A Walk to Remember - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,30

was all I had. Occasionally I even felt sort of good about it, too, though I never admitted it to anyone. I could practically imagine the angels in heaven, standing around and staring wistfully down at me with little tears filling the corners of their eyes, talking about how wonderful I was for all my sacrifices.

So I was walking her home that first night, thinking about this stuff, when Jamie asked me a question.

“Is it true you and your friends sometimes go to the graveyard at night?”

Part of me was surprised that she was even interested. Though it wasn’t exactly a secret, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing she’d care about at all.

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging. “Sometimes.”

“What do you do there, besides eat peanuts?”

I guess she knew about that, too.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Talk . . . joke around. It’s just a place we like to go.”

“Does it ever scare you?”

“No,” I answered. “Why? Would it scare you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It might.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d worry that I might do something wrong.”

“We don’t do anything bad there. I mean, we don’t knock over the tombstones or leave our trash around,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her about our conversations about Henry Preston because I knew that wasn’t the sort of thing Jamie would want to hear about. Last week Eric had wondered aloud how fast a guy like that could lie in bed and . . . well . . . you know.

“Do you ever just sit around and listen to the sounds?” she asked. “Like the crickets chirping, or the rustling of leaves when the wind blows? Or do you ever just lie on your backs and stare at the stars?”

Even though she was a teenager and had been for four years, Jamie didn’t know the first thing about teenagers, and trying to understand teenage boys for her was like trying to decipher the theory of relativity.

“Not really,” I said.

She nodded a little. “I think that’s what I’d do if I were there, if I ever go, I mean. I’d just look around to really see the place, or sit quietly and listen.”

This whole conversation struck me as strange, but I didn’t press it, and we walked in silence for a few moments. And since she’d asked a little about me, I sort of felt obliged to ask her about herself. I mean, she hadn’t brought up the Lord’s plan or anything, so it was the least I could do.

“So, what do you do?” I asked. “Besides working with the orphans or helping critters or reading the Bible, I mean?” It sounded ridiculous, even to me, I admit, but that’s what she did.

She smiled at me. I think she was surprised by my question, and even more surprised at my interest in her.

“I do a lot of things. I study for my classes, I spend time with my dad. We play gin rummy now and then. Things like that.”

“Do you ever just go off with friends and goof around?”

“No,” she said, and I could tell by the way she answered that even to her, it was obvious that no one wanted her around much.

“I’ll bet you’re excited about going off to college next year,” I said, changing the subject.

It took her a moment to answer.

“I don’t think I’m going to go,” she said matter-of-factly. Her answer caught me off guard. Jamie had some of the highest grades in our senior class, and depending on how the last semester went, she might even end up valedictorian. We had a running pool going as to how many times she would mention the Lord’s plan in her speech, by the way. My bet was fourteen, being that she only had five minutes.

“What about Mount Sermon? I thought that’s where you were planning to go. You’d love a place like that,” I offered.

She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye. “You mean I’d fit right in there, don’t you?”

Those curveballs she sometimes threw could smack you right between the eyeballs.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said quickly. “I just meant that I’d heard about how excited you were to be going there next year.”

She shrugged without really answering me, and to be honest, I didn’t know what to make of it. By then we’d reached the front of her house, and we stopped on the sidewalk out front. From where I was standing, I could make out Hegbert’s shadow in the living room through the