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Everything hurt, and he was all alone, and all Dally could think was I want my mom back.
He was certainly no stranger to losing fights, and even if he won he’d still get plenty hurt. There was no way for him not to at the age he was. Most of his opponents liked to aim for the face, though, not the abdomen. It was a stupid reflex, throwing his hands up instead of down, one he knew had doomed him as he practically crawled away from the scuffle.
“Hell no, kid, you ain’t gonna walk away that easy.” The victor was practically growling with how rageful his words were. Dally knew he wanted more. He could tell that this man didn’t just let fights end—he finished them himself.
“Easy on him, he ain’t even thirteen yet!” someone else shouted. He hated it when people looked down on him because he was young, even though today he knew it would save his life. As the pair argued above him, he somehow managed to slip away.
It all hurt so much. If he listened hard enough, he could almost hear her cursing in Belarusian like she used to when he was at home—but then she’d gone and died, and now his father didn’t even let him speak it. As if he remembered more than a few words anyway. He knew the curses, he knew the lullabies, and he knew that the way the consonants melted together was the only thing in the world that sounded like home. He didn’t have that now. He’d never get to have that again.
Dally blinked, and suddenly the glass on the sidewalk was digging into his trembling palms. Then someone was hauling him up roughly by the armpits, setting off a stream of cries that didn’t come anywhere close to a language; for a moment, pain became his mother tongue. The next he knew, he was slung over someone’s shoulder (which was sharply digging into the spot on his abdomen that hurt the most with each step) and staring at the trail of blood his hands left behind in steady drips. Then he blinked again and he was on a dingy couch in an apartment he didn't recognize with bandages wrapped uncomfortably tight over his stomach.
He never found out who did his appendectomy, only that it was someone so unqualified that he never had to pay a cent. It left a nasty little scar, larger than one he’d get if a doctor had done it, just under the right side of his ribcage. Year after year, he’d hide it or make up some cover story, as if its existence somehow made him lesser.
Dally would carry that scar for the rest of his short life.
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Once in a while, he would think about his father. He was a wretched man, one that deserved everything that came to him—but there had been a time where that wasn’t the case. Dally had one or two blurry memories of that version of him from his early childhood. In both of them he felt his mother’s presence, even if he couldn’t see or hear her. It was like the world was a little bit brighter back then, back when the sound of laughter was as common as the smell of fresh-baked bread.
He’d never thought of food as something safe before, not until he made it to Tulsa. At the time of his earliest memories, he was far too young to understand the love that went into a simple meal, and by the time he’d grown up some the concept was lost to him. But here and now, at the age of fifteen, he could finally discover it—a taste so simple it made him want to throw up. Dally didn’t like cake. He hardly even considered himself someone who liked sweets, because they just weren’t a piece of the survival he’d built for himself.
But after that first experience, he found himself craving Mrs. Curtis’ chocolate cake more and more. The feeling itself was near foreign to him; he didn’t understand it in the slightest. Dally didn’t want chocolate cake because he didn’t need chocolate cake. It was always supposed to stay that simple.
And yet he still came back for more, because the cake she gave him reminded him of a lost comfort from so long ago he couldn’t remember anything more than a vague warmth, laughter, and the scent of fresh-baked bread.
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Dally had seen countless people die, but this was his first time attending a funeral.
Closed casket, Darry had said, because the death was as messy as it was quick and painless. It was a cold comfort to all of them. They couldn’t afford to bury their parents with much more than dignity, but everyone made do just like they always had. To Dally, the ceremony was a sight both alien and all too familiar—the streets of New York were no place to bury someone (if there was even a body left to bury), but the last traces of the dead still lingered about like a scent the same way they did here and everywhere else.
He might’ve said something if he thought there was anything good to say. Instead, he brought Johnny to his place more often than before. He showed up to the house less. When he did make an appearance, he filled the cabinets with stolen medicine and stole away any trace of liquor he could find. Dally knew grief alone could never kill Darry—but he’d seen a cocktail of grief and alcohol get away with murder one too many times to even leave an opportunity for it to rear its ugly head. He wasn’t soft, but he took care of his own.
Even as life for the Curtis brothers fell into a new kind of normal, he stayed vigilant. Normality was meaningless, and complacency was dangerous, so Dally would accept neither as absolute even as he felt his own roots dig themselves further into Tulsa’s back yard.
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He hadn’t even realized the world had brightened until it went dark again. Johnny had been a candle burning bright in the sky, just like a star. Ponyboy had once rambled to him about some mad ones, creatures that blazed quick and radiant and exploded into brilliant dust at the first glimpse of moonlight. Dally had never deluded himself into believing he was one of those stars.
And yet, just like Johnny, he would die too soon and leave a tangled mess of secrets and scents that remained burned into the backs of their eyelids for the rest of their lives. Yes, Dally had died the same way he lived—in a flash of light that vanished the second they’d blinked, the second they’d gone too far, trusted too much, or even too little.
Now the last remnants of his own life had exploded into hazy red mist that he would never see, just like he’d never get to see the way Ponyboy immortalized it in ink right along with the rest of him—because to them, no different from Johnny, Dally Winston had always been more than just a candle.