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Tuck Everlasting
by
Natalie Babbitt
At noon of that same day in the first week of August, Winnie Foster sat on
the bristly grass just inside the fence and said to the large toad who was
squatting a few yards away across the road, “I will, though. You’ll
see. Maybe even first thing tomorrow, while everyone’s still asleep.”
It was hard to know whether the toad was listening or not. Certainly, Winnie
had given it good reason to ignore her. She had come out to the fence, very
cross, very near the boiling point on a day that was itself near to boiling,
and had noticed the toad at once.
It was the only living thing in sight except for a stationary cloud of hysterical gnats suspended in the heat above the road. Winnie had found some pebbles at the base of the fence and, for lack of any other way to show how she felt, had flung one at the toad. It missed altogether, as she’d fully intended it should, but she made a game of it anyway, tossing pebbles at such an angle that they passed through the gnat cloud on their way to the toad.
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