Cutting Class begins with P.B. initials short for PonyBoy, named after the famous book that his mother was once obsessed with. P.B. is very angry, and partly blames this on his father having been in prison for P.B.'s entire life. His mother refuses to talk about why his father is in prison for murder, an act that his father committed when he was 18, the age that P.B. will soon be, so P.B. finds his mother's journals from when she was 15 and begins to read them in hopes that it will help him understand how he ended up a fatherless kid. The journals portray the tragic love story of his unpopular parents in the public school system, where his mother is a loner who talks to no one, and his father is a cute book worm who all the girls fawn over, but who has an angry side that is soon pushed to its limits by the high school football team. P.B. is nothing like his father, he is in fact a star member of his schools football team and quite popular, at least until he starts pursuing Pixie, the school token "weird girl." Maybe father and son are not that different.