Edit: Re-post, with a few minor formatting changes. Originally a one-shot, but I might expand this if there's any interest. Read and review.
The first time they meet, they are both five and Annie has just stumbled into school, shirt inside out and two different socks on her feet. Her hair is only combed on one side and she has a tear in her jacket. Her brother got her dressed today. Michael calls her a rude name and Connie Baxter, all four and a half feet of her, punches him in the face. Connie is apprehended by the playground monitor and Michael is sent to the time-out corner. Afterwards, Annie gives Connie a thank-you hug and they go to her house and watch Keith and the neighbors tackle each other in a not-remotely-regulation game of football. They are fast friends.
When Annie is seven and Connie is eight, Connie's dad comes home drunk and hollers terrible things at Connie and her mom. Her mom yells terrible things right back. Connie, desperate and afraid, runs the two and a half blocks to Annie's house. Annie lets her sleep in her bed and makes her breakfast. When Connie returns to her own home, she finds her dad nursing a hangover and her mother gone.
When Keith is twelve, he starts hanging out with the gang more. Annie likes most of them, and at first she doesn't mind that she hardly ever sees her brother. He learns how to steal and starts carrying a switchblade. He drinks and cuts school and tells everyone to call him Two-Bit. Then Annie starts to mind a little more.
When Annie is eleven, her dad comes back. It is brief, it is angry, and it leaves her terrified. Her mother is upstairs crying and Annie is frantic. Keith (she will never call him Two-Bit) hasn't been home in three days. She calls everyone she can think of, but no one knows where he is. Finally, she gives up and calls Connie. Connie helps her take care of her mom and cleans up the house and promises that everything will be alright. Keith comes home the next night, drunk, and Annie goes to Connie's house to avoid him. She is disgusted with herself and her father and him. She cries into Connie's shoulder and tries to forget everything.
When they are thirteen, Connie's dad loses his job and Connie goes from a poor middle-class girl to just poor. They move into the house down the block from Annie, but neither of them is particularly happy about it. Connie, who has never been good at coping, handles it by going to Angela Shepherd's party and getting high as a kite. Afterwards, Connie is ashamed and embarrassed and vows never to do anything like it again.
She keeps her promise.
When they are fourteen, things start happening faster. They both start at the local high school, but they hardly have any classes together (Connie is smarter). Connie gets a boyfriend and starts going to parties again- but true to her word, she never touches alcohol or drugs. Annie dates various boys, but none of her relationships last very long because her aunt got pregnant at fifteen and she's terrified of making the same mistakes. They start to run out of money. Her mom's hours got cut at her work, and god knows Keith isn't going to get a job. Annie persuades a friend's older brother to get her a job at a movie house, and Connie, who's been living off the lunch program at the middle school for the last two years, becomes a waitress.
When Annie is still fourteen and Connie is fifteen, Connie has a revelation. They'd just had a fight over something inconsequential and stupid, and Annie hasn't spoken to her in several days. Connie corners her and they have discuss the disparity in their relationship. Annie is prettier and calmer and levelheaded. Connie is outgoing and hot-tempered and smarter. Annie is poor and Connie is poorer. The talk ends with tears and both girls are reminded just why they are best friends.
When they are fifteen, Annie's boyfriend, Michael, realizes that she doesn't plan on having sex with him. In a rage, he hits her across the face. She crumples against the wall and he kicks her in the chest, calls her a bitch and rages off. She makes her way home, hoping for sympathy, only to find her brother passed out on the couch and her mom working the graveyard shift. She calls Connie.
When Connie is sixteen, there is a bar fight at the restaurant where she waitresses. She gets shot in the thigh and has no one to call but Annie. Annie has no way to get to the hospital and no idea where her mother is. She sprints four and a half blocks in the rain to the Curtis's house, a place she used to go when the parents were still alive but hasn't visited in years. She doesn't bother to knock, just bursts in the door and near screams for Keith. The boys (later she will find that Darry, Johnny, Ponyboy, and Sodapop were there) stare at her wide-eyed. She asks again, weakly this time, and Soda huskily replies that Keith is across town. She screams into her hands. Darry is on his feet now, asking her if she needs a ride somewhere. On the way to the hospital, she sits very still in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap. She thanks Darry in a kind of frantic gasp for the ride and dashes upstairs to Connie in 3-25. They hold hands as Connie makes dark jokes about dying such an unheroic death.
Connie is released from the hospital two days later, and she stays at Annie's house because she's unable to walk. The next day Connie has a fever and Annie is running to the Curtis house again. Keith is once again not there, but Johnny, a small, dark boy quietly persuades a hood named Dally to drive them to the hospital. Connie makes a complete recovery. The next week, Johnny kills a boy and dies in a fire in a Church in Windrixville. He saved some kids that were trapped, and Annie and Connie both privately think that Johnny was a hero before he ran into the burning church. Annie never gets a chance to thank him.
They grow up, slowly and all at once. Dally is shot to death for robbing a grocery store and pulling a gun. Soda and his best friend get drafted and only Steve returns. Ponyboy goes to college. Keith grows up. Annie becomes a teacher and gets married. She never has any kids. She works as a teacher for forty years before retiring. She dies in a car accident at fifty-six. Connie attends her funeral. Connie moves to New York to become an actress. She makes it, but she still returns to Tulsa every Christmas to visit Annie. She never gets married. She adopts a little girl, Elise. She gets breast cancer when she's fifty-three, but recovers. She stars in thirty-four movies before her death from a heart attack at seventy.
And the world keeps turning.