It was 1969, three years since the whole thing with Johnny and the soc and Dally. They weren't fading like I thought they would. A bit, I guess. Now I was 17, as old as Dally, older than Johnny. And I'd always get older and they'd be stuck in 1966.
Sodapop was 19, still working at the DX. He had a new girlfriend now, Betty, but he didn't love her like he had loved Sandy. Darry still juggled two jobs because he had to. The price of stuff kept going up. But I had a job, too. I tutored kids a couple days a week.
This one day I didn't have to tutor anyone and figured I'd stop by the DX after school. I didn't do that so much anymore. Shoot, I could buy my own bottles of pepsi or coke now. And Soda had said I'd grow out of not being so crazy about girls. Well, he was right. I had one I was pretty crazy about, a 15 year old soc.
I walked by the lot and winced a bit, remembering talking by the fire with Johnny. Sometimes the pain was nearly faded, Johnny and Dally were in the past and not a part of my life now. But sometimes it was sharp, the hurt right there.
When I walked into the DX Steve looked stunned. It wasn't a look I was used to with him. He tended more towards anger or a sort of vicious happiness.
Soda didn't look much better, a sort of soft disconnect. The last time I'd seen him look like that we'd just found out our parents had been killed.
"Uh, what's the matter?" I said.
"Ponyboy," Soda said, taking the effort to focus his gaze on me, "I got drafted,"
I had made some excuse, booked it out of there. Drafted. I didn't want to deal with it, almost couldn't deal with it. Maybe he'd be okay, some unusually optimistic part of my brain tried to say. But I knew better. My world didn't work like that. My parents were dead. My best friend was dead. If my brother, in many ways my favorite brother, got drafted to go to Vietnam then he would die there. I was certain of it.
So I headed over to see my little soc girlfriend, Linda. I took a bus to the south side of town and by that time it was late afternoon, that somehow sad gold afternoon light falling on everything.
She opened the door when I rang the bell, her face lighting up.
"Ponyboy! Come in," She dragged me in, tugging on my sleeve.
"Mom! Dad! Ponyboy's here!"
Her parents were sipping cocktails out on the patio. Her house was really amazing. Stone and glass, wall to wall carpets, high ceilings, paintings and china and crystal all over the place.
"Hello, Ponyboy," her mother said, smiling at me. She was attractive for someone that old. She kept herself up.
"Hello, son," her father said, and I smiled at them but felt funny being called son. It made me conscious of not being anyone's son anymore.
Her parents were real nice to me but I kind of felt like a social class experiment to them, like they were thinking they should be nice to the lower class boy from the north side. And they weren't really worried about Linda, I didn't think. She was just 15 and had plenty of time to find that nice upper crust boy who would be a doctor or a lawyer after he got back from Harvard or Yale or Princeton.
"Would you like a drink?" her mother said, and I shook my head no.
We finally got out of there, managed to go for a walk. We held hands and that was nice. Linda was a real pretty girl, dark hair falling in waves to her shoulders, blue eyes. I liked Linda partly because she had never had any tragedies in her life.
"Ponyboy, what's the matter?" she said. I kicked at a little stone like Johnny used to do.
"My brother got drafted,"