The Outsiders

by SE Hinton

  “Hey, did the mail come in yet?” Soda slammed the door and yelled for the mail, just the way he does every day when he comes home from work. I was in the bedroom, but I knew he would throw his jacket toward the sofa and miss it, take off his shoes, and go into the kitchen for a glass of chocolate milk, because that’s what he does every day of his life. He always runs around in his stocking feet—he doesn’t like shoes.

  Then he did a funny thing. He came in and flopped down on the bed and started smoking a cigarette. He hardly ever smokes, except when something is really bugging him or when he wants to look tough. And he doesn’t have to impress us; we know he’s tough. So I figured something was bothering him. “How was work?”

  “Okay.”

  “Something wrong?”

  He shook his head. I shrugged and went back to drawing horses.

  Soda cooked dinner that night, and everything came out right. That was unusual, because he’s always trying something different. One time we had green pancakes. Green. I can tell you one thing: if you’ve got a brother like Sodapop, you’re never bored.

  All through supper Soda was quiet, and he didn’t eat much. That was really unusual. Most of the time you can’t shut him up or fill him up. Darry didn’t seem to notice, so I didn’t say anything.

  Then after supper me and Darry got into a fuss, about the fourth one we’d had that week. This one started because I hadn’t done anything on that theme, and I wanted to go for a ride. It used to be that I’d just stand there and let Darry yell at me, but lately I’d been yelling right back.

  “What’s the sweat about my schoolwork?” I finally shouted. “I’ll have to get a job as soon as I get out of school anyway. Look at Soda. He’s doing okay, and he dropped out. You can just lay off!”

  “You’re not going to drop out. Listen, with your brains and grades you could get a scholarship, and we could put you through college. But schoolwork’s not the point. You’re living in a vacuum, Pony, and you’re going to have to cut it out. Johnny and Dallas were our buddies, too, but you don’t just stop living because you lose someone. I thought you knew that by now. You don’t quit! And anytime you don’t like the way I’m running things you can get out.”

  I went tight and cold. We never talked about Dallas or Johnny. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like me just to get out. Well, it’s not that easy, is it, Soda?” But when I looked at Soda I stopped. His face was white, and when he looked at me his eyes were wide with a pained expression. I suddenly remembered Curly Shepard’s face when he slipped off a telephone pole and broke his arm.

  “Don’t . . . Oh, you guys, why can’t you . . .” He jumped up suddenly and bolted out the door. Darry and I were struck dumb. Darry picked up the envelope that Soda had dropped.

  “It’s the letter he wrote Sandy,” Darry said without expression. “Returned unopened.”

  So that was what had been bugging Soda all afternoon. And I hadn’t even bothered to find out. And while I was thinking about it, I realized that I never had paid much attention to Soda’s problems. Darry and I just took it for granted that he didn’t have any.

  “When Sandy went to Florida . . . it wasn’t Soda, Ponyboy. He told me he loved her, but I guess she didn’t love him like he thought she did, because it wasn’t him.”

  “You don’t have to draw me a picture,” I said.

  “He wanted to marry her anyway, but she just left.” Darry was looking at me with a puzzled expression. “Why didn’t he tell you? I didn’t think he’d tell Steve or Two-Bit, but I thought he told you everything.”

  “Maybe he tried,” I said. How many times had Soda started to tell me something, only to find I was daydreaming or stuck in a book? He would always listen to me, no matter what he was doing.

  “He cried every night that week you were gone,” Darry said slowly. “Both you and Sandy in the same week.” He put the envelope down. “Come on, let’s go after him.”

  We chased him clear to the park. We were gaining on him, but he had a block’s head start.

  “Circle around and cut him off,” Darry ordered. Even out of condition I was the best runner. “I’ll stay right behind him.”

  I headed through the trees and cut him off halfway across the park. He veered off to the right, but I caught him in a flying tackle before he’d gone more than a couple of steps. It knocked the wind out of both of us. We lay there gasping for a minute or two, and then Soda sat up and brushed the grass off his shirt.

  “You should have gone out for football instead of track.”

  “Where did you think you were going?” I lay flat on my back and looked at him. Darry came up and dropped down beside us.

  Soda shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just . . . I can’t stand to hear y’all fight. Sometimes . . . I just have to get out or . . . it’s like I’m the middleman in a tug o’ war and I’m being split in half. You dig?”

  Darry gave me a startled look. Neither of us had realized what it was doing to Soda to hear us fight. I was sick and cold with shame. What he said was the truth. Darry and I did play tug of war with him, with never a thought to how much it was hurting him.

  Soda was fiddling with some dead grass. “I mean, I can’t take sides. It’d be a lot easier if I could, but I see both sides. Darry yells too much and tries too hard and takes everything too serious, and Ponyboy, you don’t think enough, you don’t realize all Darry’s giving up just to give you a chance he missed out on. He could have stuck you in a home somewhere and worked his way through college. Ponyboy, I’m telling you the truth. I dropped out because I’m dumb. I really did try in school, but you saw my grades. Look, I’m happy working in a gas station with cars. You’d never be happy doing something like that. And Darry, you ought to try to understand him more, and quit bugging him about every little mistake he makes. He feels things differently than you do.” He gave us a pleading look. “Golly, you two, it’s bad enough having to listen to it, but when you start trying to get me to take sides . . .” Tears welled up in his eyes. “We’re all we’ve got left. We ought to be able to stick together against everything. If we don’t have each other, we don’t have anything. If you don’t have anything, you end up like Dallas . . . and I don’t mean dead, either. I mean like he was before. And that’s worse than dead. Please”—he wiped his eyes on his arm—“don’t fight anymore.”

  Darry looked real worried. I suddenly realized that Darry was only twenty, that he wasn’t so much older that he couldn’t feel scared or hurt and as lost as the rest of us. I saw that I had expected Darry to do all the understanding without even trying to understand him. And he had given up a lot for Soda and me.

  “Sure, little buddy,” Darry said softly. “We’re not going to fight anymore.”

  “Hey, Ponyboy”—Soda gave me a tearful grin—“don’t you start crying, too. One bawl-baby in the family’s enough.”

  “I’m not crying,” I said. Maybe I was. I don’t remember. Soda gave me a playful punch on the shoulder.

  “No more fights. Okay, Ponyboy?” Darry said.

  “Okay,” I said. And I meant it. Darry and I would probably still have misunderstandings—we were too different not to—but no more fights. We couldn’t do anything to hurt Soda. Sodapop would always be the middleman, but that didn’t mean he had to keep getting pulled apart. Instead of Darry and me pulling him apart, he’d be pulling us together.

  “Well,” Soda said, “I’m cold. How about going home?”

  “Race you,” I challenged, leaping up. It was a real nice night for a race. The air was clear and cold and so clean it almost sparkled. The moon wasn’t out but the stars lit up everything. It was quiet except for the sound of our feet on the cement and the dry, scraping sound of leaves blowing across the street. It was a real nice night. I guess I was still out of shape, because we all three tied. No. I guess we all just wanted to stay together.

  I still didn’t want to do my homework that night, though. I hunted around for a book to read, but I’d read everything
in the house about fifty million times, even Darry’s copy of The Carpetbaggers, though he’d told me I wasn’t old enough to read it. I thought so too after I finished it. Finally I picked up Gone with the Wind and looked at it for a long time. I knew Johnny was dead. I had known it all the time, even while I was sick and pretending he wasn’t. It was Johnny, not me, who had killed Bob—I knew that too. I had just thought that maybe if I played like Johnny wasn’t dead it wouldn’t hurt so much. The way Two-Bit, after the police had taken Dally’s body away, had griped because he had lost his switchblade when they searched Dallas.

  “Is that all that’s bothering you, that switchblade?” a red-eyed Steve had snapped at him.

  “No,” Two-Bit had said with a quivering sigh, “but that’s what I’m wishing was all that’s bothering me.”

  But it still hurt anyway. You know a guy a long time, and I mean really know him, you don’t get used to the idea that he’s dead just overnight. Johnny was something more than a buddy to all of us. I guess he had listened to more beefs and more problems from more people than any of us. A guy that’ll really listen to you, listen and care about what you’re saying, is something rare. And I couldn’t forget him telling me that he hadn’t done enough, hadn’t been out of our neighborhood all his life—and then it was too late. I took a deep breath and opened the book. A slip of paper fell out on the floor and I picked it up.

  Ponyboy, I asked the nurse to give you this book so you could finish it. It was Johnny’s handwriting. I went on reading, almost hearing Johnny’s quiet voice. The doctor came in a while ago but I knew anyway. I keep getting tireder and tireder. Listen, I don’t mind dying now. It’s worth it. It’s worth saving those kids. Their lives are worth more than mine, they have more to live for. Some of their parents came by to thank me and I know it was worth it. Tell Dally it’s worth it. I’m just going to miss you guys. I’ve been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid, like green. When you’re a kid everything’s new, dawn. It’s just when you get used to everything that it’s day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That’s gold. Keep that way, it’s a good way to be. I want you to tell Dally to look at one. He’ll probably think you’re crazy, but ask for me. I don’t think he’s ever really seen a sunset. And don’t be so bugged over being a greaser. You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want. There’s still lots of good in the world. Tell Dally. I don’t think he knows. Your buddy, Johnny.

  Tell Dally. It was too late to tell Dally. Would he have listened? I doubted it. Suddenly it wasn’t only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn’t believe you if you did. It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing. There should be some help, someone should tell them before it was too late. Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand then and wouldn’t be so quick to judge a boy by the amount of hair oil he wore. It was important to me. I picked up the phone book and called my English teacher.

  “Mr. Syme, this is Ponyboy. That theme—how long can it be?”

  “Why, uh, not less than five pages.” He sounded a little surprised. I’d forgotten it was late at night.

  “Can it be longer?”

  “Certainly, Ponyboy, as long as you want it.”

  “Thanks,” I said and hung up.

  I sat down and picked up my pen and thought for a minute. Remembering. Remembering a handsome, dark boy with a reckless grin and a hot temper. A tough, towheaded boy with a cigarette in his mouth and a bitter grin on his hard face. Remembering—and this time it didn’t hurt—a quiet, defeated-looking sixteen-year-old whose hair needed cutting badly and who had black eyes with a frightened expression to them. One week had taken all three of them. And I decided I could tell people, beginning with my English teacher. I wondered for a long time how to start that theme, how to start writing about something that was important to me. And I finally began like this: When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home . . .

  speaking with S. E. Hinton . . .

  You were a sixteen-year-old high school student in Oklahoma when you wrote The Outsiders. Where did you get the idea for the story?

  I was actually fifteen when I first began it. It was the year I was sixteen and a junior in high school that I did the majority of the work (that was the year I made a D in creative writing). One day a friend of mine was walking home from school and these “nice” kids jumped out of a car and beat him up because they didn’t like his being a greaser. This made me mad and I just went home and started pounding out a story about this boy who was beaten up while he was walking home from the movies—the beginning of The Outsiders. It was just something to let off steam. I didn’t have any grand design. I just sat down and started writing it. I look back and I think it was totally written in my subconscious or something.

  So was there a real-life Ponyboy? A real Johnny?

  Ponyboy’s gang was inspired by a true-life gang, the members of which were very dear to me. Later, all the gang members I hung out with were sure they were in the book—but they aren’t. I guess it’s because these characters are really kind of universal without losing their individuality.

  How did you turn that inspiration for a story into such memorable characters?

  When I write, an interesting transformation takes place. I go from thinking about my narrator to being him. A lot of Ponyboy’s thoughts are my thoughts. He’s probably the closest I’ve come to putting myself into a character. He has a lot of freedom, true-blue friends, people he loves and who love him; the things that are important to him are the things that are important to me. I think Ponyboy and Soda and Darry come out better than the rest of them because they have their love for one other.

  What were you like as a teenager? Were you a Greaser; a Soc?

  I was a tomboy—I played football, my close friends were guys. Fortunately, I was born without the need-to-belong gene, the gene that says you have to be in a little group to feel secure.

  I never wanted to be classified as anything, nor did I ever join anything for fear of losing my individuality. I didn’t even realize that these guys, who were my good friends, were greasers until one day we were walking down the street and some guys came and yelled, “Greaser!” It’s funny to look at people you’ve known all your life, to suddenly see them as everyone else sees them, with their slicked-back hair and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and their black leather jackets, and respond, “My God, they’re hoods.” You know them and know they’re not hoods, but they just look like hoods. I had friends on the rich side of town, too, and saw that they had their share of problems, also.

  How did you pursue getting The Outsiders published?

  When I wrote it I hadn’t thought of getting it published. But at school one day I mentioned to a friend that I wrote, and her mother happened to write children’s books. I gave her a copy of The Outsiders, and this woman showed it to a friend who had a New York agent. The agent liked it and sold it to the second publisher who read it. She has been my agent ever since. I received the contract from the publisher on graduation day!

  What made you want to become a writer?

  The major influence on my writing has been my reading. When I was young, I read everything, including cereal boxes and coffee labels. Reading taught me sentence structure, paragraphing, how to build a chapter. Strangely enough, it never taught me spelling.

  I have always loved to write, almost as much as I love to read. I began goofing around with a typewriter when I was about twelve. I’ve always written about things th
at interest me, so my first years of writing (grades three through ten), I wrote about cowboys and horses. I wanted to be a cowboy and have a horse.

  Writing is easy for me because I never begin to write unless I have something to say. I’m a character writer. Some writers are plot writers. . . . I have to begin with people. I always know my characters, exactly what they look like, their birthdays, what they like for breakfast. It doesn’t matter if these things appear in the book. I still have to know. I get ideas for characters from real people, but overall they are fictional; my characters exist only in my head.

  What books and authors inspire and influence you?

  Well, as an adult, I can pick out a lot of authors who have influenced me. My favorite authors are Jane Austen, Mary Renault, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Shirley Jackson. My favorite books are The Haunting of Hill House, Fire from Heaven, Emma, and Tender Is the Night. I like Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s novels, but not his short stories, and the other way around for J. D. Salinger.

  But people want to know your childhood influences, and I’ll have to say just books in general. I loved to read, and as soon as I learned how I was reading everything I could get my hands on. I was a horse nut, and Peanuts the Pony was the first book I ever checked out of the library. I still remember that book. The act of reading was so pleasurable for me. For an introverted kid, it’s a means of communication, because you interact with the author even if you aren’t sitting there conversing with her.

  Why do you use your initials instead of your full name?

  My publisher was afraid that the reviewers would assume a girl couldn’t write a book like The Outsiders. Later, when my books became popular, I found I liked the privacy of having a “public” name and a private one, so it has worked out fine.