Buddy, Beware! (Bryce)
- We're back to Bryce's story and now it's time to hear more about seventh and eighth grade.
- For Bryce, the major change in seventh grade is that his Granddad Duncan moves in with his family—Bryce doesn't really understand why Granddad spends all his time looking out the window.
- This changes in eighth grade when Granddad wants to talk to Bryce about Juli. Apparently she's become a local celebrity with an article about her on the first page of the newspaper. But before he gives us this tale, Bryce is going to give us some backstory.
- Juli gets famous because of a sycamore tree in their neighborhood. She loves the tree. Bryce thinks it's ugly as all get-out, but he also thinks that maybe Juli doesn't have the best eye for beauty. Apparently her house is a pretty messy place, complete with weeds, some chickens, and a snake.
- While Bryce takes us on this detour about Juli's messy yard, we learn that she has two older brothers, Matt and Mike. She's also got a dad who works in construction and paints in his free time. Plus we learn that Bryce's dad is super obsessed with a clean yard—so you can bet that he hates the Baker place.
- Now back to that sycamore tree: Juli loves it so much that she plays on it all the time. In the fifth grade, she even rescued Bryce's kite from super high up in the tree—so high that Bryce couldn't climb there himself.
- Once junior high starts in sixth grade, Bryce and Juli take a bus that picks kids up by the tree. In seventh grade, Juli is still climbing the tree every morning when they wait for the bus.
- Over time Bryce gets tired of Juli pestering him to join in on the tree climbing, so he starts finding his own secret place to wait for the bus. Yep—this guy goes to some pretty hefty lengths to avoid Juli. With his new hiding spot, seventh and most of eighth grade fly by a bit easier.
- Then one day there's a huge hullabaloo about the sycamore tree. A bunch of trucks and guys with chain saws are trying to chop it down, and Juli is up in the tree refusing to come down.
- Juli begs Bryce and her classmates to help her save the tree, and Bryce decides to head to school with everyone else.
- But he does think about Juli and the tree all day long… And he keeps thinking about her when he gets home and the tree is getting chopped down. Bryce feels seriously bad, but he doesn't know if he should reach out to Juli or leave her alone.
- So that's the backstory about Juli and the tree. Now it's one day later and we're back to Granddad wanting to talk to Bryce about this Juli gal. Basically Granddad wants to know why Bryce isn't friends with Juli, and Bryce gets annoyed that Granddad thinks this neighborhood girl is so great when she's actually just a big pain in his neck.
- This whole conversation has Bryce feeling even worse than he did before—he doesn't want to think about how supposedly fabulous Juli is. In fact, he shoves the newspaper article about Juli that his grandpa gives him into a drawer without reading it.
- For the next week Bryce is pretty obsessed with Juli. She's super quiet and sad at school, and she's riding her bike instead of taking the bus. Bryce wants to tell her that he's sorry about the tree, but he also doesn't want her to think that, you know, he likes likes her or anything.
- So Bryce just keeps his mouth shut.