Bridge to Terabithia

by Katherine Paterson

we bear it because Katherine Paterson loves these characters so much, sees them so clearly, that it makes us—her readers—feel loved and seen, too. We feel as if we are in a golden room, a square of light. We feel held. We feel as if someone is telling us the truth.

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 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.

Miss Edmunds was one of his secrets. He was in love with her.

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

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.

“It might be a whole secret country,” she continued, “and you and I would be the rulers of it.”

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.

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.

Like God in the Bible, they looked at what they had made and found it very good.

Gary Fulcher could go to you-know-where and warm his toes.

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.

“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.

Them Twinkies is well on the way to padding Janice Avery’s bottom by now.”

Well the 304 just pulled out with Willard Hughes on the back seat. If he’s got a big date, he don’t seem to know much about it.”

“Then we’ll name him Prince Terrien and make him the guardian of Terabithia.”

even a prince may be a fool.”

She was learning, she related glowingly at recess, to “understand” her father. It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood

“Did you know her father beats her?” “Lots of kids’ fathers beat ’um.” Will you get on with it? “No, I mean really beats her. The kind of beatings they take people to jail for in Arlington.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You can’t imagine. . . .” “Is that why she was crying? Just ’cause her father beats her?”

There in their secret place, his feelings bubbled inside him like a stew on the back of the stove—some sad for her in her lonesomeness, but chunks of happiness, too. To be able to be Leslie’s one whole friend in the world as she was his—he couldn’t help being satisfied about that.

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.

She looked at him as if she were going to argue, then seemed to change her mind. “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.” She shook her head again. “It’s crazy.”

“You gotta believe the Bible, Leslie.” “Why?” It was a genuine question. Leslie wasn’t being smarty.

“I don’t believe it,” Leslie said. “I don’t even think you’ve read the Bible.” “I read most of it.”

“What if you die? What’s going to happen to you if you die?”

no matter how high the creek came, Leslie would still want to cross it.

I’m a liberated woman, Jess Aarons. When I invite a man out, I pay.”

“Your girl friend’s dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.”

“No,” he said straight at May Belle. “It’s a lie. Leslie ain’t dead.”

Jess was only thinking of how good the pancakes had been and hoping his mother would put down some more in front of him.

He thought, then, that he should get up and leave the table, but he wasn’t sure where he was supposed to go or what he was supposed to do.

Jess tried to understand what his father was saying to him, but he felt stupid. “What little girl?”

At the sight of Jess, P. T. snatched himself loose and leapt joyfully upon the boy. Jess picked him up and rubbed the back of the dog’s neck as he used to when P. T. was a tiny puppy.

He was the only person his age he knew whose best friend had died.

“She loved you, you know.” He could tell from Bill’s voice that he was crying. “She told me once that if it weren’t for you . . .” His voice broke completely. “Thank you,” he said a moment later. “Thank you for being such a wonderful friend to her.”

That meant Leslie was gone. Turned to ashes. He would never see her again. Not even dead. Never. How could they dare? Leslie belonged to him. More to him than anyone in the world. No one had even asked him. No one had even told him. And now he was never going to see her again, and all they could do was cry. Not for Leslie. They weren’t crying for Leslie. They were crying for themselves.

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.

“Did you see her?” she asked excitedly. “Did you see her laid out?” He hit her. In the face. As hard as he had ever hit anything in his life. She stumbled backward from him with a little yelp.

I am now the fastest runner in the fifth grade.

May Belle ain’t God.”

“Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don’t have to be ashamed.” He saw a flash of Leslie’s eyes as she was going in to the girls’ room to see Janice Avery. “Everybody gets scared.”

Of course, by Monday Jess knew; but still, but still, at the bus stop he looked up, half expecting to see her running up across the field, her lovely, even, rhythmic run.

people kept telling me not to cry, kept trying to make me forget.” Mrs. Myers loving, mourning. How could you picture it? “But I didn’t want to forget.”

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.

It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king.

Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn’t there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

And when he finished, he put flowers in her hair and led her across the bridge—the great bridge into Terabithia—which might look to someone with no magic in him like a few planks across a nearly dry gully.