I was going to break it off with Bryon. Really. I was. My rap sheet might have been long enough to wrap around the block by now, sure, but 'unrepentant cheater' still didn't sit well with me— and the fact that I'd crossed that line, and with hardly any conscious thought either, troubled me more than I wanted to admit. If I was afflicted with some kind of disease that made me lose all motor control around Curly Shepard, well, that was probably something I should try to fix (with a bucket of ice water to the head?) before I kept on messing with another guy.

My resolve started to crumble as I came face-to-face with his mother, along with a heap of her inedible peanut brittle.

"Jasmine, I swear I haven't seen you in ages," she said, shoving a dolphin-patterned plate across the table with an encouraging smile. My mama had raised me with enough manners that I couldn't bring myself to refuse, but I swore that if I broke a molar on these things, I was sending the dental bill right to their house. Then she pointed at a slice that was hemorrhaging caramel. "You want somethin' else, hon, a glass of lemonade, maybe?"

She was rawboned from her disease, skin drawn taut over the hollows of her cheeks, but even with all that and a surrogate son in the slammer, she wasn't about to let anything get in the way of her Southern hospitality. I liked Bryon's mother, the spark of spirit that kept her from breaking like a dish, and me and older women usually had a pretty rocky relationship. "Lemonade sounds good, ma'am," I said, twisting a handful of the tablecloth, then telling myself to get a damn grip already. Bryon had had a revolving door of chicks coming through here before he met me, Christ knew they'd all get over it soon enough.

I didn't so much as get to shake the cloudy ice cubes around the glass, though, or find out who her neighbor Gloria was shacking up with this week, before Bryon came in through the sliding door in the back. Three of the knuckles on his right hand were bruised, murky like watercolors a toddler had mixed together. "I'm done with the mulch bed, Mom," he said, like the homeowner's association was about to come knocking over on the East side. He pressed his lips to my temple, almost chastely. "Jasmine, you wanted to borrow For Whom The Bells Tolls, right? It's back in my room."

It was an impressively bad excuse, but a decent chunk of that woman's indomitable spirit came from her refusal to see anything she didn't want to— I didn't even like Hemingway. She still let us head out, with a door shut and locked behind us.

They'd finally moved Mark's bed out, but without anything replacing it, the room just looked hopelessly off-kilter— like Johnny's homeroom, without his desk. I wanted to suggest a potted plant. "What happened to your hand?" I asked instead. Another girl would've kissed his knuckles, cradled them to her chest. I wasn't that girl.

"I was visitin' Mark."

Out of everybody for him to get in a fight with, he managed to pick one with a guy already in handcuffs. "They sent him up to the state reformatory, didn't they?" Then the gears of my memory started turning again. "Thought he was claimin' he didn't want to see you again, as long as he lived, too."

"He wanted to fuck with my head." He picked For Whom The Bell Tolls up, then tossed it across the bedspread, its pages fanning open as it landed on its cracked spine— maybe if I looked inside, I'd find out exactly who it was tolling for. "Sayin' a bunch of messed up stuff. Lies," he added, hastily, like he was trying to convince himself. "He's tryna hurt me, get back at me, however he can. He's behind barbed wire and still workin' on the how."

A cold sensation started to snake down my spine, but I forced myself to keep a politely inquisitive— but not too inquisitive— expression. "What kind of lies?"

I already knew. I just wanted to hear him say it, in his own words.

"That you helped Dallas sell before he died, that you were out pushin' product too… he's really lost his damn mind in there. Even Dallas wouldn't try to get a chick involved in something like that. If he even was involved in that. Shit didn't used to be so rough on the East side."

His voice trailed higher and higher with every new sentence: I was starting to see that the capacity for self-delusion was a family trait. Mark was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them, and he'd managed to run a fairly sophisticated operation before Bryon busted him— he of course was well-aware of what I'd gotten up to, and the River Kings I'd put in that reformatory would be more than happy to fill any gaps in his knowledge. If anything, I was surprised it'd taken this long for him to drop a dime.

And embarrassingly enough, it'd taken me this long to figure out that if Bryon had been willing to send his own brother up to the big house, it wasn't so much of a stretch to see him making a couple of well-placed phone calls about me, some chick he was rebounding with to pass the time. I was the 'psychosexual fantasy' of a top three Tulsa drug dealer, spending my days off work spying on a mushroom-distributing hippie for him. At least Ponyboy now swapping spit with his ex-girlfriend— or holding hands at prayer group, whatever those two were up to— guaranteed Bryon was going nowhere near that caravan.

I couldn't cut him loose now— at least not right this second. The timing was horrific. He'd think I had something to hide. "Don't worry," he said with a grim hint of a smile, flashing his knuckles at me like a hunting trophy. "I think I've gotten myself permanently removed from his visitor list. Shit, I'm lucky we both didn't get taken out in cuffs."

I really would've admired his dedication to defending my honor, if all these 'rumors' weren't one hundred percent accurate. If anything, I doubted the Will Rogers rumor mill could've come up with lies half as salacious as the truth. "I would never do somethin' like that," I said, dropping my glance to the carpet, which could've used a solid vacuuming. Everybody who knew me would've been able to see right through this, but I had the feeling Bryon would be as easy to trick as my uncle Sven— who'd sent me a hundred dollar bill last Christmas, inexplicably— had been. "My daddy… he used to be mixed up in stuff like that, when I was younger, did some time up in Big Mac. He tore our family apart." Tears started to pool along my bottom lash line, and I let out a heavy sigh. "I can't believe he'd say that just to get back at you. Disrespectin' Dally's memory, too."

Lord, I really wasn't seeing the gates of heaven once Saint Peter heard this one. I didn't even let what my daddy would've thought of me slip past a single synapse.

He looked at me dead-on, and for a paralyzing second, I wondered if I'd pushed it too far. You could judge by his taste in bedtime reading alone that Bryon wasn't the dullest crayon in the box, either. Then he slumped forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. "It's sick. Everything's sick. I don't even know what's right or wrong anymore. I ruined his life, maybe, but M & M, all those other kids he sold to, they ain't even got no possibility of parole. You can't escape your own mind."

Didn't I know that one. I couldn't say anything, though, before he was pulling something out of the depths of his nightstand— a class ring on a chain, the gold still bright, an inscription inside I couldn't read from this angle. I had no clue how they'd afforded it, without Mark's revenue stream in the mix. "I maybe rolled a drunk senior," he said guiltily, rubbing the back of his neck like he was trying to get a stubborn stain out, "back at prom, last year. So it's not mine, technically… but I still want you to wear it."

He was grasping, too, as he stripped me down with his eyes and tried to get the measure of me. He wanted to know he hadn't just thrown away his last hopes of reconciliation with his brother for nothing. He was expecting a quick answer.

My first reaction was to run away screaming, the vivid flashback I got of Joe yanking Dallas's off my throat was enough to put me off the whole class ring thing for life. But I could never tell him about that, and my jig was up, anyway. If Tim— still Luis's right-hand man— caught wind of half of what I was up to, he'd promised to go straight to Darry, and I'd have a hard time doing much of anything after he'd chained me to the radiator. Maybe I was reflexively sneering at something I'd never had, never let myself hope for. A golden retriever for two point five kids to chase around the backyard, a house in the suburbs, a neighborhood where boys didn't get shot dead under the streetlights. Who was I going to trade the promise of that in for, Curly, who my brothers hated, who was no good for me? Who wouldn't take me back in the first place?

Bryon was the guy I wanted to want, the life I wanted to want. I swept my hair off my neck to let him do the clasp, and prayed for it to stop feeling like I was being put in chains.


Angela was being suspiciously well-behaved— hell, she was starting to make me look awful in comparison, I needed to have some words with her about taking it down a notch. The breakfast she was serving up for us was a damn sight better than anything I'd ever tossed in front of the boys, a task I usually treated with all the gravitas of feeding pigs at the trough. They didn't hesitate to let me know, either.

"Where'd you learn to cook like this, huh?" Two-Bit asked, practically licking his plate after he'd finished inhaling his last scrap of bacon. "Because I think you oughta lend Jasmine some of your recipes, personally—"

I punched him hard enough in the arm to make him yelp, and shut the fuck up, at least for a couple seconds. "Ain't you supposed to be on a bus to base camp by now?" I was trying to tie my hair up with one hand and shovel eggs into my mouth with another, and doing neither well. "I promise my cooking's better than whatever MRE's they'll be tossin' in front of you there."

It was nice, on one hand, having Two-Bit and Steve back here to mooch free meals like the old days— on the other, it reminded me why they rarely came around anymore. With Soda gone now too, we didn't even need any beat-up lawn chairs to seat everybody, the gaps at the table obvious and glaring. We could try and pretend all we liked, but we'd stopped being a family the minute Johnny flatlined.

"I don't remember anybody askin' me about this," Ponyboy said. He'd been so mouse-quiet, picking at his plate of toast— he'd never regained his appetite since the church— I'd hardly even noticed he was there. He was making himself known with a vengeance now.

Darry was at work, Judy was vomiting in the bathroom and trying to cover up the sound by blasting the tap, and there was nobody left to defuse this except me— Steve and Two-Bit sure as hell wouldn't do it. "I'll be gone soon enough, don't plan on crashin' the Curtis family Christmas card," Angela said calmly, putting the pan in the sink to soak. "Once I've got some money saved up for my own place."

She might as well have promised to stay with us until Darry needed elder care; like any decent Tulsa landlords rented to single girls, to begin with. "I know this was probably just another Tuesday night for you," Ponyboy's sharp tongue shot out, ready to lacerate, "but you tried to kill me, Angela. Gonna be slippin' some strychnine into my chocolate milk next time I elbow past you in the line for the bathroom?"

"I wouldn't say kill," I jumped in, unwisely. "Probably closer to, you know, maim—"

"You seemed to like your husband well enough when you were hirin' him to take out a hit on me." I'd forgotten just how nasty Ponyboy could be when pushed, at my own peril. Like the rest of the family, he also had a limitless capacity for grudge-holding. "First time you ever got turned down, you think that's a crime that ought to be punishable by death?"

I couldn't resist saying it. My mouth was doing it of its own accord. "You're best friends with a guy who tried to kill you, these days. Spend most of your time out and about with him, in fact."

He shot me the evil eye. "That's different— Randy's different now. He's changed his entire life. What exactly has Angela changed, besides her last name?"

I knew what he was thinking— that I was choosing the Shepards over my own family, once again. It'd become a reflex for me. Angela said nothing, elbows in the sink, dribbling Dawn over the sponge. She wouldn't apologize, but taking it without a word volleyed back, that was her atonement.

"I have work," I said to nobody in particular— Margaret was accomodating about a lot of things, including the kind of creeps I tended to attract to her establishment, but tardiness wasn't one of them. Then I got Angela by the arm and started dragging her out into the hall. "Angel, help me pick out an outfit."

"You need more instructions besides 'lower-cut top'? It's like you ain't even tryin' for those greasy hoods' tips."

"You should apologize to him, for real," I said, my nails digging into her arm. I didn't care if it hurt, and she probably didn't either, because she didn't try to pull away. "I ain't always gonna be around to run interference. You don't really deserve it, neither, if I'm bein' honest."

I loved her like a sister, but as much as I didn't always like him, Ponyboy was still my brother.

"Maybe." I was starting to suspect that there was more to this story than either of them was letting on, but then she finally shook me off, and the moment was lost. "See you at Atomic Liquor tonight."

The last time I'd been there was with Dallas, right before we'd broken into Norm's house together, and that made my stomach give a hard lurch like a slam on the brakes. "You will?"

She gave me her trademark sassy smirk, recovering quickly from the scene in the kitchen. "It's Curly's birthday. You forgot already?"

What I'd forgotten was that Angela, no matter what, always landed on her feet like a cat thrown out of a seven story window— and I'd brought her right into my home to play with. Maybe I was just getting dangerously bored, with every new set of lace curtains Judy hung. "I'll be there," I heard myself say. "Tell him to save me a goody bag, too."


I lasted fifteen minutes inside the venue at Curly's birthday bash, and regretted coming at all by the five minute mark. I'd barely managed to touch the maraschino cherry on my drink before Alberto, so loaded off tequila he was clutching the walls to stay upright, was trying to get my female perspective on his latest chick problem— I'd never imagined him having more of an inner life than a drill bit before, though Tim swore that between him and Luis, he was the tamer one. By the time he started demonstrating his foreplay methods via some truly unprintable hand gestures, I knew it was time to make my exit.

Curly found me out on the fire escape, fumbling around my purse for a pack of cigarettes.

"I didn't invite you, did I?" the birthday boy asked, still dripping with self-possession as he shut the door, before his mouth settled into a flat line. He always seemed to get a buzz off a crowd, especially when he was the center of its attention, but then again, if anything could wipe a smile from somebody's face, it was more than ten minutes at a stretch spent with the Ramirez clan. Or maybe it was just the unpleasant surprise of finding me.

Your sister did, I almost said, like she was the matchmaker from Fiddler on the Roof or something. I sat down on the steps instead, convinced that the rickety fire escape would collapse under our combined weight in a second; the way it swayed in a stiff breeze didn't fill me with confidence about its structural soundness. Tulsa wasn't exactly a bustling metropolis, but the passerby below, the faint hum of music coming from inside the bar, still made a wave of melancholy wash over me. I felt insignificant and meaningless in the cosmic sense, like it wouldn't matter if I went over the railing, and not just in the way Cliff's mushrooms were supposed to give me ego death. "Since when do you need an invitation to an East side party?" I asked, blowing out a mouthful of smoke. "Typically everybody just comes runnin' once they hear the keg open."

I expected him to turn around and slam the door behind him, but he sat down beside me on the steps, instead. "You bring me a present, then?"

I cut my eyes at him. "Me comin' here at all was your present."

He waved his hand at my open pack in response; grudgingly, I pushed one up for him to take. He smelled like a cologne that used too many pine needles, enough to crawl up my nostrils and die there, and a little like somebody had spilled a cup of beer down his front. "Jasmine, I'm sorry."

He wasn't dumb enough to tell me that he was sorry he'd scared me— I would've thrown my drink in his face. "Your brother makin' you say as much?" I asked, somehow madder, if anything, that he was already waving the white flag. I wasn't sure if it was because he was smothering my anger like baking soda on a grease fire, or because I couldn't tell what angle he was trying to come at me with, but either way, he wasn't even letting me get out a single line I'd told my shampoo bottle. And I'd come up with some real zingers while I rinsed, washed, and repeated.

"No, I mean it," and it wasn't one of his fake apologies, the kind he threw at Mary Magdalene or homeroom teachers when he wanted out of trouble. Then he burned up half the cigarette in one go, before he remembered he'd have to exhale. "I meant what I said, too. But I'm still sorry."

I couldn't bring myself to say it back, but my anger was still melting like the last ice cube in my half-drunk whiskey sour; I set it down beside me, let it sweat down my bare thigh. Partly because I'd behaved pretty badly myself, all things considered, starting with the kiss— partly because Curly was impossible to stay mad at, no matter how much I wanted to. Knowing he was manipulating you did nothing to stop it from working. "Luis get you anythin' good?" I had a man's discomfort with lingering apologies, or emotional moments.

He yanked a gun out of the waistband of his jeans— his second— and this one was beautiful, a new model with a gleaming, fresh-out-the-warehouse barrel. He looked like a kid showing off his new four-wheeler. "Don't tell my brother I'm carryin' this thing around," he said, a frown pulling at the edges of his mouth. Then he started to tease. "Do you want to hold her?"

If he expected me to balk, he had another thing coming, not when I'd pulled the trigger before and still couldn't bring myself to feel remorse. A gun's heavier than you'd expect, and a lot colder; I cradled it against my chest like a child, standing it up in my lap. The sky was a murky blood orange, the inside of a wildfire. "I did somethin' bad," he said, looking out past the tops of buildings, the street below. "Or I didn't do it, exactly. I let it happen."

Curly struggled quite a bit with the whole concept of agency. It'd take him a couple more decades to finally get it right. "Let me be the judge."

"You remember Billy?"

"First card in my Rolodex, yeah." Again, I'd never actually met the guy. I just tried to keep tabs on anybody who might be liable to put a bullet in my head. "You finally make a move against him?"

"I set him up. Not him, but a couple of his guys, you know, street-level shit." He still wouldn't look at me, the words coming out like he was dribbling vomit down his chin. "I sicced a cop on them, one I been sellin' to on the side, got them scooped up. Won't gum up the works too much, but it'll slow him down for the next couple of weeks, at least. Let him know he's bein' watched."

I was impressed, in spite of myself, even though I wasn't supposed to approve of anything he did anymore. It was a risky gambit. It was something I would've done. "So I'm not seein' what you have to nail yourself to the cross over, yet—"

"He ran into a couple of ours, too." His swallow made his Adam's apple bulge out of his throat. Without bothering to ask, he reached over to swipe another one of my smokes. "Kids Tim pulled out of some trailer park development, they ain't got enough sense yet to figure out when they're beat. Moctezuma's fourteen and he's still laid out in the hospital. You think his family's gonna be able to afford it when that bill comes due?"

"Did you know?"

"No," he said too quickly, then realized I wasn't buying it. "I didn't know, okay. Not at that exact time."

"But the place, you reckoned they might be hangin' around there?" I started to choose my next words carefully. "Would you have—"

He didn't say anything. I couldn't keep the contempt out of my voice, as smoke curled off the tip of his idle cigarette. "You're too soft for this business."

All that sensitivity, and then the ruthlessness right at the heart of him, the clear vision from point A to point B that nothing could interfere with— once it fascinated me and drew me to him in equal measure, but today, evidence he still had a conscience just infuriated me. Before he could rain his indignation all over me like a busted sprinkler, I was ready for him. "You don't get to strut around like el jefe all day, then cry into your pillow at night about the collateral damage, like that makes a thing better for anybody. Get a different 'job', or slip that kid's family some cash and keep it movin'. But quit sittin' out here feelin' sorry for yourself, it's pathetic. You ain't the one hooked up to an IV rack."

"And what about you, huh?" When Curly's back got shoved up against the wall, he went straight for mean. It always made me feel better about myself. "Who do you think you're foolin', exactly— Bryon fuckin' Douglas? A steady waitress gig? Homework at the kitchen table and your bobby socks pulled up— does Darry even believe half this shit? All while you're feedin' me tips on how to handle my turf war, out the other side of your mouth?" He scoffed. "At least I know what I am. Even if half the time I can't stand it."

He had my ass there. Best of all, he didn't even have the first clue about what Luis and I had cooking. He just knew me a little bit too well, that no matter how hard I tried to pretend otherwise, I was irreparably changed. "Let's don't fight," I said, slumping against the handrail with a sudden, flu-like exhaustion. "Not on your birthday."

"Too late for that, huh?" He picked at the edge of an already-bloody cuticle. "You should go home. I'll walk you."

"You're throwin' me out now?" Hell, he thought I needed an escort before the sun even set, like some West side princess? "I didn't even get to see you blow out your candles."

"We ain't no good for each other." He stood up, swiping ash off his jeans matter-of-factly. "I start apologizin' for one fight, and it's already turned into another. C'mon, Alberto always leaves his keys idlin' in his car, it's faster."

"Can't we be friends?" The question had already started to humiliate me before it'd finished leaving my mouth. I never asked men for anything. I didn't know why I was debasing myself like this now.

He'd moved on to cigarette number four, all of which were mine, by the way. He'd be greeting eighteen with advanced-stage lung cancer, at this rate. "I don't think so."

"What, you can't be friends with a girl, now?"

"Jasmine, I can't be friends with you."

The tiniest hint of disdain in his voice startled me; I wasn't used to being the recipient of that kind of tone, like what he was saying was obvious. If I looked at him, saw what I thought I would, I'd detonate. I chugged the rest of my abandoned glass and stood up too quickly, my foot catching on a crack in the corrugated metal. The whole world tilted.

What a way to go, after everything I'd been through, except there was a pair of arms around my waist all of a sudden, hauling me back upright before I could fall head-over-keister into the street. My skull would've smashed like an eggshell— just in time for the eleven o'clock news broadcast. "Easy," he said, like he was trying to soothe a spooked horse, as my heartbeat stabilized. "I got you."

I was embarrassed as all hell; now that I'd regained my footing, I was kind of wishing he'd just let me fall to my death. In our ridiculous pose, we must've looked like a dime store romance novel cover. Even worse, the cologne didn't smell so much like a car air freshener up close. "I'm fine," I snapped, ungratefully, releasing the front of his t-shirt. "I don't need no gettin'."

"You're welcome," he said dryly, then snatched the Colt right out of my hands. To my credit, I'd held on to that thing the whole time like it was my newborn. "Don't get ahead of yourself. Maybe I just didn't want you droppin' a brand new gun all over creation."

He was right: he couldn't even save my life without there being an argument. I went back inside to find Angela, my cheeks still flushed.


Judy's knock was as light as a kitten tapping its paw, almost impossible to hear over the sound of my Aretha Franklin record, and she didn't bother to repeat it before wrenching the door open. "Jasmine."

"What," I said, lying on my stomach on the bed, the new issue of Tiger Beat spread out in front of me; I'd been trying to read the same article for the third time in a row. If Angela was good, I'd let her have some of these cutouts of The Monkees.

Then she switched my record player off; I sat up, instantly irritated. "Hey, I was listenin'—"

"Listen to me," she said, a foil-wrapped packet of pills in her hand. "I don't need these anymore, but I think you might."

It took me a second to realize what they were, parse the name Enovid— in my defense, I'd never seen them before. Back in '67, you needed a wedding ring for a pharmacist to fill your script. "Birth control?"

It was a lucky guess. "You take one of these every day," she said briskly, "at the same time every day, that's important so it's effective. Put it in your planner," she added, making one hell of an assumption about the way I lived my life. "It only starts workin' after a week, so… plan that, too."

"I'm not havin' sex."

Me waiting for marriage was a lie so obvious, I was embarrassed I'd even let it leave my mouth. "Okay," she said after a lingering moment— her eyes landed on the skirt I'd worn to Curly's party, now hanging on the doorknob, which left little to the imagination. "In case you start, though."

Taking them was tempting. I wouldn't have to worry about rubbers anymore, the potential of one breaking, wrestling one onto Bryon's dick in the first place. But I was getting the uncomfortable feeling that I'd just been outmaneuvered, that this would give her powerful leverage over me. "Does my brother know you're givin' me these?"

Somehow I doubted it, or that he'd approve if he did.

Judging by the guilty look that came over her face, he was, in fact, blissfully ignorant. "Your brother wouldn't want you bringin' home another baby to raise," she finally said. "I don't, either, so I think this can stay our little secret."

"Don't want to be stuck with another mouth to feed?" I asked before I could stop myself— like I hadn't been worrying about the possibility of her bun in the oven falling into my lap. The fact that I hadn't been all that careful lately— that I'd been rolling the dice for a long time, in fact, a crapshoot both Sandy and Angela had lost— was only feeding into my nastiness.

She bent down and brushed her lips against my forehead; I just sat there, frozen like a gargoyle. I really didn't know what in the hell to do. Giving her a perfunctory hug at her wedding had already taken a lot out of me. "Is it that hard to believe someone might be worried about you?"

I wasn't looking for another mommy and thought I'd made as much clear. I didn't like whatever this was foretelling, a sickly green sky right before the twister hit. But I wasn't dumb enough to ditch the pills, either.