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.