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It was a pretty standard Friday, it really was. Steve had gone to school, albeit reluctantly, he had only skipped one or two unimportant classes, he had driven Ponyboy home and picked up Sodapop on the way. As usual, he lingered at the Curtis home for a bit with the rest of the gang, save for Dallas, who was probably off fighting with Tim somewhere, and Darry, who was still at work by that time. It was snowing then, but nobody thought anything of it, after all, it was January.
Ponyboy and Johnny were both trying their darndest to light a fire in the woodstove, however they weren’t getting anywhere because anytime the match would burn down just a little bit they would panic and blow it out. Sodapop and Steve both sat on the couch, listening to Two-Bit narrate one of his anecdotes, gray eyes flashing with liveliness as he gesticulated wildly and paced around, lost in reliving the tale. That was the thing about Two-Bit, his stories were simple enough, but the way he saw them and shared that view with others was what made them special.
Suddenly, the door swung open and Dallas came bombing straight through, bringing with him a cold draft and a flurry of snowflakes. Dallas tumbled to the ground, clearly not expecting the door’s cooperation. He let out a string of curses, slightly out of breath.
“That damn door handle,” he gasped. “The thing got so stuck I had to wrestle with it for five whole minutes!”
“Well, Darry’s not home yet, but when he gets here we can let him know, he’ll fix it.” Two-Bit said. “But for now, you had better close that door so we don’t all freeze to death before I can finish telling the story that you so rudely interrupted.”
Dallas grumbled a small protest, but ultimately complied, kicking the door shut from where he was on the floor. He sat up and swung his legs out in front of him to start untying his boots. He kicked them off his feet and stood, tossing his jacket onto a hook and peeling away his gloves to reveal pale fingers turning slightly purple at the tips.
“How cold is it out there, Dally?” Johnny asked, waving out yet another flame that burned a bit too close to his hand.
“Real cold. I think the thermometer reads about 5°? You better not be wasting those matches, Johnnycake. We may end up really needin’ ‘em.”
“And it’s snowing hard?”
“You betcha. Started picking up pretty quick too, it’s not a blizzard, but it might become one.”
“Blizzard? How will Darry get home?” Soda was doing his best to sound calm, but Steve picked up on his worry anyway. It’s easy to detect that kind of thing when you’ve been best friends for as long as you can remember. Steve got up and wandered over to the window, through which he spotted Darry fighting the stuck door handle.
“Speak of the devil…” he muttered, and Sodapop rushed over to look. Upon seeing Darry, he made a beeline for the door to let Darry in.
Darry crossed the threshold and immediately spat, “Dammit, that door handle’s gonna be the dean of me. Why does nothing in this house work anymore?”
“Bad day at work?” Dallas asked, noticing the uncharacteristic aggression towards a minor inconvenience that Darry would usually brush off.
“How’d you know?” Darry deadpanned back. “It’s snowing rather hard out there, I don’t s’pose y’all are makin’ it back to your own houses tonight?” He asked, gesturing at the four non-Curtises in the room. Steve thought back to how his dad’s place would be now- cold, empty, probably reeked, and quickly his head no, as did the other three.
Darry sighed. “Alright. I figured as much. I’ll go start some soup for dinner. It may be a Friday, but it’s gotta be an early night tonight because we’re gonna have to shovel-” he was abruptly cut off by a chorus of groans “-and I’m not hearin’ any of that nonsense because there’s no shot I’m doin’ it alone.” Darry shuffled off into the kitchen, shaking his head and muttering something about being the single father of six whole adolescents at the ripe old age of twenty.
Two-Bit went back to telling his story, but Dallas had replaced Steve on the couch, as Steve now had to take over the fire-starting duties. Ponyboy and Johnny were relegated to the rug, where they sat reading from the same book. Steve always wondered how they were able to do that, it was almost like they shared a brain.
Later, Darry had finished making the soup and he rounded them all up for dinner. Steve had successfully gotten a fire going by that point, so they all ate by the fire instead of at the kitchen table. Darry went to bed immediately after finishing his soup, having given up on enforcing the early to bed idea. He opted to let the other six make their own decisions, and if they made a foolish one, surely they’d pay for it.
Sodapop and Steve were on dish duty that night, with Steve washing them and Soda drying them. There was a rare silence between the two, the only sounds being the running water and the quiet clatter of dishes when Soda set them down. Finally, Soda decided to try and make some conversation.
“Remember how much fun we used to have when it snowed? Nowadays we just worry about stuff, like how bad the roads will be.” He took another dish, rubbing it with the now slightly damp rag.
“I remember. I miss that.” Steve kept his reply short. He didn’t want to be rude, he just didn’t have much to say.
“When did it all change?” Sodapop didn’t have to ask. They both knew damn well that it all changed when the police officer came knocking to tell what was left of the Curtis family that their parents were dead and that Darry would have to give up on his dreams if he wanted to keep his kid brothers out of the system. For most of them, the first moment when they had to grow up had actually come much earlier, but at least when Mr. Curtis and Mrs. Curtis were alive; they had a chance to take back some of their childhood innocence and be somewhat unburdened.
“What was your favorite thing to do again? Was it snowmen?” Steve asked, deciding that if they were going to talk about the past they may as well make it the better past.
Soda grinned. “Yup. And you would always try to help and fail because your fingers were too cold to hold on to anything. It wouldn’t have killed you to wear gloves, y’know, and it won’t kill you now.”
“Not true! I would not let something like that get in the way! I could handle the cold just fine then, and I still can!” Steve knew Soda was probably right, but he went on denying it. He told himself it was for his dignity.
“Oh yeah? Prove it.” Sodapop smirked. “This is the last dish, so when we’re done cleaning I dare you to go out into the snow in nothing but a t-shirt and jeans. No shoes, no socks, no nothing.”
“Challenge accepted!” The pair got done with their chores and went over to where the others were.
“Are you two going to do something stupid?” Ponyboy asked, walking up to Soda, who flashed a sly grin.
“Was it that obvious? Well, I’m not, but Steve sure is! I challenged him to go out in the snow in nothing but a t-shirt and jeans, and he accepted!” Sodapop told him excitedly.
“Okay, I’m going now.” Steve called from where he stood by the door. He opened it up and stepped out.
“Hey, this reminds me-” Two-Bit started, but then Steve shut the door and couldn’t hear him anymore. Steve took a step onto the snow, immediately sinking down into it. It was just past his knees, and he could already feel the snow starting to melt through his jeans, cooling the skin rapidly. Alright, he thought, all I’ve gotta do is run around for a bit. He tried to take a step and tripped, face planting right into the pile of cold, unwelcoming snow. Yeah, that counts, he decided, rolling over and standing up to walk back to the door.
Steve tried the handle. It didn’t work. Shit. Shit. Shit. He had forgotten. So had everyone else. He turned the handle once. Twice. He started to get rough on the third. He let go of it and-
CLANG.
It fell clean off.
Steve slid down the wall next to the door and pulled his knees to his chest. “This is bad. This is really fucking bad.” He said to himself, unable to keep his panic in the confines of his mind. “I can’t knock. If I knock I’ll wake up Darry. Damn guy sleeps like a rock until someone knocks on the door, then he’s up in a flash.” Steve couldn’t blame him though, knowing why. “If he finds out he’s gonna be so fucking angry. I can’t have that.”
Steve took to grabbing his freezing cold feet in his shaking hands, trying to rub some warmth and feeling back into his toes, which were starting to turn an odd color. “Maybe they’ll remember and let me back in. Yeah, maybe they’ll realize the mistake and everything will be okay and we can just never talk about this again.”
He waited there for some time, clinging to the possibility, before coming to a realization. “Dammit. They’re not coming to let me in. They forgot about me.” Steve started getting desperate. He was losing his head and he knew it, but what could he do? “ Please don’t forget about me. Shit, I’m gonna die out here. I’m gonna die out here and they’re gonna have to scrape my frozen corpse off of their front step in the morning!”
A gust of wind threw a cloud of needle-sharp ice particles right at Steve, who started pacing around and frantically running his hands through his hair. “I should just knock. It’d save me a lot of trouble, maybe my life- No. I can’t wake Darry, he doesn’t deserve that trouble, and besides, he’d make me wish I were dead.”
Steve sat down again and tried to compress himself as small as possible. He felt tears beginning to prick up in his eyes, and if they fell, he couldn’t tell because he was already soaking wet and cold.
“They really forgot about me. They really forgot.” Almost any faith he once had for the chance that someone remembered was gone by then, and he started to accept his fate.
Suddenly, the wind whipped again, but stronger this time, causing a whistling sound as it blew against the side of the house. There was a loud crack when a large tree branch broke off, and Steve jumped up, hope reignited by the possibility that the guys inside heard it too. He turned to look in the window and locked eyes with Sodapop, whose eyes went wide as he dashed to the door.
“Shit, I’m sorry Steve,” Soda opened the door to let him in. “We just…”
Forgot. Steve’s mind filled in the blank, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. He just smirked and said, “No worries, man. I told you so, I’m tough. I can take it.” Steve wanted so badly to be honest, to tell his friend the truth about how he genuinely thought he was going to die, how it wasn’t alright at all. He wanted to say how shitty it felt when he was forgotten, how he would have died, but his mouth couldn’t seem to form the words. Instead, he just curled his toes in an attempt to hide their unnatural color, grabbed his extra layers that he had left inside the house, and went to the bathroom to replace his wet clothes with the dry ones.
When Steve walked out of the bathroom, Ponyboy and Sodapop had gone, presumably to bed. Johnny, Two-Bit, and Dallas were all getting settled, Johnny on the couch and Two-Bit and Dallas on the two armchairs. There were no blankets left so Steve decided he would just sleep under the rug. But first, he put his socks on.
“Do you always sleep with socks?” Johnny asked groggily from the couch.
Steve wanted to tell him that he was wearing socks to warm his toes up so that they wouldn’t fall off because the five of them couldn’t figure out how to rub their five collective brain cells together in a way that would make them remember Steve while he froze outside. But he couldn’t snap at Johnny like that, and it was his own stupid fault anyway. So he just said “Yeah.” He then crawled under the rug, and was out like a light.
The next morning, Steve woke up and it was already seven. So much for an early morning, he thought, but he was pretty grateful. He looked around and saw that everyone else was still asleep. Then he spotted Darry in the kitchen, making eggs.
“I thought we were waking up early to shovel?” Steve asked.
Darry shrugged. “Yeah, we were going to but then Soda told me what happened last night and I decided to let y’all sleep.”
“Really? You’re not mad?”
“What? I mean, a little, that was really idiotic of you, but I decided that you’re useless to me if you’re too tired to do anything.”
Steve let out a small sigh of relief. Terrifying as Darry is, Steve should have known he'd go easy. After all, there was probably nothing in the world he loved more than his kid brothers and the gang. Still, Steve had been a little scared. Just in case. He glanced out the window at the snow sparkling in the light of the rising sun. He didn’t ever want to feel cold again after last night.
“I’m gonna go grab the paper.” Darry started towards the door.
“Okay. I’ll let you in.”
“Steve?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry that happened.”
“It’s fine. It was my own fault anyway.”