I saw Pony walking toward the DX and I drank the last of the coke and tossed the glass bottle into the wastebasket, heard it clang inside of it. I lit up a cigarette, leaned against a car, flipped my hair out of my eyes. It never did any good. It always fell right back in them.
"Hey, Johnny," Pony said, slapping me on the back in a playful way, but I felt myself tense up when he did it. I always tensed up if anyone went to touch me at all.
"Hey," I said softly, feeling slightly sick from smoking so much and eating so little. I had that thought that sometimes came into my head, this thought that I could be better than I was. I could quit smoking so much and eat more and go to school and try harder, but all of that seemed so hard. School made my head hurt, and it made me feel even worse about all this shit.
Pony got himself a coke and I watched him guzzle it down, and I looked at his bag filled with books that was next to him, right next to his beat up white converse sneakers. I shook my head. That bag was full of books, he did homework even on the weekend. I hadn't been to school in so long that I didn't even know what they were doing in any of the classes, never mind bringing home a bagful of books on the weekend. I bit my lip and glanced at Pony, he looked young, kinda. He looked as old as I did, but I looked real young, too. I knew I looked about 14, and that was pretty lousy. He looked like a young punk kid but I knew he wouldn't stay that way, I knew he'd go on to college and some kind of career, and he'd get out of this shit hole neighborhood and this shit hole city.
"Let's go to my house and get something to eat," he said to me, and I nodded, followed him the few blocks to his house. There was left over fried chicken from the night before, and some bags of potato chips.
It wasn't too long after that that we were gonna meet Dally on one of the street corners. I stood there kicking at the rocks on the sidewalk, watching the little bits of dust and sand get kicked up with them. Ponyboy ran a comb through his hair. Him and Soda did have the best hair in the whole town.
Dally showed up. It wasn't that certain that he would, you never knew. Sometimes things got in the way for Dally, like girls or a fight with someone. Dal would fight with anyone, even his friends. Well, not me. He never did fight with me, not physically. He'd kind of yell at me like he yelled at everybody but come to think of it, he hardly ever even yelled at me. That was funny.
I looked at Dally's white blond hair, you've never seen hair so blond. It was kind of amazing to me, especially since my hair was so dark. His eyes were so blue, too, they looked like winter.
"Hey, Johnny, what's up?" he said, kind of messing up my hair, which I didn't really like. I jerked my head away, but I liked when he paid attention to me. I shrugged and didn't answer. He looked at me for a second too long and then he shrugged, too.
Now that we were with Dally what we did was up to him, and me and Pony were just following along. So we trailed after Dally to some diners and fooled around blowing straws at waitresses and we went into little convenience stores and watched Dally steal half the place and we chased after some kids in a field. The field was all long dried grass and small rocks and bits of glass and patches of dirt.
Once it started to get dark we headed over to the drive-in movie theater. I knew Dal was gonna sneak in without paying. You could sneak in right under a fence. So we all followed him, getting our jeans dirty in the dusty area under that bit of fence.
There were a lot of people there. Sometimes that kind of bothered me. There was a lot of noise, kids shouting to each other from cars, the movie had started up and that was blaring away at us, and Dally was talking almost non-stop. It could be too much, and I'd kind of blank out a little, just stop paying attention to all of it. I just followed the two of them. I thought they might go to the concession stand and get some popcorn or something but they didn't, they headed straight for the seats.
I saw the two girls who didn't belong in these cheap seats that were usually filled with greasers who were too poor to even have a car for the drive-ins. Like us. We belonged in these seats with our ratty run down clothes and long greasy hair and banged up old sneakers. These girls, one a red head and one with dark hair, they were dressed all nice and you could tell they were rich, they were socs. Dally sat right behind them and started in with his tricks, and I slumped down in my seat next to him and so did Pony. I widened my eyes and looked over at Ponyboy, and he looked back at me with the same look. His ears were turning a dark red, I could see that even through the darkness. Dally was, he could say some shit that would make you want to die and crawl under the chairs.
Dally thought it was funny, and I guess in a way it was, but it was also...it was kind of disrespectful for some reasons. It wasn't just because these girls were pretty and they were rich, which was why he was talking like that. It was because, it was hard to explain...it was because it didn't matter that they were pretty and rich, or that they were socs and didn't really belong sitting over here, it didn't really give him the right to treat them like that because all that was surface stuff, which was the same reasons the socs thought they could just beat the shit out of us for no reason other than that we were greasers...he was kind of doing the same thing to them. I couldn't take it.
"I'm gonna go get a coke," I said, standing up and bolting out of there.