The Bridge Battle, page 1
Dedication
For Joy Bernstein and Charlie Rich,
good neighbors and
true patrons of the arts
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 Welcome to Fairy Land
Chapter 2 Natural-Born Leader
Chapter 3 The Great Big Book of Bridges
Chapter 4 Glitch
Chapter 5 Unexpected Outcomes
Chapter 6 Friday #1
Chapter 7 Sneaky People
Chapter 8 Out of the Scrub and onto the Roof
Chapter 9 The Bet
Chapter 10 Friday #2
Chapter 11 Tension and Compression
Chapter 12 Just a Joke
Chapter 13 Where Is Pixie?
Chapter 14 You Get Used to It
Chapter 15 Something Diabolical
Chapter 16 Someone Smaller
Chapter 17 How an Arch Bridge Works
Chapter 18 Friday #3
Chapter 19 An Unexpected Visitor
Chapter 20 The Bridge Between
Chapter 21 Applause
About the Author
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Welcome to Fairy Land
“Geese!” said Jessie, wrinkling her nose and pointing at a pair of birds nibbling grass on the playground. “I don’t like geese.”
“I know,” said her mother, hurrying up the path to the school. They were almost—but not quite—late for the first day of Summer Fun Exploration Camp. “Just stay away from them, okay?”
“Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t get within fifty feet of those geese!” said Jessie indignantly. “Do you know how much they poop?”
“No,” said Mrs. Treski.
“Well, I do!” said Jessie, breaking into a run. Jessie was small for her age and often had to jog to keep up with her mother and older brother, Evan. Her backpack, heavy with its special book inside, banged against her rear end with every step.
“I thought you would,” said Mrs. Treski, scanning the playground. All the other kids had gone inside. They were definitely late.
“A Canada goose makes up to two pounds of poop every day!”
“Jessie, please,” said her mother. “We need to find your class.”
Jessie stopped on the walkway and folded both her arms across her chest. “My class was Young Engineers: Build Your Own Bridges!” she said. “That’s the one I signed up for.”
“I know,” said Mrs. Treski. “It’s my fault. I sent in the form late. I’m sorry, Jess. But you can still have fun in a different class.”
“How to Make and Decorate Fairy Houses?” shouted Jessie. “Are you kidding me?” Jessie still couldn’t believe that she had to spend three whole weeks doing something as ridiculous, as foolish, as dishonest as making fairy houses. There are no such thing as fairies. Jessie was nine years old and she knew this for a fact. She had never believed in fairies. Never.
Before this morning, Jessie had hoped the class would be canceled. She was the sixth person to sign up for the class, and there had to be at least seven students or the class would be canceled. For two weeks, Jessie had waited to get the cancellation email. It never came.
“It’ll be fun,” said Mrs. Treski, trying to open the side door of the school. It was locked. They would have to climb the hill, for which the school was named, and enter through the front door.
Jessie was about to list all the ways that this fairy class would not be fun—she could think of at least eight reasons right off the top of her head—when she caught sight of her mother’s face. Her mother’s lips were pressed together, her cheeks were red, and her eyebrows dipped down at the sides.
Jessie knew from her emotions flash cards that these three things meant that her mother was “worried” or “frustrated.” Why would her mother be worried or frustrated? Jessie wondered. She wasn’t the one who was going to be stuck at Summer Fun Exploration Camp building fairy houses for three weeks!
Jessie checked her mother’s face again. Feelings were often a mystery to Jessie. Still, she was getting better at reading the clues on people’s faces. And she didn’t want to make her mom feel worse. Jessie knew it was hard being a grownup and taking care of two kids all on her own. Evan had explained that to her. Evan explained a lot of things to Jessie.
She hitched up her backpack on her shoulders and started to walk up the hill. One of the geese on the playground flapped its wings and honked loudly, causing Jessie to look toward the stream and the middle school beyond.
“Look!” shouted Jessie, pointing across the playground fields. “I see Evan!”
Mrs. Treski stopped and looked beyond the little stream that separated the elementary school and the town’s one middle school. Jessie shouted, “Hey! Evan! Over here!”
Evan was starting his first day of summer school. Summer school was not the same as Summer Fun Exploration Camp. Evan had told her this, too. It was real school for kids who needed extra help. Jessie had wanted Evan to walk to camp with her, but he had said, “No way! I’m not showing up on the first day of school with my little sister!” Jessie wished she was going to real school instead of camp. In fact, she would rather sit on a mound of dirt filled with ten thousand biting fire ants than spend three weeks building fairy houses.
Evan looked in her direction. There were other kids entering the middle school. He didn’t wave to her. Instead, he hunched his shoulders and kept on walking toward the school entrance.
Jessie frowned.
“C’mon, Jess,” said her mother, tugging gently on Jessie’s backpack because Jessie didn’t like to be touched.
“Mom, I know the way,” said Jessie. “You don’t have to walk me in.” This was the school that she and Evan went to. Next year, they would both be in the fifth grade, even though Jessie was a year younger than Evan. She had skipped third grade because she was “academically advanced.” And also because those three horrible girls—Lorelei, Andrea, and most especially Becky Baker—had played a really mean trick on her. If she had had her way, she would have sent all three of them to live in a different town—perhaps one with lots of mounds of dirt filled with fire ants.
But no one had been sent away. Instead, the three girls had gone to the principal’s office and Jessie had gotten to skip ahead to Evan’s grade. She was glad to be away from those girls forever.
“Okay,” said Mrs. Treski. “I have a meeting that starts in ten minutes. You’ll be fine.” She knelt down so she was looking right into Jessie’s face. “Look. I know this isn’t what you wanted. But try to make the best of it, okay?”
“Lemons into lemonade,” said Jessie glumly.
“Exactly. We’re Treskis. We know how to roll with the punches, right?”
Jessie nodded, but inside she was thinking, Three weeks! She looked across the field to the middle school. The stream with the marshlands in between the two schools was a stopping-off point for migrating Canada geese and a permanent home for the ones that didn’t migrate. Every year a few pairs made their nests in the tall grasses near the stream. All the kids at Hillside Elementary thought the goslings that hatched were cute, but Jessie knew that those cute babies would grow into adult geese that made even more poop! She was not a fan of baby geese.
Jessie entered the school and walked straight to the art room, a room she had never liked because the art teacher kept it very messy. The scissors were never in the right place, the glue bottles had gunky dried bits crusted on the tips, the floor was littered with hard blobs of clay, and the paper wasn’t sorted by color, starting with red and ending with violet, the way the light spectrum sorted colors. If Jessie had her way, she would reorganize the entire art room. Jessie liked to organize.
But when she walked into the art room this morning, it was almost empty. All the art supplies had been removed for the summer, and the long black tables had been scrubbed down so that they were completely smooth. Even the walls were bare. Jessie liked it!
“Hello! And welcome,” said a young woman dressed in a fairy costume. She didn’t look old enough to be a teacher, but she was definitely too old to be dressed like a fairy. She had a sparkly silver sequined top and a puffy tulle skirt like a ballerina. She was also wearing a glittery diamond tiara on top of her jet-black hair, and dangly diamond earrings that were so long they brushed the tops of her bare shoulders. Jessie counted six earrings—in each ear! The gossamer fairy wings on her back twinkled, as did her shimmering nose ring. In one hand, she held a star wand made from a striped drinking straw and in the other she held a pinch of silver glitter. There was a colorful tattoo on her wrist of a seagull standing on a rock. She twirled toward Jessie, did a kitty-cat leap, and tossed some glitter into the air. “Welcome to Fairy Land!” she said.
“Stop it!” shouted Jessie, trying to swipe the glitter away. Jessie hated glitter. It was messy and fake and you could never get rid of it, no matter how hard you tried. It stuck and it stuck and it stuck, and days after cleaning it up, you would still find bits of it on the floor or on your cheek or in your bed. Jessie’s best friend, Megan, loved glitter, but even when Megan had used it to decorate their lemonade stand last summer, Jessie had refused to touch it.
“Sorry! Um. Are you okay? Good. Ha! That was a mistake. My name is Pixie Fairydust!” said the teacher. “I’m so glad you’ll be part of our Fairy Circle!” She picked up an ordinary clipboard and asked, “What is your name, please?”
A g
Jessie felt her cheeks get hot. She looked over. There were five girls of different ages seated at one of the long black art tables. Her eyes quickly spotted a cluster of three at one end who bent their heads together like flowers after a rain.
There was Lorelei.
There was Andrea.
And there was Becky Baker.
All three were sitting on stools, leaning their elbows on one of the smooth, clean art tables. All three were smiling as if they were the nicest girls in the world. But Jessie knew the truth. They were not nice girls. They were poison.
Becky Baker. This was going to be the worst Summer Fun Exploration Camp ever.
Chapter 2
Natural-Born Leader
Evan approached the middle school slowly. He had been inside it before. Basketball practices for the town-wide teams were sometimes held in the middle school gym. Still, it wasn’t his turf, and he could feel it, so he approached cautiously, his eyes scanning to see if he knew any of the boys, noticing who was standing with whom, trying to guess the ages of the kids, hoping to spot just one familiar face.
Evan reminded himself he was good at this. It was easy for him to talk to people. When he and his mom and Jessie went to the beach, Evan always found kids to play Frisbee with, while Jessie was happy to collect shells in a bucket or sit by herself reading.
Everyone liked Evan. He was good at getting along. On all his report cards, his teachers would write: “Well liked. Works well in groups. A natural-born leader.”
But they also wrote things like: “Needs academic support. Would benefit from extra help in reading fundamentals. Not up to grade level in math.”
His fourth grade teacher had strongly recommended summer school, and that had sealed his fate. This summer, he would be in school every day for eight weeks. None of his friends had to go. Only him. He felt like he was being sent into the desert with a lame camel and a half-empty canteen.
“Hey,” he said to the one boy who sat by himself at a picnic table. “My name’s Evan.”
The boy, whose back was to Evan, quickly scooped something off the picnic table and stuffed it in his pocket. When he turned around, Evan saw that the boy was small, with rectangular glasses that seemed too big for him, and a large birthmark on his left cheek. His hair was cut badly so that he had a serious spike right at the crown of his head.
The boy looked at him, then over at the larger group of boys standing in the middle of the blacktop. He squinted into the sun, and the light bounced off his glasses, creating so much glare that it looked to Evan like he had no eyes at all.
“Are you friends with them?” the boy asked. He curled his fingers under so that the tips pressed against the palms of his hands. Close and open. Close and open. Evan noticed that one of the boy’s front teeth was slightly chipped.
Evan looked over at the boys too. They were his height or even taller. The biggest one was leaning against a basketball pole, with one foot propped up against it. The other boys were turned toward him.
Evan understood this. A group is like a wheel, and the tall boy was at the center. He was the hub, and the others were just spokes that radiated off him.
“Nah,” Evan said to the boy. “I don’t know any of them. Do you think they’re in elementary school, like us?”
The boy straightened up, anger flashing across his face. “I’m going into seventh grade next year,” he said. “What grade are you in?”
Evan flushed. Now he’d said the wrong thing, and he barely even knew this kid. Plus, he had to admit that he was younger. Not a good way to start. “Sorry,” said Evan. “I guess I just figured everyone in this class would be in the same grade. I don’t know why.” He shrugged. “I’m going into fifth grade.”
He reached down and scooped up some pebbles, then did a fadeaway jump shot, tossing the pebbles into the air so that they rained down on the blacktop. When Evan needed to think or calm himself down, he always reached for a ball. He wished he’d brought his basketball today. But looking at the older boys, he had second thoughts. They weren’t playing ball. Maybe it was better just to do nothing. Maybe that’s what older kids did on the playground before school.
“You’re big for your age,” said the other boy, and Evan bit his tongue to keep from saying the obvious: You’re small for yours.
“Yeah,” said Evan, “I’m the tallest kid in my class at Hillside.” He pointed to the elementary school across the stream, then scooped up a few more pebbles and started juggling them in the air, tossing them from one palm to the other.
“I wish I was tall,” said the boy.
“Well, everybody’s got something,” said Evan. That’s what his mom always said. She meant it both ways: everybody’s got talents and everybody’s got troubles. She said it to Evan and she said it to Jessie, and she meant it just the same with both.
The boy jammed his hand in his jacket pocket and clutched whatever he had shoved in there a moment earlier. He seemed to be trying to decide something.
“Hey, Jump Shot,” shouted a voice across the blacktop. Evan turned. It was the tall boy, the one who was the center of the wheel. He was still leaning against the basketball pole, as if getting Evan’s attention wasn’t even worth the trouble of moving.
“Hi,” said Evan, smiling. Maybe someone in the group had a ball. Maybe they could shoot a few hoops before going in for their first day of summer school. That would make Evan feel better. Less nervous.
The boy sitting at the picnic table turned away quickly, like a clam snapping shut, so that his back was to Evan and the boys. Evan looked at the boy then drifted a little closer to the circle around the basketball pole. He still had a few pebbles in his hand.
“Bet you can’t make a basket with one of those pebbles from—” The tall boy glanced around the blacktop and then pointed. “That line.”
Evan smiled. He could make that shot. Maybe tomorrow he could bring his ball and they could start a game in the cool of the morning.
Evan moved up to the line, inching his toes to the very edge of the white paint. He picked the pebble in his hand that had the most weight and the roundest shape. He wished he could dribble it a few times to get his legs under him, but that wouldn’t work with a pebble. So he bent his knees twice and then let the pebble sail through the air.
It went right through the net. Dead center. Everybody’s got something, he thought to himself with satisfaction.
The boys roared, and a few of them even cursed loudly, which surprised Evan since they were so close to the school and a teacher might hear. The biggest kid said, “You’re pretty good,” and Evan could tell he had won his approval. Maybe summer school wasn’t going to be so bad after all. He could make new friends and even hang out with some seventh grade boys. That sounded pretty cool.
The tallest boy sauntered over and draped an arm around Evan’s neck. All the other boys trailed behind. “You know how to shoot,” he said, tightening his arm in a way that hurt Evan’s neck.
Evan smiled and let himself be pushed around a little. It was all in good fun.
Then the tall boy leaned in closer and said, “Do you think you can make that shot?” He pointed to a different part of the playground. But there was no basketball pole there. There was just the picnic table with the boy sitting at it, his back still turned to the other boys.
“What do you mean?” asked Evan.
“See if you can hit him with a pebble from here. It’s thirty feet, at least. If you can make that, you’re the champ.”
“N-o-o-o,” said Evan. “I’m not going to do that.”
“Aw, c’mon,” said the boy. “It’s just a pebble. It’s not going to hurt him. Look.” The tall boy scooped up a pebble, tossed it into the air, and let it land on his own head. “See. It’s nothing.”
Evan was still holding one pebble in his hand. He couldn’t imagine throwing it at some kid’s back, a kid he didn’t even know. It was different when you were horsing around with your friends. Over the years, he and Paul and Adam had thrown just about everything at each other: wads of paper, superballs, paper clips, even shoes. But Evan didn’t do that when a kid had his back turned. That wasn’t right.
Suddenly, a pebble flew through the air toward the picnic table. It missed its mark by more than ten feet. Evan didn’t know who had thrown it.
