Flipped

Last year, in the seventh grade, Bryce’s grandfather, Chet (Patsy’s father), moved in with the family. At first, he spent most of his time sitting by the front window, staring out at the neighborhood, and barely acknowledged Bryce. Bryce often caught him fixating upon the Bakers’ yard. To Bryce, this made no sense—the Bakers’ place is a tangle of weeds, bushes, and vines. Unlike Bryce’s dad Rick, who takes pride in his home’s appearance, Juli’s father Robert isn’t much of a landscaper. In fact, he’s a landscape painter.

The whole time Bryce has known Juli, she’s been in love with the old sycamore tree by the bus stop, climbing it every chance she got. Back in the fifth grade, she scrambled up to retrieve Bryce’s kite from its branches. Bryce, however, was never quite as brave or fearless. By the seventh grade, it had become her routine to climb it each morning and call out how many blocks away the bus was. Bryce thought she was embarrassing herself, and he never joined her, even when she begged him to climb up.

Eventually, Bryce stopped waiting at the bus stop altogether, choosing instead to hide nearby until the bus arrived so he wouldn’t have to deal with Juli first thing each day. But one morning last year, he saw a group of men with chainsaws at the base of the sycamore, shouting at Juli to come down. She had climbed to the top in protest—they were there to cut the tree down. Bryce boarded the bus when it came, leaving her behind, and later that day he returned to find half of the tree cut down. To his surprise, he felt like crying, and he even considered calling Juli to apologize. But in the end, he kept quiet.

The next day, Chet had handed Bryce the local newspaper with a photo of Juli in the sycamore on the front page. He told Bryce he should befriend her, because “a girl like that doesn’t live next door to everyone.” He urged Bryce to read the article, but Bryce only felt irritated that the first real conversation his grandfather wanted to have with him was about Juli. In the following days, she stopped coming to the bus stop, and his friend Garrett eventually mentioned that she’d been biking to school. Bryce had thought about convincing her to ride the bus again, but he’d stopped himself, afraid she’d mistake it for romantic interest.