Bridge to Terabithia

“Oh, Momma, you remember.” Ellie’s voice was sweeter than a melted Mars Bar. “Daddy said last week we girls were going to have to have something for school.”

“Oh, take it,” his mother said angrily, reaching for her cracked vinyl purse on the shelf above the stove. She counted out five wrinkled bills.

“Momma”—Brenda was starting again—“can’t we have just one more? So it’ll be three each?”

“No!”

“Momma, you can’t buy nothing for two fifty. Just one little pack of notebook paper’s gone up to…”

“No!”

Ellie got up noisily and began to clear the table. “Your turn to wash, Brenda,” she said loudly.

“Awww, Ellie.”

Ellie jabbed her with a spoon. Jesse saw that look. Brenda shut up her whine halfway out of her Rose Lustre lipsticked mouth. She wasn’t as smart as Ellie, but even she knew not to push Momma too far.

Which left Jess to do the work as usual. Momma never sent the babies out to help, although if he worked it right he could usually get May Belle to do something. He put his head down on the table. The running had done him in this morning. Through his top ear came the sound of the Timmonses’ old Buick—“Wants oil,” his dad would say—and the happy buzz of voices outside the screen door as Ellie and Brenda squashed in among the seven Timmonses.

“All right, Jesse. Get your lazy self off that bench. Miss Bessie’s bag is probably dragging ground by now. And you still got beans to pick.”

Lazy. He was the lazy one. He gave his poor deadweight of a head one minute more on the tabletop.

“Jess-see!”

“OK, Momma. I’m going.”

It was May Belle who came to tell him in the bean patch that people were moving into the old Perkins place down on the next farm. Jess wiped his hair out of his eyes and squinted. Sure enough. A U-Haul was parked right by the door. One of those big jointed ones. These people had a lot of junk. But they wouldn’t last. The Perkins place was one of those ratty old country houses you moved into because you had no decent place to go and moved out of as quickly as you could. 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.

The flies were buzzing around his sweating face and shoulders. He dropped the beans into the bucket and swatted with both hands. “Get me my shirt, May Belle.” The flies were more important than any U-Haul.

May Belle jogged to the end of the row and picked up his T-shirt from where it had been discarded earlier. She walked back holding it with two fingers way out in front of her. “Oooo, it stinks,” she said, just as Brenda would have.

“Shuttup,” he said and grabbed the shirt away from her.

TWOLeslie Burke

Ellie and Brenda weren’t back by seven. Jess had finished all the picking and helped his mother can the beans. She never canned except when it was scalding hot anyhow, and all the boiling turned the kitchen into some kind of hellhole. Of course, her temper had been terrible, and she had screamed at Jess all afternoon and was now too tired to fix any supper.

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 U-Haul was still out by the Perkins place. He couldn’t see anybody moving outside, so they must have finished unloading.

“I hope they have a girl, six or seven,” said May Belle. “I need somebody to play with.”

“You got Joyce Ann.”

“I hate Joyce Ann. She’s nothing but a baby.”

Joyce Ann’s lip went out. They both watched it tremble. Then her pudgy body shuddered, and she let out a great cry.

“Who’s teasing the baby?” his mother yelled out the screen door.

Jess sighed and poked the last of his sandwich into Joyce Ann’s open mouth. Her eyes went wide, and she clamped her jaws down on the unexpected gift. Now maybe he could have some peace.

He closed the screen door gently as he entered and slipped past his mother, who was rocking herself in the kitchen chair watching TV. In the room he shared with the little ones, he dug under his mattress and pulled out his pad and pencils. Then, stomach down on the bed, he began to draw.

Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey. The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body. Lord, he loved to draw. Animals, mostly. Not regular animals like Miss Bessie or the chickens, but crazy animals with problems—for some reason he liked to put his beasts into impossible fixes. This one was a hippopotamus just leaving the edge of the cliff, turning over and over—you could tell by the curving lines—in the air toward the sea below where surprised fish were leaping goggle-eyed out of the water. There was a balloon over the hippopotamus—where his head should have been but his bottom actually was—“Oh!” it was saying. “I seem to have forgot my glasses.”