Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson [38]
He was glad she was gone. There was something weird about a woman like that crying. It was as if the lady who talked about Polident on TV had suddenly burst into tears. It didn’t fit. He looked around at the room full of red-eyed adults. Look at me, he wanted to say to them. I’m not crying. A part of him stepped back and examined this thought. He was the only person his age he knew whose best friend had died. It made him important. The kids at school Monday would probably whisper around him and treat him with respect—the way they’d all treated Billy Joe Weems last year after his father had been killed in a car crash. He wouldn’t have to talk to anybody if he didn’t want to, and all the teachers would be especially nice to him. Momma would even make the girls be nice to him.
He had a sudden desire to see Leslie laid out. He wondered if she were back in the library or in Millsburg at one of the funeral parlors. Would they bury her in blue jeans? Or maybe that blue jumper and the flowery blouse she’d worn Easter. That would be nice. People might snicker at the blue jeans, and he didn’t want anyone to snicker at Leslie when she was dead.
Bill came into the room. P.T. slid off Jess’s lap and went to him. The man leaned down and rubbed the dog’s back. Jess stood up.
“Jess.” Bill came over to him and put his arms around him as though he had been Leslie instead of himself. Bill held him close, so that a button on his sweater was pressing painfully into Jess’s forehead, but as uncomfortable as he was, Jess didn’t move. He could feel Bill’s body shaking, and he was afraid that if he looked up he would see Bill crying, too. He didn’t want to see Bill crying. He wanted to get out of this house. It was smothering him. Why wasn’t Leslie here to help him out of this? Why didn’t she come running in and make everyone laugh again? You think it’s so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well, it ain’t.
“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.”
Bill didn’t sound like himself. He sounded like someone in an old mushy movie. The kind of person Leslie and Jess would laugh at and imitate later. Boo-hooooooo, you were such a wonderful friend to her. He couldn’t help moving back, just enough to get his forehead off the stupid button. To his relief, Bill let go. He heard his father ask Bill quietly over his head about “the service.”
And Bill answering quietly almost in his regular voice that they had decided to have the body cremated and were going to take the ashes to his family home in Pennsylvania tomorrow.
Cremated. Something clicked inside Jess’s head. 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. Just themselves. If they’d cared at all for Leslie, they would have never brought her to this rotten place. He had to hold tightly to his hands for fear he might sock Bill in the face.
He, Jess, was the only one who really cared for Leslie. But Leslie had failed him. She went and died just when he needed her the most. She went and left him. She went swinging on that rope just to show him that she was no coward. So there, Jess Aarons. She was probably somewhere right now laughing at him. Making fun of him like he was Mrs. Myers. She had tricked him. 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.
He was never sure