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Cherry Valance has had enough of being catcalled.
“Now that you’re not Bob’s anymore, you’re back on the menu, hot stuff!”
Was that really all she was? An object to be admired? A meal to be devoured? It seemed to be what every man thought of her.
“You wanna come to mine and see what real fun looks like?”
She’d hoped against hope that Ponyboy Curtis would be different. That he would maybe see her as a human instead of a girl just as much as he’d seen her as a girl instead of a Soc. Those hopes had been cruelly dashed the moment she saw him heckling a poor Greasy girl during a joint track practice. Cherry saw this, and she hurt, and she did with that hurt what she did best.
She got angry.
Pony always ended up waving to her when they crossed paths in the hallways, and true to her word, she had never waved back. But she had never shunned him, either, always giving him a small, polite nod. It had become their own little form of greeting, one that no Greaser would see as anything more than surface level niceties, and that no Soc would see as anything at all. That day, Cherry decided to become a Soc to him again- hell, maybe she’d always been one and was just too distracted by talks of sunsets to figure it out. She sure didn’t miss how he was always picking on people of his own class.
But thinking about it, had Bob really treated her any better before they’d started dating? Sure, once she was his, he toned it down. Before that, though? It was all more of the same. She was starting to feel a little sick thinking about it.
Cherry was afraid of going outside alone- she always had been. Sure, it sounded irrational, but she dared you to wear the hip-hugging clothing expected of her and see how long you would last before you went around judging her for it.
Well, fine. If Ponyboy Curtis was going to treat her like a Soc girl, she was gonna treat him like a Greaser boy.
-
The first time Cherry ignored Pony’s wave, he didn’t think much of it, she was sure. They were both busy people and they missed each other’s glances sometimes. But once it started becoming a pattern, she noticed his gaze lingering on her in the hallways. She tried not to look at it, tried not to feel bad for protecting herself, but the hurt look in those big green eyes wasn’t a pleasant thing for her to witness. Eventually, he gave up and started looking at the ground whenever he saw her.
That was, until he cornered her after a cheer practice.
-
Cherry hadn’t been expecting it. She was just cleaning up after the team broke so she would have to do less small talk in the locker rooms. Just like she always did, she bent at the knees, not the waist; lest someone sneak up on her and look for something he wasn’t supposed to. That was what she’d been expecting when she heard the light footsteps behind her, at the very least. Cherry turned around, bracing herself for a solo encounter, but she was faced instead with someone looking at her eyes, not her breasts or her butt. She almost laughed. Why was the first thing she felt relief? She knew what Ponyboy did. She saw how he treated people just like her, only with less money.
“You’ve been givin’ me the cold shoulder for a week now!” he said without even giving her a chance to address him. All her anger flooded out at once.
“You’ve been out and about harassin’ girls! How am I s’posed to know you ain’t gonna do that to me, huh? I thought you were different, Ponyboy. I thought you were a good one.”
“I am!”
“Good ones don’t yell at people in the streets for the crime of existing! An’ you do that, don’t you? Don’t lie to me, I’ve watched it happen.”
“Well, sure, but it’s only when my friends are around, it’s not a normal thing-”
“That’s what life is like for every woman, every day, Ponyboy! It’s normal for us.”
He paled. Cherry huffed.
“All those times y’all go walkin’ around in the streets harassing us? We feel that. Every day I live in fear that someone is gonna do to me what they did to you. I may not be a Greaser like you, but I am a woman, and in this town that’s the next worst thing.”
For once, Pony didn’t seem to have anything to say.
“Yeah, hollerin’ at all those girls ain’t seemin’ so tuff now, is it?” she spat.
“No,” he said quietly, staring into space, “It ain’t.”
She stood up, brushing the dirt off her uniform.
“You’d better learn from this, Ponyboy Curtis,” Cherry said, “Or so help me, no girl, Greaser or Soc, will want to talk to you ever again.” Was it a threat? She didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
“And tell all your friends that, too!” She yelled over her shoulder as she left.
Threat or not, it must have worked, because Ponyboy hadn’t so much as looked the wrong way at a girl all week. She didn’t want to entertain the thought that maybe he felt bad. Cherry couldn’t give herself that kind of hope again.
-
It was after another cheer practice that he came up to her again. He didn’t look angry anymore. He still wasn’t looking at her body- he was looking shamefully at the ground, but again, he didn’t give her a chance to talk.
“Look, I didn’t realize what I was doin’ at first. It just seemed so . . . normal. But then you talked to me, an’ I realized that you were right. You have to walk around just as scared as I do. Maybe more scared. And I helped make that happen.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. Cherry’s expression softened. She had gotten lots of sorrys before. Most of them were just words thrown out to placate her before she found someone they respected to put them in their place. This one wasn’t. He wasn’t apologizing at her, he was apologizing to her.
“It is what it is,” she said, “But . . . thank you. For changing.”
“Thank you for showing me I needed to.”
Cherry gave him a small, polite nod. Ponyboy waved back, and each went their separate ways feeling lighter than before.