walked right into that one— it wasn't Bryon Douglas, or the sorry state of Curly's dating life, that he really gave a shit about. "I want you to think very, very carefully about where you're takin' that question."

"In the direction that's obvious to anybody with a pulse."

Tim wasn't about to make this easy on me, not that I'd expected it from him. "He asked me to do some spy work for him on the side, nothin' serious." He wouldn't believe an outright denial, but maybe downplaying it might fly under the radar. I twisted the heel of one sandal into the spongey grass. "Hangin' around one of those hippie buses uptown to see if the lead hippie's pushin' product— I might as well be organizing a Beta Club carwash, for all the danger I'm in. Most importantly, I am not fucking him."

For obvious reasons, I didn't mention how I'd gotten completely loaded on mushrooms my first visit, or Ponyboy's warning about how Aisha had wandered into oncoming traffic, or how Luis had offered to take me on a date as payment. Unfortunately for me, he was reading between the lines just fine. "Jasmine, whatever he's tellin' you, he doesn't think you're smart and he doesn't think you're interesting, or more mature than all the other girls your age," he said flatly, slicing through all of my minimizing bullshit. "He wants to get back at your daddy, actin' out some… psychosexual fantasy…." He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to straighten it again; I found it a little funny that for all his alleged prowess in the sack, his face still colored saying 'psychosexual'. That was one big vocabulary word for a downtown hood. "I don't know how you're so jaded, somehow you loop right back around to naive, all over again."

I wasn't dumb enough to need all of this spelled out for me, from him or Sylvia, as much as nihilistic. Luis was a creep, sure, I'd known it from the first time he'd squeezed my ass at fifteen years old— but part of me wanted to think that it gave me a degree of power over him, the ability to jerk him around by the rudder in his pants, and part of me felt some sick sense of flattery that I'd managed to capture his attention. My fatal flaw was that awareness of my bad decisions had never stopped me from making them: I was too morbidly fascinated by how they might play out. The prospect of cheap thrills attracted me more to Luis than his silver tongue or six pack ever could've, and he'd always understood that.

"I got three brothers already, I ain't on the market for another one up in my business." Maybe you should be saying all this to Angela, if you're so eager to lecture, but I just barely managed to leash my barbed tongue before I threw their estrangement back in his face— I'd been nasty enough in one twenty-four hour period, my new 'stepmother' was already plotting ways to toss me out of the house. "Where's Gabi anyway, huh?" I asked with a hint of desperation, swiveling my head around as I scanned the crowd. Grabbing a drink? Taking a leak? She was never usually away from Tim's side for this long.

Tim lit up a cigarette, and released a cloud of smoke into the air before he answered me. "She wants me to leave the life," he finally said. Whatever I'd been expecting to hear, that wasn't it. "I mean, she won't spell it out that obvious, but she doesn't want to be no gangbanger's wife and that's really the end of it." He tapped a cascade of ash onto the ground, and gave me a cold and mechanical smile. "So you could say we've been on the rocks."

"Do you?" For all his secret softness, an inherent sense of empathy the East side hadn't managed to beat out of him yet, he might as well have told me she wanted him to throw on a feather boa and start walking the Sunset Strip. Unlike Steve or Two-Bit, petty hoods who had a good chance of straightening themselves out, his delinquency had always held the promise of something much more real and permanent. "Want out?"

"You can't just stroll out of a gang the same way you throw off your apron at the Tastee Freez, even if your uncles run it," he said acidly, and lit another cigarette with the cherry at the end of his first one. Christ knew what I'd do without him to spell out the facts of life for me. "Ain't a question of want. Besides, if I'm gone, it'll just be Curly— do you think I can't tell when you're tryna change the goddamned subject? You better cut that lil' espionage mission short."

I rested my hand on my hip and wished I had something else to drink, besides a few drops of punch clinging to the sides of my cup. Pressed up against a wall with peeling paint, we got a nice view of two kids I didn't recognize, the girl bearing a striking resemblance to Steve, swapping spit. "Or what," I asked as he reached up past the hem of her blouse, too tired to raise the octave of my voice into a question. The sun had barely started to set, casting a parallelogram of blood-orange light across the grass, and I already wanted to head home.

He smiled at me again, not showing any teeth. "Or I'll tell Darry, sweetheart, how 'bout it?"

A couple of years ago, when Darry and I were constantly clawing at each other's throats, I couldn't have cared less if he was ashamed of me and wanted to ship me off to Texas at my aunt's earliest convenience— or, at the very least, I tried my damndest to pretend I didn't care. Things were a lot different now, with the slow crawl of his regained trust in me. My stomach curdled, remembering how he'd defended me to Judy and blown off her accusations, and how she'd been more right about me all along than she even knew.

"Don't look at me like that," Tim broke the long silence, "ain't like you couldn't have it worse, if I was your actual brother. Curly tell you I'm makin' him go to summer school?"


When I went up to the North side that next morning, it was with the intention of divesting myself from this mess altogether, and leaving Ponyboy to drop all the acid and paint all the runny watercolors his heart desired. Luis might've been a gang lord it was unwise to cross, sure, but Darry's wrath was going to be a lot more up-close and personal for me if Tim snitched; besides, Christ knew there just wasn't much left to report on. Necessity had made me a good judge of bad character, and Cliff was a harmless kook, a street prophet who gave out valuable product like water flowed through a sieve to get what he really craved: attention. He wasn't worth Luis's time, none of these hippies were.

The smell of grass hung so heavily in the air, as I climbed into the VW bus and pushed aside a new bead curtain in the process, you wanted to cut a hole in it just to catch your breath. Randy was still plucking at the strings of that ukelele, slumped backwards over a crimson velvet ottoman, trying and failing to recreate Tim Buckley's Phantasmagoria in Two this time; Aisha was sprawled on her stomach, skimming, of all things, a dog-eared copy of Sex and the Single Girl. I only had eyes for Cliff, though, brushing off the already-lit joint somebody was pressing into my hand, and finally found him coming out of the tiny kitchen with a cup of tea that looked like the water you dipped paintbrushes into.

Unlike all of his acolytes, lounging around the bus in various stages of dissociation, I realized that I'd never really seen him look impaired. His smile lit up the room like the rising sun; I'd never seen anything like its ability to attract someone to him, either. "Little sister," he started after a small sip— if there was one thing I'd never be in short supply of, it was brother figures. "Your date go okay the other day?"

I scratched the side of my head; in all honesty, I'd expected him to ask what I'd done with the stack of pamphlets he'd pressed into my hands as I left (bottom of the Market Street dumpster). "That's a real pretty bracelet," he said before I could answer, pointing at the string of champagne pink beads on my left wrist. "Where'd you get it from?"

I glanced downwards to jog my memory; I hadn't thought twice about it as I got dressed that morning, grabbing it off my nightstand as I headed out. Then my face heated up. "Oh, it's just a gift from Luis."

"Luis?" His tone morphed back into teasing as fast as quicksilver. "Don't tell me you moved onto a new boyfriend already."

He wasn't kidding when he said that I'd be compensated for my work, but I still felt like a cheap hooker, easily bought off with costume jewelry because he knew I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I should've asked for Cartier, Tiffany, the sort of thing he put on his girlfriends' wrists to pacify them— God knew he owed me more than he'd spent on all of them put together. "Nah, he's my ex-boyfriend's uncle," I said with an affected shrug, "you ever want to start turning a profit on any of those mushrooms you're handing out, you're gonna have to kiss the ring first. He's a big pusher on this side of town, closer to the East, though."

I honestly hadn't expected any kind of reaction from him, much less the shower of sparks that went off in his dark eyes, like somebody had struck flint inside of them— he tried to play it off immediately, school his expression, but he wasn't a skilled enough actor to make me forget what I'd just seen. Harmless kook, my ass. You had to hand it to Luis, however grudgingly: whether it was years of hard-earned knowledge or pure instinct, he was better at his job than me.