You laugh every time you drink a soft drink for reasons unknown to people around you.
You name your horse (Or any other pet) Ponyboy.
You've looked up Robert Frost poems before, just to read Nothing Gold Can Stay from a million different sources.
You've read Gone With the Wind, even though it's more than a thousand pages long, for no other reason except because it was mentioned in The Outsiders.
If you HAVE read Gone With the Wind, you get randomly excited and squeal at the page where it quotes exactly, "riding into sure death because they were gallant".
You've started wearing black leather jackets, old jeans, and white t-shirts a lot more than you usually do.
You've researched the 60s for fun, and you have asked questions concerning the 60s to your baffled history teacher.
You've tried slicking back your hair with hair gel/grease and squealed happily at the results.
You've bleached your hair just because Ponyboy did.
You've started caring about your hair a lot more than you did before.
You've stopped getting haircuts.
You've started using the words, "ain't", "golly", "gee", "dig", and other old slang words proudly, not paying attention to the weird stares you're getting from people around you.
You've read the book so many times you could quote entire pages from it.
You love your English teacher for getting you to read it.
You announce to your stunned parents that your new favorite cartoon character is Mickey Mouse.
You want to hit people when your teacher's showing the Outsiders movie, and they don't pay attention to it/laugh at it.
You rush up to every random person reading the book, squealing and babbling about how amazing the book is, and how much they're gonna love it so much. You say these thing to COMPLETE STRANGERS too.
You suddenly wish you had a southern accent, and you love people who actually do.
You've developed a sudden interest in old movies.
You do a double take each time someone says the word "Soda" or "Pony".
You laugh every time you drink Pepsi (Ponyboy's addiction) or Coke. (Dally/Cherry incident)
You write "Stay Gold" as the last line of every letter you write.
You've paused the movie at the very beginning when Ponyboy writes in his composition book, and tried to copy his handwriting.
You've wondered what it would be like the live as a greaser in the 1960s.
You and your best friend spend three hours running around the mall asking random people where you can find some white and black Converse high-tops, just because Ponyboy has white ones and Johnny has black. Then you spend all your mom's birthday money buying some.
You spend twenty bucks at the bouncy ball machine, trying to get a red one. Then when you do, you walk around your subdivision for hours, bouncing it like Ponyboy does in the beginning of the movie.
~Elise (Stay gold!)
P.S. I haven't done ALL these things, but I DO know someone who has!
When something is real you know it! And when it's not sometimes you want it to be real so badly that start believe it. When Johnny died I pretty much convinced myself that it was like the end of the Bourne Ultimatum and Johnny was just gonna sit up and say "PSYCH! I got you good!" But he didn't and I wouldn't believe it. I started to cry hoping it would change the words on the page but I still didn’t believe it. In my mind Johnny was in a beach house somewhere laughing it up with Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. However, just because I believed it didn’t make it true. When Dally committed suicide I gave up on Johnny and felt unforgivably guilty but I knew it must be true. The truth is a tricky thing. It can be misinterpreted, bent, broken, twisted, and flat out destroyed. But sometimes there is more than one right way of looking at the truth. I could have looked at those two unexpected deaths as depressing and stupid, or I could look at them as the start of something – a fresh start. Thank you S.E. Hinton! You made me look at life differently!
