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Johnny wakes up the next morning with the dead-weight of Dallas’ arm draped over his bare chest and for a moment he’s taken aback, confused and a little panicked, before he recalls the night before. At the thought, every inch of his body relaxes, turns to honey.
Dallas stirs some minutes later and he tenses the way Johnny had, goes bone rigid like they’ve crossed lines, but he has the same realization and sits up, yawns. “Buck come knockin’?”
Johnny shakes his head.
“Good. I owe him rent and he hasn’t come asking yet.”
“Oh.” Johnny has a feeling he’ll be spending more and more time at Buck’s now that he and Dally are going together, so he adds, “I could start pitchin’ in on that.” He gets allowance from his dad every week, but if he really needs to, he could pick up a job somewhere. Sweep in front of shops, clean windows. Soda could probably get him a spot at the DX and that meant he wouldn’t have to cut his hair none to work there…
Dally looks over at him, eyebrows knit, and shakes his head. “You ain’t gotta pay squat. It’s my room.”
Johnny knows better than to argue. He could start dropping coins into Dallas’ pockets when he ain’t looking, hide a dollar under the pillow.
“What are the big plans today?” Dally’s up now, pulling on some lowcut blue jeans, nosing around for a clean enough shirt.
“Oh. Uh. I’unno. Pony probably wants his book back.”
Dallas nods. “So we’ll hit the Curtis house.”
Johnny gets off the bed and starts wriggling into his jeans. A nervous shiver snakes through him while he's buttoning his fly and he glances over at Dally, who is wrestling into a plain black shirt, going to pick up his brown leather jacket.
Dally asks, “What?”
“Uh. Are we gonna say anythin’ about-? I mean…”
“What? Tell ‘em?”
Johnny nods, standing there foolish as hell without his shirt on, no shoes on.
Dallas snorts. “Glory, kid. Honest as a priest,” he mutters, but he sounds amused. He wrenches his index and thumb around his finger, slides off his ring, and flicks it to Johnny, who just barely catches it. “That way it won’t be a big deal.”
Johnny blinks, but he slips it on and flexes his hand out, admires it. His face is going red.
"Good?" Dallas asks.
"Good," Johnny confirms. He pulls on his shirt, gets into his jacket. "Real tuff."
For a Wednesday, the house is full. They’ve gotten there bright and early, not fooling around any with the other hoods they passed on the way, so Darry isn’t even dressed in his work clothes yet when they step in.
“No school or somethin’?” Dally asks. “Thought you were all book smart and all that, Pony.”
“Teacher workshop,” he answers. “Even the junior high is closed for the day.”
Soda’s on the couch, in one of his striped pajama shirts, eating a bowl of cereal. His hair is flat on one side and in need of a good greasing.
“What about you?” Dallas asks, kicking the edge of the couch with his boot.
“My shift don’t start till noon,” he says, a lick of happiness to his voice.
Dallas nods and watches the chaos a moment, Johnny opting to sit in the one armchair the Curtis’ have. Two-Bit’s in the kitchen and Steve peers out from the bedroom, apparently looking to borrow one of Soda’s blue button downs because his are all wrinkled and greased and his shift starts sooner than Soda’s does. It’s weird timing that they’re all together at the house unplanned like this, but Dallas isn’t complaining.
Johnny isn’t either. If word’s gonna come out now that he and Dally are a thing, he’d rather the whole gang be present, so rumors won’t get spread.
Dallas seems a little lost on what to do, Johnny watching as he glances around, and he finally opts to plop himself down on the floor in front of the couch, join in watching the morning cartoons. There’s an edge to him, Johnny observes, how he seems antsy or even a little dangerous. Maybe taking him to talk to the gang about their relationship was a bad idea.
Despite being the one to say the ring would be explanation enough, Dallas looks about ready to burst into confession. It makes Johnny nervous.
Instead, Ponboy notices first. It really comes as no surprise considering he’s always sitting around and observing, drawing the gang or peeping over the corners of books.
“Dang, Johnny, that’s quite a piece…,” he remarks, jutting his chin at Johnny’s finger, where the ring practically glows silver.
His stomach drops. “Oh.” He swallows, eyes darting to Dally. “Thanks, Pony.” He fiddles nervously with the thing, wrenching it around his finger with his other hand.
Two-Bit, who’s now at the table with a glass of chocolate milk, cranes his neck and whistles, says, “Say, now you and Dally are all matchin’.”
Soda takes interest and glances down at Dallas real quick. “Hey, Dally, you missin’ your ring? Take it off for a rodeo? Scared you’d lose it?”
Dallas laughs in a way that comes out as a puff of exhale escaping through his nostrils and rather than twisting into a mean scowl, he kind of grins wolfishly, says, “No. Uh, actually, Johnny’s got my ring.” He perks his eyebrows, then slaps the couch cushions real hard with his palm, and gets up, sits across from Two-Bit at the table.
Two-Bit cocks one eyebrow, creeps the other down in that way he does.
Johnny, face already flaming red, skitters up from his chair and slinks behind Dally, takes a seat next to him. He kind of wishes a sink hole would open up in the floor and swallow him down into it.
Everyone in the gang shares shit: shirts, shoes, jackets, smokes get passed around from one mouth to the other when a pack can’t be bought.
A ring is something different.
Everyone knows that.
“Well, what’s Johnny wearing your ring for?”
Soda gets up and drops his cereal bowl off in the sink, opens the fridge door. “Yeah, you lose a bet to Johnny? That don’t sound like little Johnny Cade we know.”
Pony must feel abandoned, or maybe he just wants an ear on the action, because he joins them at the table, sitting opposite to Two-Bit, right of Johnny.
“Well, when I was goin’ with Sylvia, I gave her my ring so I thought it’d only be fair now that Johnny and me are goin’ together, he get the same treatment,” Dallas explains, plain as day.
Johnny cringes with regret, feels like he’s been slapped. He wants to reach over and take Dally’s hand.
“Goin’ together?” Soda asks, coming in with a glass of chocolate milk. He sits next to Two-Bit.
“Yeah…,” Ponyboy says, all slow. “Whaddya mean goin’ together, Dal?”
Dally’s features clench up in that way they do and Johnny braces himself for a cuss out, for Dallas to get up and clock one of them.
“Goin’ together like going steady. Like how I went with Sylvia or how Soda went with Sandy.”
A stupid, momentary feeling of pride wells inside Johnny, admiring how simple Dallas has put things. He’d never have thought to say it that way.
Everyone clams right up at that, though. Steve’s got his head peered in through the doorway to the kitchen, listening close, and by the way Darry’s paused in the living room now, he’s heard, too. Two-Bit’s eyebrows settle. Soda looks like he was only a second away from doing a genuine spit take on his milk.
After a beat of silence, Two-Bit asks, with a hesitant, creeping smile, “You know what they say about hoods who knock boots?”
Dally pierces him with a glance, says, “Nothin’, ‘cause they don’t have the teeth to talk with.” If a soc had tried cracking that joke, even that one question before the punchline, Dallas would’ve floored them.
By the startled look in Two-Bit’s eyes, he knows it, too.
Everyone clams up again and Soda sips his chocolate milk with his eyebrows raised, casts a look over at Steve who’s still in the doorway, looking more uncomfortable than the others. Darry goes into the kitchen and opens the fridge, probably making busy so he doesn’t have to play father.
Johnny plays with the buttons on his jacket, drops his eyes away from the table. He feels foolish now, embarrassed, even a little sick deep down in his stomach, that hot-acid feeling he gets before his dad cracks down on him in a drunken fit. Why’d he ever think the gang would handle it with grace? They’d probably take it better if he’d come to the house with the homecoming queen against his hip.
Johnny looks over at Ponyboy with dark, pleading eyes.
Pony readjusts in his seat and speaks up, "Well, I don't see nothin' wrong with it."
Two-Bit drums his fingers on the table and nods along, looks around at all the guys like he's surveying the scene. "Yeah, I mean, if we turned y'all away over this then we're no better than the damn Socs."
From the kitchen, Darry calls out, "If you two stay over from now on, no more sharing a bed. Ponyboy with Johnny and Dallas can sleep with Sodapop."
All at once everyone has something to say, speaking over each other.
Dallas rolls his eyes and kind of half-smiles, while Johnny perks up, insists he's not a kid. Pony gets to giggling, says, “Aw, Darry, they ain't kids. Let ‘em have the couch." Two-Bit cackles and whoops, "Call that grease on grease crime!" and Soda snorts on his milk, elbows Two-Bit in the side. Even Steve, with the mean set to his jaw, slips into a grin.
“If they ain’t kids they can stay at Buck’s together.” Darry leans in the doorway next to Steve, and he’s smiling smally, an eyebrow cocked. It’s a funny notion, Darry telling anyone to be around the likes of Buck, and by the little twinkle in his blue-green eyes, Johnny knows he’d let them over any night, let them have the couch.
No one looks tense anymore, all loose around the edges like they are, and Two-Bit pushes up from the table with his palms, asking, "Hey, Darry, you guys got any cold cuts?"
Steve follows suit and Darry returns back to the kitchen to feed the herd.
Johnny splits into a grin, totally amused by how quickly the situation has polarized to a positive vibe, switched right over to the normality of their day to day.
Soda giggles, says, “Shoot, Johnny, you look like you could get up and dance.”
Johnny turns bashful and looks down at his lap, still smiling, fiddling with Dallas' too-big ring, and Dallas ruffles his hair, grabs him by the neck to pull him closer, nearly tipping him in his seat. From the kitchen, where he’s leaned against the sink with his mouth all full of bread, Two-Bit says, “Easy there, Love Birds.”
Ponyboy smiles like he can’t believe Dallas loves anything. Ponyboy smiles like he can't believe Johnny can look so cheerful.
Johnny leans his head to Dally's shoulder and no one says boo about it. Sodapop picks up his hand, his milk done and glass set aside on the table, and tells Dallas to get back in for the game, says, "C'mon, Two-Bit, you got a round of poker to lose."
Pony and Johnny both just sit quiet and watch the way Dallas turns to stone, no tell at all in his face, and Steve asks to be dealt in a few moments later, Darry in the kitchen sounding like he's doing the dishes.
Johnny has never felt so thankful in his life. He wishes every day could be a long stretched-out version of this moment: leaned up on Dally, the gang casually accepting their relationship, no one hollering at him or hitting him with a broom. Hell, Johnny is so starstruck and ecstatic, watching Dallas bluff like the devil at the gates of heaven, watching Pony watching Dallas, he forgets, just for a second, that there are Socs out there that are better off than him in every way, with their Madras jackets and beer blasts, who still pick fights just because Johnny Cade can’t catch a break and is digging on the wrong side of the tracks and probably forever will be. In this moment, all that is gone. It’s just him and his gang.
Johnny is broken from his dreaminess when Two-Bit, in an attempt to get Dallas to break his stoney face, asks, overly casual, “So, Dallas, you talk to Johnny dirty the way you do broads? Make his ears go red just the way they do?”
Soda snickers, busting out that award winning grin of his, all littered with amusement. Steve shifts his eyes back and forth to everyone at the table.
Dally must be in the end all of good moods, real pleased by his new relationship and unabashed in it, because here’s another chance to floor Two-Bit Mathews, and Dally doesn’t even flinch. He plucks a card out of his hand, moves it over to spaces to the left. “I reckon you should switch your mind over to cards. Your bluffs have been shit.”
Soda hollers and Steve looks a little entertained, but he glances at the clock and folds, says he oughta get going down to the DX now or he’ll be late. He promises to swing by at lunch and pick up Soda for his shift.
“Shoulda known those rumors were true,” Two-Bit continues, voice light and sly. “Knew those cowboys like you were always up to somethin’ funny.” It’s obvious that he’s just trying to throw Dallas off his game, but Johnny and Ponyboy both look alarmed, ready to bolt off as soon as Dallas decides he’s had enough.
“You keep talkin’ big, I’m gonna take you down the corner and skin you,” Dally growls. He doesn’t draw his eyes up from his hand, but Johnny has a feeling his look is blazing, that piercing glance that could send anyone running.
He’s had enough.
Two-Bit stops talking big and plays cards.
“Here.” Pony passes Johnny a small booklet titled Frank O’Hara: The Collective, and Johnny turns it over, his eyebrows going together. “Seen it at the library and when I was readin’ Frost some months ago I found this guy.”
“Yeah?” Johnny isn’t too much into poetry the way Ponyboy is, a lot of it seems too vague and fanciful for him to savvy the right way, but he likes when Pony reads it out loud to him, usually when they’re in the lot together, lying down in the grass, even if he doesn’t have any idea what it’s supposed to be telling him.
“Yeah. Well, you and Dallas come around today and it reminded me of this book ‘cause of this one poem in there,” Pony explains. He takes the book back out of Jonny’s hand and leafs through the pages until he finds it, passes it back. “See?”
It’s titled Homosexuality. Johnny reads through it silently while Ponyboy squats down and looks at his other books, all neatly lined on a shelf Two-Bit built for him in shop class some months back. He doesn’t really get this poem at all. There are some words he doesn’t even know the meanings of, like “candor” and “Abyssian”, but he figures he can look them up in Pony’s dictionary.
He likes the first two lines a lot: “So, we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping our mouths shut? as if we’d be pierced by a glance!” He can only guess what that means. Johnny figures it’s about being honest about liking other men, if the title of the poem can give him any context, but the last line is his favorite: “It’s a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.”
Regardless of the intended interpretation, Johnny knows that feeling well.
“Huh,” Johnny hums. He keeps the book open. “I didn’t know people… wrote about these things. You know, being like… like how me and Dally are.” It’s weird to talk about, even though Ponyboy was the first one to voice his acceptance. Johnny’s glad everyone else is out of the house: Two-Bit off wherever he’s slunk to, Steve and Soda at the DX, Darry out roofing, Dallas gone to talk to Buck and probably run into trouble.
“Well, there’s this other- this other poet I found. I can’t remember his name. He’s got this one really long poem and it’s got this one line. It sounds like how Dally talks when he gets dirty.” Pony gives him a knowing look and Johnny goes red in a heartbeat.
“Like they published it and everythin’ that way?”
Ponyboy nods. “Mhm. Ginsberg or Greensburg or somethin’.”
“Huh.” Johnny can’t believe there are people out there like him and Dally, people out there who not only kiss boys and tell their friends, but they’ve brave enough to publish that kind of stuff for the whole world to know.
Johnny clears his throat. “Thank you, Pony. For uh, showin’ me this and-and bein’ so savvy about how Dally and I are…”
Pony smiles and gives Johnny a push on the shoulder. “‘Course, Johnny. Don’t gotta thank me for that."
Johnny reads the poem over again to himself, coming away with no better grasp than his first go through, but it comforts him deeply, knowing there are others like him. That there are guys who kiss guys. Probably other greasers, even, who wear the rings of fellow hoodlums, JDs all over the country sharing smokes and kisses and having to keep it secret.
Things are rough all over, but at least Johnny's got Dally and the gang's got them both, no matter if they're going together.
When Pony's turned away to look through his bookshelf, Johnny brings his hand up to his lips and kisses Dally's ring and says a silent thank you in his head.