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Author's Note: This is set 25 years after The Outsiders and is from Ponyboy's POV. It contains tie-ins with Marauder and the Q's amazing Steve-centered story, Cogs in the Machine, which I highly suggest you check out. It deals with Steve's life as a drug counselor in present day. But enough rambling.
Any and all constructuve criticism, suggestions and reviews are always welcome.
Disclaimer: I do not own any familiar characters, situations or places. Marauder and the Q owns some plot ideas and character structures.
“Honey?” Nancy furrowed her brow, staring at me in concern. She set a soft hand on my arm, the wedding band smooth and cool against my heated skin. Lord, I was starting to sweat… surely returning home shouldn’t be this hard.
I forced a shaky smile to my face in an effort to reassure her, though she saw right through my façade. “It’s going to be all right, Michael.”
But in that moment, I wasn’t Michael, a 39-year-old writer that lived in Chicago with his wife and two kids. Right then, I was a scared, angry 18-year-old Ponyboy Curtis. I was mad at my oldest brother and grieving over the loss of my other, driving for hours on end with the sole intention of getting as far from Tulsa, Oklahoma as I could.
“Daddy, are you sick?” It was my daughter that brought my attention back to the present.
Looking down at the girl, I couldn’t stop the smile that creased across my face. She was the light of my life and I loved my daughter like I could never have imagined. Mary had wild brunette curls that fell around her pale face. Her name was a testament to the fact that no matter how far away I moved or how much I tried to forget where I’d come from, my past was always a part of my present. Marion, named after her grandmother.
“No Mary, I’m not.” I smiled at her, and then straightened up a little and turned to my other side where Patrick, who looked so much like his namesake it hurt, was slouched. He was fifteen and eight years older than his sister, which meant that he thought she was annoying and pesky.
“You keep frowning like that and your face will freeze that way,” I told him, to which he rolled his eyes. I missed my little boy, the one that thought I was the greatest thing in the world and would sit in my office, playing with this trucks and trains for hours while I pounded out pages of a new book on my computer.
Teenagers were no picnic to raise, I was realizing. I could finally, after 21 years, understand why Darry had yelled at me so much. In fact, I wondered sometimes how he and Sodapop had dealt with my surliness.
Patrick did not want to be in Oklahoma for his summer break, and he made sure that we knew it. We were there for the official reason of helping Nancy’s youngest sister, Laura, through the final month of her first pregnancy, but I had other intentions as well. Nancy had somehow convinced me that I needed to confront my past and make amends with everyone that I used to know. She wanted to meet my family and my friends, the people that had been my life so many years before.
“Let’s get our luggage,” I suggested, taking Mary’s hand on my right and Patrick’s on my left, which got me a soft grin from her and a biting glare from him.
Nancy took Mary’s other hand and we made our way to the baggage claim. Once we had our things, we went out to the front and waved over a taxi.
“Where to?” The driver asked jovially, and I nearly let slip my old address. Instead, I bit my tongue and gave him the paper that had the address to the hotel we had reservations at scribbled on it.
That night, with my family all sound asleep around me, I stared up at the popcorn ceiling, my stomach rolling in anxiety. I couldn’t keep the memories of my last night in Tulsa from my mind.
“Apparently you can’t, Kid, or you wouldn’t be throwing your future away!”
“Like you did?” I yelled, glaring at him as his icy eyes tore through me. We were on opposite sides of the room, perhaps with a little reminder of what had happened last time we’d gotten so upset with each other keeping us careful to put a few feet between us. No one wanted a repeat of that night; and this time, Sodapop wouldn’t be here to play the peacemaker.
Darry’s face was thunderous. “Yeah, like I did!”
“Then why don’t you go on to college then, if you want to so bad?”
“I gave up my chance, Ponyboy, but you’ve got yours right in front of you and you’re gonna take it! There’s nothing keeping you from it!”
By now, the neighbors were surely getting furious at all the noise we were making at three in the morning, but neither Darry nor I cared. Had it really been just a month before that Darry had been beaming proudly at me and I’d been holding my OU acceptance letter in my shaky hands, filled with wonder and excitement?
The knock on the door that came two weeks ago had been what had finally broken through our happy atmosphere. And boy, when we crashed, we really crashed. Sodapop… dead? It seemed impossible, but the soldiers at the door had the few personal items he’d been carrying with him. His dog tags had been lost in an ambush, but I don’t think either of us was ready to see those anyway.
It had taken me fourteen long days of grieving and pain to finally come to my decision; that I just wasn’t going to college. I had no interest in an education, not when my brother was dead in Vietnam. I wasn’t sure just what I was planning on doing, but I knew that I would not be moving my things into a dorm at a university.
Darry was having a real hard time accepting that though.
“Sodapop is dead, Darry, and you want me to go on to OU and start my classes like nothing’s changed?” I yelled, pushing down the tears that sprang to my eyes at Soda’s name.
Darry pulled a hand through his hair in exasperation and my childish mind selfishly ignored the look of pure, raw suffering that had flashed through his eyes.
“You know that just ‘cause someone dies that don’t mean you stop living. You pick yourself up and you keep going!” We were both silent for a minute, the only sound that of the crickets chirping outside, as I clenched my fists in stubbornness. I would not be going to college.
Then Darry spoke, his voice final and hard. “If you don’t go to OU, you ain’t staying here, Ponyboy. I can’t let you keep living here.”
That I hadn’t been expecting, and I nearly felt the air whoosh right out of me. He was kicking me out now?
“Well that’s good, ‘cause I haven’t got any intention of staying in this damn house any longer,” I snarled in anger, storming to my room and tossing clothes and possessions into a bag.
Darry stood in the doorway and watched me, his grim mouth set in a line of determination.
When I was finished, I took one last look around my room, the one that held so many memories of Sodapop and I, and heaved the bag up onto my shoulder, pushing past Darry and to the front door.
“Where are you planning on going at three in the morning, Kid?” Darry asked, his voice calm.
“Anywhere but here,” I said bitterly, stepping outside and walking down to the rusted car I’d scraped together money to buy a year back. I tossed the bag into the seat beside me and drove, not caring where I ended up. I had some money saved in my bank account, enough to get me to wherever I was headed, and I didn’t plan on returning. Darry and I had shared our last fight.
It was my excuse for leaving, being so angry with my oldest brother, but the underlying reasons were much more painful. Tulsa held too many memories of the people that I had lost. My mom and my dad… Dallas and Johnny… and now Sodapop. I just wasn’t sure that I could handle staying.
So that night, I started driving, and I wouldn’t stop until I hit Chicago, a place that seemed as different from Tulsa as it could get. The radio was my only company, and I was careful not to wonder what Two-Bit would think of my leaving. I hadn’t even said good-bye.
I stopped at gas stations whenever I needed to and pulled into fast food restaurants for my grumbling stomach, but was very cautious to stay far away from DX stations and Dairy Queens, trying to leave the past behind me instead of bring it to my mind again.
After I’d reached Chicago and found a cheap apartment to rent, I’d tried to leave all my old memories and things from my past behind me. I wrote free lance articles for a couple papers and even got a few short stories of mine published in a book.
Money was still tight though and I was constantly scrimping just to pay the bills. That was when I started dating Nancy. Her dad worked at a publishing company that had bought some of my pieces, and a few months into our relationship, she was over at my little apartment, helping me unpack some of the boxes I had yet to touch. They were the ones that held all my old things that I didn’t need anymore, all of the sentimental possessions that I wasn’t quite ready to look at.
I went to get us some drinks from the kitchen and when I came back, she was sitting on the floor, completely engrossed in reading a thick stack of papers. It was my old English theme, I realized. She was only on one of the first few pages, right at where I was describing the gang, and she had a little smile on her face.
I started to take the papers from her but she looked up at me, her innocent eyes wide. “Wait, can I read this?”
Even though I felt like refusing, I nodded and started unpacking all of the other boxes, setting things in drawers and shelves that I wasn’t bound to look at, just trying to keep myself busy and stop from fidgeting as she read my past. It was three hours later that she finally looked up, tears streaming down her face. “Michael… you have to publish this. I can show it to my dad.”
“No,” I was quick to shake my head, taking the papers from her hands and setting them in a corner of my closet. I didn’t want my past dredged up so easily, and she bit her lip anxiously, wanting to say more but deciding against it. After that though, the idea was planted in her mind, and she continually brought it up in casual conversation.
She was convinced that if I would just publish it, it could actually change things. It couldn’t bring back my friends, my parents or my brother though, so I had no interest in letting my old injuries be poked at again.
In Chicago, I was an entirely different person and that was what I loved about the city. No one knew that I had watched a hoodlum get shot down by the police, or that I’d saved a bunch of kids from a church fire. No one knew that both my parents had been killed in one swoop in a car accident, and no one knew that my brother had died in ‘Nam.
Except for Nancy, and she wasn’t ready to forget anytime soon. As she and I grew closer, she slowly wore down my barriers. By the time I was ready to ask her to marry me, I had no money and no way to support the two of us. I didn’t want to commit her to a life of poverty, so I gave in, finally, and took the theme to her dad’s office.
Two days later, I got a call from my future father-in-law informing me that the company was eager to publish it.
It wasn’t like I got famous after that or anything, but I did certainly make enough money to support us comfortably. And with her job as a nurse at the local hospital, we were decently well off. People around Chicago knew me pretty well, but in other cities, my book wasn’t a huge success.
And I didn’t work too hard to promote it, never granting interviews or book signings. I still wanted my past behind me, and I came close to regretting ever letting that theme get published sometimes. I’d wound up telling Nancy everything, all about what happened after the end of the book and why I left Tulsa, and she was supportive. She understood that I needed time and space from my past, so she didn’t push me to contact my brother.
Her own family was large enough for the both of us, with five brothers and sisters and seemingly endless aunts, uncles and cousins.
When she told me a few months back that she had to go to Tulsa to be with her youngest sister as she gave birth, I nearly choked on the coffee I’d been drinking. Out of everywhere in the entire world, her sister and her new husband had moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
With her soft voice and gentle eyes, she looked at me, “I think you should come with me and see your friends and brother again.”
I vehemently resisted at first, but after a few days, I was slowly starting to give in. Clearly, I wasn’t going to forget my past like I’d been trying to do, so I better make amends. Patrick was none too happy with our decision, but Mary was thrilled at the prospect of going to some “foreign” place.
Lying in a hotel room in that town though, with the spot where the Dingo had once stood just down the road and my old home a mere twenty minutes away, I wasn’t so sure. I was scared to death that Darry would slam the door in my face, refuse to speak to me. After all, I hadn’t invited him to my wedding or even written him since I had argued with him so long ago.
But as Nancy woke beside me she gave me a reassuring smile and kissed me lightly. “Everything will be okay, Michael.”
She got ready and woke the kids up, leaving for her sister’s house before the clock even read nine in the morning. I had the day to myself, and I knew what I had to do. I had to face my growing fear.
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