For a minute he thought Gary was going to sock him, and he stiffened. He mustn’t let Fulcher suspect that he was scared of a little belt in the mouth. But instead Gary broke into a trot and started bossing the threes into line for their heat.
“You can run with the fours, Leslie.” He said it loudly enough to make sure Fulcher could hear him and then concentrated on the runners. See, he told himself, you can stand up to a creep like Fulcher. No sweat.
Bobby Miller won the threes easily. He was the best of the fourth graders, almost as fast as Fulcher. But not as good as me, Jess thought. He was beginning to get really excited now. There wasn’t anybody in the fours who could give him much of a race. Still it would be better to give Fulcher a scare by running well in the heat.
Leslie lined up beside him on the right. He moved a tiny bit to the left, but she didn’t seem to notice.
At the bang Jess shot forward. It felt good—even the rough ground against the bottom of his worn sneakers. He was pumping good. He could almost smell Gary Fulcher’s surprise at his improvement. The crowd was noisier than they’d been during the other heats. Maybe they were all noticing. He wanted to look back and see where the others were, but he resisted the temptation. It would seem conceited to look back. He concentrated on the line ahead. It was nearing with every step. “Oh, Miss Bessie, if you could see me now.”
He felt it before he saw it. Someone was moving up. He automatically pumped harder. Then the shape was there in his sideways vision. Then suddenly pulling ahead. He forced himself now. His breath was choking him, and the sweat was in his eyes. But he saw the figure anyhow. The faded cutoffs crossed the line a full three feet ahead of him.
Leslie turned to face him with a wide smile on her tanned face. He stumbled and without a word began half walking, half trotting over to the starting line. This was the day he was going to be champion—the best runner of the fourth and fifth grades, and he hadn’t even won his heat. There was no cheering at either end of the field. The rest of the boys seemed as stunned as he. The teasing would come later, he felt sure, but at least for the moment none of them were talking.
“OK.” Fulcher took over. He tried to appear very much in charge. “OK, you guys. You can line up for the finals.” He walked over to Leslie. “OK, you had your fun. You can run on up to the hopscotch now.”
“But I won the heat,” she said.
Gary lowered his head like a bull. “Girls aren’t supposed to play on the lower field. Better get up there before one of the teachers sees you.”
“I want to run,” she said quietly.
“You already did.”
“Whatsa matter, Fulcher?” All Jess’s anger was bubbling out. He couldn’t seem to stop the flow. “Whatsa matter? Scared to race her?”
Fulcher’s fist went up. But Jess walked away from it. Fulcher would have to let her run now, he knew. And Fulcher did, angrily and grudgingly.
She beat him. She came in first and turned her large shining eyes on a bunch of dumb sweating-mad faces. The bell rang. Jess started across the lower field, his hands still deep in his pockets. She caught up with him. He took his hands out and began to trot toward the hill. She’d got him into enough trouble. She speeded up and refused to be shaken off.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Yeah?” For what? he was thinking.
“You’re the only kid in this whole durned school who’s worth shooting.” He wasn’t sure, he thought her voice was quivering, but he wasn’t going to start feeling sorry for her again.
“So shoot me,” he said.
On the bus that afternoon he did something he had never thought he would do. He sat down beside May Belle. It was the only way he could make sure that he wouldn’t have Leslie plunking herself down beside him. Lord, the girl had no notion of what you did and didn’t do. He stared out the window, but he knew she had come and was sitting across the aisle from them.
He heard her say “Jess” once, but the bus was noisy enough that he could pretend he hadn’t heard. When they came to the stop, he grabbed May Belle’s hand and dragged her off, conscious that Leslie was right behind them. But she didn’t try to speak to him again, nor did she follow them. She just took off running to the old Perkins place. He couldn’t help turning to watch. She ran as though it was her nature. It reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in the autumn. So smooth. The word “beautiful” came to his mind, but he shook it away and hurried up toward the house.
FOUR
Rulers of Terabithia
Because school had started on the first Tuesday after Labor Day, it was a short week. It was a good thing because each day was worse than the day before. Leslie continued to join the boys at recess, and every day she won. By Friday a number of the fourth- and fifth-grade boys had already drifted away to play King of the Mountain on the slope between the two fields. Since there were only a handful left, they didn’t even have to have heats, which took away a lot of the suspense. Running wasn’t fun anymore. And it was all Leslie’s fault.
Jess knew now that he would never be the best runner of the fourth and fifth grades, and his only consolation was that neither would Gary Fulcher. They went through the motions of the contest on Friday, but when it was over and Leslie had won again, everyone sort of knew without saying so that it was the end of the races.
At least it was Friday, and Miss Edmunds was back. The fifth grade had music right after recess. Jess had passed Miss Edmunds in the hall earlier in the day, and she had stopped him and made a fuss over him. “Did you keep drawing this summer?”
“Yes’m.”
“May I see your pictures or are they private?”
Jess shoved his hair off his red forehead. “I’ll show you ’um.”
She smiled her beautiful even-toothed smile and shook her shining black hair back off her shoulders. “Great!” she said. “See you.”
He nodded and smiled back. Even his toes had felt warm and tingly.
Now as he sat on the rug in the teachers’ room the same warm feeling swept through him at the sound of her voice. Even her ordinary speaking voice bubbled up from inside her, rich and melodic.
Miss Edmunds fiddled a minute with her guitar, talking as she tightened the strings to the jingling of her bracelets and the thrumming of chords. She was in her jeans as usual and sat there cross-legged in front of them as though that was the way teachers always did. She asked a few of the kids how they were and how their summer had been. They kind of mumbled back. She didn’t speak directly to Jess, but she gave him a look with those blue eyes of hers that made him zing like one of the strings she was strumming.
She took note of Leslie and asked for an introduction, which one of the girls prissily gave. Then she smiled at Leslie, and Leslie smiled back—the first time Jess could remember seeing Leslie smile since she won the race on Tuesday. “What do you like to sing, Leslie?”
“Oh, anything.”
Miss Edmunds picked a few odd chords and then began to sing, more quietly than usual for that particular song:
“I see a land bright and clear
And the time’s coming near
When we’ll live in this land
You and me, hand in hand…”
People began to join in, quietly at first to match her mood, but as the song built up at the end, their voices did as well, so that by the time they got to the final “Free to be you and me,” the whole school could hear them. Caught in the pure delight of it, Jess turned and his eyes met Leslie’s. He smiled at her. What the heck? There wasn’t any reason he couldn’t. What was he scared of anyhow? Lord. Sometimes he acted like the original yellow-bellied sapsucker. He nodded and smiled again. She smiled back. He felt there in the teachers’ room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so.
He did not have to make any announcement to Leslie that he had changed his mind about her. She already knew it. She plunked herself down beside him on the bus and squeezed over closer to him to make room f
or May Belle on the same seat. She talked about Arlington, about the huge suburban school she used to go to with its gorgeous music room but not a single teacher in it as beautiful or as nice as Miss Edmunds.
“You had a gym?”
“Yeah. I think all the schools did. Or most of them anyway.” She sighed. “I really miss it. I’m pretty good at gymnastics.”
“I guess you hate it here.”
“Yeah.”
She was quiet for a moment, thinking, Jess decided, about her former school, which he saw as bright and new with a gleaming gymnasium larger than the one at the consolidated high school.
“I guess you had a lot of friends there, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you come here?”
“My parents are reassessing their value structure.”
“Huh?”
“They decided they were too hooked on money and success, so they bought that old farm and they’re going to farm it and think about what’s important.”
Jess was staring at her with his mouth open. He knew it, and he couldn’t help himself. It was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard.
“But you’re the one that’s gotta pay.”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t they think about you?”
“We talked it over,” she explained patiently. “I wanted to come, too.” She looked past him out the window. “You never know ahead of time what something’s really going to be like.”
The bus had stopped. Leslie took May Belle’s hand and led her off. Jess followed, still trying to figure out why two grown people and a smart girl like Leslie wanted to leave a comfortable life in the suburbs for a place like this.
They watched the bus roar off.
“You can’t make a go of a farm nowadays, you know,” he said finally. “My dad has to go to Washington to work, or we wouldn’t have enough money…”
“Money is not the problem.”
“Sure it’s the problem.”
“I mean,” she said stiffly, “not for us.”
It took him a minute to catch on. He did not know people for whom money was not the problem. “Oh.” He tried to remember not to talk about money with her after that.
But Leslie had other problems at Lark Creek that caused more of a rumpus than lack of money. There was the matter of television.
It started with Mrs. Myers reading out loud a composition that Leslie had written about her hobby. Everyone had to write a paper about his or her favorite hobby. Jess had written about football, which he really hated, but he had enough brains to know that if he said drawing, everyone would laugh at him. Most of the boys swore that watching the Washington Redskins on TV was their favorite hobby. The girls were divided: those who didn’t care much about what Mrs. Myers thought chose watching game shows on TV, and those like Wanda Kay Moore who were still aiming for A’s chose reading Good Books. But Mrs. Myers didn’t read anyone’s paper out loud except Leslie’s.
“I want to read this composition aloud. For two reasons. One, it is beautifully written. And two, it tells about an unusual hobby—for a girl.” Mrs. Myers beamed her first-day smile at Leslie. Leslie stared at her desk. Being Mrs. Myers’ pet was pure poison at Lark Creek. “‘Scuba Diving’ by Leslie Burke.”
Mrs. Myers’ sharp voice cut Leslie’s sentences into funny little phrases, but even so, the power of Leslie’s words drew Jess with her under the dark water. Suddenly he could hardly breathe. Suppose you went under and your mask filled all up with water and you couldn’t get to the top in time? He was choking and sweating. He tried to push down his panic. This was Leslie Burke’s favorite hobby. Nobody would make up scuba diving to be their favorite hobby if it wasn’t so. That meant Leslie did it a lot. That she wasn’t scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light. Lord, he was such a coward. How could he be all in a tremble just listening to Mrs. Myers read about it? He was worse a baby than Joyce Ann. His dad expected him to be a man. And here he was letting some girl who wasn’t even ten yet scare the liver out of him by just telling what it was like to sight-see underwater. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
“I am sure,” Mrs. Myers was saying, “that all of you were as impressed as I was with Leslie’s exciting essay.”
Impressed. Lord. He’d nearly drowned.
In the classroom there was a shuffling of feet and papers. “Now I want to give you a homework assignment”—muffled groans—“that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.”—mumblings of unbelief—“Tonight on Channel 7 at 8 P.M. there is going to be a special about a famous underwater explorer—Jacques Cousteau. I want everyone to watch. Then write one page telling what you learned.”
“A whole page?”
“Yes.”
“Does spelling count?”
“Doesn’t spelling always count, Gary?”
“Both sides of the paper?”
“One side will be enough, Wanda Kay. But I will give extra credit to those who do extra work.”
Wanda Kay smiled primly. You could already see ten pages taking shape in her pointy head.
“Mrs. Myers.”
“Yes, Leslie.” Lord, Mrs. Myers was liable to crack her face if she kept up smiling like that.
“What if you can’t watch the program?”
“You inform your parents that it is a homework assignment. I am sure they will not object.”
“What if”—Leslie’s voice faltered; then she shook her head and cleared her throat so the words came out stronger—“what if you don’t have a television set?”
Lord, Leslie. Don’t say that. You can always watch on mine. But it was too late to save her. The hissing sounds of disbelief were already building into a rumbling of contempt.
Mrs. Myers blinked her eyes. “Well. Well.” She blinked some more. You could tell she was trying to figure out how to save Leslie, too. “Well. In that case one could write a one-page composition on something else. Couldn’t one, Leslie?” She tried to smile across the classroom upheaval to Leslie, but it was no use. “Class! Class! Class!” Her Leslie smile shifted suddenly and ominously into a scowl that silenced the storm.
She handed out dittoed sheets of arithmetic problems. Jess stole a look at Leslie. Her face, bent low over the math sheet, was red and fierce.
At recess time when he was playing King of the Mountain, he could see that Leslie was surrounded by a group of girls led by Wanda Kay. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could tell by the proud way Leslie was throwing her head back that the others were making fun of her. Greg Williams grabbed him then, and while they wrestled, Leslie disappeared. It was none of his business, really, but he threw Greg down the hill as hard as he could and yelled to no one in particular, “Gotta go.”
He stationed himself across from the girls’ room. Leslie came out in a few minutes. He could tell she had been crying.
“Hey, Leslie,” he called softly.
“Go away!” She turned abruptly and headed the other way in a fast walk. With an eye on the office door, he ran after her. Nobody was supposed to be in the halls during recess. “Leslie. Whatsa matter?”
“You know perfectly well what’s the matter, Jess Aarons.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed his hair. “If you’d justa kept your mouth shut. You can always watch at my…”
But she had wheeled around again, and was zooming down the hall. Before he could finish the sentence and catch up with her, she was swinging the door to the girls’ room right at his nose. Jess slunk out of the building. He couldn’t risk Mr. Turner catching him hanging around the girls’ room as though he was some kind of pervert or something.
After school Leslie got on the bus before he did and went straight to the corner of the long backseat—right to the seventh graders’ seat. He jerked his head at her to warn her to come farther up front, but she wouldn’t even look at him. He could see the seventh graders headed for the bus—the huge bossy bosomy girls and the mean, skinny, narrow-eyed boys. They’d kill her for sitting in their territory. H
e jumped up and ran to the back and grabbed Leslie by the arm. “You gotta come up to your regular seat, Leslie.”
Even as he spoke, he could feel the bigger kids pushing up behind him down the narrow aisle. Indeed, Janice Avery, who among all the seventh graders was the one person who devoted her entire life to scaring the wits out of anyone smaller than she, was right behind him. “Move, kid,” she said.
He planted his body as firmly as he could, although his heart was knocking at his Adam’s apple. “C’mon, Leslie,” he said, and then he made himself turn and give Janice Avery one of those look-overs from frizz blond hair, past too tight blouse and broad-beamed jeans, to gigantic sneakers. When he finished, he swallowed, stared straight up into her scowling face, and said, almost steadily, “Don’t look like there’ll be room across the back here for you and Janice Avery.”
Somebody hooted. “Weight Watchers is waiting for you, Janice!”
Janice’s eyes were hate-mad, but she moved aside for Jess and Leslie to make their way past her to their regular seat.
Leslie glanced back as they sat down, and then leaned over. “She’s going to get you for that, Jess. Boy, she is mad.”
Jess warmed to the tone of respect in Leslie’s voice, but he didn’t dare look back. “Heck,” he said. “You think I’m going to let some dumb cow like that scare me?”
By the time they got off the bus, he could finally send a swallow past his Adam’s apple without choking. He even gave a little wave at the back seat as the bus pulled off.
Leslie was grinning at him over May Belle’s head.
“Well,” he said happily. “See you.”
“Hey, do you think we could do something this afternoon?”
“Me, too! I wanna do something, too,” May Belle shrilled.
Jess looked at Leslie. No was in her eyes. “Not this time, May Belle. Leslie and I got something we gotta do just by ourselves today. You can carry my books home and tell Momma I’m over at the Burkes’. OK?”
“You ain’t got nothing to do. You ain’t even planned nothing.”