Jamie, though, wasn't going to let me off that easy. No, she got me right where it hurts, right smack in the old ego.

I was out with Eric on Saturday night following Beaufort's third consecutive state championship in football, about a week after rehearsals had started. We were hanging out at the waterfront outside of Cecil's Diner, eating hushpuppies and watching people cruising in their cars, when I saw Jamie walking down the street. She was still a hundred yards away, turning her head from side to side, wearing that old brown sweater again and carrying her Bible in one hand. It must have been nine o'clock or so, which was late for her to be out, and it was even stranger to see her in this part of town. I turned my back to her and pulled the collar up on my jacket, but even Margaret—who had banana pudding where her brain should have been—was smart enough to figure out who she was looking for.

"Landon, your girlfriend is here."

"She's not my girlfriend," I said. "I don't have a girlfriend."

"Your fiancée, then."

I guess she'd talked to Sally, too.

"I'm not engaged," I said. "Now knock it off."

I glanced over my shoulder to see if she'd spotted me, and I guess she had. She was walking toward us. I pretended not to notice.

"Here she comes," Margaret said, and giggled.

"I know," I said.

Twenty seconds later she said it again.

"She's still coming." I told you she was quick.

"I know," I said through gritted teeth. If it wasn't for her legs, she could almost drive you as crazy as Jamie.

I glanced around again, and this time Jamie knew I'd seen her and she smiled and waved at me. I turned away, and a moment later she was standing right beside me.

"Hello, Landon," she said to me, oblivious of my scorn. "Hello, Eric, Margaret . . ." She went around the group. Everyone sort of mumbled "hello" and tried not to stare at the Bible.

Eric was holding a beer, and he moved it behind his back so she wouldn't see it. Jamie could even make Eric feel guilty if she was close enough to him. They'd been neighbors at one time, and Eric had been on the receiving end of her talks before. Behind her back he called her "the Salvation Lady," in obvious reference to the Salvation Army. "She would have been a brigadier general," he liked to say. But when she was standing right in front of him, it was another story. In his mind she had an in with God, and he didn't want to be in her bad graces.

"How are you doing, Eric? I haven't seen you around much recently." She said this as if she still talked to him all the time.

He shifted from one foot to the other and looked at his shoes, playing that guilty look for all it was worth.

"Well, I haven't been to church lately," he said.

Jamie smiled that glittery smile. "Well, that's okay, I suppose, as long as it doesn't become a habit or anything."

"It won't."

Now I've heard of confession—that thing when Catholics sit behind a screen and tell the priest about all their sins—and that's the way Eric was when he was next to Jamie. For a second I thought he was going to call her "ma'am."

"You want a beer?" Margaret asked. I think she was trying to be funny, but no one laughed.

Jamie put her hand to her hair, tugging gently at her bun. "Oh . . . no, not really . . . thank you, though."

She looked directly at me with a really sweet glow, and right away I knew I was in trouble. I thought she was going to ask me off to the side or something, which to be honest I thought would turn out better, but I guess that wasn't in her plans.

"Well, you did really well this week at rehearsals," she said to me. "I know you've got a lot of lines to learn, but I'm sure you're going to get them all real soon. And I just wanted to thank you for volunteering like you did. You're a real gentleman."

"Thanks," I said, a little knot forming in my stomach. I tried to be cool, but all my friends were looking right at me, suddenly wondering if I'd been telling them the truth about Miss Garber forcing it on me and everything. I hoped they missed it.

"Your friends should be proud of you," Jamie added, putting that thought to rest.

"Oh, we are," Eric said, pouncing. "Very proud. He's a good guy, that Landon, what with his volunteering and all."

Oh no.

Jamie smiled at him, then turned back to me again, her old cheerful self. "I also wanted to tell you that if you need any help, you can come by anytime. We can sit on the porch like we did before and go over your lines if you need to."

I saw Eric mouth the words "like we did before" to Margaret. This really wasn't going well at all. By now the pit in my stomach was as big as Paul Bunyan's bowling ball.

"That's okay," I mumbled, wondering how I could squirm my way out of this. "I can learn them at home."

"Well, sometimes it helps if someone's there to read with you, Landon," Eric offered.

I told you he'd stick it to me, even though he was my friend.

"No, really," I said to him, "I'll learn the lines on my own."

"Maybe," Eric said, smiling, "you two should practice in front of the orphans, once you've got it down a little better. Sort of a dress rehearsal, you know? I'm sure they'd love to see it."

You could practically see Jamie's mind start clicking at the mention of the word orphans. Everyone knew what her hot button was. "Do you think so?" she asked.

Eric nodded seriously. "I'm sure of it. Landon was the one who thought of it first, but I know that if I was an orphan, I'd love something like that, even if it wasn't exactly the real thing."

"Me too," Margaret chimed in.

As they spoke, the only thing I could think about was that scene from Julius Caesar where Brutus stabs him in the back. Et tu, Eric?

"It was Landon's idea?" she asked, furrowing her brow. She looked at me, and I could tell she was still mulling it over.

But Eric wasn't about to let me off the hook that easy. Now that he had me flopping on the deck, the only thing left to do was gut me. "You'd like to do that, wouldn't you, Landon?" he said. "Helping the orphans, I mean."

It wasn't exactly something you could answer no to, was it?

"I reckon so," I said under my breath, staring at my best friend. Eric, despite the remedial classes he was in, would have been one hell of a chess player.

"Good, then, it's all settled. That's if it's okay with you, Jamie." His smile was so sweet, it could have flavored half the RC cola in the county.

"Well . . . yes, I suppose I'll have to talk to Miss Garber and the director of the orphanage, but if they say it's okay, I think it would be a fine idea."

And the thing was, you could tell she was really happy about it.

Checkmate.

The next day I spent fourteen hours memorizing my lines, cursing my friends, and wondering how my life had spun so out of control. My senior year certainly wasn't turning out the way I thought it would when it began, but if I had to perform for a bunch of orphans, I certainly didn't want to look like an idiot.

Chapter 6

The first thing we did was talk to Miss Garber about our plans for the orphans, and she thought it was a marvelous idea. That was her favorite word, by the way—marvelous—after she'd greeted you with "Hellooooo." On Monday, when she realized that I knew all my lines, she said, "Marvelous!" and for the next two hours whenever I'd finish up a scene, she'd say it again. By the end of the rehearsal, I'd heard it about four zillion times.