Bridge to Terabithia: Chapters 1–3

When you were the only boy smashed between four sisters, and the older two had despised you ever since you stopped letting them dress you up and wheel you around in their rusty old doll carriage, and the littlest one cried if you looked at her cross-eyed, it
was nice to have somebody who worshiped you.

He had never learned to run properly, but he was long-legged for a ten-year-old, and no one had more grit than he.

"Oooo, Momma, he stinks.” Brenda pinched her nose with her pinky crooked delicately.

"Christmas! You don’t want us to have no fun at all.”
“Any fun,” Ellie corrected her primly.

He thought later how peculiar it was that here was probably the biggest thing in his life, and he had shrugged it off as nothing.

Jess made peanut-butter sandwiches for the little girls and himself, and because the kitchen was still hot and almost nauseatingly full of bean smell, the three of them went outside to eat.

The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body.

He managed to endure the whole boring week of school for that one half hour on Friday afternoons when they’d sit on the worn-out rug on the floor of the teachers’ room (there was no place else in the building for Miss Edmunds to spread out all her stuff) and sing songs like “My Beautiful Balloon,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “Free to Be You and Me,” “Blowing in the Wind,” and because Mr. Turner, the principal, insisted, “God Bless America.”

Miss Edmunds would play her guitar and let the kids take turns on the autoharp, the triangles, cymbals, tambourines, and bongo drum. Lord, could they ever make a racket!

So the students of Lark Creek Elementary sat at their desks all Friday, their hearts thumping with anticipation as they listened to the joyful pandemonium pouring out from the teachers’ room, spent their allotted half hours with Miss Edmunds under the spell of her wild beauty and in the snare of her enthusiasms, and then went out and pretended that they couldn’t be suckered by some hippie in tight jeans with makeup all over her eyes but none on her mouth.

So the students of Lark Creek Elementary sat at their desks all Friday, their hearts thumping with anticipation as they listened to the joyful pandemonium pouring out from the teachers’ room, spent their allotted half hours with Miss Edmunds under the spell of her wild beauty and in the snare of her enthusiasms, and then went out and pretended that they couldn’t be suckered by some hippie in tight jeans with makeup all over her eyes but none on her mouth.

It wouldn’t help to try to defend Miss Edmunds against their unjust and hypocritical attacks.

But whenever possible, he stole a few minutes on Friday just to stand close to her and hear her voice, soft and smooth as suede, assuring him that he was a “neat kid.”

“You’re the proverbial diamond in the rough,” she’d said to him once, touching his nose lightly with the tip of her electrifying finger.

Down on the road an occasional truck passed by with its dimmers on.

“You ought to be in bed,” he said huffily, mad at himself for cutting her down.

Gary smirked. He thinks he can beat me, the dumbhead.

It occurred to Jess that she, too, wished to postpone regular school as long as possible.

“She’s eating clabber.”

“Jesse Aarons. That noise is pure repulsive.”

He glared at her hard and gave another slurp.

The fifth-grade boys, bursting with new importance, ordered the fourth graders this way and that, while the smaller boys tried to include themselves without being conspicuous.

“It was Clyde.”
“It was a tie, Fulcher,” a fourth grader protested.

“Sure,” he said recklessly. “Why not?”

He mustn’t let Fulcher suspect that he was scared of a little belt in the mouth.

He wanted to look back and see where the others were, but he resisted the temptation.

It would seem conceited to look back.

Fulcher would have to let her run now, he knew. And Fulcher did, angrily and grudgingly.

Lord, the girl had no notion of what you did and didn’t do.

When they came to the stop, he grabbed May Belle’s hand and dragged her off, conscious that Leslie was right behind them.