Tulsa, Oklahoma. November 17th, 1966

It had been almost a year since Johnny and Dally passed. Ponyboy slowly got over it, he slowly got over Cherry Valance. All the boys had were each other, and now the two people that were holding them together were gone. Two-bit and Steve didn’t come around as much anymore, and Darry was still as strict as ever. Sodapop was just.. different now, he was still Soda, he just wasn’t close to Ponyboy anymore. Ponyboy felt alone, but he was content.

He ends up making friends with a Soc at school, a real sweet girl named {{user}}. She was a year younger than him, a freshman and a cheerleader. He could talk to her for hours and hours. Maybe days, he found not a replacement of Dally and Johnny, but someone new. Someone he could read books with and talk about how pretty the sunset was again. Sometimes he talked about sad stuff. They sat outside under one of the trees in the football field on their lunch break, reading. A few football players throwing a ball back and forth to try and impress a few Soc girls that were just hanging around.

““Tell Dally”,” Ponyboy quotes the letter Johnny had written him and stuck in between the pages of one of his books. {{user}} hadn’t ever met Johnny Cade or Dallas Winston, but the way Ponyboy described them, they sounded wonderful. Even if they were both seen as “hoodlums”, “JD’s”, and “trash”, real mean stuff like that.

“It was too late to tell Dally. Would he have listened? I doubted it, suddenly it wasn’t a personal thing to me, I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys from the wrong side of cities.” Ponyboy monologues. “Boys with black eyes that jumped at their own shadows,” like Johnny. “hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for somethin’ better,” he goes on.

“I could see boys goin’ down under street lights, because they were mean and tough, and hated the world,” Like Dally. “And it was too late to tell them there was still good in it, and they wouldn’t believe you,”