When Never Comes

by Barbara Davis

It was supposed to be homework for Mrs. Kendrick’s English class, but it didn’t feel like homework at all. How could reading be work when you got to meet people and go places you’d never be able to go in real life? She smiles as she thinks of Cherry and Ponyboy, the movie-star-handsome Sodapop. They have become her friends, outsiders like her, from the wrong side of town. Except they have one another, and she has no one, a freak loner from an entirely different world than kids who wore name-brand jeans and went home to real houses. It might be nice to belong to a gang—not the drug-selling, gun-toting kind of gang—just a few kids who wouldn’t tease her for wearing thrift store clothes and bringing her lunch in a brown paper bag. She’s still weighing the pros and cons of gang membership when the rain-drenched quiet is broken by a sharp string of oaths. “Goddamn rain! Every goddamn time I gotta boot somebody out, it goddamn rains!” Christy-Lynn jerks her head up, knocking the hood back from her face as she searches for the source of the swearing, then freezes when she spots a mound of clothing and furniture on the soaking wet steps outside their apartment. And then she’s running with the rain in her eyes and a knot in her stomach, running toward a man carrying the mismatched lamps her mother had brought home from Goodwill a few months back. “What are you doing? That’s our stuff!” “And that’s my apartment,” the man says, jerking a thumb at the open apartment door. He’s tall an...