FOUR
Rulers of Terabithia
Because school had started on the first Tuesday after Labor Day, it was a short week. It was a good thing because each day was worse than the day before. Leslie continued to join the boys at recess, and every day she won. By Friday a number of the fourth- and fifth-grade boys had already drifted away to play King of the Mountain on the slope between the two fields. Since there were only a handful left, they didn’t even have to have heats, which took away a lot of the suspense. Running wasn’t fun anymore. And it was all Leslie’s fault.
Jess knew now that he would never be the best runner of the fourth and fifth grades, and his only consolation was that neither would Gary Fulcher. They went through the motions of the contest on Friday, but when it was over and Leslie had won again, everyone sort of knew without saying so that it was the end of the races.
At least it was Friday, and Miss Edmunds was back. The fifth grade had music right after recess. Jess had passed Miss Edmunds in the hall earlier in the day, and she had stopped him and made a fuss over him. “Did you keep drawing this summer?”
“Yes’m.”
“May I see your pictures or are they private?”
Jess shoved his hair off his red forehead. “I’ll show you ’um.”
She smiled her beautiful even-toothed smile and shook her shining black hair back off her shoulders. “Great!” she said. “See you.”
He nodded and smiled back. Even his toes had felt warm and tingly.
Now as he sat on the rug in the teachers’ room the same warm feeling swept through him at the sound of her voice. Even her ordinary speaking voice bubbled up from inside her, rich and melodic.
Miss Edmunds fiddled a minute with her guitar, talking as she tightened the strings to the jingling of her bracelets and the thrumming of chords. She was in her jeans as usual and sat there cross-legged in front of them as though that was the way teachers always did. She asked a few of the kids how they were and how their summer had been. They kind of mumbled back. She didn’t speak directly to Jess, but she gave him a look with those blue eyes of hers that made him zing like one of the strings she was strumming.
She took note of Leslie and asked for an introduction, which one of the girls prissily gave. Then she smiled at Leslie, and Leslie smiled back—the first time Jess could remember seeing Leslie smile since she won the race on Tuesday. “What do you like to sing, Leslie?”
“Oh, anything.”
Miss Edmunds picked a few odd chords and then began to sing, more quietly than usual for that particular song:
“I see a land bright and clear
And the time’s coming near
When we’ll live in this land
You and me, hand in hand…”
People began to join in, quietly at first to match her mood, but as the song built up at the end, their voices did as well, so that by the time they got to the final “Free to be you and me,” the whole school could hear them. Caught in the pure delight of it, Jess turned and his eyes met Leslie’s. He smiled at her. What the heck? There wasn’t any reason he couldn’t. What was he scared of anyhow? Lord. Sometimes he acted like the original yellow-bellied sapsucker. He nodded and smiled again. She smiled back. He felt there in the teachers’ room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so.
He did not have to make any announcement to Leslie that he had changed his mind about her. She already knew it. She plunked herself down beside him on the bus and squeezed over closer to him to make room f
or May Belle on the same seat. She talked about Arlington, about the huge suburban school she used to go to with its gorgeous music room but not a single teacher in it as beautiful or as nice as Miss Edmunds.
“You had a gym?”
“Yeah. I think all the schools did. Or most of them anyway.” She sighed. “I really miss it. I’m pretty good at gymnastics.”
“I guess you hate it here.”
“Yeah.”
She was quiet for a moment, thinking, Jess decided, about her former school, which he saw as bright and new with a gleaming gymnasium larger than the one at the consolidated high school.
“I guess you had a lot of friends there, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Why’d you come here?”