Jacob Have I Loved: A Newbery Award Winner

by Katherine Paterson

I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention.

Life begins to turn upside down at thirteen. I know that now.

I was right. I knew I was right, so why had they all laughed?

I didn’t want to go, but it would have been harder to stay away and imagine what people were saying about me than to go and face them.

It was a very comforting feeling thus to remove myself from the world I imagined was laughing at me.

But I had never caused my parents “a minute’s worry.” Didn’t they know that worry proves you care? Didn’t they realize that I needed their worry to assure myself that I was worth something?

I longed for the day when they would have to notice me, give me all the attention and concern that was my due.

But to fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.

I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm. There was nothing I could do about it. I seemed relatively harmless.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.

Males, I thought, always have a chance to live no matter how short their lives, but females, ordinary, ungifted ones, just get soft and die.

There was that old dream of mountains. Maybe I would go far enough to see a mountain.