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?”
“Right.”
That afternoon, crouched in the stronghold of Terabithia, they held a council of war. How to get Janice Avery without ending up squashed or suspended—that was their problem.
“Maybe we could get her caught doing something.” Leslie was trying out another idea after they had both rejected putting honey on her bus seat and glue in her hand lotion. “You know she smokes in the girls’ room. If we could just get Mr. Turner to walk past while the smoke is pouring out—”
Jess shook his head hopelessly. “It wouldn’t take her five minutes to find out who squawked.” There was a moment of silence while they both considered what Janice Avery might do to anyone who reported her to the principal. “We gotta get her without her knowing who done it.”
“Yeah.” Leslie chewed away at a dried apricot. “You know what girls like Janice hate most?”
“What?”
“Being made a fool of.”
Jess remembered how Janice had looked that day he’d made everyone laugh at her on the bus. Leslie was right. There was a crack in the old hippo hide. “Yeah.” He nodded, beginning to smile. “Yeah. Do we get her about being fat?”
“How about,” Leslie began slowly, “how about boys? Who’s she stuck on?”
“Willard Hughes, I reckon. Every girl in the seventh grade slides to the ground when he walks by.”
“Yeah.” Leslie’s eyes were shining. The plan came all in a rush. “We write her a note, you see, and pretend it’s from Willard.”
Jess was already getting a pencil from the can and yanking a piece of notebook paper out from under a rock. He handed them to Leslie.
“No, you write. My handwriting is too good for Willard Hughes.”
He got set and waited.
“OK,” she said. “Um. ‘Dear Janice.’ No. ‘Dearest Janice.’”
Jess hesitated, doubtful.
“Believe me, Jess. She’ll eat it up. OK. ‘Dearest Janice.’ Don’t worry about punctuation or anything. We have to make it look as if Willard Hughes really wrote it. OK. ‘Dearest Janice, Maybe you won’t believe me, but I love you.’”
“You think she’ll…?” he asked as he wrote it down.
“I told you, she’ll eat it up. Girls like Janice Avery believe just what they want to in this kind of situation. OK, now. ‘If you say you do not love me, it will break my heart. So please don’t. If you love me as much as I love you, my darling—’”
“Hold it. I can’t write that fast.”
Leslie waited, and when he looked up, she continued in a moony voice, “‘Meet me behind the school this afternoon after school. Do not worry about missing your bus. I want to walk home with you and talk about US’—put ‘us’ in capitals—‘my darling. Love and kisses, Willard Hughes.’” “Kisses?”
“Yeah, kisses. Put a little row of x’s in there, too.” She paused, looking over his shoulder while he finished. “Oh, yes. Put ‘P.S.’”
He did.