Keep On Trying by Another Illusion

Summary: Dealing with the deaths of two friends, Two-Bit uses all his wit to try and keep his remaining friends together, and on meeting someone within detention realises the importance of family and friendship to get through these difficult times. Two-Bit, OMC, OFC 3rd person POV.

A.N-I’m British so use British spelling and terminology, which you may know by now! Thanks as ever to my betas and all my reviewers.

Disclaimer: I do not own Two-Bit or any of the characters created by S E Hinton or ‘Sweet Surrender’ by Sarah Mclachlan.

Seven: The Truth Comes Out

“It doesn't mean much/ It doesn't mean anything at all/ The life I've left behind me/ Is a cold room ...”

Two-Bit pulled into the school parking lot carefully. He took the keys out of the ignition and grinned, for once he was not late-- by his standards anyway. In fact, he might even make it to the last few minutes of Homeroom.

As he got out of the car he could see a girl from his History class talking to some guy. Her arms were folded and Two-Bit could hear their raised voices from where he was.

“No, if you can’t say it-” she loudly said. Two-Bit wondered what was going on and moved, as subtly as he could, closer to the scene.

“Dammit, Judy,” the guy paused, turning away from the girl. Two-Bit recognised him as Paul Samuels. He was the leader of the Brumly Boys and an intimidating twenty year old.

“Look, Paul-” she snapped.

“Judy, Judy,” he said moving closer to her. Two-Bit knew this game well. “You’re really special to me, you know that right? We’re special, yeah?” Two-Bit rolled his eyes and watched Judy simper. Paul whispered something in her ear as he touched her face. She smiled at Paul and then walked away, heading for the front door of the school.

Paul caught Two-Bit’s gaze and grinned at him. The poor girl must have been a real idiot to think she and Paul had anything special; it was a known fact that he said that same line to every girl he came across. Shoot, Two-Bit wouldn’t be surprised if he told the exact same thing to some stranger on the street.

“You okay?” Paul asked cheerfully as he lit a cigarette.

“Yeah,” Two-Bit said slowly, wondering what Paul wanted.

“Didn’t you break up with Kathy?” Two-Bit nodded slowly, was that what he wanted? To make a move on Kathy? Well, that would never work; Kathy was way too smart to get involved with a guy like Paul. Kathy could see through a lie with disturbing clarity, Two-Bit always had thought that she read people too well.

“I heard you were seein’ some other girl,” Paul stated coolly.

“I’m starting to, yeah,” he said cautiously.

“What was her name? Connie or something like that?”

“ Bonnie,” Two-Bit said. He was suspicious, what the hell did Paul want from this conversation?

“Bonnie? Bonnie Cross?” he asked curiously. Two-Bit nodded, unsure whether Paul was genuinely curious and questioning, or whether he knew. “Is she Marty Cross’ sister?”

“Probably, Cross isn’t a very common surname, is it?” he casually replied.

“No, I suppose not.” His face changed and a sense of dread filled Two-Bit.

“What is it to you?” he asked, hoping that he was not secretly dating Bonnie or something like that.

“No, I think it’s great. My cousin went out with her brother once,” he said, which did not help Two-Bit identify Paul’s motives either since he didn’t know her brother or whether or not he was a good guy. If it was the brother who had glared at him a few days earlier, then he wasn’t holding out much hope. “I think it’s really good you can see past the whole adoption thing, a lot of people can’t.”

“Adoption thing?” he asked, looking up suddenly.

“You know her and brothers are adopted, don’t you? Shoot, I thought everybody knew.” Two-Bit nodded slowly, hoping Paul would not see he was lying

Bonnie was adopted? No, it was a lie, or a rumour, something like that. It had to be. She wasn’t the adopted type, looking at her there was nothing about her that said she was adopted. In fact, the whole idea was confusing him - what if she was adopted? How would it change things? If she was adopted, surely that meant she had some type of past, didn’t she? And Two-Bit didn’t want to have to deal with that in addition to everything else. He liked things to be simple, no complications. This seemed to complicate things a whole lot.

Filled with unanswerable questions, Two-Bit walked towards the main school building, replaying the previous conversation in his head and still not quite understanding what was going on.

It was probably the worst English lesson that Two-Bit had ever had to sit through. The only time that anything worth mentioning had happened was when Bonnie watched him sit on his own at the beginning of class, rather than with her. The dullness and boredom caused by Mrs. Baker’s monotonous rambling was nothing compared to the guilt he felt at seeing Bonnie’s face fall like that.

He didn’t know her though, surely this was proof. He had only met her just under a week ago, he owed her nothing. Two-Bit owed her nothing at all. Or at least, that was what he kept telling himself. This was a thousand times worse than the Annette situation.

He leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly, the dull tones of Mrs. Baker drifting around him. It was only about ten minutes until the end of the lesson, that wasn’t too long. He could make it through ten more minutes, no sweat.

“This is bull,” someone behind him said. He turned around to face an irritated Mark Jones. Mark was in his French class and they mostly would joke around in the lesson together. Two-Bit never planned on going to France or going to those French speaking parts of Canada, so what use was learning the language? Could anybody imagine some greaser going to France and sipping coffee by the Eiffel Tower? The idea was ridiculous.

“It’s all crap,” he continued. Two-Bit nodded, smiling bitterly to himself. It was crap. This whole situation was a great big stinking pile of crap.

“You alright, Mark?” he asked, grinning at Mark. Two-Bit had always found he could deceive most people into believing he felt a certain way, even when he didn’t. It certainly had its advantages.

“Other than the boredom, yes,” he said. “You?”

“Never better,” he lied convincingly. “I can’t wait for this class to end, though.”

“Yeah, get in line, man,” Mark grinned.

Finally the bell rung and there was a mad rush to leave the classroom as soon as possible. Two-Bit hurriedly stuffed his copy of the textbook in his bag.

He looked up to see Bonnie staring at him coldly. “So who told you then?” There was more venom in her voice than he had ever imagined her feeling and for a moment he wondered how she had known. Perhaps she had expected it, perhaps she had taken the way he didn't sit with her as confirmation, or maybe she'd heard something.

Confused, he tried to think of the best thing to say to her, but before he could answer she walked away.

That lunch, Two-Bit was unusually quiet, even by his own admission. His head was filled with so many crazy thoughts that he could hardly concentrate on the simplest things, like eating his lunch. It was a good thing Steve drove them to the grocery store so he didn’t have to sit in silence in the cafeteria and risk seeing Bonnie.

“You okay?” Steve suddenly asked. “You’ve been too quiet. Are you sick or something?”

Two-Bit looked up. “Huh? Oh, I’m fine, Steve.”

Steve dubiously nodded and then reverted his attention back to his drink. He was sitting on the hood of the car while Two-Bit was leaning against it. Two-Bit guessed to an outsider they would have looked pretty tough, what with Steve’s often menacing face, and their leather jackets. ‘Greaser’ in Tulsa was synonymous with trouble, which struck Two-Bit as pretty funny since the Socs were just as bad, maybe worse in some ways.

“Whatever you say, Two-Bit,” Steve finally replied. There was something wrong-- and no, it was not just the Bonnie situation-- he could feel a tension in the atmosphere, there was a distance between Steve and Two-Bit and it had been there since they got in the car.

“ How about you, Steve? Anything bugging you?”

“ No,” he said quickly, too quickly. Two-Bit noticed that he looked uncomfortable but did not press him. Perhaps, like him, there was something else on Steve’s mind -- something he didn’t want to talk about.

Two-Bit shivered, it was freezing cold. He flipped up his jacket collar and put his hands in his pockets. “Damn, it got cold quick,” he said, just to be saying something.

Steve shrugged. “I guess.” There was a silence. “Did you hear that Brumly is tryin’ to move in on Tim’s turf already? Joey told me earlier.” Joey James was a Senior and a member of the Shepard gang, he rarely showed up at Will Rogers, and as such Two-Bit didn’t know him too well. He only knew a few of Shepard’s outfit, and to be honest, he didn’t particularly want to get involved with them. Playing poker with Adam Green was one thing, but the idea of actually getting tight with the rest of the gang didn’t sit well with him.

“It don’t surprise me none, Paul’s a sneaky guy,” Two-Bit said simply, thinking of the way he had been earlier. “Tim won’t be happy.” The more Two-Bit thought about the conversation with Paul, the more he came to the conclusion Paul had known that he had no clue about Bonnie being adopted.

“No shit.” Steve lit a cigarette and looked around for a moment.

Two-Bit crumpled up his bag of chips and sighed. He wanted to get out there, he wanted to go back to school and not be faced with Steve’s weird mood, or the Bonnie situation. Thankfully, he had no classes with her in the afternoon, so he could successfully avoid her for the rest of the day. Two-Bit wasn’t sure he could face seeing her for the again, at least for a while; just thinking about her made him feel awkward. He really screwed things up and he had no idea how to fix them.

Guilt was a funny thing, particularly when Two-Bit was beginning to feel like he had overreacted when he found out. Adoption was hardly any different to not having a dad around, right? In fact, who’s to say just what makes up a family? Johnny’s parents sure weren’t a family to him, and Dally hardly ever saw his. The gang had been their family – shoot, sometimes the gang was more of a family to all of them, himself included. They were brothers, perhaps in the same sense Bonnie and her family were. Maybe he was just being stupid, he was probably more worried about her having issues or some type of past than her actually being adopted. He didn’t even know the full story either.

“You seen Annette today?” Steve suddenly asked, a wicked smile on his face. Clearly he wanted to forget whatever was happening around him, and the best way to do that was to make fun of Two-Bit. Two-Bit couldn’t blame him, he had a habit of doing the same thing.

“No,” Two-Bit said, shaking his head at his friend. It seemed that he was perfectly able to hold a seemingly pointless and casual conversation with Steve, while thinking about things that went well beyond Annette, the Brumly Boys, or the damned weather.

He resolved to talk to Bonnie at some point, even though he currently felt uncomfortable just looking at her. How the hell was he supposed to talk to her? What if she had some past? Being adopted implied things like your parents dying, or having some hellish home like Johnny, But, he could remember their light hearted conversation in detention, the way they had just clicked and it threw up a conflicting theory on what to do. All of his senses were telling him to leave Bonnie alone and abandon ship, by he knew that he wanted to apologise to her eventually.

“Let’s get out of here,” Steve said quickly. He threw his bottle in the direction of a nearby bin, grinning smugly when it went in.

Two-Bit pulled out of the intersection a little too quickly. Soda had just finished his work for the afternoon and so Two-Bit had offered to drop him off at his house on his way home from school. This usually would have been fun, but Two-Bit had too much occupying his mind.

Soda leaned his head against the window and grinned at Two-Bit. “So, you okay, buddy?” Everybody had been asking him that today.

Two-Bit nodded, hoping that Soda wouldn’t choose this moment to detect his lies and call him up on it. “I’m great, yeah. How about you -- are you nervous about the big date?” Two-Bit asked, hoping he sounded casual.

“Not really,” Soda said, grinning. “She’ll naturally fall for my charm and good looks.”

“Sure she will, Casanova,” he said.

Two-Bit swallowed as he turned left, hating the street he was about to drive down. It was where Dally had been killed right in front him. He quickly pushed the violent images out of his mind and drove on, trying to avoid looking at the streetlamp his friend had died under.

“I miss them,” Soda said suddenly, also apparently realizing what street they had turned on to. “I miss Johnny a lot.”

“Yeah?” he asked hesitantly, uncomfortable with the topic.

“Yeah,” Soda said, his voice quiet, his eyes distant. “Do you?”

“I guess.” He did, he missed Johnny. When it was bad, Johnny used to stay ‘round Two-Bit’s house. He hadn’t wanted Darry --or his parents, while they were alive-- to know how bad it could get. Johnny had been a good guy, a real good guy; how he had lived and died wasn’t fair. Thinking of the way no one ever got him out of that house made him angry, the only people who had ever loved him were the gang.

“I still can’t get my head around the fact he’s gone. I keep wanting to tell him stuff, and he’s not there,” Soda quietly said.

Two-Bit had no idea how to respond to this and his thoughts turned to adoption once again. What if Johnny had had that chance? Two-Bit knew, however, that he would never be able to vocalise this. He had to hide it away, bury it and let it rest. Soda seemed to pick up that Two-Bit was uncomfortable with the subject so dropped it, much to his relief. The rest of the journey was silent, with Two-Bit still trying to make sense of the events of the day.

Bonnie looked at her makeshift family assembled at the kitchen table and sighed, a sense of dread filling her. In this light she could see their differences more clearly - her mother’s hair was red and her father had light hair, Dale’s hair was black and Marty’s was light brown. She wondered how they could ever pass for a true family. And yet, at the same time they were her true family and they were a close-knit unit.

She could feel all the worry and conflict about her adoption start to creep back up on her and she felt sick. She picked at her food, unable to finish it. She should have known better than to let her guard down, especially around a guy.

“Bonnie, are you alright dear? You look quite pale.”

“I’m fine, Ma’,” she lied. Marty met her eyes and frowned at her, before he returned to his dinner.

Maybe she was becoming paranoid, but she felt as if her entire family was looking at her, studying her. She swallowed. “May I be excused?”

“Of course, Bonnie. Are you sure you’re okay?” her mother persisted.

“I’m fine, okay!” she snapped, standing up and storming to her room in a way that was immature, but at the same time strangely satisfying.

Even her favourite books provided little solace because they were all filled with the same stupid fucking romance stories. She threw one against the wall and scowled. Acting like this was pathetic and childish, and she was all too aware of that as she leaned back on her bed, but at this point she could not bring herself to care. She was drowning in her own woe, as though she was some character in a novel. It was poetic. It made reality seem less real and she could delude herself that she was in some novel, with her own Mr Darcy around the corner -- well, perhaps a less formidable romantic hero.

There was a sudden knock at the door and Marty and Dale walked in without waiting for her to invite them. Marty sat on the end of the bed and smiled sympathetically at her while Dale loitered by the wall after picking up her book.

“C’mon, what’s happened?” Marty asked, probing gently.

“He found out,” she said flatly.

“Okay,” Marty said softly. “So he’s a shit, why are you bothered?”

“Because it isn’t fair that everybody thinks they can judge me on something that happened when I was a baby and had no control over it. It doesn’t define me.”

“I’m going to kill him,” Dale said in a low voice. “You’re really upset, Bonnie. I won’t let him get away with this.” Marty looked at him and muttered something Bonnie couldn’t quite make out.

She sighed and looked at Marty. “How come you don’t get problems like this?”

“Honestly? Probably because most of the girls I sleep with want to look after me, fix me I suppose. It’s all secretly very patronising when you think about it. A lot of guys --not all guys, but some – wouldn’t want the hassle of a ‘broken girl’.” Bonnie wondered how any girl could ever think they could fix Marty. She looked at him and all she could see was the wild hair and too many tattoos, a broken kid with a ton of baggage. “ Plus,” he continued. “I don’t do relationships, Bonnie; I do ... something else.”

“But I’m not broken,” she argued, Marty shrugged and looked at the ceiling “I’ve never had anything really bad happen to me,” she continued. “I was just adopted as a baby! I mean, is that so hard to understand?”

“People don’t get it though. That’s all,” he said simply. “D’you want my advice? Just forget about this dick, you are worth ten of anyone stupid enough to upset you.”

The sound of Lori crying carried up the stairs and Dale helplessly looked at Bonnie before walking out of the room to attend to his daughter.

Marty and Bonnie sat in silence for a moment, Marty absent-mindedly tracing the letter of one of his tattoos.

“It’s just one of those things. It’s horrid an’ it hurts, I bet, but you can’t let it beat you,” he finally said.

“I know, it just brings everything back,” she said. She had only ever known the Crosses as her parents after being adopted as a newborn. Hell, if it wasn’t for them continually caring for foster children and adopting Marty and Dale she may never have known she was adopted. Sometimes she resented her brothers for that, but they were family and she loved them.

“I was so angry at first. I was really mean actually, I just got so mad, and he didn’t even talk to me about it. He ignored me and then I knew that he knew,” she said quickly. “I was scared of this. Marty, I was so scared of this.”

For a while they didn’t speak, Marty just sat with her, looking at his arms occasionally or humming some tune she didn’t recognize; his presence almost always made her feel calmer.

A.N-During the 1960s, adoption was still a subject that people did not talk about very openly, which is why Bonnie did not tell Two-Bit, and why he reacted the way he did. I hope I am doing this subject justice, and that this is being handled in an uncliched and non Mary-Sueish way. I would appreciated all your comments and constructive criticism.