A Girl in New York (Pre/Sequel to The Outsiders: A Girl in the Gang)

Chapter 2- Memories, Mostly Bad

Note to Readers: This chapter takes place in New York, and then I'll be switching back to when they're in Tulsa and then back to New York and...I think you get the point.  Please comment and vote!

         The first memory I have of my brother was when I was four.  He was seven.  I had been home with our parents because he was at school.  The only reason Dally went to school was because he got food, and then he’d always steal one of the other kid’s lunches to bring home to me because our parents never fed us.

        Our father was drunk, and him and our mother were fighting.  They were screaming at each other, yelling and swearing and threatening to hit one another, and being only four years old, I was scared.

         I remember Dally coming home from school, seeing me crying in the corner, and he picked me up and carried me to our room, telling me the whole time that it would be okay while I sobbed uncontrollably into his shoulder.

        The only thing in the room we shared was a mattress on the floor covered in worn out sheets and blankets, and two old cardboard boxes that contained the few clothes we had. 

        Our mother had a job, but it didn’t pay well, and we got a welfare check from the state, but our father usually drank it all away, so they barely had enough money to pay rent, much less provide food and clothes for their two kids.

         I had sat on the mattress crying and Dally was trying to get me to calm down, so he made up a story to tell me, about dragons and princesses and all that other fairy tale junk.  When I was four, I liked it, even though my brother was, and still is, horrible at telling stories.  Now I don’t understand how I could have stood for listening to that, but he used to tell me stories all the time when I was little to get me fall asleep and forget about our parent’s constant bickering.

        Well, all the time until I wouldn’t listen anymore, so it lasted about a year before I realized that it was all fake, and I got sick of hearing how the princess was rescued by a knight in shining armor or her true love.

        By that time though, I was old enough to go to school myself.  So then we both started stealing other kid’s lunches so we’d have something to eat at home, and occasionally Dally would come home with something he had shoplifted from a store.

        Around that time, when I was five and Dally was eight, he started disappearing from home more often.  So long as both of our parents weren’t home while he was gone, I was fine, but I remember occasionally lying awake at night in our room, listening to our parents yell and not being able to fall asleep until Dally snuck in the window and climbed in bed next to me.

        As we got older, he somehow managed to get another mattress, because sharing the same bed at night usually involved a lot of arguing and wrestling over blankets, but we still shared the same room.  It didn’t feel like that most of the time though because when he was gone doing who knows what, I was there, and when I was gone he was there, or we were both gone and rarely saw each other on the streets and in the alleys in downtown New York City.