A Walk to Remember Chapter 1

Chapter summary: We meet a Bible-thumping minister and Landon is a terrible person. Also, the designated love interest is an Angel of the House: innocent, perfect, and pure.

The story is set in Beaufort, North Carolina in 1958.

Landon says that the humidity is so hot in the summer that “walking out to get the mail made a person feel as if he needed a shower.”

People waved from their cars whenever they saw someone on the street whether they knew him or not,

In a Nicholas Sparks, everyone is friendly, good, and God-fearing Christians. (The villain is always one-dimensional.)

They know each other’s business and have lived in town for their entire lives. And news always travels fast in the small town.

Landon says for many people fishing and crabbing is a way of life.

Only three channels came in on the television, though television was never important to those of us who grew up there. Instead our lives were centered around the churches, of which there were eighteen within the town limits alone.

1. Yes, I know that Americans were more religious in the 1950’s.

2. But they still had a life outside of a church and weren’t thinking about Jesus 24/7.

3. People went camping and fishing. They also went to bowling alleys, sock hops, and drive-in movie theaters.

4. For most of the story, Landon isn’t very religious. He goes to church but that’s it. And Landon regards a girl who reads the Bible every day as a weirdo.

5. The only time Landon became religious is when he supposedly fell in love with Jamie.

6. It is important to remember that Nicholas Sparks has writing rules that he won’t break like all of his characters must go to church.

7. And he has said that people without faith are alone, thinking they are the center of the universe.

Landon rattles off the names and types of Baptist churches in the area.

The big event of the year is a Christmas play sponsored by the Baptist church downtown and the local high school.

The play is written by Hegbert Sullivan, “a minister who’d been with the church since Moses parted the Red Sea.“

Okay, maybe he wasn’t that old, but he was old enough that you could almost see through the guy’s skin. It was sort of clammy all the time, and translucent—kids would swear they actually saw the blood flowing through his veins—

Translucent skin… Translu…

“His skin was translucently white, like onionskin, and it looked just as delicate—” New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

So Hegbert is a sparklepire? Good to know.

and his hair was as white as those bunnies you see in pet stores around Easter.

Wow. Just wow. The prose is so boring and bland.

And Nicholas Sparks thinks he writes like Ernest Hemingway…

Also, what seventeen-year-old boy would say “bunnies”?

Hebert wrote the play The Christmas Angel because he hates A Christmas Carol.

In his mind, Scrooge was a heathen, who came to his redemption only because he saw ghosts, not angels—and who was to say whether they’d been sent by God, anyway?

I hate to break it to ya but both ghosts and angels are spirits.

The only difference is that a ghost is a human spirit that has not properly passed over to the other side and they remain on earth while angels are spiritual beings of light.

And who was to say he wouldn’t revert to his sinful ways if they hadn’t been sent directly from heaven?

1. Um… If the ghosts weren’t sent from Heaven, then where did they come from?
2. Baptists don’t believe in purgatory. After death, they believe that there are only two places where people can go: Heaven or Hell.
3. Unless the minister thinks the ghosts are demons in disguise.
4. It won’t make any sense because the three spirits are trying to get Scrooge to repent and be a better person.

The play didn’t exactly tell you in the end—it sort of plays into faith and all—

Maybe Charles Dickens didn’t think he had to spell it out in 72 pt Times New Roman font.

but Hegbert didn’t trust ghosts if they weren’t actually sent by God, which wasn’t explained in plain language, and this was his big problem with it.

1. And where is the proof that they are not sent by God?

2. Faith is about believing without seeing and not demanding proof.

3. And Christians who deepen their faith learn how to discern between the voice of God, the voice of Satan, and one’s ego.

4. Is Hegbert pissed off at Charles Dickens because the ghosts didn’t say ”I am the ghost of Christmas (past/present/future) and I was sent by God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth”?

5. Because following that logic, the Archangel Raphael was not sent by God.

6. In The Book of Tobit, the Archangel Raphael didn’t reveal his identity until Tobit cures his father’s blindness. For most of the story, Tobit knew the Archangel Raphael as Azariah the son of Hananiah the great.

A few years back he’d changed the end of the play—sort of followed it up with his own version, complete with old man Scrooge becoming a preacher and all, heading off to Jerusalem to find the place where Jesus once taught the scribes.

Unsurprisingly, nobody liked the play so Hegbert decided to write his own play.

He’d written his own sermons his whole life, and some of them, we had to admit, were actually interesting, especially when he talked about the “wrath of God coming down on the fornicators” and all that good stuff.

A fire and brimstone minister.

N. Sparks will claim later on that he has a great sense of humor and we are supposed to see him as a great guy.

Because we all know fire and brimstone ministers are not anti-semitic, homophobic, islamophobic, misogynistic, racist, sexist and xenophobic pieces of shit.

That really got his blood boiling, I’ll tell you, when he talked about the fornicators. That was his real hot spot.

“And don’t get him started on those Commies and sodomites.“

So Landon and his friends hid behind trees and shouting that Hegbert is a fornicator before walking down the street.

We’d giggle like idiots, like we were the wittiest creatures ever to inhabit the planet.

Landon is following Anita Blake’s logic: If you do something wrong, just say you feel bad about it, and continue being a terrible person. And nobody will dare tell you to STOP being an asshole.

Old Hegbert, he’d stop dead in his tracks and his ears would perk up—I swear to God, they actually moved—and he’d turn this bright shade of red, like he’d just drunk gasoline, and the big green veins in his neck would start sticking out all over, like those maps of the Amazon River that you see in National Geographic.

1. So Hegbert is a mog too? (Virtual cupcake to anyone who gets that reference.)

2. I know that some people can wiggle their ears. Because humans can’t perk their ears up like a dog.

Hegbert is pissed off and he is looking for them.

Boy, it was something to watch, that’s for sure.

"Being an asshole is a lot of fun!”

So the assholes are hiding behind a tree. Landon sneers “what kind of parents name their kid Hegbert, anyway?” and Hegbert is standing there, waiting for them to “to give ourselves up, as if he thought we’d be that stupid.”

They cover their mouths with their hands and Hegbert always knows where to find them.

Hegbert tells them that he along with the Lord knows “who you are”. And a minute later, Hegbert walks away.

During the sermon that weekend he’d stare right at us and say something like “God is merciful to children, but the children must be worthy as well.”

“But subject you to pain, unpleasantness – suffering – and you will take notice, you will fight to overcome, to earn your redemption. That is when you’re at your best.” Gabriel from Constantine 2005.

I think Gabriel and Hegbert should go bowling.

The assholes lower themselves in seats “not from embarrassment, but to hide a new round of giggles.”

Landon says that Hegbert didn’t understand us “didn’t understand us at all, which was really sort of strange, being that he had a kid and all.”

But then again, she was a girl. More on that, though, later.

“Girls are ladylike and only like cute and pretty things. And tomboys don’t exist.”

Landon repeats the fact that Hegbert is the one who wrote The Christmas Angeland decided to put on the play.

He says that the play isn’t bad and this surprised everyone the first year it was performed.

I am putting on my jeweled turban and gaze into my crystal ball.

It’s about Hegbert Tom Thorton who had lost his wife in childbirth and is raising a daughter all on his own.

It will also be sappy like a Hallmark movie. Aren’t I awesome?

He hasn’t been the greatest father and his daughter wants a special music box for Christmas. He can’t find the box and meets an angel disguised as a woman on Christmas Eve.

The angel promises to help him to get the gift for his daughter. Along the way, they help a homeless person and Landon is quick to say that “back then they were called bums”.

Tom tells the angel that he wants his wife back for Christmas. The angel tells him to look into the city fountain and he’ll find what he is looking for.

Tom cries after seeing the face of his daughter. The angel is MIA and Tom heads home.

He realizes he hasn’t been a good father and that his daughter is all he has left of his wife.

The story ends with the music box underneath the tree and the angel on the box looks exactly like the mysterious woman.

Landon repeats that the play “wasn’t that bad”.

Apparently, the play sold out every year and people “cried buckets” every time they saw it.

Hegbert wants seniors in high school to perform the play and not the theater group.

I reckon he thought it would be a good learning experience before the seniors headed off to college and came face-to-face with all the fornicators.

1. Unless these seniors want to become actors, how is performing a play count as “good learning experience”?
2. And how does performing a Christmas give the students the information to deal with “fornicators”?
3. I’m getting the impression that Nicholas Sparks thinks that men and women in the past were BOTH expected to stay celibate before marriage.
4. But that’s not the case. Men weren’t expected to remain virgins.
5. Men could have extramarital affairs, have longtime mistresses, and even have sex with other men. And guys would get away with it as long as they didn’t flaunt them in public.
6. Women were expected to celibate until they were married. It took an unchaperoned visit or ONE sexual affair for a woman to be considered a whore.

He was that kind of guy, you know, always wanting to save us from temptation.

“Remember boys and girls: premarital sex is wrong!”

He wanted us to know that God is out there watching you, even when you’re away from home, and that if you put your trust in God, you’ll be all right in the end.

Riiight.

Because the same minister who gives fire and brimstone sermons would be the sort of person that would talk about God watching over you and if you trust Him, then things will be all right.

I think the minister would most likely say “God is always watching your every move. If you are bad, He will smite you. And your soul will burn in Hell for all eternity.”

It was a lesson that I would eventually learn in time, though it wasn’t Hegbert who taught me.

“It would be my designated love interest.”

Landon says that Beaufort is a typical southern town but it has an interesting history.

He talks about how Blackbeard owned a house in town and recently his ship might have been found by “some archaeologists or oceanographers or whoever looks for stuff like that.”

Landon, they are called marine archaeologists.

Being that it sank over 250 years ago and you can’t exactly reach into the glove compartment and check the registration.

Because a pirate ship would have a glove box.

I think that comment sounded wittier in Nicholas Spark’s head than it does on paper.

Beaufort’s come a long way since the 1950s, but it’s still not exactly a major metropolis or anything.

We get it, Landon. Beaufort is a quaint and small southern town.

Beaufort was, and always will be, on the smallish side, but when I was growing up, it barely warranted a place on the map.

For the love of all that is holy, will you please stop talking about the same thing over and over again?

Landon keeps talking about how Beaufort is a small town and how “the congressional district that included Beaufort covered the entire eastern part of the state—some twenty thousand square miles—and there wasn’t a single town with more than twenty-five thousand people.”

It turns out that Landon’s father is a congressman.

I suppose you’ve heard of him. He’s sort of a legend, even now.

If he was a legend, then you wouldn’t be telling us who he is.

Landon’s father is Worth Carter and he was a congressman for almost thirty years.

Worth’s election slogan is “Worth Carter represents ———” and people are supposed to fill in the city name where they lived.

I can remember, driving on trips when me and Mom had to make our appearances to show the people he was a true family man

I call bullshit on Landon’s dad being a “true family man”.

Landon’s father is gone nine months out of the year and is living in Washington D.C. while his mother is taking care of him.

Landon talks about how his father election slogan “was fairly sophisticated publicity.”

He says that nowadays people would put foul language in the blank space but in the good ol’ days “we never saw it once.”

Landon quickly backpedals and says “okay, maybe once.”

A farmer from Duplin County once wrote the word shit in the blank space, and when my mom saw it, she covered my eyes and said a prayer asking for forgiveness for the poor ignorant bastard.

1. Nicholas Sparks is still trying to persuade me that 1950’s was a wholesome utopia.
2. But I’m not convinced.
3. Every era of human history, no matter how fascinating or glamorous, has a dark side that people don’t want to acknowledge.
4. And I find it very hard to believe that Landon has never seen or heard foul language before.
5. For instance, in middle school, I heard people say things that would make even a sailor blush.

Since Landon’s mother is ladylike, she “didn’t say exactly those words.”

So my father, Mr. Congressman, was a big-wig, and everyone but everyone knew it, including old man Hegbert.

Landon claimed that daddy dearest was a “legend.”

And Merriam-Webster defines a bigwig as “an important person”

So the words “everyone but everyone knew it” is redundant.

Worth Carter and Hegbert don’t get along. But Worth still goes to Hegbert’s church whenever he was in town.

Hegbert, in addition to his belief that fornicators were destined to clean the urinals in hell, also believed that communism was “a sickness that doomed mankind to heathenhood.”

1. I will bring this up if anyone claims that Hegbert is a good guy.
2. One of the biggest problems with A Walk to Remember is plot mixing.
3. What is plot mixing, you may ask?
4. Plot mixing is a term that I have coined. Plot mixing is when an artist takes at least two contradictory plots and character traits, mixing them together, resulting in a ghastly mess.
5. For instance, Hegbert is supposed to be a wonderful guy with a great sense of humor. But he is acting like a Bible-thumping minister.

They also knew that he was directing his words specifically to my father, who would sit with his eyes closed and pretend not to listen.

I have just a quick question: why would Landon’s dad go to a church where the minister despises him and makes pointed sermons?

According to Landon, there are other churches in the area. So, why hasn’t Worth Carter left Hegbert’s church and joined another church?

It turns out that Landon’s father belongs to the House of Un-American Activities Committee.

My father had consistently looked for facts, which were irrelevant to people like Hegbert.

1. IRL, I hate it when people think they are the gatekeepers of knowledge, truth, and wisdom.
2. They also claim that they have “facts” that support their worldviews.
3. If anyone who disagrees with them, then they are dumb sheep and a racist bigot.
4. Are we seriously supposed to see HUAC as the good guys?
5. HUAC ruined people’s lives and careers. And their actions violated the 1st and 5th Amendments of the Bill of Rights.

Every time Landon’s father would come home after the church service, he would complain about Reverend Sullivan.

My father tried to defuse situations whenever possible. I think that’s why he stayed in Congress for so long.

Like any politician, a congressperson gives people in high places verbal blowjobs and make promises that they have no intentions of keeping along with having goons to cover up their crimes.

The guy could kiss the ugliest babies known to mankind and still come up with something nice to say.

Are we supposed to applaud Landon’s dad being nice to the “ugly” people?

“He’s such a gentle child,” he’d say when a baby had a giant head, or, “I’ll bet she’s the sweetest girl in the world,” if she had a birthmark over her entire face. One time a lady showed up with a kid in a wheelchair. My father took one look at him and said, “I’ll bet you ten to one that you’re smartest kid in your class.”

Fuck this book with a rusty screwdriver!

And he wasn’t such a bad guy, not really, especially if you consider the fact that he didn’t beat me or anything.

A parent is not supposed to abuse their children, you twat!

But he wasn’t there for me growing up.

1. In a better story, Landon being estranged from his father would be a source of conflict.
2. And throughout the story, Landon would fix his broken relationship with his father.
3. But this is a shitty story, Landon will meet his designated one tru luv who is purer than Sir Galahad.
4. Landon spends time with this girl and his relationship with Dad is magically mended.

I hate to say that because nowadays people claim that sort of stuff even if their parent was around and use it to excuse their behavior. I’m not using it to excuse the person I’ve become, I’m simply saying it as a fact.

1. No, you did.
2. You even said it “made me become something of a rebel.”

My mother didn’t go with him because both of them wanted me to grow up “the same way they had.”

1. So they were raised by one parent?
2. Wait a tick… I think what Landon means is that his parents wanted him to grow up in a small town.
3. And small towns tend to be politically conservative.
4. As a member of HUAC, a married man living alone would raise more than a few eyebrows.
5. Especially since the nuclear family was considered the “ideal” family in 1950’s.
6. Also during this time period, people wanted to uphold traditional family roles and values.
7. I’m sure Worth Carter’s political opponents would have a field day if they knew he wasn’t a family man.
8. And you can’t tell me that in a Southern small-town that people won’t gossip about a married woman raising a child all by herself and her husband is rarely home.

Landon says that his grandfather spent time with his father and how that “adds up to quite a bit before adulthood.”

Landon talks about how his father was “a stranger” and someone he “barely knew at all.”

He also used to think that “all fathers lived somewhere else.”

Landon says that one day his best friend Eric Hunter asks him “who that guy was who showed up at my house”.

Landon replies that the man was his father “proudly.”

“Oh,” Eric said as he rifled through my lunchbox, looking for my Milky Way, “I didn’t know you had a father.”

“People around town were saying that your mamma was a whore and has a beau.”

Landon repeats the fact that he was raised by his mother.

Now she was a nice lady, sweet and gentle, the kind of mother most people dream about.

1. Because most people want their mother to be a cold-hearted bitch.
2. Does Landon seriously think that his mother deserves a medal for not being an asshole?
3. And I’m getting the feeling that dear old mom is going to be a submissive housewife who never speaks her mind, makes sure the house is always immaculate and treats her husband like a king.

But she wasn’t, nor could she ever be, a manly influence in my life, and that fact, coupled with my growing disillusionment with my father, made me become something of a rebel, even at a young age.

1. Where do I even begin?
2. According to Landon, women are incapable of doing/liking “manly”activities.
3. Butch women or tomboys don’t exist. ALL women love feminine things and are ladylike.
4. And it takes a MAN to raise a “real” man.
5. The father is supposed to do “manly” activities with his son on a regular basis. And boys are supposed to do and like “manly” activities.
6. If the boy doesn’t and becomes a delinquent, then he is a sissy and his mother is to blame.

Not a bad one, mind you.

This is a Nicholas Sparks novel.

He would never have a “protagonist” do bad things. He has a wholesome image to uphold.

They must be good as gold or be mildly delinquent.

Me and my friends might sneak out late and soap up car windows now and then or eat boiled peanuts in the graveyard behind the church, but in the fifties that was the kind of thing that made other parents shake their heads and whisper to their children, “You don’t want to be like that Carter boy. He’s on the fast track to prison.”

Contrary to what Nicholas Sparks might believe, the 1950’s wasn’t Leave it to Beaver.

For instance, people did phone pranks, threw cherry bombs or were stealing statues.

Me. A bad boy. For eating boiled peanuts in the graveyard. Go figure.

Landon repeats the fact that his father and Hegbert don’t get along. But he says “it wasn’t only because of politics.”

And then it happens.

It turns out that Worth Carter and Hegbert knew each other for a long time.

And Hegbert is twenty years older than Daddy Dearest and used to work for Landon’s grandfather.

My grandfather— even though he spent lots of time with my father —was a true bastard if there ever was one.

I have a question, Landon. Does your grandfather only wears black clothing and has an evil laugh?

He was the one, by the way, who made the family fortune, but I don’t want you to imagine him as the sort of man who slaved over his business, working diligently and watching it grow, prospering slowly over time.

We get it, Nicholas Sparks. Landon’s grandpa is more evil and greedy than all the robber barons.

Next, you’ll be telling us that grandpa was a pedophile or kicked puppies for fun.

His grandfather was a bootlegger during the Prohibition, started buying land and then hired sharecroppers to work it.

Grandpa also took ninety percent of the money the sharecroppers made and loaned them money whenever they needed it at high-interest rates.

Grandpa is so EVIL he forecloses on any equipment or land they happen to own. Evil Grandpa…

No. From now on, I’m calling him Grandpa Beelzebub or GB.

GB started a bank called “Carter Banking and Loan.”

The only other bank in a two-county radius had mysteriously burned down, and with the onset of the Depression, it never reopened.

The other bank didn’t “mysteriously” burn down, you twit. GB had his goons torch the place.

Though everyone knew what had really happened, not a word was ever spoken for fear of retribution, and their fear was well placed.

So even the police were shaking in their boots?

The bank wasn’t the only building that burned down.

Landon repeats the fact that Grandpa Beelzebub’s interest rates “were outrageous.” As time progresses, GB amasses more land and property.

He gets the original owners to continue working and pays them just enough money to “to keep them where they were, because they had nowhere else to go.”

He told them that when the economy improved, he’d sell their business back to them, and people always believed him.

The townspeople know that GB used fear and intimidation to get what he wanted along with his shady business practices.

And they ALL believed that he would honor his promises.

Never once, however, did he keep his promise. In the end he controlled a vast portion of the county’s economy, and he abused his clout in every way imaginable.

Ya know what?

There are so many times I can point out how Grandpa Beelzebub is cartoonishly evil so I’ll let this speak for itself.

Grandpa Beelzebub died while having sex with his mistress on his yacht in the Cayman Islands. GB was also an old man.

He’d outlived both his wives and his only son.

1. If Daddy Dearest died before GB, he wouldn’t be a prominent congressman.
2. And Landon would have never met his father.
3. He would be visiting Daddy’s grave and be raised by a widow.

Life, I’ve learned, is never fair.

Marvel at how deep he is! No one has ever made such a wise statement.

Landon whines that it should be taught in school.

Hegbert, once he realized what a bastard my grandfather really was,

You mean arson and usury are not legal and moral? I never knew that!

Thanks for letting me know, Nicholas Sparks!

So, Hegbert quit working for GB and went into the ministry. Then he started ministering in the same church that Landon’s family attended.

Hegbert spent some time “perfecting his fire-and brimstone act”, giving monthly sermons on the evils of greed.

He was so busy Bible thumping that he had “scant time for anything else.”

Hegbert was forty-three when he was married and his daughter Jamie was born when he was fifty-five.

Hegbert’s wife was twenty-three years old and had six miscarriages before Jamie was born. She also died in childbirth.

Hence, of course, the story behind the play.

I love it when I’m right. And Hegbert is so arrogant if he thinks that everyone would want to see a play that is his thinly veiled life story.

People knew the story even before the play was first performed.

If it was any more obvious, the character Tom would be called Hegbert and be a minister.

It was one of those stories that made its rounds whenever Hegbert had to baptize a baby or attend a funeral.

Baptists don’t baptize babies. They believe that only believers should be baptized and be fully immersed in the water.

Landon repeats the fact that everyone knew about Hegbert’s story and says it is why people “got emotional” when they saw the play.

They knew it was based on something that happened in real life, which gave it special meaning.

So if a story isn’t based on something that happened in real life, then it isn’t special? Fuck you, Landon.

Jamie Sullivan was a senior in high school, just like me, and she’d already been chosen to play the angel, not that anyone else even had a chance.

1. I would be very surprised if Jamie WASN’T in the play.
2. After all, the play was written by her father and is a thinly veiled story about her dad losing her mom.
3. And real subtle, Nicholas Sparks.
4. A saintly girl is going to play an angel.
5. Thank God, Jamie isn’t named Sunshine Goodness.

Jamie playing the angel is going to make the play “extra special” and how it is going to be a “big deal” especially for Miss Garber.

Miss Garber is the drama teacher and she was excited “the first time I met her in class.”

Landon admits that he really didn’t want to take drama class but it was “either that or chemistry II.”

No papers, no tests, no tables where I’d have to memorize protons and neutrons and combine elements in their proper formulas … what could possibly be better for a high school senior?

How about lunch? All you have to do is eat and socialize.

It seemed like a sure thing, and when I signed up for it, I thought I’d just be able to sleep through most every class, which, considering my late night peanut eating, was fairly important at the time.

Why am I getting the feeling that “late night peanut eating” is a euphemism for sex? Because eating peanuts is not a strenuous thing to do…

Landon arrives before the bell rang and sits in the back of the room.

Miss Garber had her back turned to the class, and she was busy writing her name in big cursive letters, as if we didn’t know who she was.

1. You just said that you met Miss Garber for the first time in class.
2. Now you are saying that you already knew her.
3. Which is it, Landon?
4. All these contradictions are giving me a headache.

Everyone knew her—it was impossible not to.

“She was bludgeoned with the ugly stick.”

Am I the only one who thinks this comment is catty?

She was big, at least six feet two, with flaming red hair and pale skin that showed her freckles well into her forties.

1. The word “tall” seems like a better fit.
2. Big is used to describe the size of something.
3. While “tall” refers to the height of something.
4. I seriously hope that Landon isn’t saying that this woman is “ugly”.

She was also overweight—I’d say honestly she pushed two fifty—and she had a fondness for wearing flower patterned muumuus. She had thick, dark, horn-rimmed glasses, and she greeted everyone with, “Helloooooo,” sort of singing the last syllable.

Translation: she’s a fat Julia Child who wears glasses.

From now on, I shall call Miss Garber Julia Child.

Miss Garber was one of a kind, that’s for sure, and she was single, which made it even worse.

Stop! Do not pass go! Do not collect $200!

A guy, no matter how old, couldn’t help but feel sorry for a gal like her.

1. Because after all, beauty on the outside is the only thing that matters.
2. Being a good human being and having a nice personality is overrated.
3. Later on, Landon complains that “the pickings were getting pretty slim” and how he doesn’t want to be stuck bringing an “ugly” girl to the homecoming dance (i.e. girls who have thick glasses or have lisps.)
4. People praise Nicholas Sparks for writing wholesome fiction that has life lessons and good morals.
5. But I would rather read a story that has swearing (Ow! My virgin ears!) or graphic sex (gasp!) than a story with shitty messages and it is written by a pretentious writer who believes that they write literary masterpieces.

Julia Child writes the three goals that she wants to accomplish: self-confidence, self-awareness, and self-fulfillment.

Landon remarks that she was “into the ‘self’ stuff.”

Maybe it had something to do with the way she looked; maybe she was just trying to feel better about herself. But I digress.

It wasn’t until the class started that I noticed something unusual.

“Everyone wore black cloaks and pledged their allegiance to Satan.”

Landon is surprised that the class is “at least ninety percent female” because he “knew for a fact” that school is split 50/50 between boys and girls.

There was only one other male in the class, which to my thinking was a good thing, and for a moment I felt flush with a “look out world, here I come” kind of feeling.

1. The schools in Beaufort NC have excellent math programs…
2. I don’t feel like spending hours trying to look up the average high school class size in North Carolina during the 1950’s.
3. So I’ll be using the current average high school class size in North Carolina.
4. According to this,the average class size for secondary school (high school) in North Carolina is 25.8 students.
5. Let’s say there are twenty-six students in the drama class.
6. 91% of 26 would be 23.66
7. Approximately, there would be 23 girls and 3 boys.
8. Besides Landon, there would be two other boys in the classroom.

Girls, girls, girls … I couldn’t help but think. Girls and girls and no tests in sight.

It is good to know that Landon is thinking with his head and not with his dick.

Okay, so I wasn’t the most forward-thinking guy on the block.

Anita Blake Logic # 2: If you say something wrong, act like you are feeling guilty.

You DON’T try to be a better person and APOLOGIZE to the person/people that you have hurt. No one EVER calls you out on your shit.

So Julia Child talks about the play and tells everyone that Jamie is going to play the angel.

She starts clapping and it turns out that she is a member of Landon’s church.

And there were a lot of people who thought she was gunning for Hegbert in a romantic sort of way. The first time I heard it, I remember thinking that it was a good thing they were too old to have children, if they ever did get together. Imagine—translucent with freckles?

The very thought gave everyone shudders, but of course, no one ever said anything about it, at least within hearing distance of Miss Garber and Hegbert.

So everyone is an asshole and gossips like fishwives?

Gossip is one thing, hurtful gossip is completely another, and even in high school we weren’t that mean.

“Like Duloc, the South is a perfect place!”

1. I’m sorry but I don’t believe that a high school with no cliques and everyone is nice exists.
2. Landon is a douchebag and so are his friends.
3. Also, how is gossiping about Thank God Hegbert and Julia Child can’t reproduce count as not being “mean”?
4. And the townspeople talk about Hegbert’s wife having multiple miscarriages and dying in childbirth…
5. And for a novel that is so friggin’ preachy by constantly talking about God’s plan/the Lord’s plan and quoting Bible verses…
6. It doesn’t realize that the Good Book doesn’t view gossip as a venial sin while “hurtful” gossip is a mortal sin.
7. The Bible denounces it.

Julia Child keeps on clapping until everyone finally joined in. She orders Jamie to stand up.

Jamie stands up and turns around. Julia Child is clapping even faster to which Landon snidely remarks “as if she were standing in the presence of a bona fide movie star.”

Now Jamie Sullivan was a nice girl. She really was.

Translation: It’s a pleasant way to say that she isn’t attractive.

Landon talks about the town only has one elementary school so everyone has been “in the same classes our entire lives.”

He admits to having a “few conversations” with Jamie.

Who I saw in school was one thing; who I saw after school was something completely different, and Jamie had never been on my social calendar.

“She is not worthy to stand before me!”

It’s not that Jamie was unattractive— don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t hideous or anything like that.

“Inner beauty is overrated!”

Landon reluctantly admits that Jamie “wasn’t half-bad.” But he doesn’t consider her to be attractive.

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.

1. Because having fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes were NEVER considered to be signs of beauty.
2. And I really hate it when a character is “TV ugly”.
3. Especially when it is combined with this.

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.

I love how inner beauty is put in quotes. As if the concept is absolute horse shit.

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.

This statement is obnoxious because later on in the story Jamie will be described as beautiful even when she is dying of a terminal illness.

Jamie wears frumpy clothes and everyone thought it was “just a phase”.

But it wasn’t just the way Jamie looked that made her different; it was also the way she acted.

“She acted like an Angel of the House: innocent, perfect, and pure.”

Jamie never went to slumber parties or had a boyfriend.

Old Hegbert would probably have had a heart attack if she had.

Hegbert would have denounced his daughter as a harlot before killing her.

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.

“It couldn’t possibly be that her father is a Bible-thumping asshat.”

Now, I liked the Bible as much as the next teenage boy,

Translation: not at all.

but Jamie seemed to enjoy it in a way that was completely foreign to me.

“She reads it from cover to cover.”

Not only did she go to vacation Bible school every August, but she would read the Bible during lunch break at school.

This is Nicholas Spark’s “subtle” way of telling us that Jamie is a good person. Because she reads the Bible.

Landon thinks Jamie is abby normal. How romantic.

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.

1. Because flirting is a lot of fun!
2. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say flirting is a code word for sex…
3. But one of Nicholas Sparks’ writing rules is that his teenage characters never have premarital sex.

But Jamie didn’t stop there. I knew she volunteered at the orphanage in Morehead City, but for her that simply wasn’t enough.

Let me guess. Jamie is SO good that she is going to help baby animals and solve world hunger.

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.

1. Ho-lee fuck! Where do I even begin?
2. There is no such thing as a Native American princess.
3. Nobody is perfect. But according to Nicholas Sparks Landon, Jamie is practically perfect in every way.
4. Jamie is NEVER depicted as having any flaws. She is always nice to everyone and always never does anything wrong.

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.

You are a douchebag who makes snide comments.

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.

We get it, Sparks. Jamie is a paragon of virtue. Stop talking.

With Jamie, everything was in the Lord’s plan. That was another thing. She always mentioned the Lord’s plan whenever you talked to her, no matter what the subject.

1. I get it, Sparks.
2. Jamie is a saintly person.
3. And Jesus is love, Jesus is life.

Landon tells us that Jamie thinks she is “so blessed to have a father like mine.”

He thinks “what planet she actually came from.”

Despite all these other strikes, though, the one thing that really drove me crazy about her was the fact that she was always so damn cheerful, no matter what was happening around her.

1. In real life, a person who is ALWAYS cheerful is depressed.
2. But this is a Nicholas Sparks novel.
3. So Jamie is cheerful like a Disney princess.
4. Thank God, Jamie doesn’t break into song.

I swear, that girl never said a bad thing about anything or anyone, even to those of us who weren’t that nice to her.

Translation: Jamie is a female version of Jesus Christ.

Landon keeps going on about how nice Jamie is.

All the adults “adored” her and ladies would “come running out of their house” if they see Jamie walking by.

I was thinking about all this while Jamie stood in front of us on the first day of drama class, and I admit that I wasn’t much interested in seeing her.

For a girl that Landon despises, he won’t stop talking about her.

But strangely, when Jamie turned to face us, I kind of got a shock, like I was sitting on a loose wire or something.

It is bad enough that Nicholas Sparks is forcing a romance between two characters and will claim that they are soulmates…

Now he has them feeling an instant electric connection.

What’s next? Will fireworks go off? Will cherubs start to sing?

She wore a plaid skirt with a white blouse under the same brown cardigan sweater I’d seen a million times, but there were two new bumps on her chest that the sweater couldn’t hide that I swore hadn’t been there just three months earlier.

1. I’ll give three guesses and the first two don’t count.
2. It isn’t surprising since a lot of Nicholas Sparks’ novels are renowned for having contrived “tragic” endings in which someone (usually the love interest) dies.

She’d never worn makeup and she still didn’t, but she had a tan, probably from Bible school, and for the first time she looked—well, almost pretty.

If “almost pretty” isn’t a backhanded compliment, I don’t know what is.

Landon quickly “dismissed” the thought.

But as she looked around the room, she stopped and smiled right at me, obviously glad to see that I was in the class.

1. Smiling is an expression that shows happiness, affection, etc.
2. She shouldn’t be happy to see him.
3. The guy mocks her and avoids her like the plague.
4. But Sparks told us that Jamie is made up of sugar, spice, and everything nice.

It wasn’t until later that I would learn the reason why.