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Sodapop sometimes finds himself thinking how Ponyboy still has the same radiant smile as before. The same twinkling grin that he’d flash, back when he was fourteen and making one mouthy remark after another. It was rarer now, and Soda learned to cherish each time his little brother’s green eyes grew bright and his tender smile embodied a fragment of hope.
“You’re really growin’ up now, huh, honey?” Sodapop asks softly, cupping Ponyboy’s face and tilting it so their eyes meet. At seventeen, Ponyboy’s hair hung behind his ears with sun-bleached strands of gold and he stood eye-to-eye with Soda. Sodapop’s eyes glistened while clad in cut-off shorts, and wildly blazed with an unshakable sense of pride. “University and everything. My kid brother’s gettin’ too good for little ‘ol Tulsa!”
Darry’s voice coarsely echoes off the bright yellow walls next. “Think you’ll be all right?”
Ponyboy nodded slowly, before being engulfed in his eldest brother’s arms, a quiet giggle coming from his lips as Darry picked him off his feet and spun him around.
“You’re getting too heavy for that, Pony. You ain’t fourteen no more,” Darry quips, setting him back on the hardwood floors.
“I think you’re the one gettin’ too old, Dar. Not freshly twenty, huh?”
Darry chuckles, ruffling Ponyboy’s hair affectionately. Light flooded a small corner of the dimly lit room, with the blinds slipped half down with strips of daylight spilling across the floor.
There were new cracks in the ceiling to memorize, Ponyboy laid freezing cold despite the blankets and buried himself against the wall trying to remember Soda’s arm draped over him just two days before.
“I always knew you could do it,” Darry says, his eyes bright. “I’m so proud of you, baby. We all are.”
The floorboards creak loudly under his footsteps as he moves closer towards Pony.
“Ma and dad would be so proud of you, too.”
That’s what it had all been for—all the hollering and the agony and the tears. Late nights working under only the dim glow of the moon until Soda begged him to go to sleep, and running out of aspirin nearly every month when his head pounds and death is a thousand prickles on his neck…
“I’m sorry I was so hard on you.”
“We’ve already been through this,” Ponyboy insisted, “I know you only wanted the best, Darry.”
Darry shook his head. “It wasn’t the right way.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t turn out to be a juvenile delinquent or a drug pusher or somethin’. You were still a kid too.”
It wasn’t too strange to Pony that he bruised at the slightest touch, but then he just suddenly couldn’t stomach anymore and tylenol couldn’t compare to his drug of choice. It just wasn’t enough anymore. Nothing but pain would give him just the slightest bit of relief.
“You feelin’ okay, Pony?”
Three years ago, Ponyboy always said university was a worry for tomorrow. The same tomorrow where he’d wonder if bereavement would ever leave from their front door. Foolishly saving that chocolate bar or looking away when the sun sets or keeping Darry’s old painkillers underneath the bed, all for a tomorrow that was never promised.
“Leaving you and Soda..it just doesn’t feel right.”
Somehow, that same fabled tomorrow came as he kicked a cardboard box with a small lump of clothes he had yet to unpack to the side.
Darry hopped onto the edge of the barren mattress, with the unmade sheets and pillows all bundled up in the corner. Ponyboy and Sodapop followed, throwing an arm around his kid brother.
“I’m…I’m scared,” Ponyboy muttered. “I ain’t ever been this far from home.”
Darry rubbed his shoulder comfortingly, while Soda tried to comfort the simmering worries. “Don’t be, Pone. C’mon, you’re gonna have so much fun here that you’re gonna forget ‘bout ol’ Soda and Darry back in Oklahoma.” Sodapop could always make him smile even when his head was full of doubts, finding himself weakly grinning.
Ponyboy’s favorite blanket was still crumpled up into a ball on the sofa when Darry sat his shoes by the door. Five chairs at the dinner table and only two plates of dinner were made that night.
Sodapop placed a sloppy kiss on Pony’s forehead, as he groaned and playfully pushed his older brother away. He still smelled like grease and motor oil with a whiff of that old drugstore cologne–a pungent blend of sandalwood and musk–that he’d drenched himself in until it was just the stench of alcohol.
“We’re gonna miss you so much.”
“Thought you’d be glad to finally get rid of me.” Ponyboy laughs before Darry cuts him short with a frown.
“Don’t you ever say that again,” Darry scolded.
Ponyboy had a look of mock incredulousness on his face.
“Sorry for givin’ you so much trouble..before,” Pony mumbled sheepishly. “Don’t know how you’re gonna pick up any girls with gray hairs in your twenties, Dar.”
“We ain’t gonna stop worrying our asses off, you know that, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, Darry.”
“I love you so much, Pony,” Darry said seriously. “Call us as much as you want. I don’t care about payin’ for long distance.”
“Sure, Dar,” Ponyboy agreed. “I love you too.”
“C’mon, my turn!” Sodapop swung his head over Pony’s shoulder, enveloped like they were at home and in the dead of night, instructively pulling his little brother’s soaked body closer after a nightmare.
“I love you, I love you so much,” Sodapop half-sobbed into Ponyboy’s shirt. He was warm to the touch.
“I love you too, Soda,” Ponyboy whispers, muffled in the crook of his older brother’s neck. “I love you so much.” He could’ve stayed like that for a millenia–safe and sound and warily imagining how it could have all turned out if he didn’t get to know love and pride and Sodapop’s bright blue spaghetti dinners.
“Say hi to Two and Steve for me.”
Sodapop nodded. “Okay, honey. Tell us if you pick up any cute broads, savvy?”
“Don’t you listen to him,” Darry quickly butts in. “Keep your head straight and focus on your studies.”
“C’mon, lay off him Dar. He’s seventeen and it ain’t gonna be long before we get some more little bookworms and chocolate cake fiends running around.” Pony rolled his eyes with a pout. A smile tugs at his lips, and Sodapop’s subsequent amused grin forces him to mirror the image.
“Let’s hope not. Taking care of just one of you was bad enough.” Darry laughed, and playfully punched Pony’s shoulder.
“We’ll see you at Christmas, all right?” Soda said softly. “Get you a plane ticket and you’ll come home. We’ll have a tree and everything ‘cause we haven’t had one since…since mom and dad...”
Ponyboy nodded, watching Sodapop’s eager grin fall away as the last word left his lips. He didn’t need to continue. “I know,” he said quietly, falling into Soda’s arms again and clinging onto him tightly like a lifeline. This time, Darry envelopes the two in his embrace, leaning in and pressing a kiss to the top of Pony’s head.
Ponyboy looked up after a moment. “Thank you for helping me move in,” he says carefully, “thank you.”
“You don’t ever gotta thank us. Ever, you dig?” Darry affirmed sternly.
Pony nodded, an uneven and unnerving feeling sinking to the bottom of his stomach. There wouldn’t ever be enough time.
He suddenly wished he held on tighter as he hears Sodapop call out, “Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do!” through the rolled down window of their red Ford truck with a scrape tattooed on the left door.
“I know!” Ponyboy screamed back. The second the words left his lips, a sudden bleary emptiness settling as his face stings red against the gray. Summer in San Francisco didn’t burn in shades of amber and ruby like it did back home.
And they were gone—staring at the red mass before it just became another distant star in the night sky. Ponyboy lingered on the uneven mosaic steps a little longer, the blue fire that tugged at his heartstrings burning out.
The empty street, the crunching of the rough gravel, and the unfamiliar place he was to call home for the next four years was sore on his heart, and some part of him wanted to get on the next plane to Tulsa, or run after his older brothers until his legs gave way.
Turning and shutting the door, the draft in the room seemed frigid, and a foreign scent lingered in the air. Dallas’s Saint Christopher pendant was cool against his chest, his fingers subconsciously reaching underneath his shirt and eerily feeling the engraving with his thumb.
In a smaller cardboard box, underneath the fleeting afterglow and brown flaps, sat a stack of books with Gone With The Wind solemnly at the top. Chills spread through him like a wildfire as his quivering fingers tugged at the worn cover and he finds himself face to face with Johnny’s silent declaration–the same one that had Ponyboy struggling everyday to find himself again even years afterwards.
Tears swell up in Pony’s eyes, and his chest tightens as he recalls fighting for his life on the bathroom floor and hoping his heart would stop hurting and for something he did to finally be right for once—hanging in the balance when every night he drifted off, he was met in his dreams by things he could never grasp.
Ponyboy still sees haunted look etched in Darry’s blue eyes and he constantly hears Sodapop’s agonizing scream and remembers feeling the layers of bandages that hid the delicate scars. A dark red bag of fluid hung above his head, standing out rashly from the other two bags with clear liquid as his heart rate grew quicker and quicker while Ponyboy seemed paralyzed when he noticed the maroon tube fed straight into the crook of his elbow.
Coming home from the hospital, the first thing his eyes had been drawn to was a dusty black-and-white portrait of his mom in a swirl of gray curls and dad’s white smile that sat forgotten by time atop the piano. Pony tells them, I’m exhausted.
It was cold then, like it is now. The sickly yellow walls and florid embossed plaster painted a ghostly white suffocated him. Breaking the surface and sinking down onto the floor, Ponyboy didn’t know whether he was lucky or not—always grabbing at air hoping what he’s lost will come back.
He misses them all.