I guess it doesn't really matter where I was born.

It doesn't matter if it does matter either, because I don't know where I was born. I asked my mom a couple of times but she'd either wave me off or pretend like she hadn't heard me. Or maybe she really didn't hear me. Some days she was too drugged up to really hear or see anything—she just sat the couch looking at the fuzzy TV screen in her own warped world.

Once, while looking for our old camera in a box in the attic labeled MISC in thick permanent marker, I found my baby book underneath a few old files. I didn't even know I had a baby book until that day, but there it was, beat up and discolored. The ponies that decorated it were surely once white, but now they were sickly yellow, and the spine cracked so loud when I opened it that I thought the book would break in half. I thought surely it would say where I was born, but that space had been left mysteriously blank. There was not birth certificate in it either. It was missing.

I wondered if I even had one, or if I was just born on the side of the road in a ditch somewhere.

So, it's doesn't matter where I'm from really, just that when I was four years old I moved here—to Tulsa, Oklahoma. My very first memory is riding in the front seat of my mother's rusted Honda on a pile of phone books that served as a booster seat and passing the green and white sign that said WELCOME TO TULSA. I couldn't read a lick then, nor could I for a long time afterwards, but my mom read it out loud as we crossed the city limits.

She was excited. I could tell from her voice. I had never heard her excited before and I don't reckon I've heard her excited since. I think that's why it stuck to clearly in my mind.

We drove through the outskirts of the city, past the big houses where the big shots lived and through the center, then out the other side to this crummy neighborhood and to the house my stepdad owned. Only, he wasn't my stepdad yet. He wouldn't be for another seven months. But he had met my mother at the diner she worked at, I guess, when he was hauling a load overnight through wherever we lived then. Soon after that, he called her at work and invited us to move in with him. Just like that.

Back then the house wasn't quite as rough as it is now. Now, the porch was kind of crooked because the posts were slowly rotting away and the entire house was sort of melting into the ground unevenly. Even the kitchen and living room tilt, but it's difficult to tell unless you drop a ball or something round, like an orange, and watch it roll quickly to the front of the house. The porch is definitely the worst bit, so I have to be extra careful when sneaking out not to step on a rotten board so it snaps beneath me or groans uneasily.

But when my mom and I moved in ten years ago, the porch was level and the paint wasn't yet chipping off the door and window frames. That was before my stepdad, Clive, lost his job at the trucking company and my mom spent all of his savings on drugs or booze or whatever. That savings was Clive's chance of moving out of this neighborhood and starting a decent life, but that is long gone now. So the three of us were kind of stuck here together, which is hell for all of us because over the last decade we have learned a special sort of hatred for each other.

They especially hate me. On a good day this means that Clive and my mom just sort of pretend that I don't exist, on a bad day…well, I try not to think about those so much.

Today was a good day because Clive wasn't home—he was probably at the bar or with his buddies down at the rodeo—and Mom had locked herself in her room for the day, which was normal after her and Clive had gotten into a particularly nasty brawl.

It was easy to slip out of the house and out onto the cracked sidewalk down the familiar path that led down the street, then between the Shears' and the Wilson's houses to another road that put me at my best friend's house. I figured he would be home by now since the movie he was going to see had started at one o'clock and it was nearly four.

It was well into fall, but still it was unnatural for it to be chilly. Usually the sweltering summer heat stuck around until well into October, but I was shivering because I was wearing denim shorts and a ratty t-shirt with our school mascot on it. It was extra ratty because it wasn't even my shirt. It was Darrel's from his high school football days, so it was at least six years old. When he gave it to me—or, really, when I'd taken it from the second drawer in his dresser one day after Two-Bit was horsing around and spilled beer all down the front of my tank top—it was already faded and the lettering was peeling off of it, but now there were holes in the armpits. I figured I would cut off the sleeves altogether soon.

The sun was out which made the cold bearable. My freckles were already beginning to fade though, which was good because then Steve and Soda would stop teasing me about being able to play connect the dots on my entire spot-covered face.

One time last summer I braided my hair into pigtails and Steve had gotten a real kick out of that. He started calling me Pippi Longstocking because of my bright red hair and my crazy freckles and pulling on each of them whenever he could. I learned my lesson real good then and went back to my regularly scheduled ponytail.

That ponytail was short now. I had cut it in the bathroom earlier using some kitchen scissors that morning and my head felt unnaturally light as I made my way down the dirt path.

I had made it through the shortcut between the houses and onto the next street when I ran smack into a leather jacket. This made me nearly jump out of my skin because I had been lost in my own thoughts and hadn't really been paying attention to where I was going. I walked this same trail nearly every day so my feet just took me there on instinct now.

I let out a kind of strangled yelp and jumped back, nearly dropping my backpack, which I had slung over one shoulder.

"You'd best watch where your going, Grease," a voice said from above me, kind of low and menacing.

But I wasn't scared, and my heart stopped beating out of control in my chest because I knew that voice. I knew that voice well.

"Dallas Winston," I said, grinning up at him. I hadn't seen him in three months, but he looked exactly the same—blonde hair, square jaw, and tough eyes that probably could turn a Soc to stone in just one look. He'd be in jail for a while for starting a knife fight in an alley near Buck Merrill's place. But being in the cooler had done him well, it seemed. Dally was the only one I know that could actually come out of prison looking even healthier than he did when he went in. And I've known a lot of guys who've gone to prison. A couple of girls too.

"Mattie." He nodded in my direction as a way of greeting and continued walking toward the Curtis house, to the same place I was headed. He lit up a cigarette and took a drag before he asked, "They ain't put you in the girls' home yet?"

He was joking around, but I didn't like when he joked about that. No way I was going into a girls' home. Sure, my home life wasn't great, but at least I could go where I want and do what I wanted. I was free. The girls' home would be prison.

"Never," I said and I gave him as much as an grin as I could muster, but he didn't notice really, because all of the sudden he had stopped in his tracks and cocked his head to one side like he was listening to something far away. I stopped too and watched him for a second.

"What is it?" I asked, but he held up his hand to shut me up.

I listened hard, but this time the noise he had heard was much louder. I could hear it without straining myself. It was someone shouting. A familiar voice that for a millisecond I couldn't place. Then it hit me.

Ponyboy.