Chapter 1 text

As I walked back into the old Devon school I noticed some changes, not everything was the same as that summer of 1942. I remember when me and a couple of my pals used to play sports, stay after school, and jump into the river. We had the best of times, and it felt like just yesterday that i was just an average kid in that high school again. My best friend was Phineas but people called him Finny for short. Finny was the best athlete in the school and someone that I truly admired. We were about the same height and weight and pretty much overall the same. Me Finny and some other friends used to go down to the river after school and jump of a certain tree. It was like a ritual or almost like a tradition to us. "The tree was tremendous, an irate, steely black steeple beside the river. I was damned if I'd climb it. The hell with it. No one but Phineas could think up such a crazy idea" (6). Phineas was very brave, and definitely more brave than all of us in the group. As we all jumped off he would make little comments to try to get us scared, but nothing really worked. "We were still calmly, numbly reading Virgil and playing tag in the river farther downstream. Until Finny thought of the tree" (7). Finny being my best friend I did look up to him, he was like the leader of the pact and we all followed his lead most of the time. He was the biggest athlete out of all of us, and he taught us almost everything we knew from sports to jumping off the tree. "All right, pal, Finny spoke in his cordial, penetrating voice, that reverberant instrument in his chest, "don't start awarding prizes until you've passed the course. The tree is waiting" (9). This quote showed that even though everyone thought that they were doing better than Finny, he wouldn't allow them to think that. We thought it was unfair of him but it was just Finny being himself.

Chapter 3 text

During this one summer day Finny, Bobby Zane, and I made up a game called Blitzball. There is no certain number of players involved but there has to be more than 2. We used a medicine ball and the rules are pretty simple. You run and once you get hit the other team receives the ball and gets to make a play. We thought if was a very catchy and unique game, especially for the summer. We also were still swimming at the lake everyday and jumping from the tree. "One day he broke the school swimming record" (34). As we were all swimming one day Phineas had swam by and noticed that there was a record on the wall that said "100 Yards Free Style", "A. Hopkins Parker-1940-53.0 seconds." I was extremely frustrated about school and feelings that I had. When I have a lot to think about I like to ride my bike down to the beach and lay in the sand. This time when I decided to ride my bike Finny followed me, and wanted to talk to me. I said to him that I wanted to maintain my life and wanted a reasonable amount of order. As I was explaining my problems to Finny he said to me "You can't just come to the shore with just anybody and you can't come by yourself, and at this teen-age period in life the proper person is your best pal, which is what you are" (40). When I began to say something back to Phineas, something suddenly stopped me and held be back. I was about to retract to my opinion but then again I was speechless at the same time. I did not want to lie to him but the truth would not come to my mouth. I thought he had a lot of courage to say that to me even though I didn't know what to say back to Finny I could not leave him. I was thinking about enlisting for a while with Leper, but the thought of leaving frightened me. For some reason my last thought on that beach was that maybe Finny was not my best pal and truest friend like I thought he was. No matter how much we had been through all those years, all of a sudden it hit me that he isn't as true as i thought he was.