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I died at about 7:15 pm in a Tusla hospital.
Dying felt weird, you know? Like just… Falling asleep. I didn’t have some gallant death on a battlefield like I imagined happening to those Civil War folks in Gone with the Wind. I just fell on a bed. Simple. Light.
Speaking of light, I didn’t see that. It was like I woke up, actually. I heard the door slap against the wall, and I barely saw Dally running out. Then I saw Ponyboy stare at my bed in shock. Not even saying anything.
My name was Johnny. Johnny Cade. My real name was Jonathan, but the people who actually knew me called me Johnny. I was a greaser, too. My hair was still put back like how Dally put it seconds before. I knew I was dead. I knew was going to be before I was in the hospital bed. I knew Ponyboy wanted me to wake up, too. My legs phased through the blanket, and I got up. My body was still there, and I finally got the chance to really look at myself.
My eyes were closed. I laughed, because I finally looked peaceful for a change. The curly hair I always tried to put grease in and failed to do every single time, and I was stuck in a hospital gown. Forever now.
I watched Ponyboy walk out of the room, then out of the hospital. The staff didn’t ask him anything, because they knew as well as he did that I was dead.
I scanned the look on his face. I was really good at stuff like that. He wasn’t crying, which I thought was kind of weird. Greasers didn’t really show their emotions, plus Sodapop, his brother, cried a lot more than most of us combined. Ponyboy’s gray-green eyes were almost blank as I followed him across the road. I didn’t try to say anything to him. I knew he couldn’t hear me.
-
Ponyboy picked up a ride back to his house. Then I realized he was bleeding. The rumble, I remembered. I don’t know why he went. Heck, I don’t even know why the Socs went. They had a dead guy, and now so did we.
Me! A voice yelled in my head like I didn’t know it. I’m the dead guy.
I waved the thought away and got out when Pony did. I phased through the door right before Ponyboy walked through it. And me. He didn’t even notice, but boy did I. I almost fell on the Curtis’ floor.
“Where have you been?” I knew it was Darry, our gang’s oldest, who asked, with his rough voice. But then his voice got softer. “Ponyboy, what’s the matter?”
Ponyboy’s eyes scanned the room quickly. “Johnny… He’s dead.” His voice was different too now. More absent, like his eyes. “We told about beatin’ the Socs and… I don’t know, he just died.”
The room was quiet, and it was like I was alone with my thoughts even though I was in the room with everyone else.
You’re not dead, though, another voice rang out in my head. You’re right there.
“Dallas is gone,” Ponyboy spoke up again in the same, strange absent voice. “He ran out like the devil was after him. He’s gonna blow up. He couldn’t take it.”
I suddenly remembered Dally. His sharp eyes always lit up by a cigarette, and his reckless smile.
“No.”
It was the first actual word I said after I died, I think. And I kept repeating it, even as I followed the rest of the gang out to the vacant lot. “Nononono-!”
The panic kept my speed up. I was never the fastest, but the thought of someone else in the gang dying the same day I did hurt too much.
It wasn’t going to happen. Not now. Give the greasers at least a day to mourn. They need it.
But there was Dally when we hit the lot, running towards us with red and blue lights blaring behind him. His eyes were sparkling. Daring. Daring for the police to take a shot at him as he pulled out a gun that he knew was empty.
It helps with a bluff, I remembered him saying. But the police didn’t know that.
They didn’t know it when the shots rang out.
Dally’s eyes didn’t lose that spark, even when the bullets hit his body. He smiled, too. Triumphently. Like he did everything he wanted to.
“Now that was a gallant death,” I whispered.
“Aw, you think so?”
I jumped. “Who-?” I turned around, and Dally was grinning at me. “You’re… You’re a ghost too.”