Wendelin Van Draanen - Flipped

Anyway, normally I wouldn’t care about someone’s yard, but the Bakers’ mess bugged my dad big-time, and he channeled his frustration into our yard. He said it was our neighborly duty to show them what a yard’s supposed to look like. So while Mike and Matt are busy plumping up their boa, I’m having to mow and edge our yard, then sweep the walkways and gutter, which is going a little overboard, if you ask me.

And you’d think Juli’s dad—who’s a big, strong, bricklaying dude — would fix the place up, but no. According to my mom, he spends all his free time painting. His landscapes don’t seem like anything special to me, but judging by his price tags, he thinks quite a lot of them. We see them every year at the Mayfield County Fair, and my parents always say the same thing: “The world would have more beauty in it if he’d fix up the yard instead.”

Mom and Juli’s mom do talk some. I think my mom feels sorry for Mrs. Baker — she says she married a dreamer, and because of that, one of the two of them will always be unhappy.

Whatever. Maybe Juli’s aesthetic sensibilities have been permanently screwed up by her father and none of this is her fault, but Juli has always thought that that sycamore tree was God’s gift to our little corner of the universe.

Back in the third and fourth grades she used to clown around with her brothers in the branches or peel big chunks of bark off so they could slide down the crook in its trunk. It seemed like they were playing in it whenever my mom took us somewhere in the car. Juli’d be swinging from the branches, ready to fall and break every bone in her body, while we were waiting at the stoplight, and my mom would shake her head and say, “Don’t you ever climb that tree like that, do you hear me, Bryce? I never want to see you doing that! You either, Lynetta. That is much too dangerous.”

My sister would roll her eyes and say, “As if, ” while I’d slump beneath the window and pray for the light to change before Juli squealed my name for the world to hear.

I did try to climb it once in the fifth grade. It was the day after Juli had rescued my kite from its mutant toy-eating foliage. She climbed miles up to get my kite, and when she came down, she was actually very cool about it. She didn’t hold my kite hostage and stick her lips out like I was afraid she might. She just handed it over and then backed away.

I was relieved, but I also felt like a weenie. When I’d seen where my kite was trapped, I was sure it was a goner. Not Juli. She scrambled up and got it down in no time. Man, it was embarrassing.

So I made a mental picture of how high she’d climbed, and the next day I set off to outdo her by at least two branches. I made it past the crook, up a few limbs, and then — just to see how I was doing — I looked down.

Mis-take! It felt like I was on top of the Empire State Building without a bungee. I tried looking up to where my kite had been, but it was hopeless. I was indeed a tree-climbing weenie.

Then junior high started and my dream of a Juli-free existence shattered. I had to take the bus, and you-know-who did, too. There were about eight kids altogether at our bus stop, which created a buffer zone, but it was no comfort zone. Juli always tried to stand beside me, or talk to me, or in some other way mortify me.

And then she started climbing. The girl is in the seventh grade, and she’s climbing a tree — way, way up in a tree. And why does she do it? So she can yell down at us that the bus is five! four! three blocks away! Blow-by-blow traffic watch from a tree — what every kid in junior high feels like hearing first thing in the morning.

She tried to get me to come up there with her, too. “Bryce, come on! You won’t believe the colors! It’s absolutely magnificent! Bryce, you’ve got to come up here!”

Yeah, I could just hear it: “Bryce and Juli sitting in a tree… ” Was I ever going to leave the second grade behind?

One morning I was specifically not looking up when out of nowhere she swings down from a branch and practically knocks me over. Heart a-ttack! I dropped my backpack and wrenched my neck, and that did it. I refused to wait under that tree with that maniac monkey on the loose anymore. I started leaving the house at the very last minute. I made up my own waiting spot, and when I’d see the bus pull up, I’d truck up the hill and get on board.

No Juli, no problem.

And that, my friend, took care of the rest of seventh grade and almost all of eighth, too, until one day a few months ago. That’s when I heard a commotion up the hill and could see some big trucks parked up on Collier Street where the bus pulls in. There were some men shouting stuff up at Juli, who was, of course, five stories up in the tree.

All the other kids started to gather under the tree, too, and I could hear them telling her she had to come down. She was fine — that was obvious to anyone with a pair of ears — but I couldn’t figure out what they were all arguing about.

I trucked up the hill, and as I got closer and saw what the men were holding, I figured out in a hurry what was making Juli refuse to come out of the tree.

Chain saws.

Don’t get me wrong here, okay? The tree was an ugly mutant tangle of gnarly branches. The girl arguing with those men was Juli — the world’s peskiest, bossiest, most know-it-all female. But all of a sudden my stomach completely bailed on me. Juli loved that tree. Stupid as it was, she loved that tree, and cutting it down would be like cutting out her heart.

Everyone tried to talk her down. Even me. But she said she wasn’t coming down, not ever, and then she tried to talk us up . “Bryce, please! Come up here with me. They won’t cut it down if we’re all up here!”

For a second I considered it. But then the bus arrived and I talked myself out of it. It wasn’t my tree, and even though she acted like it was, it wasn’t Juli’s, either.

We boarded the bus and left her behind, but school was pretty much a waste. I couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Juli. Was she still up in the tree? Were they going to arrest her?

When the bus dropped us off that afternoon, Juli was gone and so was half the tree. The top branches, the place my kite had been stuck, her favorite perch — they were all gone.

We watched them work for a little while, the chain saws gunning at full throttle, smoking as they chewed through wood. The tree looked lopsided and naked, and after a few minutes I had to get out of there. It was like watching someone dismember a body, and for the first time in ages, I felt like crying. Crying . Over a stupid tree that I hated.

I went home and tried to shake it off, but I kept wondering, Should I have gone up the tree with her? Would it have done any good?

I thought about calling Juli to tell her I was sorry they’d cut it down, but I didn’t. It would’ve been too, I don’t know, weird.

She didn’t show at the bus stop the next morning and didn’t ride the bus home that afternoon, either.

Then that night, right before dinner, my grandfather summoned me into the front room. He didn’t call to me as I was walking by — that would have bordered on friendliness. What he did was talk to my mother, who talked to me. “I don’t know what it’s about, honey,” she said. “Maybe he’s just ready to get to know you a little better.”

Great. The man’s had a year and a half to get acquainted, and he chooses now to get to know me. But I couldn’t exactly blow him off.

My grandfather’s a big man with a meaty nose and greased-back salt-and-pepper hair. He lives in house slippers and a sports coat, and I’ve never seen a whisker on him. They grow, but he shaves them off like three times a day. It’s a real recreational activity for him.