the outsiders || imagines

ii. hiding my heart

this one is based off of adele's cover of "hiding my heart" originally sang by brandi carlile :)
the reason i had this idea is near the end! sorry it's so long
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war.

some believe it's meant to be a way of fixing things.
an answer.

he didn't. he only went because he'd been one of the "lucky ones" who'd "won" the draft lottery. number 283.

i remember him acting like he was constantly stuck between two worlds. it wasn't like he would sit and stare at a wall, he couldn't sit still long enough to do that. he was always bouncing from one action to the next, as though both worlds were pulling him to and from each decision. he didn't finish what he'd started a whole lot. pony didn't agree with me when i'd said that all that stuff about the two worlds one night while he'd been studying at the curtis kitchen table and soda went to go to the restroom but decided that i needed a few blankets from his room when he looked at me after fixing a picture on the wall.

sodapop was an energetic one. according to ponyboy, his younger brother, he always had a lot of energy, but he'd gotten more and more distracted after the last girl he was with left him and two of his best friends died in an accident that i never got the full story of.

i met him after all that, at some drag race that his closest friend, steve, had dragged him to to make him "feel like himself" again.

pony didn't like me very much. i understood, i was loud and reckless and had a reputation, and soda's last girl had been the same way, only she got pregnant and went to florida without barely saying a word to him again. sandy really tore soda up.

somehow, i had been helping him. the first time i went to soda's, his older brother, darry, thanked me for putting him "back in his happy place" and said i was welcome to come around the house anytime. pony didn't like darry very much, either. i guess he doesn't enjoy people who were too serious or not serious enough, besides soda, who'd pony always seemed to want to be around
.
pony seemed to admire soda, in a way.

i remember the day we found out he'd be fighting.

it was december, and he'd only been 20 for a couple of months. we'd been dating for well over 3 years, so we were comfortable enough with each other for him to come over to my apartment and stay the night. he practically lived there, the only reason he hadn't moved in completely was because ponyboy would be starting college in the fall (he'd decided to take the year off to help darry pay the bills) and my roommate, ellen, wasn't moving out until the end of june (something about family drama).

i remember we were having a conversation about what we were both planning on doing when my internship for the local newspaper ended and i graduated from college- i was about halfway through with getting my degree, i wanted to be a journalist, because there weren't a lot of girl ones- and when he was done with his auto-mechanics classes- he'd had a real knack for cars and, when steve was done learning about the business side of things, they wanted to open a car shop somewhere in town.

that never happened, of course. steve went on to own a grocery store around the corner from where the old dx (which went out of business when they both quit) was. opening a car shop without soda would've torn him apart.

when i brought up the idea of me writing an article for the car shop when they opened it, the phone rang. our apartment only had one, of course, and i usually let ellen answer for us, since she got more calls than i did and it was awkward for me to pick it up to one of her brothers yelling for her, but something told me to pick it up.
so i did.
that night, i decided to pick up the phone. and that phone call was phase one of my broken heart

"you're watching right? was that his number? he is 283?"

i didn't have time to clarify who was calling, or that it was, in fact, me. i didn't have to ask who was on the other side of the phone- i'd had plenty of panicked late night conversations with darry before (usually because soda would forget to check in for a couple of days), but i had never heard him like this. if i didn't know any better, i'd think he was crying. but darry didn't cry. once, soda told me that he didn't even cry at their parents funeral a few years back.