I find her at the far edge of the lot, balanced on the balls of her feet with a pack of her brother's cigarettes clutched in her grip. She looks younger and older all at once, soft in the face like how babies are but with the promise of something more obvious, more grown-up, lingering underneath.

I say, "Hey," and Izzy Mathews doesn't bother looking up at me when she answers.

"I heard what happened," she says. She's in a beat-up pair of jeans that must have belonged to Two-Bit, torn at the knees and oversized on her. The sweater she's wearing is too small, and her wrists are thin like how all kids her age seem to get, caught between growing up and getting enough food to keep up with it. Her hair—the same color as Two-Bit's—falls, wispy, around her face. She ain't smoking, just holding the pack of cigarettes, and when I lean down to steal one, she doesn't react.

I take a deep drag, watch how the smoke curls from my own mouth afterwards. I touch my hair to make sure the curls are still in place. I say, "You seen your brother?"

"He's out," she says, and looks at me. She has eyes like her mom, which is to say Mrs. Mathews has got serious brown eyes that never look happy, or at least not in the last few years. Izzy looks like her right now, expression beyond what a normal twelve-year-old should ever feel. Then again, we're a bunch of greasers on the Eastside, so maybe I'm just forgetting what all of us were like at that age. "Is it true?"

"Is what true?"

"They killed a boy."

"Ain't your business," I say, and take another drag to avoid looking at her and seeing her mother and brother alike in her face. I tell myself that little girls got no business knowing what Johnny and Ponyboy have just got up to, but Izzy Mathews is twelve-going-on-thirteen. That's how Two-Bit says it; I ain't ever seen a kid less excited for their birthday than his sister. I'd think it was a birthday present if my old man up and left the week I turned nine, but then again, Old Man Mathews wasn't a mean drunk like mine is. He wasn't much of anything, really.

Last night, Soda as good as stormed into the house talking a mile a minute about Darry and Ponyboy getting into it. I didn't think much of it until he said Darry put his hands on the kid, and that's when I knew it was bad. The Curtises weren't that kind of family, not really. Not like how Johnny's folks are, or my old man when he's had more to drink than usual. Even Dally's old lady throws plates at his head when she's hopped up and mistakes him for his deadbeat daddy, but the Curtises were never anything like the rest of us, not in the ways that counted. Not in the ways that hurt.

Izzy straightens up from her squat, and I'm surprised to realize she's taller already. Twelve, almost thirteen. If they hadn't let Ponyboy skip a grade, they'd only be one year apart in school. Like her, Ponyboy's still soft in the face. There have been girls their age sent off to family in the country for the better part of the year who come back changed, quiet, all alone. Plenty of kids that age get caught up in things bigger than them. Bigger than anything should be. None of it's all that surprising, if I let myself think too hard about it.

She says to me, "Everyone knows. The fuzz are lookin' for Dally."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"At the corner store," she says. She's chewing gum, and she bites hard enough that I can hear it snap between her teeth. "If'n someone calls the fuzz, they look for him first. Why else would he get hauled in when it was dumb ol' Two-Bit who busted all them windows at the school?"

"Dally ain't one to snitch on his buddies," I say. I let myself look out over the lot, which is empty like it never is. Usually there's a kid or two tossing a football, or a group playing cards. You can hear the noise of the neighborhood from here, usually—a reminder that no one's ever really alone.

Ponyboy and Johnny fell asleep out here last night, Soda told me while we drove in circles. Occasionally he'd lean out the window and shout for them, and sometimes his voice would break, and I'd pretend not to notice him rub at his eyes with his wrist. We went looking for Two-Bit, but he wasn't home. He found us cradling coffee to our chests today in the morning, eyes wild, like he had heard the news secondhand, too.

"Tellin' the fuzz he didn't break the windows ain't blabbin'," Izzy says, but she doesn't seem all that bothered. She looks like the kid right now, like she's thinking hard about something she doesn't need to be thinking about at all. When she speaks now it's as that twelve-year-old she oughta be, not the going-on-thirteen that Two-Bit boasts when he wants to brag about how his kid sister's a real genius, too.

'Course kid brothers and sisters get to be geniuses. They got big brothers and sisters to look out for them.

She says, voice hushed like it's a secret no one's meant to know, "It was Johnny, wasn't it?"

I can't say anything for a long, long minute. She watches me while I try to remember how words work, how to push air through my throat to speak. When I finally do, it almost hurts. "Who told you that?"

"Pony wouldn't," Izzy says. She sounds sure of herself, and maybe she should. She and Ponyboy got thrown together when they were smaller all the time—when the Mathews caught the chickenpox, Ponyboy did too, and he spent a week at their place to keep it from making their old man sick. (Me and Soda and Darry had caught it years before that, so we would take over soup and sweets to cheer the three of them up and tell Ponyboy his hair was redder than ever, like the Mathews'.)

"Kid, don't nobody wake up in the morning and decide to kill someone," I tell her. I feel sick to my stomach. "Not anyone who don't deserve to be thrown in the looney bin. 'Course Pony wouldn't…Ain't like he woulda thought about it."

The papers said that Soc—Bob Sheldon, the one with the blue Mustang, dark haired just like me—was stabbed at the fountain and found dead in a pool of his own blood. One of his friends told the paper they were having a good time when they got jumped by two Eastside kids. Kids. Johnny and Pony look about the same age, which is a nice way of saying they look fresh out of the middle school, not that it matters much. Give them a couple years and a few more good meals (for Johnny most especially) and they'll be stealing girls out from under Dally in no time, and not just the sneaky ones, like Sylvia Costello.

But the papers didn't say which of them had the knife. Someone knows, Soda said earlier today, someone's gotta know, I'll find out, and I had to drag him back to the living room to make sure he didn't try and kidnap the first Soc he could find.

I won't let myself think too hard about it. Someone stabbed someone and now Johnny and Ponyboy are on the run. Neither of them would've gone looking for a fight. I know them both too well to think anything else. This morning Two-Bit told us they walked some girls home and their boyfriends got mad. The park ain't hard to find. Two kids skirting the fountain ain't hard to miss. Bob Sheldon's body was slumped next to the fountain, and there are whispers that someone almost drowned—maybe they're just rumors from some dope with too much time on their hands, who ain't thinking about how that rumor might make someone's brothers feel. But maybe they're not.

I think of what I might do if I thought Soda or Dally or Two-Bit was about to get hurt. Self-defense is different. Izzy's twelve, everything's real black and white at that age. Telling myself this ain't much of a comfort.

"He wouldn't," she says, insistent. "C'mon, Steve, you see them near every day. He wouldn't think of it like that."

"Think of what like that?"

Izzy takes a long, deep breath. "He'd try to find another way."

"What?"

"If someone was drownin'," she says, voice carefully low, and I think of the summer me and Soda spent teaching Pony how to swim, Darry and their folks lounging on a blanket while they watched us at the river, "he'd find another way. He thinks different than you, or Dally, or even Johnny. But if Johnny thought it was the only way—"

"You don't know what you're talkin' about." I won't let her finish the thought. If she does, I think I'll believe her, and I think I already do. If Johnny thought he had no choice, he would do it. Sandy, Soda's girl, once said that where Johnny goes, Pony follows, and I remember I rolled my eyes, because switching Johnny for Soda made more sense. But it's true. If me and Soda are as good as brothers, so are Johnny and Pony. Soda would tear the world apart for any of us.

If Johnny had a knife and only a second to think about it, he would have done something like this. He must have.

I say, and I don't sound like myself, not really, "What're you doin' out here, anyway. You oughta be in school."

"It's all anyone's talkin' about," she says, voice quiet again. Twelve again. Just a kid stuck on the Eastside. "They know I know them. They asked questions I didn't like. I left for lunch, but I don't wanna be at home all alone. Two-Bit wasn't there, neither."

"Don't listen to them," I tell her, but I know it ain't that simple. "Don't think about it, neither."

"Why?"

Because if she doesn't have to, then she shouldn't. I can imagine Pony's face, damp with fountain water. I can see Johnny with a knife in his hand.

Instead of answering I say, "Let's go find your brother," and wait for her to nod before we walk back to my car. She's quiet for a long moment, and I know she's going to ask me something, but I'm not exactly sure what it is until she speaks again.

"How come you went to the lot, anyway?"

I can see the flash of her red hair from the corner of my eye. Her and Two-Bit, like twins sometimes. Her and the kid, who grew up together like how he grew up with me, too. "Was hopin' I'd find something, I guess," I say, the silence stretching just a little too long. Izzy doesn't say anything, but I know we're thinking the same thing. And I know we're afraid of it, too.