A/N: I don't own The Outsiders.

Angela and me didn't always agree on what to call it when there was a real emergency and we needed to split. At home we called it the bitch, but cussin's not too hot a tamale in school, if you know what I mean. We spent half an hour in detention—Angie just had to call that girl fat, although her cereal bowl sure came with a lifeguard, didn't it, Ang?—thinking about it, and at the end of the day Angie was left staring at a piece of paper as empty as her head, and me tossing around all the paper airplanes I'd throw at Mr. Addison's head while the bumfuck was busy sleeping at his desk.

Every day, Angie would get off the bus about five blocks from our street to cut across the Curtises' backyard. (I feel sorry for you, Pony. But trust me—she hasn't caught you in the shower yet!) I'd have to follow her because Tim said he'd kill me if anyone tried anything funny. To Angie? Ha. I rolled my eyes and said, Who'd touch a grease-rag like her? and before I could fucking sneeze, the guy's fist came crashing down right where it hurt, just like lightning; it hit me before I even knew I was struck.

Damn.

Then Tim would go into the living room and sink in his chair, just like always. He had a funny way of sittin' down; see, he'd walk real slow to the chair, like molasses, and just kind of fold his legs in on himself. That was the way he did it at home. When he went out, he slammed his ass down on the stool like he was anybody's Marlon Brando. But everything about him was different at home—I dunno where the hell all these guys got their right going around saying my brother's the shit at the bottom of the cereal box—and we needed to keep it that way. It wasn't easy when I got slammed, though. I'd have to leave the rest to Dal and Ang, and you know those two...one time Dally got slammed for petty larceny and was put in the cell next to me. I asked him what he froze for. He smirked and said he took all week of Tim's bitching without a single complaint, but left behind a blazing trail the minute Angie bust open the front door and announced that her PMS could suck it.

Tim acted like it was some capital fucking offense when I got back from the cooler. Who the hell did he expect me to be anyway, Beaver Fucking Cleaver? Real life ain't like that, Tiny Tim, I thought. Hell—he drove me to the reformatory twice himself. I told him the second time that if he didn't want me around, he should just leave me there. When I said this, though, he got this weird-ass look on his face, like I'd just told him I shot my sister with Dad's old Smith and Wesson, and his eyes got real quiet and bright and red.

But it lasted for only a minute before he went back to that stone mask we were all so fucking used to.

"Curl," he said. "Get the hell out."

So I did.

"Remember to write," I said as he drove away.

"How's the bitch today?" Angie asked without looking up from her comic book.

"She's alright," Tim said, flicking open the milk carton tab.

"Dally?"

He grinned in between swills. "Shit, Angie-Baby, you shoulda seen it—I sent your boyfriend groveling home with his tail in between his legs."

We glanced wearily at each other. Apparently Dallas slashed his tires and had been gloating about it all day. So Tim was his daily penance of whoop-ass, and took it outta him by any means necessary.

Angie's eyes narrowed. "Timmy—your hand's twitching."

"I know. I struck a nerve there when Dally came back around at me with a left and I tried to block it," he said, swatting her away when she leaned in to touch it. "It's fine. It'll go away if you let it alone."

Then he dropped the milk.

"Shit," he said, bending down to wipe it off. But now he kept dropping the cloth. His eyes narrowed, trying to fix themselves.

He began murmuring to himself.

"Hey," I said. "You feeling alright?"

His head snapped up. "Yeah," he said to Angela. "What? Are you gonna start touching me, too?"

"No, she isn't. You need more sleep...you look like a cat who got stuck in a microwave," I said.

"I'm fine, Ang. Don't touch me."

I looked at her. She shrugged. I should have known better...the drunk-ass. "Look at me—I'm talking," I said, pointing to myself, "and no one's touching you. Now let's get you upstairs."

"Just don't touch me, got it?"

"Tim—"

His face twisted into a colorless ball. "Don't you touch me!"

Angie didn't even have time to react. She just went down. I'd never forget that sound his fist made against her nose—like a hiss or a pop, but with a little more bang, like something being cracked open...like the earth cracking open under a sudden bolt of lightning. Her nose cracked open just like that, and blood flooded out of her nostrils so hard and so deep it was almost purple.

And then there was a loud, broken wail as she staggered against the wall.

I exploded from my chair and put all my weight forward into spearing myself into Tim's legs. The first place you try to get any big guy is in the legs—anything to get their balance off. That's what I wanted to do, knock him down, shift his balance, stun him a little; these things never turn out as nice and neat as they do in the movies. Paul Newman never had a mass of blood so red it was purple running down his perfect little chin. Vivien Leigh never stood in a corner the way Angie did, a mixture of hate and shock and fear and God knows what else spewing out of her eyes—

He went around me, trying to get up, and I ducked all the obvious swings. Two minutes later I heard a stiff crack...his head against the floor.

I don't remember much after that, just that I had him pinned with my knee on his throat.

"Oh my God, you're killing him!" my sister screamed, her face purple and swollen and bleeding as she wrapped her arms around my neck and tried to pry me away. "You're killing him! Get off! Get OFF!"

I always told myself the day I won a fight against my brother was the day I'd finally be free. We had an understanding that this was more a suicide unit than a family. Everything as we knew it was so fucked-up—the way Dad died and Mom left, the way Tim had to be both for us and how we killed some little part of him every time we looked up to him; the way we killed ourselves every fucking day, the way we trudged around the war zone and said you can't die until I fucking say so.

It'd be the day when he'd open his mouth and realized he had nothing remarkable to say. But, watching him writhe there on the floor, his eyes fixed and distant on me, it might just be the day I'd lose him altogether.

I should have known something was wrong when he came to my room later. Motherfucker didn't even knock, just boom, he was standing there as if he were a fuckin' sequoia tree springing up from the middle of the floorboards.

Wrong—very, very wrong...I should have just taken Angie and left the house altogether. But I imagined the two of us roaming the street in the middle of the night, cold as anything and bug-bitten twice over, or, if Angie-Baby played her cards right, swooning over Ponyboy as Darry stared at us from the top of his newspaper and Soda opened his big fat mouth to ask where in the Sam Hill our brother sent us this time.

Either way we were screwed.

"Curly," he said. "Can I tell you something?"

"Depends," I said. "Anything to do with giving Angie an apology?"

He looked up. He was thinking about it. Angie was bleeding her guts out her nose because of him, and the bastard was thinking about it. "No."

"Then shuddup."

"Listen," he said. "This might be the only time I'll ever be able to say this."

I was listening.

"Something's wrong," he said, too slowly.

It seemed as Tim got older he got slower. He wasn't a real athlete anyway, so none of us thought much of it when he couldn't pull his punches like he used to. He was just a normal guy.

But, I guess, he did have something weird happen to him. He used to be able to take out a pocket knife and do this trick where he laid his hand—or your hand, if the fee was right—flat against a table, spread his fingers apart, and stab all the spaces in between at lightning speed—and I'm not lying when I say this guy was fucking supersonic. He was recorded by the number of knife marks he left on the table; his fastest time had been sixty-seven clips in forty-eight seconds. But as he got older, he got slower, and—what was weird to me—clumsier. Lord knows all the fights he'd gotten into when he'd clipped Dally's hand more than a few times.

That was also how Tim almost lost a finger when he turned eighteen. I wasn't sure if it was because of the slowness or not, because the dumbass hadda get drunk on top of that—I got a neighbor to drive him to the hospital, and then stayed at home all night long waiting for the telephone to ring. When they decided to keep him at the hospital the next day, I went up to his room to go straighten some things around, and found Angie squatted on the floor, crying in the middle of it.

The entire room was spattered with blood.

My fucking heart slammed against my ribcage.

She said that during the night she had wandered into his room, thinking it was mine—and she found the blood spattered like paint across the walls. She said she looked around and found two more knives he had tucked under the bed—one a Swiss, one a switch.

God damn you, Tim, I thought, wishing I could die right then, the poor kid's only eight.

I told her some made-up fairy-tale shit about how the blades bit him because he wasn't treating 'em fair. After that, I carried her to the bathroom, made her wash off her face and hands, laid her down in my bed where she wanted to be, and an hour later she was finally able to get some sleep. But now I was scared shitless, too. I wished I had someone to tell me a lie, a fairy tale, anything with a reason, anything with a cause, a what, a why...but there was only silence in the blackness of the bloodstains that crusted on the pillows.

Yea? Nay? OK?

A/N to Self: I need to get going on cookies and reviewers.