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 MoreheadCity, 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