It seemed like an okay school. The walls were lined with recently repainted lockers. (Nova knew they were recently repainted because she touched one and got paint on her finger, which she licked off. It did not taste as orange as it looked.) Above the lockers and on teachers’ doors were posters and projects by students who’d designed their own book covers. Nova recognized one title right away: Bridge to Terabithia. Bridget had read her the first two chapters but ended up finishing it on her own one night while Nova was asleep. She’d apologized in the morning, explaining she “just had to” know the ending. Nova didn’t mind. Bridget had promised they’d start A Wrinkle in Time next, and Nova already loved it for its dusky blue cover with green and black circles.

“Sad book.” Francine tapped the Bridge to Terabithia poster. “I don’t think kids should read books about other kids dying.”

Kids dying.

Nova shuddered.

Kids should not be dying. Bridget had taught her that last spring when she’d done a project on starvation in Ethiopia.

“This shouldn’t happen.” Bridget slammed her research book shut. “Not to kids. Kids don’t deserve to die. Leave the dying for the people who start the wars that create the famines, not the kids who can’t do a damn thing about it!”

Nova didn’t understand words like starvation and famine and didn’t have the first idea where Ethiopia was (far from their home in New Hampshire, she guessed), but she understood that it was bad, because Bridget swore. And Bridget almost never swore. Not in front of Nova.

“Do you see?” asked Billy, jostling Nova out of the memory. He was pointing at another poster, which featured a girl jumping over a brook. “That’s what your classmates are learning.”

Nova couldn’t understand all of the words on their projects, but she could tell that these kids weren’t reading picture books, which were the only ones teachers ever gave her. They usually weren’t even good picture books. Each boring book had two or three boring words on each boring page under boring pictures. See cat. See cat run. Run, cat, run!

Nova hated those books.

Only Bridget read to her from chapter books and novels, ones that looked like Bridge to Terabithia. The Little Prince had been their favorite since forever, but they’d also shared Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Harriet the Spy, and all seven books about spunky Ramona Quimby and her big sister, Beezus.

Nova was still staring at the Bridge to Terabithia poster when she began to wiggle. The wiggle grew into a dance. She squeezed her legs together, bouncing on her toes.