A Walk to Remember Read Online Free PDF Page A

keep turning your head to keep him in sight. I swear he was probably the most annoying person I’d ever met. If I didn’t get a date, he’d stand off on one side with me all night long, firing questions like some deranged prosecutor.
    So there I was, flipping through the pages in the junior class section, when I saw Jamie Sullivan’s picture. I paused for just a second, then turned the page, cursing myself for even thinking about it. I spent the next hour searching for anyone halfway decent looking, but I slowly came to the realization that there wasn’t anyone left. In time I finally turned back to her picture and looked again. She wasn’t bad looking, I told myself, and she’s really sweet. She’d probably say yes, I thought. . . .
    I closed the yearbook. Jamie Sullivan? Hegbert’s daughter? No way. Absolutely not. My friends would roast me alive.
    But compared with dating your mother or cleaning up puke or even, God forbid .  . . Carey Dennison?
    I spent the rest of the evening debating the pros and cons of my dilemma. Believe me, I went back and forth for a while, but in the end the choice was obvious, even to me. I had to ask Jamie to the dance, and I paced around the room thinking of the best way to ask her.
    It was then that I realized something terrible, something absolutely frightening. Carey Dennison, I suddenly realized, was probably doing the exact same thing I was doing right now. He was probably looking through the yearbook, too! He was weird, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who liked cleaning up puke, either, and if you’d seen his mother, you’d know that his choice was even worse than mine. What if he asked Jamie first? Jamie wouldn’t say no to him, and realistically she was the only option he had. No one besides her would be caught dead with him. Jamie helped everyone—she was one of those equal opportunity saints. She’d probably listen to Carey’s squeaky voice, see the goodness radiating from his heart, and accept right off the bat.
    So there I was, sitting in my room, frantic with the possibility that Jamie might not go to the dance with me. I barely slept that night, I tell you, which was just about the strangest thing I’d ever experienced. I don’t thinkanyone ever fretted about asking Jamie out before. I planned to ask her first thing in the morning, while I still had my courage, but Jamie wasn’t in school. I assumed she was working with the orphans over in
Morehead
City
, the way she did every month. A few of us had tried to get out of school using that excuse, too, but Jamie was the only one who ever got away with it. The principal knew she was reading to them or doing crafts or just sitting around playing games with them. She wasn’t sneaking out to the beach or hanging out at Cecil’s Diner or anything. That concept was absolutely ludicrous.
    “Got a date yet?” Eric asked me in between classes. He knew very well that I didn’t, but even though he was my best friend, he liked to stick it to me once in a while.
    “Not yet,” I said, “but I’m working on it.”
    Down the hall, Carey Denison was reaching into his locker. I swear he shot me a beady glare when he thought I wasn’t looking.
    That’s the kind of day it was.
    The minutes ticked by slowly during my final class. The way I figured it—if Carey and I got out at the same time, I’d be able to get to her house first, what with those gawky legs and all. I started to psych myself up, and when thebell rang, I took off from school running at a full clip. I was flying for about a hundred yards or so, and then I started to get kind of tired, and then a cramp set in. Pretty soon all I could do was walk, but that cramp really started to get to me, and I had to bend over and hold my side while I kept moving. As I made my way down the streets of Beaufort, I looked like a wheezing version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
    Behind me I thought I heard Carey’s high-pitched laughter. I turned around, digging my fingers