Young Blood ⏤ Ponyboy Curtis | ✓

17 | little by little

Tim is passed out on the old, worn-out sofa, mouth open and drooling when Billie and Curly leave the house at noon. The floorboards around the sofa are littered with empty beer bottles, and from the way Tim is out, dead to the world, he's had a long night of drinking.

Which isn't surprising, given how stressed and exhausted Tim has been. For the past month, the eldest Shepard has had permanent dark rings around the rims of his eyes, paired with a distant, faraway gaze in his eye that Billie puts down to the type of fatigue that never goes away, instead finding a home deep in the core of one's body.

Tim's been pulled in multiple directions this past month: the River Kings have pulled the Shepard gang into a turf war that doesn't involve them, members of his own gang getting thrown into the cooler and now their father deciding that he doesn't need to pay a monthly allowance as compensation for leaving his four children without any parents for a woman half his age.

Billie's afraid when her brother will snap. It's inevitable, as a person cannot take hit after hit and not snap, to lash out at the unfairness of it all. And with Tim's self-destructive tendancies (despite him brushing them off, saying that they don't exist), Billie's afraid for Tim and the poor person on the end of Tim's wrath. Billie knows that Tim is close to snapping; he's been showing signs, especially in the last week, when Curly had asked if he can come with the Shepard gang to a meeting with the River Kings and Tim blasted Curly for asking so.

Billie looks down pitifully on her older brother. From here, Tim looks vulnerable, something that Billie has never seen her brother look like. For a moment, Tim looks like a kid, not a teenager on the verge of adulthood with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Curly is careful to not slam the fly screen door shut as they exit the house. Curly and his friends are meeting up at the Dingo for a bite to eat, and Scott had insisted yesterday that Billie come also. Scott is the first friend Billie has (and she can positively say they are friends, as Scott confirmed it when he responded to Lloyd's question about Billie's presence by stating that she's his friend.) but not the only one. Who would've thought that by October, nearly two months into the new school year, Billie has not one, but three friends? (Billie counts Laura and Leo as her friends, as they've been sitting with her and Scott everyday for the last month. She also counts Ponyboy, as Ponyboy spends most days hanging with them instead of Two-Bit and Steve, the only other members of the Curtis gang who attend school).

And speaking of Ponyboy, Laura hasn't mentioned anything Ponyboy liking Billie in the last month, which seems unusual for Laura. It seems like she's forgotten that conversation in the bathroom ever happened, or finally realises that nothing romantic is happening between Billie and Ponyboy.

"What's been going on with you?" Curly asks Billie as they exit their street and wait to cross the world. "Feels like I never see you. You're always with Scott." The glance that Curly gives Billie is heavy and intrusive.

"Sorry," Billie mumbles, feeling a wave of panic crash over her. Is this Curly's way of saying he doesn't like that she and Scott are friends?

"I'm not mad," Curly tells Billie, sensing Billie's fear. "I'm happy he's hanging out with you. He deserves better friends than us, anyway."

"Why's that?" Billie frowns at the way Curly dismisses himself and Dean. Not Lloyd, because Lloyd is a foul-mouthed, selfish piece of work who has no redeeming qualities in Billie's eyes. (Billie hasn't forgotten the way he sneered at Ponyboy at the Nightly Double at the end of August and how he kicked his rubbish underneath his seat as though a garbage can wasn't five steps away from him).

"You really think we're good influences on him?" Curly's tone drips of skepticism as he asks this.

"But you've been there for him when he needed you," Billie counter-argues, thinking back to the time where Scott had been kicked out of the house by his parents and Dean immediately said that Scott could live with him and his mother, and how the boys didn't leave Scott's side for the next month as he adjusted to not living with his parents anymore.