On the fifth day, Ponyboy is sick of eating baloney and also sick from smoking so much, and just as he curls up to fall asleep, he hears a whistle.
They are both baffled by the poem, and Ponyboy admits that "I never quite got what he meant by it." Johnny brings up Ponyboy's family, and they decide that the two of them are different from the rest of the gang. He watches the sunrise, and soon Johnny joins him, commenting on the beauty of the sunrise and saying it's "too bad it couldn't stay like that all the time." That reminds Ponyboy of the poem " Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost, and he recites it for Johnny. One morning, Ponyboy wakes up early and goes to sit outside and have a smoke. Ponyboy is shocked, but realizes for the first time "the extent of Johnny's hero-worship for Dally Winston." They stay in the back of the church so they won't be seen by the rare passers-by. Johnny becomes interested in the idea of gallant southern gentlemen, and says he thinks that Dally is most like them. Over the next four or five days, Ponyboy and Johnny kill time by playing cards and reading Gone with the Wind.
Soon they fall asleep, and when they wake up, they decide they're "all cried out now," and that they can "take whatever was coming now." Ponyboy comforts him, but starts to cry himself. Thinking about Two-bit makes them homesick for the gang, though, and when Ponyboy starts talking about the night before, Johnny tells him, "Stop it!" and begins to cry.
The boys talk about the little store that Johnny bought the goods from, and how Two-bit would have stolen everything easily from it because the products were just lying out. Ponyboy sulks about losing his hair, but Johnny is optimistic, saying "It's just hair." Then Johnny washes the grease out of his hair, and Ponyboy cuts it off. After it's all done, Ponyboy looks at himself in the mirror and thinks that he looks "younger and scareder," not at all like himself. Ponyboy is horrified, since he is proud of his hair. Johnny has bought peroxide, and reveals his plan to cut their hair and bleach Ponyboy's, as a disguise. They go inside the church, and Johnny reveals that he's bought food (including a week's supply of baloney) and a copy of Gone with the Wind for Ponyboy, since he remembered that Ponyboy had wanted to read it. Johnny returns, and Ponyboy is so glad to see him that he trips and falls down the steps. He feels overwhelmed, and can't keep track of how much time has passed since the night before. Ponyboy wanders outside to get a drink from the pump behind the church. When he gives up pretending, he realizes that Johnny is gone, and has left a note in the dust on the floor that he's gone to get supplies. He pretends for a moment that he is back home, and it is a usual weekend morning. Ponyboy wakes up in the abandoned church, and at first thinks he has dreamed everything that has happened.
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