Helpless

Soda

"I wake up
In the night

All alone and

It's all right

The chemicals

Are wearing off

'Cause you've gone..."

-Ben Folds

(Soda)

For the first time in three months, I stepped across the threshold of the hallway and into what was our room.

Darry had packed my things and put them in the truck. Ponyboy's were gone- I guessed he'd donated them to charity. He'd kept his books and drawings and a few of his favorite shirts, stuck them in a box with Mom and Dad's things.

We'd had to declare bankruptcy, and the bank had taken back the house and most of our stuff. Cherry had called to tell us that she had donations set up to help pay our debts and that her Uncle owned apartments in the middle- class section of town and wanted to offer us a two bedroom apartment for free for as long as we needed it. So it looked like we were moving.

"It's better this way," Darry had told me and Steve and Two-bit after he'd hung up from her. "It's not good here anymore. Not for us. Too many memories and too much space. Plus the neighborhood's better and we'll be saving money on housing. You guys can still come over whenever. We'll give you keys."

I wanted to go; I was sick of avoiding and pulling my eyes away from the closed door with out untouched room behind it. Pony should be in there. I was sick of finding his shoes under furniture or his shirts in the dryer and bursting into tears. I was sick of the emptiness and silence when Darry and I ate together. Most of all I was sick of sleeping on the sofa; I hated rolling over and reaching for him in the middle of the night, my stomach and heart dropping as my arm fell on the air before my hand smacked the floor, my chest wrenching as I remembered that he wasn't hiding in some church in Windrixville. He wasn't coming back this time.

So why can I come back in here now? I thought as I wandered slowly through our empty room. I knew why; his theme.

I'd read the English theme he'd written all those months ago, read it and cried through most of it, memorized the second page where he'd scrawled: "I love Soda more than I've ever loved anyone, even Mom and Dad." I hadn't wanted to touch it at first, but Darry had insisted. He thought it would help me somehow come to terms with our brother's death, the same way it had helped him to.

"Pony asked if I'd get people to read it," Darry had told me. "That includes you. After all, it's about us."

Darry had been working hard in all his free time to type the theme up and send it off to places. Publishing houses, I guess you'd call them. Neither one of us expected anything to happen, but we thought we'd better try for Pony's sake. He'd wanted people to read it. We'd both been shocked to get the letter of acceptance: "Because of the writer's extraordinary ability to capture social warfare and personality despite his age, and in light of his recent passing, we believe this to be a truly marketable, but above all meaningful, work we would very much like to purchase for publication," the letter had read. People were going to know our side, our story.

I just wish you were here to see it happen, Ponyboy, I thought, leaning against the wall where our bed used to be. Why couldn't we have read it before this happened? Or maybe we never would have if this hadn't.

I drew a deep breath-but for the first time in weeks, my eyes weren't stinging with tears when I thought about my younger brother. Darry was right; his theme had helped me find peace. And I hoped, as I closed the door to our room and walked out our front door for the last time, that it would help others like us. Because that is all Ponyboy had ever wanted.

It was what he had died for.