NOW THERE WERE four of us sitting in the waiting room waiting to hear how Dally and M/n were.
Then the reporters and the police came. They asked too many questions too fast, and got me mixed up. If you want to know the truth, I wasn't feeling real good in the first place.
Kind of sick, really. And Johnny and I are scared of policemen anyway. The reporters fired one question right after another at me and got me so confused I didn't know what was coming off.
Darry finally told them I wasn't in any shape to be yelled at so much and they slowed down a little. Darry's kinda big.
Sodapop kept them in stitches. He'd grab one guy's press hat and another's camera and walk around interviewing the nurses and mimicking TV reporters.
He tried to lift a policeman's gun and grinned so crazily when he was caught that the policeman had to grin too. Soda can make anyone grin.
I managed to get hold of some hair grease and comb my hair back so that it looked a little better before they got any pictures.
I'd die if I got my picture in the paper with my hair looking so lousy.
Darry and Sodapop were in the pictures too; Jerry Wood told me that if Sodapop and Darry hadn't been so good-looking, they wouldn't have taken so many. That was public appeal, he said.
Soda was really getting a kick out of all this. I guess he would have enjoyed it more if it hadn't been so serious, but he couldn't resist anything that caused that much excitement.
I swear, sometimes he reminds me of a colt. A long-legged palomino colt that has to get his nose into everything. The reporters stared at him admiringly; I told you he looks like a movie star, and he kind of radiates.
Finally, even Sodapop got tired of the reporter--- he gets bored with the same old thing after a time--- and stretching out on the long bench, he put his head in Darry's lap and went to sleep.
I guess both of them were tired--- it was late at night and I knew they hadn't had much sleep during the week.
Even while I was answering questions I remembered that it had been only a few hours since I was sleeping off a smoke in the corner of the church. Already it was an unreal dream and yet, at the time I couldn't have imagined any other world.
Finally, the reporters started to leave, along with the police. One of them turned and asked, "What would you do right now if you could do anything you wanted?"
I looked at him tiredly. "Take a bath."
They thought that was pretty funny, but I meant it. I felt lousy. The hospital got real quiet after they left. The only noise was the nurse's soft footsteps and Soda's light breathing.
Darry looked down at him and grinned half-heartedly. "He didn't get much sleep this week," he said softly. "He hardly slept at all." "Hhhmmmm," Soda said drowsily, "you didn't either."
The nurses wouldn't tell us anything about m/n and Dally, so Darry got hold of the doctor. The doctor told us that he would talk only to the family, but Darry finally got it through the guy's head that we were about as much family as Dally and M/n had.
Dally would be okay after two or three days in the hospital, he said. One arm was badly burned and would be scarred for the rest of his life, but he would have full use of it in a couple of weeks. Dally'll be okay, I thought. Dallas is always okay. He could take anything.
It was m/n I was worried about.
He was in critical condition. His back had been broken when that piece of timber fell on him. He was in severe shock and suffering from third-degree burns. They were doing everything they could to ease the pain, although since his back was broken he couldn't even feel the burns below his waist. He kept calling for Dallas and Ponyboy.
