A walk to remember || Tk

「 Chapter 6 」

—Chapter six—

In the two weeks following the homecoming dance, my life pretty much returned to normal. My father was back in Washington, D.C., which made things a lot more fun around my house, primarily because I could sneak out the window again and head to the graveyard for my late night forays. I don't know what it was about the graveyard that attracted us so much.

Maybe it had something to do with the tombstones themselves, because as far as tombstones went, they were actually fairly comfortable to sit on.

We usually sat in a small plot where the Preston family had been buried about a hundred years ago.

There were eight tombstones there, all arranged in a circle, making it easy to pass the boiled peanuts back and forth between us. One time my friends and I decided to learn what we could about the Preston family, and we went to the library to find out if anything had been written about them.

I mean, if you're going to sit on someone's tombstone, you might as well know something about them, right?

It turns out that there wasn't much about the family in the historical records, though we did find out one interesting tidbit of information. Henry Preston, the father, was a one-armed lumberjack, believe it or not. Supposedly he could cut down a tree as fast as any two-armed man. Now the vision of a one-armed lumberjack is pretty vivid right off the bat, so we talked about him a lot.

We used to wonder what else he could do with only one arm, and we'd spend long hours discussing how fast he could pitch a baseball or whether or not he'd be able to swim across the Intracoastal Waterway.

Our conversations weren't exactly highbrow, I admit, but I enjoyed them nonetheless.

Well, Namjoon and me were out there one Saturday night with a couple of other friends, eating boiled peanuts and talking about Henry Preston, when Namjoon asked me how my "date" went with Jeon Jungkook.

Namjoon and I hadn't seen much of each other since the homecoming dance because the football season was already in the playoffs and Namjoon had been out of town the past few weekends with the team.

"It was okay," I said, shrugging, doing my best to play it cool.

Namjoon playfully elbowed me in the ribs, and I grunted. He outweighed me by at least thirty pounds.

"Did you kiss him goodnight?"

"No."

He took a long drink from his can of Bud-weiser as I answered. I don't know how he did it, but Namjoon never had trouble buying beer, which was strange, being that everyone in town knew how old he was.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, tossing me a sidelong glance.

"I would have thought that after he helped you clean the bathroom, you would have at least kissed him good night."

"Well, I didn't."

"Did you even try?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"He's not that kind of person," I said, and even though we all knew it was true, it still sounded like I was defending him.

Namjoon latched on to that like a leech.

"I think you like him," he said.

"You're full of crap," I answered, and he slapped my back, hard enough to force the breath right out of me. Hanging out with Namjoon usually meant that I'd have a few bruises the following day.