Disclaimer: Never have and never will own S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders

I was walking through the park near Matty's house when I saw him walking towards me. When he came closer I asked him where he was going.

Looking at me as though I had grown an extra head, he responded, "School... It's Monday. What, does your school have the day off or something?"

"No, I..." my voice trailed off as a soft murmuring echoed through the trees. Matty must have heard it too because he hid behind a bush and motioned for me to follow.

"...money from that record store..." somebody said.

I heard Matty gasp.

"What is it?" I asked him.

"C'mon," he said as he crept away, "We don't want to be here."

"Why, you know him?"

"Sort of..."

"...I'll leave it in the old park, ain't no one gonna find it there..." the voice said.

I peered through the leafy branches to get a good look at the intruder. It was a kid, probably only a year or two older than me. He seemed to have a good build but was wearing a hoodie and sunglasses so I couldn't see his face.

"C'mon," Matty repeated, "We should go; we both have to get to school."

I nodded so we both crawled out from behind the bush. Bad move.

The sound of twigs snapping beneath our feet alerted the boy to our presence. He was kneeling down, placing a brown bag in a knot at the base of a nearby tree trunk. He stood up so quickly to find us that his glasses fell off, revealing stormy gray eyes.

My first instinct was to hide, but in my minds eye, I kept seeing flashbacks of the night Josh's store got robbed and Josh poured the money into a brown bag...

"Andrea, run!" Matty's voice snapped me back to reality and I realized that the kid was chasing us. I tried desperately to follow Matty through the woods, but it was getting harder and harder to keep up. Since I had no idea where Matty was going and doubted that he even knew, I chose to run a different way in hopes that I would lose the guy chasing me and would be able to rest for a minute.

I thought I had lost him, so I allowed myself to sit down underneath a large tree to catch my breath. I couldn't have been there for more than a minute when the kid approached me.

The hood of his sweatshirt was down and I could see he had spiked, light brown hair. I also noticed that he was smirking slightly, like I amused him by being unable to run away.

He must have seen me glance for a way to escape because he mockingly said, "What, scared that your mommy isn't here to protect you?"

Like an idiot, I couldn't even come up with a comeback to say to him.

Then, an older, bulkier guy wearing a similar hoodie with a jacket over it came into the clearing, dragging Matty with him. He threw Matty onto the dirt floor and said to the boy, "I thought I told you no witnesses." The boy didn't seem so cocky then; his shoulders slumped and his cheeks flushed.

"No matter," the older one said as he pulled out something I recognized.

"Josh..." I whimpered. I didn't say that because I wished he was there to protect me, but because the guy held in his hand the same gun that he pointed at my brothers head a few months ago.

"What did you say?" the man's gruff voice asked.

"I know you," I told him with a shaky voice as Matty looked at me as though I was out of my mind, "You robbed the record store my brother works at."

I had hoped that the two guys would get scared that I recognized them, but my words seemed to have the opposite effect. The gruff-voiced man laughed and said, "Well then I guess it's a good thing you're here 'cause you'll never see a living soul again to tell them what you saw."

He handed the weapon to the younger boy, telling him that he could do the "honors" and took a step back. It felt like everything was happening in slow motion and that if I had thought about it, I could have ran out of the way. But I didn't. I was too scared to move. I just stood there and squeezed my eyes shut, awaiting the sound of the trigger.

A resounding BOOM echoed through the wood, but surprisingly, I felt no pain. I opened my eyes to see Matty holding the gun. He was standing over a sight that made me want to puke.

The younger boy was lying on his back in a pool of his own blood that was flowing through an indent in his forehead.

I shifted my gaze to Matty, whose shoulders were shaking.

"What happened?" I whispered fearfully.

"I d-don't really know," He said quietly, "They sort of forgot I was there and before I knew what I was doing, I just snuck up behind Amos, wrestled the gun away and pulled the... oh man, I'm in deep shit here, aren't I?"

I didn't know what to tell him. The whole thing felt so unreal; like this was just a bad dream and I would wake up only to find that I was safe in my room with Josh nearby to comfort me.

The sound of sirens in the distance pulled me out of my train of thought. Sirens... that was another thing to think about.

"Amos... that was his name?" I asked him.

"Yeah. He is--was an eighth grader at my school. He's always getting into fights and he skips school whenever he's not suspended and I've seen him doing drugs a lot."

"How do you know him?"

"Everybody knows him, or of him; that's how much of a troublemaker he is."

"What about the other guy that was here?" I questioned.

"I'm not sure, but I think it was his older brother. I've heard a couple rumors that his brother was in a gang and wanted to initiate Amos once he got old enough. I don't know if any of it's true, though."

"What happened to him?"

"What, just now? He ran like hell the second I pulled the trigger."

The next few moments were spent in silence, as we were each trapped in our own thoughts.

"What do we do?" we both finally asked each other at the same time. We shared a small smile.

Matty was the first to speak, "Well, if we go to school, nobody will suspect anything--"

"I can't go to school; I'd have to go back home to change into my uniform and I'd run into my brothers and they'll know something's up... besides, we're probably both late already. I don't know what happens in your school, but in mine we get detention if we show up after homeroom."

"Good point," Matty said, "Okay, no school... but then where do we go? If we cut school, they'll call home so our families will know something happened today. And, somebody's going to discover the body and it'll be on the news and they'll piece it together..."

"Right, so we shouldn't even be here now in case somebody shows up. We have to get away, but where to?"

"Sasha," Matty said firmly, "She's, like, the queen of getting away with stuff; she'll know what to do."

"Great, except she's at school!"

"Not necessarily," Matty smirked, "You know how often she cuts class."

"So let's go."

I got the strangest feeling as Matty and I turned our backs on the dead youth and walked through the woods. It still felt surreal, but then there was this thrill to it, as if we were on a grand adventure. But it wasn't an adventure, it was a terrifying murder that may have prevented me from ever seeing my brothers again. What made it worse was that normally, I turned to Josh whenever I was afraid, but now I was certain that he didn't care about me and if I ran home to him, I'd be shipped off to Social Services.

But there was more to it than the fear or the thrill... there was something beneath that, almost like nostalgia. Somewhere within me, there was a sentimental feeling because it almost felt like I was back in the fifth grade, pulling off some stupid elementary prank with Matty's help and Sasha would invent some sort of crazy plan to get us out of trouble.

But this was different and I knew it... This time, if we were caught, the cost would be more than detention or a lecture from Simon.

Meanwhile, Simon was at the Veteran's home, visiting his Uncle Sodapop because Steve had fallen ill and couldn't take care of him.

"What've you kids been up to lately?" Soda asked Simon from his wheelchair as he took a sip of coffee.

"For me, nothing out of the usual. But today, Josh decided to skip school--"

Sodapop nearly choked on his tea as Simon said this. "He what? For how long? Why?"

Simon was a little shocked that his uncle cared this much. He shrugged as he said, "All I know is that his girlfriend Jamie is moving and he wanted to spend time with her. He'll get over it in a few days."

"Listen, kiddo, you better make sure it's only for a few days and then you gotta get that boy back in school. He's too brainy to waste his mind on that record store his whole dang life--"

"Uncle Soda, it's just a day of playing hookey. It won't make him a drop-out."

"See to it that it don't."

Simon struggled to find the right words to ask the question that was burning inside him. It finally came out as, "Look... it's nice that's you're concerned and everything... but, why are you concerned?"

Sodapop looked his nephew straight in the eye and told him, "Because it just started as a game of hookey for me and my girl Sandy, too. At first we skipped school just to be with each other. After awhile, school was a jail for me so I stopped goin'. I felt too stupid to be there, so I did somethin' useful and got a job at a gas station," he smiled at the memory, "It was a whole lot better than bein' at school and people thought I was a good guy, forced into it to help your dad take care of our baby brother."

"No offense, but I doubt Josh will become a drop-out to work at the record store full-time. He hates working there; the only reason he does is because he likes the extra money."

"All the more reason to keep an eye out for him before he ends up caught in a war like me," Sodapop warned.

"What do you mean?" Simon asked, puzzled, "I thought you got drafted to war, that you didn't want to go."

"I was drafted but you said it yourself that the kid hates his job. If he drops out, the military would be the first place he'd look for a new job."

"Unlce Soda, he's not dropping out. He's just taking a day off to say goodbye to his girlfriend, not going to Iraq. Josh'll be fine." Simon assured the veteran.

"Fine then, if you don't want my advice then don't take it," Sodapop sighed, "Anyways, how's your sister, Andrea? Steve told me she went M.I.A."

"Ummm, yeah..." Simon proceeded to tell his uncle the events of the previous night.

"So let me get this striaght..." Sodapop said once Simon told him everything, "Andrea got home late, you yelled at her, hit her, and then left the house to vent everything out with your girlfriend only to have her get mad at you?"

"Pretty much, yeah." Simon murmered. For some reason, the events seemed a whole lot worse when his uncle spoke about it than it had seemed when it was actually happening. How did he become the bad guy?

"Well thank God it wasn't the other way around," Soda muttered as a memory of his two brothers came to his mind.

"What?" Simon asked.

"Nothin', nothin'," he said, "Now tell me, did you see your sister since then?"

"I don't think so, why?"

"Oh, boy. You kids are in trouble..."

Author's Note: Sorry it took so long to update, but hopefully a longer chapter has made up for it! Thanks so much to those who reviewed. Please review.