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Printer Friendly
Booktalking Colorado Full Record:
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Title: |
The Sledding Hill |
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Author: |
Crutcher, Chris |
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Date Published: |
2005 |
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Genre: |
Real Life |
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Grade Level: |
7 - 12 |
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Booktalker: |
Sam Marsh |
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Booktalk:
You don’t know you’re dead when you first die, you just know something is really different. On the other hand, there is no pain. Suddenly, there you are looking back at yourself and…
My name is Billy Bartholomew and I was arguably the smartest kid in class. My best friend is Eddie Proffit, whom according to the IQ test was the dumbest kid in class. A 65 Eddie got. And then my dad found out that Eddie started seeing what a neat pattern filling in the ovals made and started making neater and neater patterns without reading the questions. His answer sheet looked ‘way cool’ according to Eddie. So, my dad went to the principal who wasn’t about to take advice from the school janitor, so dad found a test (he’s the janitor, so he has keys to every room and file draw, right?!) and had Eddie retake the test answering five at a time and Eddie score went up to about 165. The principal wouldn’t listen, so dad took the test over to Eddie’s dad at the Chevron station and Eddie never did attend any of the special ed classes that the principal had him scheduled for.
Anyway, then one-day Eddie’s dad is fixing tires and got distracted because he had chicken salad for lunch instead of tuna and he forgot to let the air out of a truck tire before breaking it down. Big mistake. It’s Eddie who finds his dad lying next to an exploded truck tire looking like something from Picasso, deader than a doornail.
Three weeks later, as Eddie is starting to learn to deal with his dad’s death, I kick a stack of Sheetrock that is leaning precariously against the stage and start to leave. The sheetrock falls forward and the upper edge catches me at the base of the skull snapping my spine. Yep, it’s Eddie that finds me, and I have no way of communicating with him . . .
Eddie is now one seriously messed up dude. It’ll be awhile before he talks again . . .
Sam Marsh August 2005
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