That Was Then, This Is Now recap

Sixteen-year-old Bryon Douglas and his adopted brother Mark have grown up treating fights, hustles, and theft as ordinary adventures. Bryon begins to change after dating Cathy Carlson, taking a job, and seeing the damage caused by the boys' reckless life. Their friend Charlie dies while saving them from men they cheated, and Cathy's vulnerable younger brother M&M runs away to a communal house, where drug use leaves him psychologically shattered. Bryon discovers that Mark has been selling drugs and calls the police, choosing the victims of Mark's trade over their lifelong loyalty. Mark is imprisoned and comes to hate him. Cathy and Bryon drift apart as well, leaving Bryon older and more responsible but cut off from the relationships that once gave his life certainty.

Bryon Douglas and Mark have been inseparable since childhood, with Mark taken into the Douglas home after losing his parents. Now sixteen, they spend their time looking for excitement and money, often at Charlie's bar, where they try to hustle strangers at pool. Mark's charm and nerve have usually made consequences seem temporary. Bryon, however, is beginning to notice a difference between them: he no longer accepts every fight or trick without question. He reconnects with Cathy Carlson and meets her younger brother M&M, a sensitive, nonviolent boy whose long hair makes him a target. Bryon's interest in Cathy gives him a life beyond Mark and starts drawing his attention toward the effects their choices have on other people.

Bryon grows closer to Cathy while his friendship with Mark remains rooted in old habits. A visit to the injured Mike Chambers exposes Bryon to a story in which an attempt to help ended in brutal violence, making simple judgments about loyalty and justice harder to sustain. Trouble among Angela and Curly Shepard and the other neighborhood teenagers shows how casually the group turns embarrassment into revenge. Bryon can still participate in that world, but he increasingly recognizes its cruelty. Mark does not share the same doubts: to him, rules remain obstacles and anything done for a friend can be justified.

A pool hustle against two dangerous strangers ends disastrously. Charlie intervenes to save Bryon and Mark and is killed, leaving Bryon burdened by the knowledge that their search for easy money led directly to a friend's death. He takes a steady job to help his sick mother and becomes more serious about Cathy. Mark continues stealing and finding money through unexplained schemes, preserving the household while widening the moral gap between the boys. Meanwhile M&M, distressed by conflict at home and by the hostility directed at him, disappears into Tulsa's counterculture. Cathy is desperate to find him, and Bryon joins the search.

Bryon and Cathy locate M&M in a communal house after he has taken LSD. His severe hallucinations and terror make the cost of the drug scene immediate, and they get him to medical care and back to his family. The experience completes Bryon's break with his old belief that private loyalty excuses any conduct. At home he discovers a supply of pills beneath Mark's mattress and realizes that Mark has been selling drugs like those that harmed M&M. Bryon faces a choice between protecting the person he has always regarded as a brother and stopping conduct that is damaging strangers. He calls the police, and Mark is arrested.

Mark is convicted and imprisoned for selling drugs. Bryon visits him hoping that some part of their old bond remains, but Mark regards the call to the police as an unforgivable betrayal and tells Bryon he hates him. Cathy and Bryon also separate as Bryon becomes unable to feel for her as he once did. M&M survives, although his drug experience leaves continuing damage and uncertainty. Bryon has learned to see consequences and has acted on that knowledge, but maturity brings no clean reward: Charlie is dead, Mark is lost to him, and his romance has ended. He is left wondering whether he would make the same decision again and mourning the certainty of the time when he and Mark believed they would always be on the same side.

After Cathy and Bryon bring M&M home from a terrifying drug experience, Bryon realizes that Mark has been selling pills. He finds Mark's supply and, unable to dismiss the harm as another harmless hustle, calls the police. Mark is arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. When Bryon visits, Mark no longer treats him as a brother and says that he hates him. Bryon's relationship with Cathy also fades; he cannot recover the intensity of feeling he once had for her or for Mark. Looking back, he understands that he made the choice he believed was right, yet he is left isolated and emotionally numb. The novel closes without repairing the friendship: Bryon has crossed into a more responsible view of consequences, but the cost is the bond that had defined his childhood.