CHAPTER-10

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

Amelia 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 Chole 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.

Amelia Garcia 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 Diana. 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 Amelia'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," Diana 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, Amelia." 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 Chloe 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 sophomore 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.

I never really mentioned this did I? Amelia Garcia's legacy doesn't end there, because of all the books reading and even Bible or maybe even Mason's influence, Amelia believed it was important to help others, and helping others is exactly what she 

did. I knew she volunteered at the orphanage in Morehead City, 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. Amelia 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. 

Then, of course, there was the whole Hegbert situation, and this didn't help her at all. Being the teacher's daughter couldn't have been easy, but she made it seem as if it were the most natural 

thing in the world and that she was lucky to have been blessed in that way. That's how she used to say it, too. "I've been so blessed to have a father like mine." Whenever she said it, all we could do was shake our heads and wonder 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. I swear she is the type of girl who can never say single bad thing about anyone..or maybe she never think like that. So you see, this girl can really really..drive me crazy..my sophomore year *sigh* can't be saved.