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Four days ago, Ponyboy Curtis forgot his coat at school.
It was an easy thing to forget. It had been draped over the back of his chair during last period, damp chalk dust clinging to the sleeves, the collar still faintly smelling like cigarette smoke and laundry soap. By the time the final bell rang, his head had already been somewhere else — running ahead of him, always running — and the coat stayed behind, lonely and unnoticed.
Four days ago, the sky split open like it had something personal against Tulsa.
Rain slammed down in heavy sheets, the kind that soaked through denim in seconds and plastered hair to skin. By the time Pony reached the halfway point home, the rain had turned sharp and biting, sleet stinging his cheeks and hands like tiny needles. The streets blurred into silver rivers beneath his shoes. He ran anyway. He always ran.
Four days ago, he pushed himself too hard because stopping felt worse.
He sprinted all the way home, lungs burning, legs screaming, breath ripping in and out of him like it might tear something loose. He told himself it was for training. Track season didn’t care about bad weather or dead friends or grief that lived in your ribcage. Coach sure didn’t. Neither did Ponyboy — not really.
Four days ago, he came home soaked through and shaking, peeled off only what was absolutely necessary, and collapsed onto his bed in damp clothes because the effort of fixing it felt impossible.
He stayed like that far too long.
It has been one hundred and sixty-seven days since Windrixville.
Pony doesn’t need to mark it down anywhere. The number exists in him the same way his heartbeat does — constant, unignorable. One hundred and sixty-seven days since fire and smoke and blood rewrote his life. One hundred and sixty-seven days since Johnny. Since Dallas. Since everything cracked open and never quite sealed back up.
For about eighty of those days, he’s been… okay.
Not good. Never good. But functional. He learned how to walk around the darkness instead of straight through it. Learned how to laugh at the right times, nod in the right places, turn his grief into something small enough to carry without dropping it everywhere.
The darkness never left — it just changed shape.
It was the same darkness that had followed him since his parents died, a shadow sewn into every corner of his life. He knew that one well. You didn’t outrun it. You learned to live with it breathing down your neck.
Most days, he could.
Other days, though — the textbook had a name for those.
Episodes.
Ponyboy preferred not to name them at all.
They came without warning, rolling in thick and heavy, clogging his chest until breathing felt like inhaling smoke through broken glass. Memories surfaced uninvited, sharp and vivid and cruel. Things he forgot how to forget. Water flooding his lungs. Embers raining down. Johnny shoving him toward the exit. Dally’s eyes — wild, defiant, shining — right before the light left them.
Some days it was enough to make him scream.
Some days it was enough to make him forget his coat. Or forget to change. Or forget that his immune system was about as sturdy as wet cardboard.
The nightmares started two weeks ago.
Real ones. The kind that clawed their way out of his skull and refused to fade with morning light. Eventually, Pony decided that maybe writing them down would help. If he could trap them on paper, maybe they’d stop living in his head.
Monday — Johnny in the church.
Tuesday — Johnny in the church, then the hospital.
Wednesday — The lot, soaked red. Dallas on the pavement.
He never wrote about his parents.
Especially not his mom.
He preferred her untouched by ink or fire or blood — preserved exactly as she’d been. Soft voice. Warm hands. Golden hair like Soda’s, glowing even in memory. She only came to him on the worst nights, like an angel breaking her own rules.
She was the only person Pony wished would still call him baby.
Thursday night was hers.
And it was hell.
“Ponyboy! Wake up!”
Hands shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth. He surfaced from the nightmare choking on his own breath, lungs burning, throat raw. It took a moment to realize Soda was yelling because Pony was screaming.
Not dreaming screaming.
Real screaming.
“Hey, hey — easy, Pone, easy,” Soda kept saying, panic cracking through his voice.
The screaming dissolved into violent coughing. Wet. Deep. It felt like something was tearing loose inside his chest.
Pony barely registered the tears burning down his face, hot against skin that felt frozen solid. He dragged in a breath that whistled wrong and wiped his face with his sleeve.
“Sorry,” he rasped.
It came out broken. Wheezy.
Soda’s eyes widened. “That was a bad one.”
“Sorry,” Pony repeated, quieter. “I’m okay.”
Soda didn’t believe him. He never did.
“Don’t apologize,” Soda said automatically, scanning him head to toe. “You alright?”
“Just a nightmare,” Pony mumbled, curling deeper into the blankets. He tried to ignore the ache in his chest — sharp and icy, like needles lodged in his lungs — and the way Soda stayed awake, watching him.
Guilt settled heavy in his stomach.
His brothers had already given up everything. He hated when they gave up sleep, too.
By morning, his body felt like it had been run over by something planetary.
Every joint ached. His head throbbed. His chest burned. Even lifting his arms felt like work. He dragged himself out of bed anyway, because staying home meant thinking — and thinking was dangerous.
The mirror confirmed what he already knew.
He looked awful.
Dark circles bruised his eyes purple and deep. His skin was pale to the point of gray, lips tinged faintly blue. He swallowed down the nausea rising in his throat and took more aspirin than he probably should have.
Just get through the day.
That was always the plan.
The plan failed slowly.
He won the relay — because running was the one thing that still made him feel free — and then everything unraveled. His vision blurred. His chest tightened. His cough deepened until it felt like something was cracking apart inside him.
By the time he collapsed at home, fever burning through him, reality slipped sideways.
Fire bled into memory. Memory bled into fear.
And when he finally went under, the world went black.
He dreamed of all of them.
Mom. Dad. Johnny. Dally.
They stood there, watching him, waiting for him to save them like he always failed to do.
And when he woke again, warm and tethered to an IV, Darry was there — eyes soft, voice steady, hands gentle.
“You don’t have to handle everything alone,” Darry told him quietly. “You never did.”
And for the first time in a long while, Pony let himself believe it.