know it’s not much, but frankly, it was all I had. Occasionally I even felt sort of good
about it, too, though I never admitted it to anyone. I could practically imagine the angels
in heaven, standing around and staring wistfully down at me with little tears filling the
corners of their eyes, talking about how wonderful I was for all my sacrifices.
So I was walking her home that first night, thinking about this stuff, when Jamie
asked me a question.
“Is it true you and your friends sometimes go to the graveyard at night?”
Part of me was surprised that she was even interested. Though it wasn’t exactly a
secret, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing she’d care about at all.
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging. “Sometimes.”
“What do you do there, besides eat peanuts?”
I guess she knew about that, too.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Talk … joke around. It’s just a place we like to go.”
“Does it ever scare you?”
“No,” I answered. “Why? Would it scare you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It might.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d worry that I might do something wrong.”
“We don’t do anything bad there. I mean, we don’t knock over the tombstones or
leave our trash around,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her about our conversations about
Henry Preston because I knew that wasn’t the sort of thing Jamie would want to hear
about. Last week Eric had wondered aloud how fast a guy like that could lie in bed and …
well … you know.
“Do you ever just sit around and listen to the sounds?” she asked. “Like the crickets
chirping, or the rustling of leaves when the wind blows? Or do you ever just lie on your
backs