Bridge to Terabithia

by Katherine Paterson

“Gonna run?” “Maybe.” Of course he was going to run. He had gotten up early every day all summer to run.

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.

It seemed to him that he had been thought too big for that since the day he was born.

“next thing you’re gonna want to let some girl run.” Jess’s face went hot. “Sure,” he said recklessly. “Why not?” He turned deliberately toward Leslie. “Wanna run?” he asked. “Sure.” She was grinning. “Why not?”

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.

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?

“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.”

Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self—his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

“You can’t wear pants.” “I’ve got some dresses, Jess Aarons.” Would wonders never cease?

“You dunce! You got me right in the ear.”

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don’t have to believe it, and I think it’s beautiful.”

“But Leslie,” she insisted. “What if you die? What’s going to happen to you if you die?”

“I will arise,” he replied with dignity, “when thou removes this fool dog off my gut.”

He may not have been born with guts, but he didn’t have to die without them. Hey, maybe you could go down to the Medical College and get a gut transplant. No, Doc, I got me a perfectly good heart. What I need is a gut transplant.

He’d have to tell Leslie about wanting a gut transplant. It was the kind of nonsense she appreciated.

Why wasn’t Leslie here to help him out of this? Why didn’t she come running in and make everyone laugh again?

She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there—like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

I am now the fastest runner in the fifth grade.

It was dark and damp, but there was no evidence there to suggest that the queen had died.

Like a single bird across a storm-cloud sky, a tiny peace winged its way through the chaos inside his body.

He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to unsay all the things he had said about her—even unsay the things Leslie had said. Lord, don’t let her ever find out.

Sometimes like the Barbie doll you need to give people something that’s for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it. Because Mrs. Myers had helped him already by understanding that he would never forget Leslie.

For hadn’t Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world—huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile? (Handle with care—everything—even the predators.)

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

As for the terrors ahead—for he did not fool himself that they were all behind him—well, you just have to stand up to your fear and not let it squeeze you white. Right, Leslie? Right.

There were the inner-city children in Dublin who were scandalized that their lunchtime milk actually came from a cow and did not originate in tiny sanitized boxes. The children in Australia who wrote to ask what Twinkies were. The children everywhere who wanted to know why, why, why did Leslie Burke have to die.

In the beginning, I thought hardly anyone would understand or embrace my strange little story. But it’s not my story. It hasn’t been mine from the day it was published. Bridge to Terabithia belongs to readers who, over these forty years, have taken it to their hearts and made it their own.