A Walk to Remember (3 page)

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 or another, helping everyone from the Boy Scouts to the Indian Princesses, and I know that when she was fourteen, she spent part of her summer painting the outside of an elderly neighbor’s house. Jamie was the kind of girl who would pull weeds in someone’s garden without being asked or stop traffic to help little kids cross the road. She’d save her allowance to buy a new basketball for the orphans, or she’d turn around and drop the money into the church basket on Sunday. She was, in other words, the kind of girl who made the rest of us look bad, and whenever she glanced my way, I couldn’t help but feel guilty, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong.

Nor did Jamie limit her good deeds to people. If she ever came across a wounded animal, for instance, she’d try to help it, too. Opossums, squirrels, dogs, cats, frogs . . . it didn’t matter to her. Dr. Rawlings, the vet, knew her by sight, and he’d shake his head whenever he saw her walking up to the door carrying a cardboard box with yet another critter inside. He’d take off his eyeglasses and wipe them with his handkerchief while Jamie explained how she’d found the poor creature and what had happened to it. “He was hit by a car, Dr. Rawlings. I think it was in the Lord’s plan to have me find him and try to save him. You’ll help me, won’t you?”

With Jamie, everything was in the Lord’s plan. That was another thing. She always mentioned the Lord’s plan whenever you talked to her, no matter what the subject. The baseball game’s rained out? Must be the Lord’s plan to prevent something worse from happening. A surprise trigonometry quiz that everyone in class fails? Must be in the Lord’s plan to give us challenges. Anyway, you get the picture.

Then, of course, there was the whole Hegbert situation, and this didn’t help her at all. Being the minister’s daughter couldn’t have been easy, but she made it seem as if it were the most natural thing in the world and that she was lucky to have been blessed in that way. That’s how she used to say it, too. “I’ve been so blessed to have a father like mine.” Whenever she said it, all we could do was shake our heads and wonder what planet she actually came from.

Despite all these other strikes, though, the one thing that
really
drove me crazy about her was the fact that she was always so damn cheerful, no matter what was happening around her. I swear, that girl never said a bad thing about anything or anyone, even to those of us who weren’t that nice to her. She would hum to herself as she walked down the street, she would wave to strangers driving by in their cars. Sometimes ladies would come running out of their house if they saw her walking by, offering her pumpkin bread if they’d been baking all day or lemonade if the sun was high in the sky. It seemed as if every adult in town adored her. “She’s such a nice young lady,” they’d say whenever Jamie’s name came up. “The world would be a better place if there were more people like her.”

But my friends and I didn’t quite see it that way. In our minds, one Jamie Sullivan was plenty.

I was thinking about all this while Jamie stood in front of us on the first day of drama class, and I admit that I wasn’t much interested in seeing her. But strangely, when Jamie turned to face us, I kind of got a shock, like I was sitting on a loose wire or something. She wore a plaid skirt with a white blouse under the same brown cardigan sweater I’d seen a million times, but there were two new bumps on her chest that the sweater couldn’t hide that I swore hadn’t been there just three months earlier. She’d never worn makeup and she still didn’t, but she had a tan, probably from Bible school, and for the first time she looked—well, almost pretty. Of course, I dismissed that thought right away, but as she looked around the room, she stopped and smiled right at me, obviously glad to see that I was in the class. It wasn’t until later that I would learn the reason why.

Chapter 2

A
fter high school I planned to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My father wanted me to go to Harvard or Princeton like some of the sons of other congressmen did, but with my grades it wasn’t possible. Not that I was a bad student. I just didn’t focus on my studies, and my grades weren’t exactly up to snuff for the Ivy Leagues. By my senior year it was pretty much touch and go whether I’d even get accepted at UNC, and this was my father’s alma mater, a place where he could pull some strings. During one of his few weekends home, my father came up with the plan to put me over the top. I’d just finished my first week of school and we were sitting down for dinner. He was home for three days on account of Labor Day weekend.

“I think you should run for student body president,” he said. “You’ll be graduating in June, and I think it would look good on your record. Your mother thinks so, too, by the way.”

My mother nodded as she chewed a mouthful of peas. She didn’t speak much when my father had the floor, though she winked at me. Sometimes I think my mother liked to see me squirm, even though she was sweet.

“I don’t think I’d have a chance at winning,” I said. Though I was probably the richest kid in school, I was by no means the most popular. That honor belonged to Eric Hunter, my best friend. He could throw a baseball at almost ninety miles an hour, and he’d led the football team to back-to-back state titles as the star quarterback. He was a stud. Even his name sounded cool.

“Of course you can win,” my father said quickly. “We Carters always win.”

That’s another one of the reasons I didn’t like spending time with my father. During those few times he was home, I think he wanted to mold me into a miniature version of himself. Since I’d grown up pretty much without him, I’d come to resent having him around. This was the first conversation we’d had in weeks. He rarely talked to me on the phone.

“But what if I don’t want to?”

My father put down his fork, a bite of his pork chop still on the tines. He looked at me crossly, giving me the once-over. He was wearing a suit even though it was over eighty degrees in the house, and it made him even more intimidating. My father always wore a suit, by the way.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that it would be a good idea.”

I knew that when he talked that way the issue was settled. That’s the way it was in my family. My father’s word was law. But the fact was, even after I agreed, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to waste my afternoons meeting with teachers after school—after school!— every week for the rest of the year, dreaming up themes for school dances or trying to decide what colors the streamers should be. That’s really all the class presidents did, at least back when I was in high school. It wasn’t like students had the power to actually decide anything meaningful.

But then again, I knew my father had a point. If I wanted to go to UNC, I had to do something. I didn’t play football or basketball, I didn’t play an instrument, I wasn’t in the chess club or the bowling club or anything else. I didn’t excel in the classroom—hell, I didn’t excel at much of anything. Growing despondent, I started listing the things I actually could do, but to be honest, there really wasn’t that much. I could tie eight different types of sailing knots, I could walk barefoot across hot asphalt farther than anyone I knew, I could balance a pencil vertically on my finger for thirty seconds . . . but I didn’t think that any of those things would really stand out on a college application. So there I was, lying in bed all night long, slowly coming to the sinking realization that I was a loser. Thanks, Dad.

The next morning I went to the principal’s office and added my name to the list of candidates. There were two other people running—John Foreman and Maggie Brown. Now, John didn’t stand a chance, I knew that right off. He was the kind of guy who’d pick lint off your clothes while he talked to you. But he was a good student. He sat in the front row and raised his hand every time the teacher asked a question. If he was called to give the answer, he would almost always give the right one, and he’d turn his head from side to side with a smug look on his face, as if proving how superior his intellect was when compared with those of the other peons in the room. Eric and I used to shoot spitballs at him when the teacher’s back was turned.

Maggie Brown was another matter. She was a good student as well. She’d served on the student council for the first three years and had been the junior class president the year before. The only real strike against her was the fact that she wasn’t very attractive, and she’d put on twenty pounds that summer. I knew that not a single guy would vote for her.

After seeing the competition, I figured that I might have a chance after all. My entire future was on the line here, so I formulated my strategy. Eric was the first to agree.

“Sure, I’ll get all the guys on the team to vote for you, no problem. If that’s what you really want.”

“How about their girlfriends, too?” I asked.

That was pretty much my entire campaign. Of course, I went to the debates like I was supposed to, and I passed out those dorky “What I’ll do if I’m elected president” fliers, but in the end it was Eric Hunter who probably got me where I needed to be. Beaufort High School had only about four hundred students, so getting the athletic vote was critical, and most of the jocks didn’t give a hoot who they voted for anyway. In the end it worked out just the way I planned.

I was voted student body president with a fairly large majority of the vote. I had no idea what trouble it would eventually lead me to.

When I was a junior I went steady with a girl named Angela Clark. She was my first real girl-friend, though it lasted for only a few months. Just before school let out for the summer, she dumped me for a guy named Lew who was twenty years old and worked as a mechanic in his father’s garage. His primary attribute, as far as I could tell, was that he had a really nice car. He always wore a white T-shirt with a pack of Camels folded into the sleeve, and he’d lean against the hood of his Thunderbird, looking back and forth, saying things like “Hey, baby” whenever a girl walked by. He was a real winner, if you know what I mean.

Well, anyway, the homecoming dance was coming up, and because of the whole Angela situation, I still didn’t have a date. Everyone on the student council had to attend—it was mandatory. I had to help decorate the gym and clean up the next day—and besides, it was usually a pretty good time. I called a couple of girls I knew, but they already had dates, so I called a few more. They had dates, too. By the final week the pickings were getting pretty slim. The pool was down to the kinds of girls who had thick glasses and talked with lisps. Beaufort was never exactly a hotbed for beauties anyway, but then again I had to find somebody. I didn’t want to go to the dance without a date—what would that look like? I’d be the only student body president ever to attend the homecoming dance alone. I’d end up being the guy scooping punch all night long or mopping up the barf in the bathroom. That’s what people without dates usually did.

Growing sort of panicky, I pulled out the yearbook from the year before and started flipping through the pages one by one, looking for anyone who might not have a date. First I looked through the pages with the seniors. Though a lot of them were off at college, a few of them were still around town. Even though I didn’t think I had much of a chance with them, I called anyway, and sure enough, I was proven right. I couldn’t find anyone, at least not anyone who would go with me. I was getting pretty good at handling rejection, I’ll tell you, though that’s not the sort of thing you brag about to your grandkids. My mom knew what I was going through, and she finally came into my room and sat on the bed beside me.

“If you can’t get a date, I’ll be happy to go with you,” she said.