I had no idea why I was so petrified to go through with this.

Jean Louise shook my hand, "Nice to meet you too, Ponyboy." She was grinning ear to ear and had a beautiful smile. She brought her whole family along with her. Behind her, her husband was rounding up the children.

"And this is Cherry, my girlfriend." I gestured towards Cherry, and Jean Louise was a little shocked I brought her with me. She still smiled and shook her hand nonetheless.

"Nice to meet you as well."

Cherry blushed, "Thank you, Mrs. Harris. I've been reading your book. It's fantastic."

More 'thank yous' and you're welcomes' were said, all while Jean Louise's husband chased their son around the diner, almost in repeated circles. I admired the little boy. He was still gold, still full of life and full of energy. I know I was told to stay gold, but nothing gold can stay.

Absolutely nothing.

We found a big booth by the window to sit down. The Harris family sat on one side, and Cherry and I sat on another.

After we ordered some drinks, Jean Louise went right down to business.

"How old are you? How old were you when this happened?"

Her first question, though obvious, was a good start.

In other words, a slow descent into madness. Not bad.

"I was fourteen. I'm fifteen now." I sighed, still in denial. I was in denial that the seasons have changed around me, without the friends I lost.

Cherry nodded her head, "He's quite mature for his age." At seventeen, people pestered her quite a bit for dating me. She didn't care, and a whole new social barrier resulted from this incident.

Age. But to tell you the truth, it was always there anyhow.

Jean Louise wrote down everything in her notebook, smiling. "Okay.." She sipped her Coca Cola, "How did everything start? Well, how did it all blow up?"

"You mean Bob and Johnny?" I questioned her.

"Yes, tell me everything."

The little boy looked at me with pure, innocent eyes. He was gold. And I was trying to be gold. I hoped to stay gold for not just Johnny, but the little boy right in front of me, who had a whole life right before his eyes.

"It was worth it... Saving those little kids, their lives were worth more than mine."

"Well, it began when my friends Johnny, Dally, and I went to the movies. We snuck in underneath the fence and didn't pay. That was where I met Cherry and one of her friends, Marcia.. Dally harassed them for a while, particularly Cherry."

Cherry laughed, "I splashed soda on him. I was pretty fed up with him."

Everyone joined in on the laugh, and I continued my story.

"Johnny and I told Dally to leave the girls alone, and he did. Though miserably. In the end, we were walking home with the girls when this.. Fancy car, not a Thunderbird, but another one comes pulling up behind us. It's Bob, Cherry's ex-boyfriend, and Marcia's... Husband Randy. They're drunk and they're angry because the girls left them so they could watch the movie. They wanted to fight with us, but Cherry ended up going with them. She doesn't like fights."

I paused and let her write. "Who's Dally?"

"Dally's a friend of ours."

She looked up at me in confusion. "He reminds me of someone I knew from New York."

"Well, maybe you met him. He lived there for three years."

She nodded her head; she looked like she had a fever she couldn't sweat out. She knew something about Dally, and I was sure of it right after that moment.

"Well.. After they went home, I got in a fight with my brother and ended up meeting Johnny at the park in a fit of rage. We tried to relax for a little while. It was late out and it was dark.. Those guys were still driving around drunk, and they saw us and were looking for a fight. They beat up Johnny and tried to drown me in a water fountain. Johnny got so angry that he.. He.. Got out a knife."

I began to shiver.

"What did he do with the knife?" Jean Louise also looked unsettled. It was then I remembered the very end of her memoir.

The same thing happened to her. She was attacked, along with her older brother, by a crazed man. He was the plaintiff in the case her father, Atticus, was working on; Atticus was part of the defense. Though her father lost the courtroom battle, this man was still embarrassed and furious that a 'rotten lawyer' stood up to him in court. He planned to get to what Atticus loved the most. The children. In the end, they were saved by their reclusive neighbor, who was doing who knows what in the middle of the night.

That man stabbed the plaintiff right in the chest with a kitchen knife. He killed him. And Johnny killed Bob in the exact same fashion.

"He.. Killed him, Mrs. Harris. He stabbed him in the chest to save me. I passed out and woke up and saw Johnny clutching the bloody knife in his hands, and I saw Bob's dead body on the ground.."

She nodded her head. "I know the feeling."

"Of what?"

"Well.. Seeing a dead man named Bob on the ground, first of all.. Second, I know what it's like to see a friend become a murderer. Boo Radley, my neighbor, and Johnny have something in common. They were mockingbirds. It's a sin to kill a mockingbird, Ponyboy."

I was beginning to feel tears brimming in my eyes.

Don't cry, don't cry..

"How did you deal with the social barrier?"

"It was the way it was."

I heard the sound of a pencil scratching the paper in the notebook. I sipped my soda.

"Back to the story.. How did you deal with everything? What happened after Johnny killed Bob?"

"We ran to Jim Shepard's house.. He was one of Dally's friends. He was having a party and we knew that Dally was there, and that if anyone ever killed anyone, he was who we had to go to. He got into a few scrapes in New York.."

"Scrapes?" I wans't sure if Jean Louise was confused by the term, or if she wanted to know what happened.

"Dally used me this story about a man that one of his buddies killed all the time. His name, the man, was Henry Clinton. He was a lawyer from Alabama, where you live. He was walking down the street one afternoon, after living in New York for about a year, when a colored man comes into his office. This colored man needed a defense lawyer real soon, and a friend of his recommended Henry. Henry refused to give this man any kind of service; he was a racist, and his belief was deeper than the center of the earth. So, one of Dally's friends, who was friends with the colored man, went to Henry Clinton's office one night and slashed his throat. That was that, and Dally had to get him out of that. That man, the one who killed Henry, wasn't arrested for a long time, not until Dally died."

Her eyes widened, "I knew him."

"Henry?"

The husband, whose name I learned was Charles, said, "We both knew him. We knew he'd wind up in some kind of bind someday.. Scout here dated him for four years, and she was even gonna marry 'im! Well, once she saw his true colors... Things turned out much different."

I decided to neglect the last part of the story. So much, in fact, that even Cherry knew nothing about it: Dally was the one who disposed of the body. He did so by bathing it in acid. The only evidence was a name card, which was found in the murderer's pocket six years later.

Oh, yes, Dally knew how to get anyone out of a murder.

I knew one thing for sure, that Jean Louise and I were becoming friends. If we got off topic any more than we already had, the interview would never end. And it was also certain that we both knew that.

"Whew! Okay! So, after you went to the house, was Dally there?" She asked, holding her pencil in her hand.

"Yes. He gave us a loaded gun, some money, and some instructions on how to get to an abandoned church in Windrixville. We took the three fifteen train and ended up at the church a little after sunrise. Johnny left me there for a little while to get food and things from the store. Dally told him to go before the story broke out. He ended up getting three things I can remember: a week's supply of bologna, hair bleach, and a copy of Gone With The Wind. We cut our hair to disguise ourselves. Johnny bleached mine, and for those four days that we were there, I looked like a pageboy." I grinned, remembering when that was the least of my worries.

Jean Louise, or Scout, as I like to call her nowadays, looked on as her daughter finally made a sound. She laughed.

"I bet you looked ridiculous!"

"Well, I did. And you're right, it was a bit funny. Not at the time, though."

Both Cherry and the young daughter blushed.

"He always looks cute! Come on, Pony! Give yourself some credit!"Cherry kissed my cheek, "Tell the rest of the story!"

"We only had that bologna to eat, and I refuse to touch it again. We read from the book to pass the time.. And we also played cards. Johnny bought some cards at the store too. We gambled out leftover cigarettes in there, and Johnny won them all away from me. It was miserable. Those four days of my life were the most uneventful I ever had, but I have yet to say it was a bad thing. There were more terrible things on the horizon, and I should've been grateful to spend those days with Johnny."

Scout wrote some more down, yet again.

"Tell me, Ponyboy, what happened after you finally left the church?"

There was a lump in my throat, a pit in a stomach, and a break in my heart.

I didn't want to tell. Not yet, I thought. Not ever.