Let It Be Me

Part 13

The sun hadn't crept through the blinds yet and I was sitting under the lamp at Ponyboy's desk with a pen in my hand and a notebook under my wrist. The house was still. The only sound was a light snore from Pony out on the couch. I bit my lip and pressed the pen to the paper.

Dear Uncle Kevin and Aunt Loraine,

My hand froze and I looked across the room. I had been struggling to get past this line for an hour. Twenty sheets of paper were balled up at the bottom of the waste basket next to me and I hadn't gotten more than three sentences down on any of them. Finally I sighed in irritation and angled the pen to the paper, scribbling across the page.

Dad killed someone. Send money.

I dropped my head onto the desk and groaned. I couldn't do this. I couldn't focus. Every time I tried I kept going back to my walk with Ponyboy. I dropped my head on my hand and started mindlessly scribbling sunbeams across the page.

We had been walking about a mile when I started to become aware that he had barely looked down from the sky once. He was mesmerized and I really wanted to know what it was that put that dreamy look in his eye while he watched it. Once or twice he glanced at me when I was talking but for the most part I was the third wheel in that moment and I was fascinated by it.

"What is it about the sunset that keeps you so wrapped up in it?" I asked as we crossed over the train tracks by the vacant lot. Whatever that look was, I wished I could connect with it. I wanted something so simple to move me in the way it obviously moved him.

He looked down long enough to glance at me and then looked back out at the horizon again with a small shrug.

"I don't know if I can explain it. I'm just different when it comes to stuff like that I guess."

"Is it the colors?" He shrugged.

"Sometimes." I took a few more steps and glanced up again. It was pretty, but I only had the attention span to look at it for a minute or two. Nothing moved. It didn't do anything. It was orange and purple and pink and blue up there just like it had been five minutes ago. Pony looked like he was deep in the plot of a movie or something. He noticed that I was still looking to him expectantly and he tried a little harder.

"Did you ever think about the fact that it's not actually the sky doin' all that? Turnin' itself those colors?" he asked with a little hesitation. "Like, the clouds and the horizon are all painted with orange and pink and blue and that's what you see when you look up but...it's actually the sun makin' those colors." I smiled, feeling way too dumb for this conversation.

"Ok..." He saw the look on my face and shook his head.

"Never mind" he said with a grin. "I told you, I'm just different."

"No, Pony" I said grabbing on to his arm. "I want to understand. Go on. I'm listening, I swear." He looked at me carefully for a second and then put his hands in his pockets and looked up again.

"See, the sun is up in the sky all day but you can't look at it. You know it's there 'cause it lights the darkness and you feel the warmth and you see the flowers grow and stuff. But if you stare at it you'll go blind, right? You have to just sort of sense it from a distance. Know it's there because you feel it even though you don't see it. Kind of like..." He blinked a few times and then took in a breath and let it out.

"Kind of like what?" He shook his head and skipped over it.

"And then all of the sudden, when the time is right, this thing that's gone unnoticed all day sends these beautiful colors out across the sky. It takes the ordinary horizon and plain white clouds and it transforms them into something amazing and sorta beautiful. It's like it's intoxicating in a way." We walked a few more steps and then he stopped and moved his eyes down to me. He hesitated for a minute.