Disclaimer: We do not own "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton nor do we own the song "Ever the Same" by Rob Thomas.
March 1967
We were drawn from the weeds
We were brave like soldiers
Falling down under the pale moonlight
There was an envelope sitting on Dally's bunk when he walked into the cell. It was sitting right on top of his pillow so that he was sure to see it. All he could do was stare. He'd been in for almost four months, and this was the first time he'd had any contact with anyone from outside prison walls with the exception of Two-Bit. When his new cellmate was giving him a funny look, Dally moved toward his bed.
He cast the letter aside, off of his pillow and out of sight as he lay down. He knew who it was from. There was only one person it could possibly be from, and he was trying really hard to not think about it. Ellie wouldn't say anything worth his while. He knew that she would only write stupid things about how she missed him and how she hoped he was okay.
His curiosity was getting to him, though, and he reached for the letter he'd tossed toward the end of his bunk and lay back down.
Holding the envelope above his face, he studied the handwriting and how worn the paper looked.
"Christ," he muttered, ripping it open.
Dear Dallas,
Dally lowered the letter and set it on his chest. He didn't know what to think, so he picked it up again and read the words over. She had scratched out a few things and the whole piece of paper looked like it had been wadded up and thrown in the trash. The letter itself didn't really say much, but the condition it was in spoke volumes about her.
I know this is stupid and you'll think it's stupid, but I wanted to write you anyway.
Things haven't been too good here. Pony's been a wreck, but I think he's finally getting better. I don't know if you heard about Sandy leaving Soda, but he's been a mess since it happened. I think Darry might have talked sense into him. I wish he would have tried harder to talk it into me. I don't know what's wrong with me. I guess I just feel bad about everything that happened to you. I wish you would have talked to me or something. I worried about you until you turned yourself in. I wish you wouldn't have done that.
I know you won't write back, but I put stamps, paper and envelopes in with this, just in case.
I miss you a lot, and you still owe me a night out. You made me promise.
Ellie
Rolling over, he picked up the envelopes she had already stamped and included with her letter and raised them up to his cellmate laying above him.
"Marty, want these?" he asked.
Marty looked over the edge and took the envelopes.
"Who they from?"
"No one," Dally said.
"That's the first bit of mail I seen you get. You ain't gonna write 'em back?"
"No," Dally said simply. Marty shrugged and rolled back onto his bunk. Dally crumpled up the letter and threw it toward his feet and to the floor.
Somewhere down the block, a guard yelled for lights out and in less than a minute the cell was swathed in darkness, the only light coming from the tiny barred window above the bunks. He heard Marty settle in and start to snore after a while. He heard footsteps headed down the row. The night sounds were out in full force, and even though he was used to them, they were keeping him up.
He stared at the cinderblock wall and then turned on his other side and stared at the other wall. There was nothing hanging on his small patch of wall, but above it, Marty's was covered in pictures of a pretty girl and little kids. It kind of made him sick that anyone would want kids in the first place, and to actually miss them when you could sleep in a quiet place all night and not deal with the shit that came with relationships.
He turned onto his back and rubbed his eyes, realizing the thing that was keeping him from sleeping was that damn letter. Even when she wasn't there, she could invade his thoughts and get in his way. If there was one thing he wanted, it was to not think about her. She was close to him, too close. She did stupid shit like write him and try to get him to talk. She cried over him.
He muttered a curse under his breath and fished the letter off the floor. He fell back on his pillow with a sigh. Uncrumpling the wad of paper, he struggled to read the words in the dark, wondering what she really wanted to say. Knowing her, there was some fucking code or something. Some stupid words she would have expected him to read between the lines. He kept reading the last line over and over again. I miss you a lot and you still owe me a night out. You made me promise.
She kept her promises. She'd come back to him. She'd probably wait her whole damn life for him if he told her to. Hell, she would probably do it if he didn't.
Folding it a couple times, he lifted the edge of his mattress and stuck it underneath. He crossed his arms over his eyes and tried to blot her out, remembering what it was like to lose something. Losing Johnny like he did was enough. That kid didn't deserve to die, and Dally hated him for doing something that ended up killing him. Dally had been right there and couldn't stop it from happening.
He rolled over to his side and tried to focus on the nighttime sounds and ignore everything raging in his mind. He decided he just wouldn't write her back, and she'd get the hint.
XXX
There wasn't much point in arguing with her mom, because as much as Ellie would fight her on a subject, Abby would just ultimately give up. Trying to convince her mom to get out of the house for awhile ended up with Abby slamming her bedroom door in Ellie's face. Ellie felt incredibly helpless when it came to her anymore. She didn't know how to get her to snap out of whatever slump she had fallen into. Ellie felt that if she could pull herself out of her own problems, her mother should at least try.
The front door opened and closed, and Ellie looked over to see Jimmy standing there.
"Any luck?"
It was strange for her to get along with Jimmy, and she figured it was because they had the same goal. Jimmy was desperate to get Abby out of the house for a bit, but she refused him as well.
"No," Ellie told him.
The helplessness in his eyes flared into anger, and he threw his lunchbox into the kitchen and stormed back out of the house. The box must have slammed hard into one of the cabinets because aside from the crash of the metal, she heard china rattle as well.
Ellie swallowed the lump in her throat, checked on Danny and then locked herself in her bedroom.
A few hours later, there came a gentle tap at her window. Grateful for the distraction from the silence in her house, Ellie pushed the curtains aside and opened the window for Ponyboy.
"Hey," she said, closing the window after him.
"Hey. Can I ask you a favor?"
He was holding a notebook in his hands, gripping it tightly.
"Sure," she said. She sat down on her bed, but Pony stayed standing, looking nervous.
"Remember when I told you Mr. Syme told me to write a semester theme to pull up my grade?" he asked.
Ellie nodded.
"Well, I wrote it."
"Already?"
"Yeah, I kind of stayed up most of the last few nights writing it."
"That's great. So what's the favor?"
He started to hand the notebook to her, but he pulled it back.
"I need someone to read it before I turn it in," he said. "I thought about asking Darry or Soda, but Soda don't really read much and I can't let Darry read it. Not yet."
"What's it about?" she asked, assuming he had written about his parents. Ellie wasn't really even sure if she could handle reading about his parents, not if Pony had written it. It would be too heartbreaking.
Finally, Pony sat down beside her on the bed, still holding the notebook as though it were a life preserver.
"It's about everything. Everything from last fall. About me and Darry and Soda. Johnny and Dallas. About everything that happened."
For a long time, she couldn't say anything; she didn't know what to say. Their story was almost too much to handle when she felt like she was still living it. Everything from last fall didn't seem all that long ago to her. Sometimes she still woke up in the morning with the feelings she had when Pony and Johnny were gone. She still woke up remembering the way Dally looked when he went down in a hail of gun fire.
Pony was looking at her expectantly, and she just looked back at him, unsure of what to say to him.
"Will you read it before I turn it in?"
Before she could stop herself, she told him she would, and Pony set the notebook in her lap.
"Let me know what you think. The truth, okay? I wanna know before I turn it in."
She nodded, and he got up and left through the window without saying anything else. Alone with the notebook, Ellie didn't know what to do. She set it on her bed and hovered over the cover, studying the way Pony wrote his name on the cover and the little doodles he had drawn on the corners.
When she decided it wasn't going to bite her, she opened the cover. He had titled his theme "The Outsiders." Ellie started reading, words jumping off the page at her. She felt like she could even hear Pony's quiet voice in them. She wasn't ten pages in before she felt the lump forming in her throat again, and she had to stop herself completely when she reached the part where Johnny killed Bob.
In the months since everything had happened, the fact that Johnny was responsible for killing Bob Sheldon had never really sunk in for Ellie. Quiet and sweet Johnnycake stabbing some kid to death just did not work in her mind. Slowly, she forced herself to read what Pony had written, and she couldn't stop herself from crying. While all this was going on with her friends – while some stupid Socs were trying to drown Pony in the fountain and Johnny was trying to stop it all – she was falling asleep next to Dally.
Ellie read and read, turning the pages slowly. There had been so much she didn't know, so much she didn't realize. Pony recalled everything with such clarity and detail. He had included every little detail about their neighborhood. Even the Shepards had a small part in it. Tim's name jumped off the page at her, and she cringed a little at Pony's comparison between him and Dallas. She knew them both, and besides being hoods, she didn't think she could draw the same comparisons.
When she reached the part where Dally was shot, she stopped again. She'd seen it up close and still could remember the way things smelled after the guns went off. Pony's retelling felt like a jab to the gut, though, because in his story, it didn't make it seem as though Dally survived. It just ended with that. Dally just disappeared in the end.
She herself was noticeably absent for most of the story, which she didn't exactly mind. She didn't want to read about herself. Her absence, though, made her feel like she had been useless during all that time. She hadn't done a thing to help her best friend, and while there may not have been much for her to do to bring him back home, she hated that he and Johnny had to go through it all alone.
Closing the notebook, Ellie lay down, curling up in her blankets and just letting herself cry. She thought about Johnny in a way she had never let herself think about him since his funeral. It simply hurt too much to think about him and what had happened to him. The words in his letter ran a marathon in her mind. She could hear Johnny's quiet voice reading them, but the voice sounded so much more confident, so sure of himself. She wished terribly that Johnny could have lived like that instead of dying the way he had.
All of those memories from the fall came flooding back like a nightmare, but all she could think of was how Johnny wanted Dally to watch a sunset for once in his life. She cried herself to sleep just thinking about how futile all of that was.
XXX
Warm from sweat, Pony kept running as hard as he could. He wanted to beat the time it had taken him to run home from school the day before. There was a lot propelling him, a lot of energy he'd kept bottled up since October. He'd found, as he once knew but had forgotten in the heat of the hell he'd lived in for several months, that running could just about solve anything. It cleared his mind, and he could sweat out everything that bothered him. He was so glad Darry talked him into joining track again.
As he came up St. Louis Street, he saw Ellie sitting on the front steps, chin in her hands. Running a little faster he sprinted down the sidewalk and across the street, slowing down as he pushed through the gate.
"Hey," he said, panting. There was still a long way to go before he was back in shape, he decided.
Ellie smiled, but there was a lot of heaviness in her eyes, and he noticed his notebook in her lap. He climbed the steps slowly and sat down beside her. Deep in his chest his heart thudded hard. He had convinced himself that of all his friends, Ellie was the one he trusted the most with his story. He realized now, however, that he had really been scared of anyone else reading it.
"What'd you think?" he asked quietly.
"It's really good," she said. She handed the notebook back to him, and he set it in his lap. "I never could have done that. Written about it, you know? I don't know how you did it."
He nodded a little, unsure of what to say. He still didn't know how he managed to get it all out, but he felt better now that it wasn't trapped inside his head anymore.
"Mr. Syme would be crazy to not pass you with that. There's so much in it. I never thought that about everything."
"Thought about what?"
She drew in a breath and held it, looking out on the neighborhood. There was a storm of uncertainty in her eyes and Pony looked away, realizing why he didn't want Darry to read the theme.
"Just that everything that happened was really so much more than what happened between all of us. A moral, I guess …" She trailed off, looking away again. "There's more to it than what happened to Johnny."
In all honesty, he hadn't read it over before he brought it to her. He burned the midnight oil getting it written, writing down everything he was thinking because of Johnny's letter. Six months of haze melted away with Johnny's steadfast words.
"I forgot all about Johnny's letter," she said. "I knew he wrote it, and I was supposed to make sure it got to you, but when I left the hospital after Dally ... "
"The book's been in my room since I got home. I didn't pick it up until I was stuck on what to write. The letter just fell out of it."
She was biting her lip like she wanted to say something, and there were tears in her eyes. He finally nudged her. "What?"
"It's really good, but the end … you make it sound like Dally died."
He went blank then and tried to remember what he had written. He didn't know what to tell her.
"It's okay the way it ends," she said quickly, "but it kind of made me think of how bad it could have been. It was almost that bad."
It was bad, at least what he could remember, and right then he was trying really hard to think about that night. He flipped to the back of the notebook, skimming the parts about Dally getting shot, about what Johnny was asking for from Dally in his letter. There wasn't anything after that because Dally wasn't there. In fact, the last time he had seen Dally was that night in the lot, a gun in his hand until he fell to the ground. The last image he had of Dally was one where anyone else would have died.
Looking at Ellie, he couldn't admit that for months he couldn't fathom how Dally was still alive. It was another lie, like the lies he told himself that Johnny hadn't killed Bob. That Johnny hadn't died.
Ellie wiped at her eyes and quickly regained her composure. He didn't know what to say to her so he didn't say anything at all. It was too much for him to explain and watching her right then, he could tell she was still upset over it all.
"I gotta get home," she said after a while. She turned around at the foot of the steps and gestured toward the notebook in his lap. "You should show Darry. It would mean a lot to him."
He wanted to tell her it wasn't a good idea, that Darry wouldn't be in to it, but he bit his tongue. The reason he didn't want Darry to read it was because he was afraid for Darry to know about the things he had said, the things he had felt. It was too personal when they were still in the process of patching everything together. Sometimes Pony worried that something would happen to tear through the seams before they were strong enough.
"I'll think about it."
"You should be proud of that. Darry would be."
With a little wave, she turned and headed toward home. Pony sat there awhile, the heft of the notebook in his lap. He looked down at it, thinking hard and deciding that he would see what Mr. Syme thought of it before he let anyone else read it.
Now it's cold and we're scared,
And we've both been shaken,
Hey, look at us,
This doesn't need to be the end.
