Leslie came and leaned over May Belle, putting her hand on the little girl’s thin shoulder. “May Belle, would you like some new paper dolls?”
May Belle slid her eyes around suspiciously. “What kind?”
“Life in Colonial America.”
May Belle shook her head. “I want Bride or Miss America.”
“You can pretend these are bride paper dolls. They have lots of beautiful long dresses.”
“Whatsa matter with ’um?”
“Nothing. They’re brand-new.”
“How come you don’t want ’um if they’re so great?”
“When you’re my age”—Leslie gave a little sigh—“you just don’t play with paper dolls anymore. My grandmother sent me these. You know how it is, grandmothers just forget you’re growing up.”
May Belle’s one living grandmother was in Georgia and never sent her anything. “You already punched ’um out?”
“No, honestly. And all the clothes punch out, too. You don’t have to use scissors.”
They could see she was weakening. “How about,” Jess began, “you coming down and taking a look at ’um, and if they suit you, you could take ’um along home when you go tell Momma where I am?”
After they had watched May Belle tearing up the hill, clutching her new treasure, Jess and Leslie turned and ran up over the empty field behind the old Perkins place and down to the dry creek bed that separated farmland from the woods. There was an old crab apple tree there, just at the bank of the creek bed, from which someone long forgotten had hung a rope.
They took turns swinging across the gully on the rope. It was a glorious autumn day, and if you looked up as you swung, it gave you the feeling of floating. Jess leaned back and drank in the rich, clear color of the sky. He was drifting, drifting like a fat white lazy cloud back and forth across the blue.
“Do you know what we need?” Leslie called to him. Intoxicated as he was with the heavens, he couldn’t imagine needing anything on earth.
“We need a place,” she said, “just for us. It would be so secret that we would never tell anyone in the whole world about it.” Jess came swinging back and dragged his feet to stop. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “It might be a whole secret country,” she continued, “and you and I would be the rulers of it.”
Her words stirred inside of him. He’d like to be a ruler of something. Even something that wasn’t real. “OK,” he said. “Where could we have it?”
“Over there in the woods where nobody would come and mess it up.”
There were parts of the woods that Jess did not like. Dark places where it was almost like being underwater, but he didn’t say so.
“I know”—she was getting excited—“it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.” Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find a place to build our castle stronghold.”
They had gone only a few yards into the woods beyond the creek bed when Leslie stopped.
“How about right here?” she asked.
“Sure,” Jess agreed quickly, relieved that there was no need to plunge deeper into the woods. He would take her there, of course, for he wasn’t such a coward that he would mind a little exploring now and then farther in amongst the ever-darkening columns of the tall pines. But as a regular thing, as a permanent place, this was where he would choose to be—here where the dogwood and redbud played hide and seek between the oaks and evergreens, and the sun flung itself in golden streams through the trees to splash warmly at their feet.
“Sure,” he repeated himself, nodding vigorously. The underbrush was dry and would be easy to clear away. The ground was almost level. “This’ll be a good place to build.”
Leslie named their secret land “Terabithia,” and she loaned Jess all of her books about Narnia, so he would know how things went in a magic kingdom—how the animals and the trees must be protected and how a ruler must behave. That was the hard part. When Leslie spoke, the words rolling out so regally, you knew she was a proper queen. He could hardly manage English, much less the poetic language of a king.
But he could make stuff. They dragged boards and other materials down from the scrap heap by Miss Bessie’s pasture and built their castle stronghold in the place they had found in the woods. Leslie filled a three-pound coffee can with crackers and dried fruit and a one-pound can with strings and nails. They found five old Pepsi bottles which they washed and filled with water, in case, as Leslie said, “of siege.”
Like God in the Bible, they looked at what they had made and found it very good.
“You should draw a picture of Terabithia for us to hang in the castle,” Leslie said.
“I can’t.” How could he explain it in a way Leslie would understand, how he yearned to reach out and capture the quivering life about him and how when he tried, it slipped past his fingertips, leaving a dry fossil upon the page? “I just can’t get the poetry of the trees,” he said.
She nodded. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You will someday.”
He believed her because there in the shadowy light of the stronghold everything seemed possible. Between the two of them they owned the world and no enemy, Gary Fulcher, Wanda Kay Moore, Janice Avery, Jess’s own fears and insufficiencies, nor any of the foes whom Leslie imagined attacking Terabithia, could ever really defeat them.
A few days after they finished the castle, Janice Avery fell down in the school bus and yelled that Jess had tripped her as she went past. She made such a fuss that Mrs. Prentice, the driver, ordered Jess off the bus, and he had to walk the three miles home.
When Jess finally got to Terabithia, Leslie was huddled next to one of the cracks below the roof trying to get enough light to read. There was a picture on the cover which showed a killer whale attacking a dolphin.
“Whatcha doing?” He came in and sat beside her on the ground.
“Reading. I had to do something. That girl!” Her anger came rocketing to the surface.
“It don’t matter. I don’t mind walking all that much.” What was a little hike compared to what Janice Avery might have chosen to do?
“It’s the principle of the thing, Jess. That’s what you’ve got to understand. You have to stop people like that. Otherwise they turn into tyrants and dictators.”
He reached over and took the whale book from her hands, pretending to study the bloody picture on the jacket. “Getting any good ideas?”
“What?”
“I thought you was getting some ideas on how to stop Janice Avery.”
“No, stupid. We’re trying to save the whales. They might become extinct.”
He gave her back the book. “You save the whales and shoot the people, huh?”
She grinned finally. “Something like that, I guess. Say, did you ever hear the story about Moby Dick?”
“Who’s that?”
“Well, there was once this huge white whale named Moby Dick…” And Leslie began to spin out a wonderful story about a whale and a crazy sea captain who was bent on killing it. His fingers itched to try to draw it on paper. Maybe if he had some proper paints, he could do it. There ought to be a way of making the whale shimmering white against the dark water.
At first they avoided each other during school hours, but by October they grew careless about their friendship. Gary Fulcher, like Brenda, took great pleasure in teasing Jess about his “girl friend.” It hardly bothered Jess. He knew that a girl friend was somebody who chased you on the playground and tried to grab you and kiss you. He could no more imagine Leslie chasing a boy than he could imagine Mrs. Double-Chinned Myers shinnying up the flagpole. Gary Fulcher could go to you-know-where and warm his toes.
There was really no free time at school except recess, and now that there were no races, Jess and Leslie usually looked for a quiet place on the field, and sat and talked. Except for the magic half hour on Fridays, recess was all that Jess looked forward to at school.
Leslie could always come up with something funny that made the long days bearable. Often the joke was on Mrs. Myers. Leslie was one of those people who sat quietly at her desk, never whispering or daydreaming or chewing gum, doing beautiful schoolwork, and yet her brain was so full of mischief that if the teacher could have once seen through that mask of perfection, she would have thrown her out in horror.
Jess could hardly keep a straight face in class just trying to imagine what might be going on behind that angelic look of Leslie’s. One whole morning, as Leslie had related it at recess, she had spent imagining Mrs. Myers on one of those fat farms down in Arizona. In her fantasy, Mrs. Myers was one of the foodaholics who would hide bits of candy bars in odd places—up the hot water faucet!—only to be found out and publicly humiliated before all the other fat ladies. That afternoon Jess kept having visions of Mrs. Myers dressed only in a pink corset being weighed in. “You’ve been cheating again, Gussie!” the tall skinny directoress was saying. Mrs. Myers was on the verge of tears.
“Jesse Aarons!” The teacher’s sharp voice punctured his daydream. He couldn’t look Mrs. Myers straight in her pudgy face. He’d crack up. He set his sight on her uneven hemline.
“Yes’m.” He was going to have to get coaching from Leslie. Mrs. Myers always caught him when his mind was on vacation, but she never seemed to suspect Leslie of not paying attention. He sneaked a glance up that way. Leslie was totally absorbed in her geography book, or so it would appear to anyone who didn’t know.
Terabithia was cold in November. They didn’t dare build a fire in the castle, though sometimes they would build one outside and huddle around it. For a while Leslie had been able to keep two sleeping bags in the stronghold, but around the first of December her father noticed their absence, and she had to take them back. Actually, Jess made her take them back. It was not that he was afraid of the Burkes exactly. Leslie’s parents were young, with straight white teeth and lots of hair—both of them. Leslie called them Judy and Bill, which bothered Jess more than he wanted it to. It was none of his business what Leslie called her parents. But he just couldn’t get used to it.
Both of the Burkes were writers. Mrs. Burke wrote novels and, according to Leslie, was more famous than Mr. Burke, who wrote about politics. It was really something to see the shelf that had their books on it. Mrs. Burke was “Judith Hancock” on the cover, which threw you at first, but then if you looked on the back, there was her picture looking very young and serious. Mr. Burke was going back and forth to Washington to finish a book he was working on with someone else, but he had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.
They didn’t look like Jess’s idea of rich, but even he could tell that the jeans they wore had not come off the counter at Newberry’s. There was no TV at the Burkes’, but there were mountains of records and a stereo set that looked like something off Star Trek. And although their car was small and dusty, it was Italian and looked expensive, too.
They were always nice to Jess when he went over, but then they would suddenly begin talking about French politics or string quartets (which he at first thought was a square box made out of string), or how to save the timber wolves or redwoods or singing whales, and he was scared to open his mouth and show once and for all how dumb he was.
He wasn’t comfortable having Leslie at his house either. Joyce Ann would stare, her index finger pulling down her mouth and making her drool. Brenda and Ellie always managed some remark about “girl friend.” His mother acted stiff and funny just the way she did when she had to go up to school about something. Later she would refer to Leslie’s “tacky” clothes. Leslie always wore pants, even to school. Her hair was “shorter than a boy’s.” Her parents were “hardly more than hippies.” May Belle either tried to push in with him and Leslie or sulked at being left out. His father had seen Leslie only a few times and had nodded to show that he had noticed her, but his mother said that she was sure he was fretting that his only son did nothing but play with girls, and they both were worried about what would become of it.
Jess didn’t concern himself with what would “become of it.” For the first time in his life he got up every morning with something to look forward to. Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self—his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.
Terabithia was their secret, which was a good thing, for how could Jess have ever explained it to an outsider? Just walking down the hill toward the woods made something warm and liquid steal through his body. The closer he came to the dry creek bed and the crab apple tree rope the more he could feel the beating of his heart. He grabbed the end of the rope and swung out toward the other bank with a kind of wild exhilaration and landed gently on his feet, taller and stronger and wiser in that mysterious land.
Leslie’s favorite place besides the castle stronghold was the pine forest. There the trees grew so thick at the top that the sunshine was veiled. No low bush or grass could grow in that dim light, so the ground was carpeted with golden needles.
“I used to think this place was haunted,” Jess had confessed to Leslie the first afternoon he had revved up his courage to bring her there.
“Oh, but it is,” she said. “But you don’t have to be scared. It’s not haunted with evil things.”
“How do you know?”
“You can just feel it. Listen.”
At first he heard only the stillness. It was the stillness that had always frightened him before, but this time it was like the moment after Miss Edmunds finished a song, just after the chords hummed down to silence. Leslie was right. They stood there, not moving, not wanting the swish of dry needles beneath their feet to break the spell. Far away from their former world came the cry of geese heading southward.
Leslie took a deep breath. “This is not an ordinary place,” she whispered. “Even the rulers of Terabithia come into it only at times of greatest sorrow or of greatest joy. We must strive to keep it sacred. It would not do to disturb the Spirits.”
He nodded, and without speaking, they went back to the creek bank where they shared together a solemn meal of crackers and dried fruit.
FIVE
The Giant Killers
Leslie liked to make up stories about the giants that threatened the peace of Terabithia, but they both knew that the real giant in their lives was Janice Avery. Of course, it wasn’t only Jess and Leslie that she was after. She had two friends, Wilma Dean and Bobby Sue Henshaw, who were almost as big as she was, and the three of them would roam the playground, grabbing up hopscotch rocks, running through jump ropes, and laughing while second graders screamed. They would even stand outside the girls’ room first thing every morning and make the little girls give them their milk money before they’d let them go to the bathroom.
May Belle, unfortunately, was a slow learner. Her daddy had brought her a package of Twinkies, and she was so proud that as soon as she got on the bus she forgot everything she knew and yelled to another first grader, “Guess what I got in my lunch today, Billy Jean?”
“What?”
“Twinkies!” she shouted so loud you could have heard her in the back seat even if you were deaf in both ears. Out of the corner of his eye, Jess thought he saw Janice Avery perk up.
When they sat down, May Belle was still screeching about her dadgum Twinkies over the roar of the motor. “My daddy brung ’um to me from Washington!”
Jess threw another look at the back seat. “You better shut up about those dang Twinkies,” he said in her ear.
“You just jealous ’cause Daddy didn’t bring you none.”
“OK.” He shrugged across her head at Leslie to say I warned her, didn’t I? and Leslie nodded back.
Neither of them was too surprised to see May Belle come screaming toward them at recess time.
“She stole my Twinkies!”
Jess sighed. “May Belle, didn’t I tell you?
”
“You gotta kill Janice Avery. Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!”
“Shhh,” Leslie said, stroking May Belle’s head, but May Belle didn’t want comfort, she wanted revenge.
“You gotta beat her up into a million pieces!”
He’d sooner tangle with Mrs. Godzilla herself. “Fighting ain’t gonna get back nothing, May Belle. Them Twinkies is well on the way to padding Janice Avery’s bottom by now.”
Leslie snickered, but May Belle was not to be distracted. “You’re just yeller, Jesse Aarons. If you wasn’t yeller, you’d beat somebody up if they took your little sister’s Twinkies.” She broke into a fresh round of sobbing.
Jess stiffened. He avoided Leslie’s eyes. Lord, there was no escape. He’d have to fight the female gorilla now.
“Look, May Belle,” Leslie was saying. “If Jess picks a fight with Janice Avery, you know perfectly well what will happen.”
May Belle wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “She’ll beat him up.”
“Noooo. He’ll get kicked out of school for fighting a girl. You know how Mr. Turner is about boys who pick on girls.”
“She stole my Twinkies.”
“I know she did, May Belle. And Jess and I are going to figure out a way to pay her back for it. Aren’t we Jess?”
He nodded vigorously. Anything was better than promising to fight Janice Avery.
“Whatcha gonna do?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll have to plan it out very carefully, but I promise you, May Belle, we’ll get her.”
“Cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die?”
Leslie solemnly crossed her heart. May Belle turned expectantly to Jess, so he crossed his, too, trying hard not to feel like a fool, crossing his heart to a first grader in the middle of the playground.
May Belle snuffled loudly. “It ain’t as good as seeing her beat to a million pieces.”
“No,” said Leslie, “I’m sure it isn’t, but with Mr. Turner running this school, it’s the best we can do, right, Jess?”
Bridge to Terabithia Page 4