Jumping Off, Jumping In

Ten-year-old Wyatt Perkins is in the emergency room after jumping off a shed and briefly knocking himself out. His worried mother, Carla, suspects Wyatt's new friend Jay Smouse is a bad influence, since Wyatt has been acting strangely ever since the two started hanging out. Because Wyatt's father is a soldier whose unit is on the move and can't be reached, Carla asks Mr. Whittaker, whom Wyatt respects, to talk with her son.

Whit finds Wyatt cheerfully begging the nurse for an MRI and quizzing her about hematomas. When Whit gently asks whether the shed jump was a dare, Wyatt insists Jay had nothing to do with it - it was his own idea. Soon Jay himself shows up at the hospital, and he backs Wyatt's story. In fact, Jay says Wyatt is "absolutely bonkers," and describes the stunts Wyatt has pulled lately: eating a chip made with the hottest pepper known to mankind behind Finnaman's Market, and climbing a fence into a cranky neighbor's yard to rescue a baseball from a supposedly ferocious dog that turns out to be ancient and toothless. Jay claims he only tags along for the entertainment.

Whit senses there's more to the story and asks about Trickle Lake, where Jay and Wyatt first met a couple of weeks earlier - the day Wyatt's older sister, Bridget, nearly drowned. Wyatt tells his version: Bridget tried a flip off the rope swing, hit the water badly, and didn't come up. Wyatt swam out, turned her over, and dragged her to shore, and then Cooper Calhoun, a trained lifeguard, ran up and revived her with CPR. Whit praises Wyatt's strength and courage, but something doesn't add up: why didn't Cooper swim out himself? Whit visits Cooper and learns that Cooper was far away in the woods when he heard cries for help - he never even saw Bridget hit the water.

Whit returns to Wyatt's room with his Bible and talks about King David, who was brave enough to fight Goliath yet still wrote, "When I am afraid, I will trust in you." At last the truth comes out. After Wyatt hauled Bridget to shore, Jay urged him to start CPR - Wyatt had learned it in health class - but Wyatt froze completely, and it was Jay who screamed for help until Cooper came running. Ashamed, Wyatt asks Whit what's wrong with him: his sister was dying, and he just sat there. Whit assures him that nothing is wrong with him, and that Bridget is alive because of what he did.

When Wyatt tells his family, another secret spills out. After the ambulance left the lake that day, Jay told Wyatt that the apple had rolled far from the tree - that the son of a war hero was "nothing like your dad." Ever since, Wyatt has been pulling daring stunts to prove his courage. Bridget is furious at Jay, but she's more troubled that Wyatt believes it. She hatches a plan: at the public pool, with Cooper on lifeguard duty and everyone watching, she'll go limp in the deep end and let Jay try to tow her to the edge. When scrawny Jay fails, everyone will see how remarkable Wyatt's rescue really was. Carla and Whit object - Bridget has already refused counseling, and she hasn't been back in the water since the accident - but Bridget pleads that her brother needs this, and Carla reluctantly agrees.

Bridget collects Jay from his house by the ear and puts the plan in motion. But the moment she goes limp, the demonstration turns real: Bridget panics in the water, and Jay truly cannot hold her up. While everyone else is still figuring out whether the drowning is real, Wyatt dives in without hesitating and pulls his sister safely to the side, where Cooper helps her out. Shaken but unhurt, Bridget watches Wyatt start to shrug off what he did - and refuses to let him. He has now saved her life twice, she tells him, risking himself for a sister who steals his candy and hogs the TV. "It makes you a lot like Dad," she says, and their mother agrees. Wyatt smiles and admits that's really nice to hear.