Dallas Winston Has A Sister? (Outsiders Fanfic)

On His Cast

Note to Readers:  This is a follow-up from Boys Cry (And For Good Reason) if you were wondering why Pony had a cast on his ankle.

        I walked into Pony's room and dropped all his schoolbooks onto his desk next to mine that I had lent him yesterday, seeing as how I never used them to do my homework. 

        He had been in the hospital most of the day yesterday due to his broken ankle, and he'd been in bed all day today because the doctor said he wasn't allowed to put any pressure on it yet.  He had skipped school of course, so all the guys deemed me to collect his homework for him seeing as how we shared the most classes, and I was the only one who wouldn't turn his assignments into paper airplanes to throw at Socs.  Instead I turned my own homework into paper airplanes, seeing as how I never did it anyways.

        "Hey Pony.  How you feeling?" I asked him, plopping down on the bed next to him and grabbing the book he had been reading and flipping through it.

        "I'm bored out of my mind and my leg won't stop hurting," he answered.

        "Figures," I replied.  "But don't worry, you get to go back to hell tomorrow," I added with a grin.  It was a running joke between me and Dally that school was hell, so I always called it that.  "What's this?" I asked, gesturing to the book I was looking through.

        "A book," he answered sarcastically.

        "I know, amazing right?" I replied in an overly dramatic falsetto voice.  "Obviously," I said, my voice returning to normal.  "I meant what kind of book," I said because it had a lot of poems in it

        "Robert Frost.  It's a bunch of poems of his," Pony explained.

        I suppose I could have figured it out myself if I actually read the cover, but I was too lazy to do that.  He had it bookmarked on page 63, a poem called The Road Not Taken.  I wasn't too lazy to read that, an the last stanza made me smile.  It kind of sounded like something Ponyboy would do.

        I handed the book back to him and hopped up from the bed, grabbing a red marker off the desk and reading what everyone else had wrote on the white cast that made his foot look three times bigger than it actually was.

        Two-Bit had written: Mickey Mouse + beer + chocolate cake = the happiest man alive, in black marker, but beer had been crossed out by me yesterday with the red marker I was currently holding.  I had to censor it so he wouldn't get in trouble at school.

        In blue, Soda had written: Chocolate cake makes everything better, and signed it Pepsi-Cola.  He had also drawn a million different colored smiley faces all over the cast.

        And in green, in Johnny's small neat handwriting, he had written: Get well soon and stay gold.  Johnny.  Gold was written in yellow.

        Pony saw me reading what Johnny had put, and he said, "That's from a Robert Frost poem."

        "I know," I replied, bending over to write my own in red: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."  I didn't really feel like signing my name, so I didn't.

        Darry, having just gotten home from work, came to check on Pony.

        "Did you do all your homework from yesterday?" he asked.

        "Yeah," Pony replied, still reading his book.  As I listened to their conversation, I started drawing a tree on Pony's cast, starting  the trunk at the spot where his foot connected to his ankle.

        "Did you take your medicine?" Darry asked.

        "Yes, Darry," Pony said, annoyed.

        "All right. Make sure you do your homework for tomorrow," Darry said before leaving the room.

        I glanced up from my tree, I was working on making the branches snake around everyone's notes and Soda's gazillion smiley faces.  Pony sighed and rolled his eyes.

        "Don't worry, Dal does the same thing to me. Except for I probably would have told him 'No, I rather enjoy the excruciating pain in my leg,'" I joked.

        "If I told Darry that he'd probably yell at me for smarting off," Pony said.

        "I say stuff like that all the time to Dally, he'd either make a smart remark back of yell at me if I'm doing something he says I'm not supposed to," I said.  It was how things usually went at my house, Dally's either yelling at me for being a smart-ass or being a smart-ass himself.

        I capped the marker and unsuccessfully tossed it at the desk, it hit the edge and bounced off, landing on the floor.

        Pony looked at the completed tree.  It was leafless, but branches spread across half his cast, snaking over and under and in between each other.  I was surprised I hadn't messed up.

        "Cool. I didn't know you could draw that well, but Soda might be mad that there's no more room for smiley faces," Pony commented.

        I shrugged and climbed off the bed, I didn't think it was all that great, just a red outline on a white cast, but he seemed to like it.  "I'd better let you do your homework before Darry yells again," I said, grabbing the stack of books I'd dragged home from school for him and handing them to him.

        "Yeah, I'd better," he mumbled to himself as I headed out of the room.  I noticed that my hand was smeared with red marker from drawing the tree, and I went to the bathroom to wash it off, wondering if Pony had read the note I'd written for him aside from the tree drawing.