Something wasn't right. I couldn't quite figure it out but something was…off.

"Ann?" I blinked, looked around. Same vacant lot, same blue Oklahoma sky, same friends.

"Yeah?" Johnny had said my name, and he smoked his cigarette and regarded me with his soft gaze.

"Where'd you go?" he said. Johnny had a heavy drawl. His accent was a bit more pronounced than the others. Ponyboy read so much, I think he tried to sound like what he read, not like a hick.

"Huh? Uh, nowhere," I smiled, but still I had this sense of…something. I couldn't seem to describe it, even to myself. So I shook it off, and asked Johnny for a cigarette. He handed me one.

I watched the smoke twirl toward the sky, watched how the sun twinkled off the broken glass, how it made the boys' hair gleam because of the grease.

I pitched the cigarette, walked toward the chain link fence. Johnny, me, and Ponyboy were here hanging out. Just a day like any day, and I watched Ponyboy bum a cigarette from Johnny.

"Shit, man, am I the only one with cigarettes?" Johnny said irritably.

"I ran out. Sorry,"

I'd basically been hanging around with them ever since I could remember. I'd grown up in the same neighborhood and all. So it meant I was poor, and I was poor cause my daddy ran out on us when I was four or five, but I remembered some things. Like how he had seemed so tall and handsome, like John Wayne or Alan Ladd, and how he smelled like the cologne he wore, and how he'd scoop me up when he came home.

But he done run out then my mom had to get about a million jobs and we had to move here, to the north side of Tulsa. Boy, how old was I then? Eight or nine, must have been. And I met Johnny first, he was 10 or 11 or so, and he was mad because his dad beat him up again. That's how he put it. Smoking, squinting at me with that shiner of his.

"Again," he said, like he couldn't believe it.

"And I didn't even do nothing," He laughed, a short, joyless, adult laugh for a 10 or 11 year old kid.

"You smoke?" he had said. And I shook my head no, scared of smoking, scared his dad did that to him, scared of this new neighborhood.

"Well, here, try it. You might like it," and he handed me my first cigarette.

And through Johnny I met all the rest of them, and they became like a family to me.

"You guys want to have supper at my house?" Ponyboy said, and we both nodded. The sun was setting, and I liked how it made the buildings look sort of reddish and gold. And I felt it again, that funny feeling that I was missing something, or I should know something and I didn't know it. It felt like there was a cold line going down my back. Goose walked over my grave. I shivered.

"You cold, Ann?" Johnny said, shrugging out of his jean jacket.

"Yeah, a little," He handed me his jacket and I put it on, smiled at him in the fading light.