legacy                                    a gift of personal property by will

And sometimes the girl holding one end of the rope is from the West side of Hector, and the girl on the other end is from the East side; and if you’re looking for Maniac Magee’s legacy, or monument, that’s as good as any — even if it wasn’t really a bull.

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legend                                   a story about mythical or supernatural beings or events

But that’s okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two partslegend, and three parts snowball.

 

maniac                                   an insane person

Of course, to be accurate, he wasn’t really Maniac then. He was Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lionel Magee.

 

bellow                                   shout loudly and without restraint

Then the giggling stopped, and eyes started to shift and heads started to turn, because now everybody could see that this wasn’t part of the show at all, that little Jeffrey Magee wasn’t supposed to be up there on the risers, pointing to his aunt and uncle, bellowing out from the midst of the chorus: “Talk! Talk, will ya! Talk! Talk! Talk!”

 

lunge                         make a thrusting forward movement

Three springy steps down from the risers — girls in pastel dresses screaming, the music director lunging — a leap from the stage, out the side door and into the starry, sweet, onion-grass-smelling night.

 

intend                                    have in mind as a purpose

And some say he only intended to pause here but that he stayed because he was so happy to make a friend.

 

claim                                      assert or affirm strongly

If you listen to everybody who claims to have seen Jeffrey-Maniac Magee that first day, there must have been ten thousand people and a parade of fire trucks waiting for him at the town limits.

 

hinge                                     a joint that holds two parts together so that one can swing

A couple of people truly remember, and here’s what they saw: a scraggly little kid jogging toward them, the soles of both sneakers hanging by theirhinges and flopping open like dog tongues each time they came up from the pavement.

 

hurl                             throw forcefully

She tore a book from the suitcase, hurled it at him — “Here!” — and dashed into school.

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stunned                                 filled with the emotional impact of overwhelming surprise

It sailed back over the up-looking gym-classers, spiraling more perfectly than anything Brian Denehy had ever thrown, and landed in the outstretched hands of still stunned Hands Down.

 

commotion               a disorderly outburst or tumult

Later on that first day, there was a commotion in the West End.

 

sacrifice                    the act of killing in order to appease a deity

So, there’s Arnold Jones, held up by all these hands, flopping and kicking and shrieking like some poor Aztec human sacrifice about to be tossed off a pyramid.

 

hallucination                        illusory perception

Another swears it was a mirage, some sort of hallucination, possibly caused by evil emanations surrounding 803 Oriole Street.

 

carcass                                  the dead body of an animal

The phantom Samaritan stuck the book between his teeth, crouched down, hoisted Arnold Jones’s limp carcass over his shoulder, and hauled him out of there like a sack of flour.

 

stupefied                  as if struck dumb with astonishment and surprise

As the stupefied high-schoolers were leaving the scene, they looked back.

 

forbidden                 excluded from use or mention

They saw the kid, cool times ten, stretch out on the forbidden steps and open his book to read.

 

pandemonium                     a state of extreme confusion and disorder

Pandemonium on the sidelines.

 

feat                 a notable achievement

The kid was trying for an inside-the-park home-run bunt — the rarest featin baseball, something that had hardly ever been done with a ball, and never with a frog — and to be the pitcher who let such a thing happen — well, McNab could already feel his strikeout record fading to a mere grain in the sandlot of history.

 

lurch              move abruptly

But now the frog shot through his legs, over to the mound, and now toward shortstop and now toward second, and McNab was lurching and lunging, throwing his hat at the frog, throwing his glove, and everybody was screaming, and the kid was rounding third and digging for home, and — unbe-froggable! — the “ball” was heading back home too!

 

intercept                 seize on its way

Buzzing about the new kid in town. The stranger kid. Scraggly. Carrying a book. Flap-soled sneakers. 
The kid who intercepted Brian Denehy’s pass to Hands Down and punted it back longer than Denehy himself ever threw it.