My eyes fluttered open as I felt the car come to a stop; the sun was setting but it was still a little bright out and I could see clearly the 'DX' sign, meaning we were back in town and gas was probably low. I stretched my arms and looked to my left where Johnny was removing the keys from the ignition.
"Boy oh boy, don't tell me little ol' Johnny is stealin' cars now?" I heard a loud voice say jokingly from outside the car. I giggled and opened the door at the same time as Johnny.
"What if I was?" he replied with a sly smile.
"Well I'd say good on ya', kid, snagged yourself a beauty." Getting out of the car, I saw Steve standing by Johnny on the driver's side and gave him a quick smile and a hello. "Hey there," he said, "So it's your car?"
"No, my dad's. He let my sister use it so obviously we took her around today."
Steve nodded and chuckled. "Need some fuel?"
"Yeah, here you go," I answer, reaching over the hood to hand him the cash. He walked back inside and I turned to Johnny. "So, watcha doin' for the rest of the night?" I ask.
"I don't know, probably just hang around these guys."
I hope that he doesn't get the wrong idea but I really wanted to spend more time with Johnny. Knowing that my mom most likely wouldn't be home made it even better timing. "Well you could come by my place," I offered. "For a little bit, y'know, I could drop you off later but my mom won't be home tonight and we can just hang. Watch TV and stuff."
"What about your sister?"
"She won't say nothin', trust me we always look out for each other."
He seemed to think about it for a bit and Steve made his way back out to come pump the gas for us. "So where'd y'all go?"
"Some lake about an hour and a half west," Johnny answered.
"Nice, Johnny here sure makes good company don't he?" Steve said to me.
"He does, it was real fun!" I respond, resting my head on my hands and glancing at Johnny with a smile. Steve smirked and looked at Johnny as well before focusing back on pumping the gas.
"Hey Johnnycake!" Sodapop greeted, walking out of the store. I giggled at the cute name they gave him and he rolled his eyes and said hello back. "Sorry, I didn't see your girl over there."
"Hey, Sodapop," I greeted.
"How ya' doin', Marlena?"
"Never been better." The car was a main topic of conversation among the guys for the next few minutes before Johnny told them he was gonna go ahead and let me get home. I'm not a car person so everything they spoke about went over my head but it sure was cute seeing Johnny talk about it with his friends; I didn't even know he knew much about cars but I guess you pick up on things when your closest friends love them the way Sodapop and Steve do.
"Y'all be safe, alright?" Sodapop says as Johnny pulls out of the DX lot.
I looked at him, noting the darkening sky outside and hoping he'd wanna spend some time with me too. "So?"
Johnny looked at me then the road and shrugged. "How do we get to your place?"
❁
We pulled into my driveway and the only light on in the house was in Sherri's room, as I expected. He looked up at my dimly lit house as we get out of the car. "I've seen your house before but it's just so nice. I look at it and think 'wow my girl lives here'?"
My heart beats a little faster when he says my girl. I really really hope he asks me out tonight. I mean we had a great day and now we're gonna spend time together at my house, what better place? "Your girl?"
He chuckled nervously as we made our way to the steps leading up to the door. "Well yeah, you don't mind me callin' you that right?"
"Not a bit." When we made it inside I told Johnny he could have a seat on the couch while I went to go call my auntie. It still sounded like a lot of people where in the background and I could hear my mother drunk and yelling with the others. I couldn't help but chuckle as aunt Martha assured me she was alright but she definitely would be staying over for the night. Drinking isn't something my mom does often, only when she's with my auntie does she really feel she can let loose like that. She doesn't even like for my dad to be around her drunk so I knew coming home probably wouldn't be on her mind.
"Y'all bein' good over there?" She asked me.
"No, I just invited all my friends over for a crazy party, that's why I had to make sure mom ain't comin' home," I say jokingly.
She laughed and said to me, "Better make sure everything is cleaned up good tomorrow."
I giggled as well before telling her that I was actually just gonna have one friend over and it definitely wouldn't get crazy. She then told me to have a good night and that she loved me before we both hung up. Cherry's room was my next stop to let her know I had a guest.
Glancing at me from behind the book she was reading she asks, "Who?"
"Um, Johnny," I say blushing a bit.
"Marlena..."
"Relax, ain't gonna do nothin', Sher. I just wanted alone time with him."
"Drivin' around in dad's car all day wasn't enough alone time?"
I crossed my arms and glared at her; I didn't expect Sherri to be completely on board but I also hoped she'd just say okay and let me be. "Come on, how often do we get to have both a car and the house to ourselves? That way I can drop him off whenever he's ready to go, too. He never gets to come over because he can't walk here."
She shrugged and looked back at the book she was reading, "You know I won't say anything but Marlena, he better not make a sleazy move on you."
"You think I'd do somethin' like that when you're in the next room?"
"I don't know, not in the past but we're older now and I know how some of your friends tease you for still not goin' all the way."
I rolled my eyes and lowered my voice; I didn't like that she thought that about me. "I wouldn't do it because of that and I'm a little offended you think I would but okay."
I started to leave her room but she called my name first. "Lena, can you bring me a snack?" she asks before I fully shut the door.
"Last I checked your legs work, get your own snack." I left her room and closed the door and went back down to the living room where Johnny was flipping through channels. "Want somethin' to drink or somethin'?"
"You got coke?"
"Sure." I went to the fridge and grabbed him a coca cola and myself some water as well the box of fiddle faddle to snack on. Finally, we could just sit together.
"You like Twilight Zone?"
He shrugged, responding slowly. "Sometimes it really gets me thinkin' and sometimes I just don't get it but it's a cool show."
"My mom and dad watch it a lot but I never did. Never paid attention just because I knew they liked it so much," I say making him laugh.
"Sounds like somethin' you'd do."
I opened the popcorn box and offer some to him which he gladly accepts. We were watching Twilight Zone for a little bit but eventually got distracted by each other. Lessening the space between us, Johnny's arm wrapped around me and I leaned my head on his shoulder as well as asked him what he was thinking about. It was so interesting what he'd say sometimes, maybe it would be "oh not much" but then there'd be times he'd actually tell me what he was thinking about. This was one of those times and he told me he was thinking about having a pet; very random.
"You ever had a pet?" he asked.
"I always wanted a cat but my parents never thought I was responsible enough and they're probably right. Sher had a dog once when we were little but I was tryin' to walk it and it ran away. Never came back and she hated me for months after."
Chuckling at my anecdote, he grabs some more of the popcorn in between us and shook his head. "You really were kinda difficult weren't you?"
"Hey I'd just call it different. It wasn't my fault, though, when the dog ran away, I just thought 'Oh maybe he didn't like us' and let it go."
"What'd your family say?"
Thinking back on the situation, I probably was a little naïve but I was young and thought it was okay. Sherri shouldn't have asked me to walk it if she didn't want it to get away. "Sherri was real upset and yelled at me and my dad told her not to yell at me but then he yelled at me because he liked the dog too."
Johnny had a small smile on his face, "I had a puppy once that I just found roamin' the street one day and he came up to me and I just liked him right then and there. My parents didn't know and when they found out they yelled at me about goin' behind their back but told me that if I take care of it I could keep it. I had him for three years, named him Frankenstein 'cause I really liked the movie and I thought Frankenstein was the monster's name."
"How old were you?"
"Oh, real young, probably like seven when I first found him but I did take good care of him. I walked him and played with him every day and I used to ask my neighbors if I could do stuff in their yards or cleanin' their houses so I could buy his food. One day he just disappeared, though, pretty sure my parents let him go but they just said they didn't know. He did chew up the furniture sometimes."
I chuckled, "So you're responsible, even when you were in your single digits, and then there's me, the exact opposite."
"Looks like it," he agreed.
"Y'know what's funny? Sher's dog ran away when I was seven. What if it went all the way to you."
"Do you know what kind of dog she had?"
I shrugged again, dog breeds were never my thing. "It was a cute brown and black puppy with little spots on it's neck, one of his legs, and it's tail, but I don't know what kind it was."
He looked at me surprised, and I chuckled at his reaction. He was way too freakin' cute. "Marlena, I might have gotten your dog." We both laughed and I shook my head, what are the odds? "That's exactly what mine looked like, I always thought it was so cool how it had spots on only one leg and his tail."
"That's crazy!" I exclaimed while giggling, "Maybe he was meant for you not for us."
"There's no way I'm gonna forget about that now," he says. Maybe I'm reading a little into it but that's basically something that connected us in a very roundabout way. My mind is a kinda blown from ir. I wonder if we have any other weird coincidences that tie us together. "Y'know you're always askin' about me, why don't you tell me somethin' else I don't know about you?"
I thought for a minute, there's a lot Johnny doesn't know about me. While I'll usually answer if someone asks me anything about myself, most people don't really ask me as crazy questions about my life the way I do so I don't often share too much. I like to think I'm an open book, but even when people do ask there are always lots of things I don't tell, especially when it's someone I don't wanna scare off. "Well, do you wanna get crazy deep or just sorta?"
"Crazy deep," he answered immediately.
Where do I begin? "Well... I guess I'll just tell you about how I met a few of my friends."
"Well you've told me that," he says.
I chuckled, "Not exactly."
Sadie was my oldest friend so it was easy to talk about her. I told him before that we met in elementary school but never how. She actually used to mess with me along with everyone else until one day she saw me crying alone during recess and promised me she'd never pick on me again.
"Why'd everyone pick on you?"
I shrugged. "People loved Sherri but never me, I think it's because I wasn't a sweetie like her. I was real loud and sometimes I'd say dumb things that didn't make sense and embarrass myself but I couldn't help it. I've always been kinda embarrassing, even to my family," I say laughing. "My parents told me they couldn't take me anywhere without me sayin' or doin' somethin' crazy but I always thought it was funny."
"You and her are real different huh?"
"Sherri? Yeah we ain't alike at all. Almost every teacher I ever had that had her too would eventually ask if we were really sisters." Johnny listened intently as I continued and told him how Sadie and I really stuck together throughout elementary and middle school, how we'd both went through our other phases with friends but always ended up back together, I left out the stuff about people calling me Little Red he didn't need to know everything embarrassing about me. Then we talked about high school.
We would've been going to high school together this whole time but Johnny was a grade lower, which explains why we never really crossed paths. He was amazed at how the socs treated Sadie and me, told me he never thought they were that way to anyone on their own side but then I told him that being a soc isn't even about the money, it's image. I've always been a "bad apple," I explained. I don't make the socs look good, so they've never liked me. I don't care about how I look to others, that's why I ended up becoming such good friends with others who didn't care either. Janice was my next closest friend, we were definitely outcasts together, very few people wanted to befriend the Asian girl who's accent was hard to understand half the time.
"And she's not Chinese or Japanese, by the way," I had to add. "She's Taiwanese. She's real sensitive about that, hates bein' called Chinese or Jap or Viet and socs do that all the time, greasers do too. Some of those guys are just as bad as socs, from what I've seen."
"Lots of 'em probably don't even know there's other countries in Asia," he jokes. I laughed and nodded, agreeing; honestly I didn't know where Taiwan was until she became my friend either, but I never called her Chinese or Japanese.
"I still don't know where the country is but I know it's over there," I say giggling.
Next he wanted to hear about Ronnie and Lowell and I actually chuckled at the thought. Lowell is a lot smarter than he comes off and I told Johnny how he was in my advanced physics class sophomore year. Since the class was full of socs and the other two greasers in the class partnered up, he was left without a lab partner until I sat next to him. The rest was history. He actually taught me so much and not just about science. Janice, Sadie, and I would go out with him for lunch instead of sitting in our little corner in the cafeteria and that was how we met Ronnie.
I was never one to get into trouble or skip classes or anything but when I got closer to them I did. That led to me explaining how I used to be a lot different than I am now.
"So you skipped a lot?"
"Kinda, yeah. Usually I'd skip my class that didn't really matter or I'd show up for attendance and go to the bathroom and not come back. Ronnie knows a guy so we'd always skip and smoke. Man, my parents found out and they flipped."
"Can you blame 'em?"
"Well, no," I said. "It was real crazy, that time. I had Sadie but I felt so alone until we met Janice and then Ronnie and Lowell. Then I started working at the record shop after something crazy happened but I'll tell you about that another day. Tired of talkin' about myself," I add with a chuckle, stuffing some more popcorn in my mouth and leaning further into the couch.
"Well, watcha wanna talk about?" I sighed and leaned on his shoulder, should I tell him what I really want? I hate that I always have to ask him about us. "I know you've probably been wonderin' why I ain't asked you to go steady already."
I had to keep myself from popping up off his shoulder and staring right at him. Was he finally gonna do it? And did he just read my mind? "A bit, yeah," I say, keeping my composure.
"Well, you know by now I think about a lot of stuff and I thought about it for a long time, it ain't that I don't want to but I just get nervous, y'know? What if your parents don't like me? We already don't get to see much of each other and then what about after school ends? You're gonna graduate and I'll still be here, what if I hold you back from doin' what you wanna do? And what if you don't think I'm that good a boyfriend anyway—"
"Johnny, you'll drive yourself crazy thinkin' about everything that can go wrong."
"I know but I can't help it."
I sighed and turned my body to face him, setting aside our snack and grabbing his hand. "Would you rather not try because everything could go wrong? Because I'd rather try and we can deal with issues as they come. I really really like you and my parents would hopefully like you, too. Hell, you're better than any soc guy Sherri's ever brought home and they'll see that. Even if they don't, I like you and that's what matters. As for after graduation, I've hardly even thought that far ahead," I say with a chuckle. "No matter what I do, though, I'd love for you to still be with me. I wouldn't want nobody else."
He was quiet for a second, I could see how red his face was turning, though, in response to everything I said. "I'm sorry, I get so negative sometimes and it just holds me back. I wanna go together, I really do. I felt like you do too I just could never bring myself to ask. It's embarrassin' but I was just... scared."
Some girls probably wouldn't like that their guy was saying that he's scared to ask her out but I love how honest he is. I love that he feels like he can tell me how he really feels. "You don't gotta be scared."
He gave me a half smile and I could've sworn my heart skipped a beat or something, I just love it when he smiles like that! He rested a hand at my jaw and leaned in, planting a gentle but nice and passionate kiss on my lips. I never wanted to pull away and I wouldn't have but he did first. "Will you go steady with me, Lena?"
I smiled excitedly and gave him another kiss, I couldn't help myself. "Of course I will." He smiled too and I just felt so happy and excited. It's official, Johnny and I are going together! Just thinking about it makes me all giddy.
"Feels unreal."
"Rad, though, ain't it?"
He chuckled and nodded, "Sure is."
He stayed for about an hour more, we made out and continued watching TV until he started getting tired and asked me to drop him off. He gave me directions to Ponyboy's house instead of his own; I wonder if I'll ever even see his place. He was dozing off on the way and I couldn't stop myself from staring at him at every red light. Gosh, I just love that feeling. I can't wait to get my own car so maybe we can see more of each other.
He gave me another kiss before getting out of the car, it's like he was saving all this kissing for when we were officially together because he ain't ever really given me so many. I'm not complaining. Riding home was alright, I like driving at night, it was always peaceful. I took the long way home so I could listen to more of my tapes and by the time I got home I was beat. Tomorrow was Monday, a regular Monday. I hope the week goes well.