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Cherry remembered a time, years and years ago, when everything was simpler than it was today, Ponyboy had told her about his nightmares.
He would wake up in the middle of the night from them, screaming and crying so bad his brother had to start sleeping in the same room.
She had thought it was crazy at the time, waking up because of dreams. It had never happened to her so she had never worried about it.
Now, though, she couldn’t get a moment’s rest.
Every night, she would wake up, in a cold sweat, her head filled with visions of a time years and years ago when she had been in high school. Surrounded by all her prissy little friends and admiring boys. And Marcia.
Tonight, she had woken up and tried very hard to shake out the thoughts of Marcia from her head and go back to sleep. But she couldn’t.
So, she climbed carefully out of bed, extracting herself from under Marcus’s arm and leaving him snoring in their shared room.
She went to the bathroom attached to the bedroom, flipping on the light and just staring at herself for a moment.
She looked like a mess.
Most would say she looked fairly put together for someone who had just woken up, but she couldn’t help but notice the few pieces of hair that had fallen out of their place or the scarf that covered her pink foam rollers had slipped, exposing the top of her head.
She swallowed the lump in her throat, splashing herself with cold water and getting to work fixing her appearance.
It didn’t help her mind from wandering.
She stayed silent, staring in the mirror as she tucked her hair back where it needed to go.
Her mind stayed focused on Tulsa, ‘67. Before she got married or had her children or any of that.
Her mind stayed focused on Marcia.
On stolen kisses and sleepovers that turned into giggle-filled make outs.
It had been an experiment. And then it had... morphed. It had turned more serious.
It turned into what boyfriends and girlfriends were supposed to be. Cherry had gotten scared. She wasn’t afraid to admit that.
It had been raining when she finally told Marcia she didn’t want to see her anymore. That they were unnatural, it had been raining.
Marcia had stood there, mascara running down her face and she had listened as Cherry told her there was no way it could work.
And then she had screamed and yelled and told Cherry she was wrong.
She had yelled out to Cherry as she was walking away.
“You can’t run away from your heart, Cherry!”
Those words would echo in her head for the rest of her life.
They had already been haunting her for years.
On her wedding day to a man she had never loved, not truly, she had thought of Marcia.
On the day she found out she was pregnant with her son and she would finally get the chance to have a real, proper family that wouldn’t fight or scream or understand that their parents were trapped in a loveless marriage. Those were the words to echo in her head.
You can’t run away from your heart.
Maybe she was right, but damn it, if Cherry wouldn’t try her hardest.
She moved on to fixing up the scarf. Again, it did nothing to stop her from thinking.
She had always thought it was something wrong with her when she started liking Marcia.
Marcia had never felt that way. She had just... accepted that as fact. Cherry didn’t know how to do that.
So she instead hid away, caught up in fingers tangled in short brown hair and talks of if they were unnatural and talks of love.
Cherry had always been more scared than Marcia. On every front.
When it came to who would try a new ballet move first or who would take the risk of falling to cartwheel, Marcia would beat her.
When it came to the risk of being seen with a greaser in public or telling their parents they liked girls in the way boys did, Marcia beat her.
It was as infuriating as it was endearing.
Marcia was an outcast of Tulsa. She had moved up to New York City only days after her parents had kicked her out. Cherry had seen her at the class reunion weeks ago. She was happy.
Marcia was unnatural. She liked girls. She wasn’t normal.
But she was happy. And she was fine in her own skin.
Cherry was also unnatural. She liked girls. She liked Marcia.
But she was in a loveless marriage, with nothing to show for the effort she put in her entire life except for a rich husband, a big house on the hill, and two children with a third on the way.
She sat in the bathroom after fixing her hair, doing nothing but sitting with her head in her hands. Her thoughts consumed by Marcia. The smell of her hair and the curve of her smile and how her body felt when it curled up next to Cherry’s in the middle of the night at a sleepover.
It took her longer than she’d like to admit to pick herself up off the toilet seat and do something other than sit there and think of the one thing she couldn’t have.
She got out of the bathroom and walked to her children’s room to check on them.
First she checked up on her oldest, David.
He slept soundly in his racecar sheets, no doubt dreaming of cars.
Then, she checked on her baby.
Lydia Marcie Stewart. But everyone called her Marcie.
She slept soundly, having learned to sleep through the night a year ago.
Lydia and David. They were the reasons she stayed through the bouts of depression where she could barely even stand.
They were the reason she stayed anywhere near this house when it sometimes felt like it was suffocating her.
She had considered skipping town like some of the other girls who didn’t like their husbands had done.
She returned back to her room, where her husband slept soundly in the bed still.
She fell asleep again and she thought of Marcia.
The worst part: she has no one to blame but herself.
But she doesn’t think of that for too long, instead focusing on pretending the solid body of her husband is the soft curvy one that she longed for on nights like these, where she and Marcia would share a bed and pretend, for a moment, that they were normal.