A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks Page B

Maurice’s Tavern, which was a hangout for people like Lew , by the way. For an hour or so it caused quite a stir, and phone lines buzzed all over town while nervous women wondered about the possibility of a crazed lunatic wandering the streets, preyingon innocent victims. Doors were locked, guns were loaded, men sat by the front windows, looking for anyone out of the ordinary who might be creeping down the street. But the whole thing was over before the night was through when the guy walked into the police station to give himself up, explaining that it was a bar fight that got out of hand. Evidently the victim had welshed on a bet. The guy was charged with second-degree murder and got six years in the state penitentiary. The policemen in our town had the most boring jobs in the world, but they still liked to strut around with a swagger or sit in coffee shops while they talked about the “big crime,” as if they’d cracked the case of the Lindbergh baby.
    But Jamie’s house was on the way to mine, and I couldn’t say no without hurting her feelings. It wasn’t that I liked her or anything, don’t get the wrong idea, but when you’ve had to spend a few hours a day with someone, and you’re going to continue doing that for at least another week, you don’t want to do anything that might make the next day miserable for either of you.
    The play was going to be performed that Friday and Saturday, and lots of people were already talking about it. Miss Garber had beenso impressed by Jamie and me that she kept telling everyone it was going to be the best play the school had ever done. She had a real flair for promotion, too, we found out. We had one radio station in town, and they interviewed her over the air, not once, but twice. “It’s going to be marvelous,” she pronounced, “absolutely marvelous.” She’d also called the newspaper, and they’d agreed to write an article about it, primarily because of the Jamie– Hegbert connection, even though everyone in town already knew about it. But Miss Garber was relentless, and just that day she’d told us the Playhouse was going to bring in extra seats to accommodate the extra-large crowd expected. The class sort of oohed and aahed , like it was a big deal or something, but then I guess it was to some of them. Remember, we had guys like Eddie in class. He probably thought that this would be the only time in his life when someone might be interested in him. The sad thing was , he was probably right.
    You might think I’d be getting excited about it, too, but I really wasn’t. My friends were still teasing me at school, and I hadn’t had an afternoon off in what seemed like forever. The only thing that kept me going was the fact that I was doing the “right thing.” Iknow it’s not much, but frankly, it 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