A Walk to Remember - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,6

year. Miss Garber started clapping right away—she was a member of the church, too—and there were a lot of people who thought she was gunning for Hegbert in a romantic sort of way. The first time I heard it, I remember thinking that it was a good thing they were too old to have children, if they ever did get together. Imagine—translucent with freckles? The very thought gave everyone shudders, but of course, no one ever said anything about it, at least within hearing distance of Miss Garber and Hegbert. Gossip is one thing, hurtful gossip is completely another, and even in high school we weren’t that mean.

Miss Garber kept on clapping, all alone for a while, until all of us finally joined in, because it was obvious that was what she wanted. “Stand up, Jamie,” she said. So Jamie stood up and turned around, and Miss Garber started clapping even faster, as if she were standing in the presence of a bona fide movie star.

Now Jamie Sullivan was a nice girl. She really was. Beaufort was small enough that it had only one elementary school, so we’d been in the same classes our entire lives, and I’d be lying if I said I never talked to her. Once, in second grade, she’d sat in the seat right next to me for the whole year, and we’d even had a few conversations, but it didn’t mean that I spent a lot of time hanging out with her in my spare time, even back then. Who I saw in school was one thing; who I saw after school was something completely different, and Jamie had never been on my social calendar.

It’s not that Jamie was unattractive—don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t hideous or anything like that. Fortunately she’d taken after her mother, who, based on the pictures I’d seen, wasn’t half-bad, especially considering who she ended up marrying. But Jamie wasn’t exactly what I considered attractive, either. Despite the fact that she was thin, with honey blond hair and soft blue eyes, most of the time she looked sort of . . . plain, and that was when you noticed her at all. Jamie didn’t care much about outward appearances, because she was always looking for things like “inner beauty,” and I suppose that’s part of the reason she looked the way she did. For as long as I’d known her—and this was going way back, remember—she’d always worn her hair in a tight bun, almost like a spinster, without a stitch of makeup on her face. Coupled with her usual brown cardigan and plaid skirt, she always looked as though she were on her way to interview for a job at the library. We used to think it was just a phase and that she’d eventually grow out of it, but she never had. Even through our first three years of high school, she hadn’t changed at all. The only thing that had changed was the size of her clothes.

But it wasn’t just the way Jamie looked that made her different; it was also the way she acted. Jamie didn’t spend any time hanging out at Cecil’s Diner or going to slumber parties with other girls, and I knew for a fact that she’d never had a boyfriend her entire life. Old Hegbert would probably have had a heart attack if she had. But even if by some odd turn of events Hegbert had allowed it, it still wouldn’t have mattered. Jamie carried her Bible wherever she went, and if her looks and Hegbert didn’t keep the boys away, the Bible sure as heck did. Now, I liked the Bible as much as the next teenage boy, but Jamie seemed to enjoy it in a way that was completely foreign to me. Not only did she go to vacation Bible school every August, but she would read the Bible during lunch break at school. In my mind that just wasn’t normal, even if she was the minister’s daughter. No matter how you sliced it, reading Paul’s letters to the Ephesians wasn’t nearly as much fun as flirting, if you know what I mean.

But Jamie didn’t stop there. Because of all her Bible reading, or maybe because of Hegbert’s influence, Jamie believed it was important to help others, and helping others is exactly what she did. I knew she volunteered at the orphanage in Morehead City, but for her that simply wasn’t enough. She was always in charge of one fund-raiser