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.

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.

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?"

"May I see your pictures or are they private?"

"Yes'm."

She smiled her beautiful even-toothed smile and shook her shining black hair back off her shoulders. "Great!" she said. "See you."

Jess shoved his hair off his red forehead. "I'll show you 'um."

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.

"Oh, anything."

Miss Edmunds picked a few odd chords and then began to sing, more quietly than usual for that particular song:

You and me, hand in hand…"

And the time's coming near

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.

"I see a land bright and clear

When we'll live in this land

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?"

"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."

"You had a gym?"

"Yeah."

"I guess you had a lot of friends there, too."

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.

"Huh?"

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 for 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.

"My parents are reassessing their value structure."

"Why'd you come here?"

"They decided they were too hooked on money and success, so they bought that old farm and they're going to farm it and think about what's important."

"Yeah."

"But you're the one that's gotta pay."

Jess was staring at her with his mouth open. He knew it, and he couldn't help himself. It was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard.

"Money is not the problem."

"Why don't they think about you?"

They watched the bus roar off.

"We talked it over," she explained patiently. "I wanted to come, too." She looked past him out the window. "You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like."

The bus had stopped. Leslie took May Belle's hand and led her off. Jess followed, still trying to figure out why two grown people and a smart girl like Leslie wanted to leave a comfortable life in the suburbs for a place like this.

"I mean," she said stiffly, "not for us."

"Sure it's the problem."

"Yeah."

It took him a minute to catch on. He did not know people for whom money was not the problem. "Oh." He tried to remember not to talk about money with her after that.

"You can't make a go of a farm nowadays, you know," he said finally. "My dad has to go to Washington to work, or we wouldn't have enough money…"

It started with Mrs. Myers reading out loud a composition that Leslie had written about her hobby. Everyone had to write a paper about his or her favorite hobby. Jess had written about football, which he really hated, but he had enough brains to know that if he said drawing, everyone would laugh at him. Most of the boys swore that watching the Washington Redskins on TV was their favorite hobby. The girls were divided: those who didn't care much about what Mrs. Myers thought chose watching game shows on TV, and those like Wanda Kay Moore who were still aiming for A's chose reading Good Books. But Mrs. Myers didn't read anyone's paper out loud except Leslie's.

But Leslie had other problems at Lark Creek that caused more of a rumpus than lack of money. There was the matter of television.

"I want to read this composition aloud. For two reasons. One, it is beautifully written. And two, it tells about an unusual hobby -- for a girl." Mrs. Myers beamed her first-day smile at Leslie. Leslie stared at her desk. Being Mrs. Myers' pet was pure poison at Lark Creek. "'Scuba Diving' by Leslie Burke."

"I am sure," Mrs. Myers was saying, "that all of you were as impressed as I was with Leslie's exciting essay."

Mrs. Myers' sharp voice cut Leslie's sentences into funny little phrases, but even so, the power of Leslie's words drew Jess with her under the dark water. Suddenly he could hardly breathe. Suppose you went under and your mask filled all up with water and you couldn't get to the top in time? He was choking and sweating. He tried to push down his panic. This was Leslie Burke's favorite hobby. Nobody would make up scuba diving to be their favorite hobby if it wasn't so. That meant Leslie did it a lot. That she wasn't scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light. Lord, he was such a coward. How could he be all in a tremble just listening to Mrs. Myers read about it? He was worse a baby than Joyce Ann. His dad expected him to be a man. And here he was letting some girl who wasn't even ten yet scare the liver out of him by just telling what it was like to sight-see underwater. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

"Mrs. Myers."

"One side will be enough, Wanda Kay. But I will give extra credit to those who do extra work."

"What if you can't watch the program?"

"A whole page?"

"Does spelling count?"

"Doesn't spelling always count, Gary?"

"Both sides of the paper?"

"What if"-- Leslie's voice faltered; then she shook her head and cleared her throat so the words came out stronger --"what if you don't have a television set?"

In the classroom there was a shuffling of feet and papers. "Now I want to give you a homework assignment"-- muffled groans --"that I'm sure you'll enjoy."-- mumblings of unbelief --"Tonight on Channel 7 at 8 P. M. there is going to be a special about a famous underwater explorer -- Jacques Cousteau. I want everyone to watch. Then write one page telling what you learned."

Wanda Kay smiled primly. You could already see ten pages taking shape in her pointy head.

"Yes, Leslie." Lord, Mrs. Myers was liable to crack her face if she kept up smiling like that.

"You inform your parents that it is a homework assignment. I am sure they will not object."

"Yes."

Impressed. Lord. He'd nearly drowned.

At recess time when he was playing King of the Mountain, he could see that Leslie was surrounded by a group of girls led by Wanda Kay. He couldn't hear what they were saying, but he could tell by the proud way Leslie was throwing her head back that the others were making fun of her. Greg Williams grabbed him then, and while they wrestled, Leslie disappeared. It was none of his business, really, but he threw Greg down the hill as hard as he could and yelled to no one in particular, "Gotta go."

Mrs. Myers blinked her eyes. "Well. Well." She blinked some more. You could tell she was trying to figure out how to save Leslie, too. "Well. In that case one could write a one-page composition on something else. Couldn't one, Leslie?" She tried to smile across the classroom upheaval to Leslie, but it was no use. "Class! Class! Class!" Her Leslie smile shifted suddenly and ominously into a scowl that silenced the storm.

Lord, Leslie. Don't say that. You can always watch on mine. But it was too late to save her. The hissing sounds of disbelief were already building into a rumbling of contempt.

She handed out dittoed sheets of arithmetic problems. Jess stole a look at Leslie. Her face, bent low over the math sheet, was red and fierce.

He stationed himself across from the girls' room. Leslie came out in a few minutes. He could tell she had been crying.

"Hey, Leslie," he called softly.

"You know perfectly well what's the matter, Jess Aarons."

"Yeah." He rubbed his hair. "If you'd justa kept your mouth shut. You can always watch at my…"

"Go away!" She turned abruptly and headed the other way in a fast walk. With an eye on the office door, he ran after her. Nobody was supposed to be in the halls during recess. "Leslie. Whatsa matter?"

But she had wheeled around again, and was zooming down the hall. Before he could finish the sentence and catch up with her, she was swinging the door to the girls' room right at his nose. Jess slunk out of the building. He couldn't risk Mr. Turner catching him hanging around the girls' room as though he was some kind of pervert or something.

After school Leslie got on the bus before he did and went straight to the corner of the long backseat -- right to the seventh graders' seat. He jerked his head at her to warn her to come farther up front, but she wouldn't even look at him. He could see the seventh graders headed for the bus -- the huge bossy bosomy girls and the mean, skinny, narrow-eyed boys. They'd kill her for sitting in their territory. He jumped up and ran to the back and grabbed Leslie by the arm. "You gotta come up to your regular seat, Leslie."

He planted his body as firmly as he could, although his heart was knocking at his Adam's apple. "C'mon, Leslie," he said, and then he made himself turn and give Janice Avery one of those look-overs from frizz blond hair, past too tight blouse and broad-beamed jeans, to gigantic sneakers. When he finished, he swallowed, stared straight up into her scowling face, and said, almost steadily, "Don't look like there'll be room across the back here for you and Janice Avery."

Even as he spoke, he could feel the bigger kids pushing up behind him down the narrow aisle. Indeed, Janice Avery, who among all the seventh graders was the one person who devoted her entire life to scaring the wits out of anyone smaller than she, was right behind him. "Move, kid," she said.

Somebody hooted. "Weight Watchers is waiting for you, Janice!"

Janice's eyes were hate-mad, but she moved aside for Jess and Leslie to make their way past her to their regular seat.

Leslie glanced back as they sat down, and then leaned over. "She's going to get you for that, Jess. Boy, she is mad."

By the time they got off the bus, he could finally send a swallow past his Adam's apple without choking. He even gave a little wave at the back seat as the bus pulled off.

"You ain't got nothing to do. You ain't even planned nothing."

Jess warmed to the tone of respect in Leslie's voice, but he didn't dare look back. "Heck," he said. "You think I'm going to let some dumb cow like that scare me?"

"Hey, do you think we could do something this afternoon?"

Leslie was grinning at him over May Belle's head.

"Me, too! I wanna do something, too," May Belle shrilled. Jess looked at Leslie. No was in her eyes. "Not this time, May Belle. Leslie and I got something we gotta do just by ourselves today. You can carry my books home and tell Momma I'm over at the Burkes'. OK?"

"Well," he said happily. "See you."

Leslie came and leaned over May Belle, putting her hand on the little girl's thin shoulder. "May Belle, would you like some new paper dolls?"

"Life in Colonial America."

May Belle slid her eyes around suspiciously. "What kind?"

"Nothing. They're brand-new."

"You can pretend these are bride paper dolls. They have lots of beautiful long dresses."

May Belle shook her head. "I want Bride or Miss America."

"How come you don't want 'um if they're so great?"

They could see she was weakening. "How about," Jess began, "you coming down and taking a look at 'um, and if they suit you, you could take 'um along home when you go tell Momma where I am?"

"Whatsa matter with 'um?"

"When you're my age"-- Leslie gave a little sigh --"you just don't play with paper dolls anymore. My grandmother sent me these. You know how it is, grandmothers just forget you're growing up."

"No, honestly. And all the clothes punch out, too. You don't have to use scissors."

May Belle's one living grandmother was in Georgia and never sent her anything. "You already punched 'um out?"

After they had watched May Belle tearing up the hill, clutching her new treasure, Jess and Leslie turned and ran up over the empty field behind the old Perkins place and down to the dry creek bed that separated farmland from the woods. 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.

"Do you know what we need?" Leslie called to him. Intoxicated as he was with the heavens, he couldn't imagine needing anything on earth.

They took turns swinging across the gully on the rope. It was a glorious autumn day, and if you looked up as you swung, it gave you the feeling of floating. Jess leaned back and drank in the rich, clear color of the sky. He was drifting, drifting like a fat white lazy cloud back and forth across the blue.

There were parts of the woods that Jess did not like. Dark places where it was almost like being underwater, but he didn't say so.

Her words stirred inside of him. He'd like to be a ruler of something. Even something that wasn't real. "OK," he said. "Where could we have it?"

"We need a place," she said, "just for us. It would be so secret that we would never tell anyone in the whole world about it." Jess came swinging back and dragged his feet to stop. She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. "It might be a whole secret country," she continued, "and you and I would be the rulers of it."

"Over there in the woods where nobody would come and mess it up."

They had gone only a few yards into the woods beyond the creek bed when Leslie stopped.

"Sure," Jess agreed quickly, relieved that there was no need to plunge deeper into the woods. He would take her there, of course, for he wasn't such a coward that he would mind a little exploring now and then farther in amongst the ever-darkening columns of the tall pines. But as a regular thing, as a permanent place, this was where he would choose to be -- 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.

"I know"-- she was getting excited --"it could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope." Her eyes were bright. She grabbed the rope. "Come on," she said. "Let's find a place to build our castle stronghold."

"How about right here?" she asked.

"Sure," he repeated himself, nodding vigorously. The underbrush was dry and would be easy to clear away. The ground was almost level. "This'll be a good place to build."

But he could make stuff. They dragged boards and other materials down from the scrap heap by Miss Bessie's pasture and built their castle stronghold in the place they had found in the woods. Leslie filled a three-pound coffee can with crackers and dried fruit and a one-pound can with strings and nails. They found five old Pepsi bottles which they washed and filled with water, in case, as Leslie said, "of siege."

"I can't." 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? "I just can't get the poetry of the trees," he said.

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. That was the hard part. When Leslie spoke, the words rolling out so regally, you knew she was a proper queen. He could hardly manage English, much less the poetic language of a king.

"You should draw a picture of Terabithia for us to hang in the castle," Leslie said.

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

When Jess finally got to Terabithia, Leslie was huddled next to one of the cracks below the roof trying to get enough light to read. There was a picture on the cover which showed a killer whale attacking a dolphin.

She nodded. "Don't worry," she said. "You will someday."

He believed her because there in the shadowy light of the stronghold everything seemed possible. Between the two of them they owned the world and no enemy, Gary Fulcher, Wanda Kay Moore, Janice Avery, Jess's own fears and insufficiencies, nor any of the foes whom Leslie imagined attacking Terabithia, could ever really defeat them.

A few days after they finished the castle, Janice Avery fell down in the school bus and yelled that Jess had tripped her as she went past. She made such a fuss that Mrs. Prentice, the driver, ordered Jess off the bus, and he had to walk the three miles home.

"Whatcha doing?" He came in and sat beside her on the ground.

"Reading. I had to do something. That girl!" Her anger came rocketing to the surface.

"It don't matter. I don't mind walking all that much." What was a little hike compared to what Janice Avery might have chosen to do?

"What?"

He reached over and took the whale book from her hands, pretending to study the bloody picture on the jacket. "Getting any good ideas?"

"No, stupid. We're trying to save the whales. They might become extinct."

"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."

"Who's that?"

"Well, there was once this huge white whale named Moby Dick…" And Leslie began to spin out a wonderful story about a whale and a crazy sea captain who was bent on killing it. His fingers itched to try to draw it on paper. Maybe if he had some proper paints, he could do it. There ought to be a way of making the whale shimmering white against the dark water.

"I thought you was getting some ideas on how to stop Janice Avery."

He gave her back the book. "You save the whales and shoot the people, huh?"

She grinned finally. "Something like that, I guess. Say, did you ever hear the story about Moby Dick?"

At first they avoided each other during school hours, but by October they grew careless about their friendship. Gary Fulcher, like Brenda, took great pleasure in teasing Jess about his "girl friend." It hardly bothered Jess. He knew that a girl friend was somebody who chased you on the playground and tried to grab you and kiss you. He could no more imagine Leslie chasing a boy than he could imagine Mrs. Double-Chinned Myers shinnying up the flagpole. Gary Fulcher could go to you-know-where and warm his toes.

Jess could hardly keep a straight face in class just trying to imagine what might be going on behind that angelic look of Leslie's. One whole morning, as Leslie had related it at recess, she had spent imagining Mrs. Myers on one of those fat farms down in Arizona. In her fantasy, Mrs. Myers was one of the foodaholics who would hide bits of candy bars in odd places -- up the hot water faucet!-- only to be found out and publicly humiliated before all the other fat ladies. That afternoon Jess kept having visions of Mrs. Myers dressed only in a pink corset being weighed in. "You've been cheating again, Gussie!" the tall skinny directoress was saying. Mrs. Myers was on the verge of tears.

There was really no free time at school except recess, and now that there were no races, Jess and Leslie usually looked for a quiet place on the field, and sat and talked. Except for the magic half hour on Fridays, recess was all that Jess looked forward to at school. Leslie could always come up with something funny that made the long days bearable. Often the joke was on Mrs. Myers. Leslie was one of those people who sat quietly at her desk, never whispering or daydreaming or chewing gum, doing beautiful schoolwork, and yet her brain was so full of mischief that if the teacher could have once seen through that mask of perfection, she would have thrown her out in horror.

"Yes'm." He was going to have to get coaching from Leslie. Mrs. Myers always caught him when his mind was on vacation, but she never seemed to suspect Leslie of not paying attention. He sneaked a glance up that way. Leslie was totally absorbed in her geography book, or so it would appear to anyone who didn't know.

"Jesse Aarons!" The teacher's sharp voice punctured his daydream. He couldn't look Mrs. Myers straight in her pudgy face. He'd crack up. He set his sight on her uneven hemline.

Terabithia was cold in November. They didn't dare build a fire in the castle, though sometimes they would build one outside and huddle around it. For a while Leslie had been able to keep two sleeping bags in the stronghold, but around the first of December her father noticed their absence, and she had to take them back. Actually, Jess made her take them back. It was not that he was afraid of the Burkes exactly. Leslie's parents were young, with straight white teeth and lots of hair -- both of them. Leslie called them Judy and Bill, which bothered Jess more than he wanted it to. It was none of his business what Leslie called her parents. But he just couldn't get used to it.

They didn't look like Jess's idea of rich, but even he could tell that the jeans they wore had not come off the counter at Newberry's. There was no TV at the Burkes', but there were mountains of records and a stereo set that looked like something off Star Trek. And although their car was small and dusty, it was Italian and looked expensive, too.

Both of the Burkes were writers. Mrs. Burke wrote novels and, according to Leslie, was more famous than Mr. Burke, who wrote about politics. It was really something to see the shelf that had their books on it. Mrs. Burke was "Judith Hancock" on the cover, which threw you at first, but then if you looked on the back, there was her picture looking very young and serious. Mr. Burke was going back and forth to Washington to finish a book he was working on with someone else, but he had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.

They were always nice to Jess when he went over, but then they would suddenly begin talking about French politics or string quartets (which he at first thought was a square box made out of string), or how to save the timber wolves or redwoods or singing whales, and he was scared to open his mouth and show once and for all how dumb he was.

Jess didn't concern himself with what would "become of it." 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.

He wasn't comfortable having Leslie at his house either. Joyce Ann would stare, her index finger pulling down her mouth and making her drool. Brenda and Ellie always managed some remark about "girl friend." His mother acted stiff and funny just the way she did when she had to go up to school about something.

Later she would refer to Leslie's "tacky" clothes. Leslie always wore pants, even to school. Her hair was "shorter than a boy's." Her parents were "hardly more than hippies." May Belle either tried to push in with him and Leslie or sulked at being left out. His father had seen Leslie only a few times and had nodded to show that he had noticed her, but his mother said that she was sure he was fretting that his only son did nothing but play with girls, and they both were worried about what would become of it.

"I used to think this place was haunted," Jess had confessed to Leslie the first afternoon he had revved up his courage to bring her there.

Terabithia was their secret, which was a good thing, for how could Jess have ever explained it to an outsider? Just walking down the hill toward the woods made something warm and liquid steal through his body. The closer he came to the dry creek bed and the crab apple tree rope the more he could feel the beating of his heart. He grabbed the end of the rope and swung out toward the other bank with a kind of wild exhilaration and landed gently on his feet, taller and stronger and wiser in that mysterious land.

Leslie's favorite place besides the castle stronghold was the pine forest. There the trees grew so thick at the top that the sunshine was veiled. No low bush or grass could grow in that dim light, so the ground was carpeted with golden needles.

"Oh, but it is," she said. "But you don't have to be scared. It's not haunted with evil things."

"How do you know?"

"You can just feel it. Listen."

At first he heard only the stillness. It was the stillness that had always frightened him before, but this time it was like the moment after Miss Edmunds finished a song, just after the chords hummed down to silence. Leslie was right. They stood there, not moving, not wanting the swish of dry needles beneath their feet to break the spell. Far away from their former world came the cry of geese heading southward.

Leslie took a deep breath. "This is not an ordinary place," she whispered. "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. It would not do to disturb the Spirits."

He nodded, and without speaking, they went back to the creek bank where they shared together a solemn meal of crackers and dried fruit.