It was recess time, and the yard was noisy from all the yelling. To Ella, it seemed like everyone was yelling, the girls especially: their chants of "Go, Ella, go," drowned out the rest.
She was standing in front of a ledge made of play structure. A wide gap separated this ledge from another one, maybe one or two yards away. A rope was tied from a bar on this ledge to a bar on the ledge Ella was standing on. She was supposed to walk on it like a tightrope; she knew it.
Ella's big brother came over to her. "You can do it, El," he told her. "Remember gymnastics lessons?"
Ella ignored him. Shaking from fear, she carefully moved one foot forward, closer to the rope.To small a distance,she decided, then moved it a little further. This time, it landed on the rope. Carefully, step by step, Ella made her way a small distance across the rope. The girls' cheers were louder now.
All the cheering must have motivated a teacher to come out, because there one was suddenly one there: the science teacher for the fourth and fifth grades. "What's going on here?" she asked, and then, seeing Ella, exclaimed, "Oh, you poor girl! Forced to walk a tightrope!" And, right then and there, she scooped Ella up and put her down on the woodpiece-covered ground. Luckily for the boys, she had not seemed to notice that the "tightrope" was actually stolen rope from the P.E. cabinet.
And the surprising thing was, though Ella had expected the boys to remember the contest and schedule it for another time, the contest was never finished. All the rest of her first-grade life, and all the other grades too, and the after-grades, too, she remembered the contest.
And that is the end.