Susan Hinton - The Outsiders

I leaned back next to him sullenly. “I guess so.”

“Oh, shoot,” Johnny said with fake cheerfulness, “it’s just hair.”

“Shoot nothing,” I snapped. “It took me a long time to get that hair just the way I wanted it. And besides, this just ain’t us. It’s like being in a Halloween costume we can’t get out of.”

“Well, we got to get used to it,” Johnny said with finality. “We’re in big trouble and it’s our looks or us.”

I started eating a candy bar. “I’m still tired,” I said. To my surprise, the ground blurred and I felt tears running down my cheeks. I brushed them off hurriedly. Johnny looked as miserable as I felt.

“I’m sorry I cut your hair off, Ponyboy.”

“Oh, it ain’t that,” I said between bites of chocolate. “I mean, not all of it. I’m just a little spooky. I really don’t know what’s the matter. I’m just mixed up.”

“I know,” Johnny said through chattering teeth as we went inside. “Things have been happening so fast…” I put my arm across his shoulders to warm him up.

“Two-Bit shoulda been in that little one-horse store. Man, we’re in the middle of nowhere; the nearest house is two miles away. Things were layin’ out wide open, just waitin’ for somebody slick like Two-Bit to come and pick ’em up. He coulda walked out with half the store.” He leaned back beside me, and I could feel him trembling. “Good ol’ Two-Bit,” he said in a quavering voice. He must have been as homesick as I was.

“Remember how he was wisecrackin’ last night?” I said. “Last night… just last night we were walkin’ Cherry and Marcia over to Two-Bit’s. Just last night we were layin’ in the lot, lookin’ up at the stars and dreaming…”

“Stop it!” Johnny gasped from between clenched teeth. “Shut up about last night! I killed a kid last night. He couldn’t of been over seventeen or eighteen, and I killed him. How’d you like to live with that?” He was crying. I held him like Soda had held him the day we found him lying in the lot.

“I didn’t mean to,” he finally blurted out, “but they were drownin’ you, and I was so scared…” He was quiet for a minute. “There sure is a lot of blood in people.”

He got up suddenly and began pacing back and forth, slapping his pockets.

“Whatta we gonna do?” I was crying by then. It was getting dark and I was cold and lonesome. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back, but the tears came anyway.

“This is my fault,” Johnny said in a miserable voice. He had stopped crying when I started. “For bringin’ a little thirteen-year-old kid along. You ought to go home. You can’t get into any trouble. You didn’t kill him.”

“No!” I screamed at him. “I’m fourteen! I’ve been fourteen for a month! And I’m in it as much as you are. I’ll stop crying in a minute… I can’t help it.”

He slumped down beside me. “I didn’t mean it like that, Ponyboy. Don’t cry, Pony, we’ll be okay. Don’t cry…” I leaned against him and bawled until I went to sleep.

I woke up late that night. Johnny was resting against the wall and I was asleep on his shoulder. “Johnny?” I yawned. “You awake?” I was warm and sleepy.

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

“We ain’t gonna cry no more, are we?”

“Nope. We’re all cried out now. We’re gettin’ used to the idea. We’re gonna be okay now.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said drowsily. Then for the first time since Dally and I had sat down behind those girls at the Nightly Double, I relaxed. We could take whatever was coming now.

The next four or five days were the longest days I’ve ever spent in my life. We killed time by reading Gone with the Wind and playing poker. Johnny sure did like that book, although he didn’t know anything about the Civil War and even less about plantations, and I had to explain a lot of it to him. It amazed me how Johnny could get more meaning out of some of the stuff in there than I could — I was supposed to be the deep one. Johnny had failed a year in school and never made good grades — he couldn’t grasp anything that was shoved at him too fast, and I guess his teachers thought he was just plain dumb. But he wasn’t. He was just a little slow to get things, and he liked to explore things once he did get them. He was especially stuck on the Southern gentlemen — impressed with their manners and charm.

“I bet they were cool ol’ guys,” he said, his eyes glowing, after I had read the part about them riding into sure death because they were gallant. “They remind me of Dally.”

“Dally?” I said, startled. “Shoot, he ain’t got any more manners than I do. And you saw how he treated those girls the other night. Soda’s more like them Southern boys.”

“Yeah… in the manners bit, and the charm, too, I guess,” Johnny said slowly, “but one night I saw Dally gettin’ picked up by the fuzz, and he kept real cool and calm the whole time. They was gettin’ him for breakin’ out the windows in the school building, and it was Two-Bit who did that. And Dally knew it. But he just took the sentence without battin’ an eye or even denyin’ it. That’s gallant.”

That was the first time I realized the extent of Johnny’s hero-worship for Dally Winston. Of all of us, Dally was the one I liked least. He didn’t have Soda’s understanding or dash, or Two-Bit’s humor, or even Darry’s superman qualities. But I realized that these three appealed to me because they were like the heroes in the novels I read. Dally was real. I liked my books and clouds and sunsets. Dally was so real he scared me.

Johnny and I never went to the front of the church. You could see the front from the road, and sometimes farm kids rode their horses by on their way to the store. So we stayed in the very back, usually sitting on the steps and looking across the valley. We could see for miles; see the ribbon of highway and the small dots that were houses and cars. We couldn’t watch the sunset, since the back faced east, but I loved to look at the colors of the fields and the soft shadings of the horizon.

One morning I woke up earlier than usual. Johnny and I slept huddled together for warmth — Dally had been right when he said it would get cold where we were going. Being careful not to wake Johnny up, I went to sit on the steps and smoke a cigarette. The dawn was coming then. All the lower valley was covered with mist, and sometimes little pieces of it broke off and floated away in small clouds. The sky was lighter in the east, and the horizon was a thin golden line. The clouds changed from gray to pink, and the mist was touched with gold. There was a silent moment when everything held its breath, and then the sun rose. It was beautiful.

“Golly”—Johnny’s voice beside me made me jump—“that sure was pretty.”

“Yeah.” I sighed, wishing I had some paint to do a picture with while the sight was still fresh in my mind.

“The mist was what was pretty,” Johnny said. “All gold and silver.”

“Uhmmmm,” I said, trying to blow a smoke ring.

“Too bad it couldn’t stay like that all the time.”

“Nothing gold can stay.” I was remembering a poem I’d read once.

“What?”

Johnny was staring at me. “Where’d you learn that? That was what I meant.”

“Robert Frost wrote it. He meant more to it than I’m gettin’, though.” I was trying to find the meaning the poet had in mind, but it eluded me. “I always remembered it because I never quite got what he meant by it.”