Bridge to Terabithia 2: A Second Chance

6. Truth

When they returned to school after homecoming weekend, the excitement of attending classes dropped and Jess, Alexandra, and Freddie already wanted to be done with the school year. Unfortunately, they still had another seven months to go until they could finally don their gowns and walk at graduation.

May Belle seemed to be enthusiastic as ever and wasn't feeling burnout yet, whereas they already felt like they were suffering from senioritis, much to the ire of their teachers.

Senioritis wasn't the only boogeyman that his peers were dealing with, which was something that Jess quickly came to realize when he met up with Alexandra for lunch later that day.

"Have you done your service hours yet?"

"Yeah, I'm almost finished with them," Jess confirmed. He only had ten more hours to go before he was officially done with the required forty hours and had plans to get those done before winter break so he could focus on applying to colleges in the second semester.

He would have been done sooner but he worked long shifts on the weekends and didn't have a lot of free time between work, school and homework, and doing chores on the farm.

"Why do you ask?"

"Because I just found out that I have to do them."

"What, really?" asked Jess, bewildered. "Didn't you have service hours at your old school?"

"My old high school didn't require us to do service learning so now I have to get in forty hours before I graduate in June."

"Man, that really sucks."

Jess genuinely felt sorry for her and somewhat jealous of her old high school, whose requirements seemed much more reasonable compared to volunteering or doing forty hours' worth of mundane, pointless projects outside of school hours.

"Yeah, you're telling me," Alexandra scoffed.

"So you just got to graduate back home in Hawaii?"

"Well, no, not really. Everyone was required to make a personal transition plan for what we were going to do after high school and earn two credits in one of the career pathway programs offered at school."

"Still sounds better than doing service hours, if you ask me," Jess remarked.

At least taking a class to graduate could be done during the school day, whereas service hours required taking additional time out of one's day just to complete a requirement that felt pointless in the long run. Alexandra shared the same sentiment when he voiced his thoughts on the matter.

After school, Jess accompanied Alexandra to the counselor's office to take a look at any service learning opportunities and she found one that didn't require traveling to Washington D.C. compared to some of the others and promised twenty hours if the project was done correctly. Jess had already done that same project as a freshman, which entailed collecting different leaves and writing a report, and he was positive that he could help Alexandra out... without cheating, of course.

On Saturday morning, Alexandra woke up bright and early and got started on her homework after breakfast in hopes of cutting down her workload before Jess came home from work around one o'clock.

The project was due on Wednesday, which meant she only had four days (five, if she counted Saturday) to gather leaves, identify and label them properly, press them in books until they were nice and flat before taping them down with clear packing tape so they could like nice on display, and write up a report. That was the only part she wasn't really looking forward to, since the questions spanned several pages, but at least it looked like the report would easily amount to twelve pages without her having to pad it out with unnecessary fluff.