Susan Hinton - The Outsiders

The only thing I’d felt in a long time was being scared. Scared stiff. I’d put off thinking about the judge and the hearing for as long as I could. Soda and Darry didn’t like to talk about it either, so we were all silently counting off the days while I was sick, counting the days that we had left together. But with Randy sticking solidly to the subject it was impossible to think about anything else. My cigarette started trembling.

“I guess your folks feel kind of awful about it, too.”

“My parents are dead. I live here with just Darry and Soda, my brothers.” I took a long drag on my cigarette. “That’s what’s worrying me. If the judge decides Darry isn’t a good guardian or something, I’m liable to get stuck in a home somewhere. That’s the rotten part of this deal. Darry is a good guardian; he makes me study and knows where I am and who I’m with all the time. I mean, we don’t get along so great sometimes, but he keeps me out of trouble, or did. My father didn’t yell at me as much as he does.”

“I didn’t know that.” Randy looked worried, he really did. A Soc, even, worried because some kid greaser was on his way to a foster home or something. That was really funny. I don’t mean funny. You know what I mean.

“Listen to me, Pony. You didn’t do anything. It was your friend Johnny that had the knife…”

“I had it.” I stopped him. He was looking at me strangely. “I had the knife. I killed Bob.”

Randy shook his head. “I saw it. You were almost drowned. It was the black-headed guy that had the switchblade. Bob scared him into doing it. I saw it.”

I was bewildered. “I killed him. I had a switchblade and I was scared they were going to beat me up.”

“No, kid, it was your friend, the one who died in the hospital…”

“Johnny is not dead.” My voice was shaking. “Johnny is not dead.”

“Hey, Randy.” Darry stuck his head in the door. “I think you’d better go now.”

“Sure,” Randy said. He was still looking at me kind of funny. “See you around, Pony.”

“Don’t ever say anything to him about Johnny,” I heard Darry say in a low voice as they went out. “He’s still pretty racked up mentally and emotionally. The doc said he’d get over it if we gave him time.”

I swallowed hard and blinked. He was just like all the rest of the Socs. Cold-blooded mean. Johnny didn’t have anything to do with Bob’s getting killed.

“Ponyboy Curtis, put out that cigarette!”

“Okay, okay.” I put it out. “I ain’t going to go to sleep smoking, Darry. If you make me stay in bed there ain’t anywhere else I can smoke.”

“You’re not going to die if you don’t get a smoke. But if that bed catches on fire you will. You couldn’t make it to the door through that mess.”

“Well, golly, I can’t pick it up and Soda doesn’t, so I guess that leaves you.”

He was giving me one of those looks. “All right, all right,” I said, “that don’t leave you. Maybe Soda’ll straighten it up a little.”

“Maybe you can be a little neater, huh, little buddy?”

He’d never called me that before. Soda was the only one he ever called “little buddy.”

“Sure,” I said, “I’ll be more careful.”

THE HEARING WASN’T anything like I thought it would be. Besides Darry and Soda and me, nobody was there except Randy and his parents and Cherry Valance and her parents and a couple of the other guys that had jumped Johnny and me that night. I don’t know what I expected the whole thing to be like — I guess I’ve been watching too many Perry Mason shows. Oh, yeah, the doctor was there and he had a long talk with the judge before the hearing. I didn’t know what he had to do with it then, but I do now.

First Randy was questioned. He looked a little nervous, and I wished they’d let him have a cigarette. I wished they’d let me have a cigarette; I was more than a little shaky myself. Darry had told me to keep my mouth shut no matter what Randy and everybody said, that I’d get my turn. All the Socs told the same story and stuck mainly to the truth, except they said Johnny had killed Bob; but I figured I could straighten that point out when I got my turn. Cherry told them what had happened before and after Johnny and I had been jumped — I think I saw a couple of tears slide down her cheeks, but I’m not sure. Her voice was sure steady even if she was crying. The judge questioned everyone carefully, but nothing real emotional or exciting happened like it does on TV. He asked Darry and Soda a little bit about Dally, I think to check our background and find out what kind of guys we hung out with. Was he a real good buddy of ours? Darry said, “Yes, sir,” looking straight at the judge, not flinching; but Soda looked at me like he was sentencing me to the electric chair before he gave the same answer. I was real proud of both of them. Dally had been one of our gang and we wouldn’t desert him. I thought the judge would never get around to questioning me. Man, I was scared almost stiff by the time he did. And you know what? They didn’t ask me a thing about Bob’s getting killed. All the judge did was ask me if I liked living with Darry, if I liked school, what kind of grades I made, and stuff like that. I couldn’t figure it out then, but later I found out what the doctor had been talking to the judge about. I guess I looked as scared as I really was, because the judge grinned at me and told me to quit chewing my fingernails. That’s a habit I have. Then he said I was acquitted and the whole case was closed. Just like that. Didn’t even give me a chance to talk much. But that didn’t bother me a lot. I didn’t feel like talking anyway.

I wish I could say that everything went back to normal, but it didn’t. Especially me. I started running into things, like the door, and kept tripping over the coffee table and losing things. I always have been kind of absent-minded, but man, then, I was lucky if I got home from school with the right notebook and with both shoes on. I walked all the way home once in my stocking feet and didn’t even notice it until Steve made some bright remark about it. I guess I’d left my shoes in the locker room at school, but I never did find them. And another thing, I quit eating. I used to eat like a horse, but all of a sudden I wasn’t hungry. Everything tasted like baloney. I was lousing up my schoolwork, too. I didn’t do too badly in math, because Darry checked over my homework in that and usually caught all my mistakes and made me do it again, but in English I really washed out. I used to make A ’s in English, mostly because my teacher made us do compositions all the time. I mean, I know I don’t talk good English (have you ever seen a hood that did?), but I can write it good when I try. At least, I could before. Now I was lucky to get a D on a composition.

It bothered my English teacher, the way I was goofing up, I mean. He’s a real good guy, who makes us think, and you can tell he’s interested in you as a person, too. One day he told me to stay in after the rest of the class left.

“Ponyboy, I’d like to talk to you about your grades.”

Man, I wished I could beat it out of there. I knew I was flunking out in that class, but golly, I couldn’t help it.

“There’s not much to talk about, judging from your scores. Pony, I’ll give it to you straight. You’re failing this class right now, but taking into consideration the circumstances, if you come up with a good semester theme, I’ll pass you with a C grade.”

“Taking into consideration the circumstances”—brother, was that ever a way to tell me he knew I was goofing up because I’d been in a lot of trouble. At least that was a roundabout way of putting it. The first week of school after the hearing had been awful. People I knew wouldn’t talk to me, and people I didn’t know would come right up and ask about the whole mess. Sometimes even teachers. And my history teacher— she acted as if she was scared of me, even though I’d never caused any trouble in her class. You can bet that made me feel real tuff.