"I suppose it might have been different," Ponyboy said after awhile, and I was a little surprised when he started speaking again, "it might have been different if our parents hadn't died like that, and then that whole thing with Johnny and Dally…"

"We clung to each other, we were all we had,"

It was such a bright day, and the sun made the road look like a faded blue. I dropped the cigarette and stepped on it.

"It wasn't fair to expect Soda to stay, he's right," Ponyboy said, and shaded his eyes as he looked back toward the new house on the vacant lot, Johnny's house, his house.

"But Darry and I did stay, and sorta blamed Soda for leaving. Then a few years later Darry died…"

We walked along, and I kicked at little stones. In the distance I saw a cemetery, gray stones all in rows.

"Have you ever heard the saying, 'After the first death there is no other,'?" Ponyboy said, turning to me. I noticed his eyes were greenish gray but looked more green in the bright sunlight. I shook my head no. I'd never heard that.

"Well, that wasn't true for me," He'd started walking again and I followed. The cemetery got closer.

"Each death was so traumatic, so tragic, I'd barely made sense of one when another happened. So sudden, like a mack truck slamming into you," He hit his open palm with his fist, and I was struck by how differently my dad and Ponyboy dealt with these tragedies. My dad ran away, escaped. Ponyboy stayed and wallowed in it.

"I'm not stupid," he said, and we'd reached the cemetery, now the white fence that bordered it, the neat green grass, the glassy gray stones with their chiseled inscriptions, "I know I was pushing people away. I couldn't let myself get close to anyone. I knew what I was doing and why, but I couldn't help it, I couldn't stop it,"

In the cemetery we walked past gravestones from the 80's, late 70's, and stopped at one from 1972. Darrel Curtis, devoted son, brother, and friend.

"I was really depressed for a long time," he said, running his finger along the top of Darry's gravestone, "barely eating, barely sleeping, just barely surviving. Every breath was painful," We'd started walking again, past the late 60's.

"I'd started thinking maybe Johnny and Dally were the lucky ones,"

We stopped again. The stone said, "Dallas Winston, 1949 to 1966" Ponyboy traced the D slowly with his index finger.

"Some uncle or second cousin or someone bought the stone and didn't put an inscription," Ponyboy said, "I'm not sure it would have been that easy," he laughed a little, and from reading "The Outsiders" I got what he meant. It wasn't easy to sum up Dallas Winston.

"You know, I've come to like Dally a lot more than I did when he was alive,"

We walked on, not far from Dally's grave was Johnny's. "Johnny Cade, 1950 to 1966".

"Johnny's parents bought that stone. He's lucky he got even that," Ponyboy said, and for a second sounded like a sour 14 year old, but then he shook his head.

"Naw, man, that ain't fair. His parents have changed since he died,"

"Wasn't his name John?" I said, thinking the gravestone is a place for formality.

"What?"

"Johnny. Wasn't his real name John or Jonathan?"

"Oh. Yeah, it was John, but no one ever called him that,"

I shrugged. Noticed how these three graves were tended while the others had weeds, dead flowers.

"So now I'm 32 and what have I got to show for it? No relationship, no career, just a dead end job. Still in the same lousy neighborhood," Ponyboy folded his arms on top of Johnny's gravestone and put his head down, the way little kids do in school.