Bridge to Terabithia's ending explained: the death in it happened for real, to an eight-year-old

Bridge to Terabithia came out in 1977, won the Newbery Medal and has been making ten-year-olds cry in classrooms ever since. It's a story about Jess Aarons, a farm kid in rural Virginia who wants to be the fastest runner in fifth grade, and Leslie Burke, the new girl who beats him. Together they invent a secret kingdom in the woods across a creek, and they call it Terabithia.

The book's ending is the reason most people remember it. What fewer readers know is where it came from, and that the person who adapted it for the 2007 movie had lived the real version.

What happens at the end

Spoilers from here. On a stormy day, Jess gets an invitation he can't refuse: his music teacher, Miss Edmunds, offers to take him to Washington, D.C., to see the Smithsonian and the National Gallery. He goes and doesn't ask Leslie to come.

When he gets home, he learns that Leslie went to Terabithia alone. The rope she and Jess always used to swing over the creek broke, she hit her head and drowned in the flooded water.

Jess's grief comes in the order real grief does:

• Denial: At first he refuses to believe it and acts as if nothing has happened.
• Guilt: He decides it's his fault, because he didn't invite Leslie to D.C. and because he had been secretly afraid of crossing the creek.
• Anger: He throws the paper and paints Leslie gave him for Christmas into the creek.
• Comfort: His father, who has barely known what to do with him all book, finds him and holds him.

Then Jess builds a real bridge across the creek, with lumber the Burkes left behind, and leads his little sister May Belle across it into Terabithia.

The title only makes sense on the last pages. The bridge is the one Jess builds after Leslie dies: the thing she never needed and he can't do without.

The real Leslie: Lisa Hill

Paterson explained the book's origin to NPR in 2007, the weekend the movie came out. It grew out of her son David's friendship with a little girl named Lisa Hill. The summer after both kids turned eight, "Lisa was struck and killed by lightning," Paterson said.

That spring, Paterson herself had had cancer surgery, so her children thought their mother was going to die. Instead, they lost Lisa, and Paterson said it was traumatic for the whole family.

"Especially for David, because she was his very best friend in the world."

— Katherine Paterson, to NPR

Paterson said she began writing to "make sense out of something that made no sense to me whatsoever." The Patersons were living in Takoma Park, Maryland, and David and Lisa spent their time near a creek bed there, Mental Floss reported. In 2005, a maple tree was planted near their elementary school in Lisa's memory.

What Paterson changed

The book doesn't copy the real death. Paterson moved it:

• The age: Lisa and David were eight. Jess and Leslie are in fifth grade.
• The cause: Lightning becomes a broken rope over a flooded creek, which turns a freak accident into something Jess can blame himself for.
• The absence: Jess is away on his best day ever when Leslie dies, the detail that makes his guilt possible.

Paterson's own explanation was blunt: "I can't make sense of Lisa's death, but the story has to make sense." Before publishing, she gave David the chance to stop it, because his friends would assume he was Jess. He only asked that the dedication include Lisa as well as him, and she changed it.

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The son who made the movie

David Paterson grew up and co-wrote the 2007 film with Jeff Stockwell. Josh Hutcherson played Jess and AnnaSophia Robb played Leslie, and the movie kept the book's ending.

He told NPR that the attention once made him "a little ashamed" because the story was so personal and painful. He also turned down studios that wanted to change the book for years, which is why the film took him "some 17 years."

Readers have always assumed the boy in the book was him. He disagrees.

"In all honesty, Jesse Aarons is my mother."

— David Paterson, to NPR

That's the twist nobody expects after the twist everybody remembers. Leslie was a real girl, but the grieving kid at the center of the book was a mother afraid she was dying, writing about her son's grief because she couldn't fix it. The boy who lived it spent 17 years refusing to let anyone change it.

Previously we wrote: Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's least-loved novel. Russell Brand's sentence just made it her most relevant