All American Girl

TO THE REAL AMERICAN HEROES OF

9/11/01

Table of Contents

Prologue

Okay, here are the top ten reasons why I . . .

1

She says she didn’t mean to.

2

Catherine couldn’t even believe it about . . .

3

Theresa was the one who ended up driving . . .

4

When I told Jack about it—what had . . .

5

Fortunately, it was raining on Thursday . . .

6

It turns out if you jump onto the back of . . .

7

I guess, even then, it didn’t really hit me.

8

Even though I have lived in Washington, D.C., . . .

9

Well, how was I supposed to know . . .

10

Here’s what happens when you stop a crazy . . .

11

I have been to the White House many times.

12

I couldn’t believe it. Busted! I was so busted!

13

“So where’d you go, then?”

14

It only took about two hours for it to get . . .

15

On Tuesday, when Theresa drove up to the . . .

16

“He said yes!”

17

I began to regret having asked David . . .

18

“Oh my God, you came!”

19

“It’s not your fault,” Catherine, across the . . .

20

The next week was Thanksgiving.

21

They made me come out of my room . . .

22

When I got home from the White House . . .

23

I stood on Susan Boone’s front porch, . . .

24

I chose Candace Wu.

25

“Do you see this skull?”

26

A week later, they had the award ceremony.

Acknowlegdments

About the Author

Books by Meg Cabot

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Okay, here are the top ten reasons why I can’t stand my sister Lucy:

10. I get all her hand-me-downs, even her bras.

9. When I refuse to wear her hand-me-downs, especially her bras, I get the big lecture about waste and the environment. Look, I am way concerned about the environment. But that does not mean I want to wear my sister’s old bras. I told Mom I see no reason why I should even have to wear a bra, seeing as how it’s not like I’ve got a lot to put in one, causing Lucy to remark that if I don’t wear a bra now then if I ever do get anything up there, it will be all saggy like those tribal women we saw on the Discovery Channel.

8. This is another reason why I can’t stand Lucy. Because she is always making these kind of remarks. What we should really do, if you ask me, is send Lucy’s old bras to those tribal women.

7. Her conversations on the phone go like this: “No way. . . . So what did he say? . . . Then what did she say? . . . No way. . . . That is so totally untrue. . . . I do not. I so do not. . . . Who said that? . . . Well, it isn’t true. . . . No, I do not. . . . I do not like him. . . . Well, okay, maybe I do. Oh, gotta go, call-waiting.”

6. She is a cheerleader. All right? A cheerleader. Like it isn’t bad enough she spends all her time waving pom-poms at a bunch of Neanderthals as they thunder up and down a football field. No, she has to do it practically every night. And since Mom and Dad are fanatical about this mealtime-is-family-time thing, guess what we are usually doing at five thirty? And who is even hungry then?

5. All of my teachers go: “You know, Samantha, when I had your sister in this class two years ago, I never had to remind her to:

double space

carry the one

capitalize her nouns in Deutsch

remember her swimsuit

take off her headphones during morning announcements

stop drawing on her pants.”

4. She has a boyfriend. And not just any boyfriend, either, but a nonjock boyfriend, something totally unheard-of in the social hierarchy of our school: a cheerleader going with a nonjock boyfriend. And it isn’t even that he’s not a jock. Oh, no, Jack also happens to be an urban rebel like me, only he really goes all out, you know, in the black army surplus trench coat and the Doc Martens and the straight Ds and all. Plus he wears an earring that hangs.

But even though he is not “book smart,” Jack is very talented and creative artistically. For instance, he is always getting his paintings of disenfranchised American youths hung up in the caf. And nobody even graffitis them, the way they would if they were mine. Jack’s paintings, I mean.

As if that is not cool enough, Mom and Dad completely hate him because of his not working up to his potential and getting suspended for his antiauthoritarianism and calling them Carol and Richard to their faces instead of Mr. and Mrs. Madison.

It is totally unfair that Lucy should not only have a cool boyfriend but a boyfriend our parents can’t stand, something I have been praying for my entire life, practically.

Although actually at this point any kind of boyfriend would be acceptable.

3. In spite of the fact that she is dating an artistic rebel type instead of a jock, Lucy remains one of the most popular girls in school, routinely getting invited to parties and dances every weekend, so many that she could not possibly attend them all, and often says things like, “Hey, Sam, why don’t you and Catherine go as, like, my emissaries?” even though if Catherine and I ever stepped into a party like that we would be vilified as sophomore poseurs and thrown out onto the street.

2. She gets along with Mom and Dad—except for the whole Jack thing—and always has. She even gets along with our little sister, Rebecca, who goes to a special school for the intellectually gifted and is practically an idiot savant.

But the number-one reason I can’t stand my sister Lucy would have to be:

1. She told on me about the celebrity drawings.

She says she didn’t mean to. She says she found them in my room, and they were so good she couldn’t help showing them to Mom.

Of course, it never occurred to Lucy that she shouldn’t have been in my room in the first place. When I accused her of completely violating my constitutionally protected right to personal privacy, she just looked at me like, Huh? even though she is fully taking U.S. Government this semester.

Her excuse is that she was looking for her eyelash curler.

Hello. Like I would borrow anything of hers. Especially something that had been near her big, bulbous eyeballs.

Instead of her eyelash curler, which of course I didn’t have, Lucy found this week’s stash of drawings, and she presented them to Mom at dinner that night.

“Well,” Mom said in this very dry voice. “Now we know how you got that C-minus in German, don’t we, Sam?”

This was on account of the fact that the drawings were in my German notebook.

“Is this supposed to be that guy from The Patriot?” my dad wanted to know. “Who is that you’ve drawn with him? Is that . . . is that Catherine?”

“German,” I said, feeling that they were missing the point, “is a stupid language.”

“German isn’t stupid,” my little sister Rebecca informed me. “The Germans can trace their heritage back to ethnic groups that existed during the days of the Roman Empire. Their language is an ancient and beautiful one that was created thousands of years ago.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Did you know that they capitalize all of their nouns? What is up with that?”

“Hmmm,” my mother said, flipping to the front of my German notebook. “What have we here?”

My dad went, “Sam, what are you doing drawing pictures of Catherine on the back of a horse with that guy from The Patriot?”

“I think this will explain it, Richard,” my mother said, and she passed the notebook back to my dad.

In my own defense, I can only state that, for better or for worse, we live in a capitalistic society. I was merely enacting my rights of individual initiative by supplying the public—in the form of most of the female student population at John Adams Preparatory School—with a product for which I saw there was a demand. You would think that my dad, who is an international economist with the World Bank, would understand this.

But as he read aloud from my German notebook in an astonished voice, I could tell he did not understand. He did not understand at all.

“You and Josh Hartnett,” my dad read, “fifteen dollars. You and Josh Hartnett on a desert island, twenty dollars. You and Justin Timberlake, ten dollars. You and Justin Timberlake under a waterfall, fifteen dollars. You and Keanu Reeves, fifteen dollars. You and—” My dad looked up. “Why are Keanu and Josh more than Justin?”

“Because,” I explained, “Justin has less hair.”

“Oh,” my dad said. “I see.” He went back to the list.

“You and Keanu Reeves white-water rafting, twenty dollars. You and James Van Der Beek, fifteen dollars. You and James Van Der Beek hang-gliding, twenty—”

But my mom didn’t let him go on for much longer.

“Clearly,” she said in her courtroom voice—my mom is an environmental lawyer; one thing you do not want to do is anything that would make Mom use her courtroom voice—”Samantha is having trouble concentrating in German class. The reason why she is having trouble concentrating in German class appears to be because she is suffering from not having an outlet for all her creative energy. I believe if such an outlet were provided for her, her grades in German class would improve dramatically.”

Which would explain why the next day my mom came home from work, pointed at me, and went, “Tuesdays and Thursdays, from three thirty to five thirty, you will now be taking art lessons, young lady.”

Whoa. Talk about harsh.

Apparently it has not occurred to my mother that I can draw perfectly well without ever having had a lesson. Except for, you know, in school. Apparently my mother doesn’t realize that art lessons, far from providing me with an outlet for my creative energy, are just going to utterly stamp out any natural ability and individual style I might have had. How will I ever be able to stay true to my own vision, like van Gogh, with someone hovering over my shoulder, telling me what to do?

“Thanks,” I said to Lucy when I ran into her a little while later in the bathroom we shared. She was separating her eyelashes with a safety pin in front of the mirror, even though our housekeeper, Theresa, has told Lucy a thousand times about her cousin Rosa, who put out an eye that way.

Lucy looked past the safety pin at me. “What’d I do?”

I couldn’t believe she didn’t know. “You told on me,” I cried, “about the whole drawing thing!”

“God, you ‘tard,” Lucy said, going to work on her lower lashes. “Don’t even tell me you’re upset about that. I so totally did you a favor.”

“A favor?” I was shocked. “I got into big trouble because of what you did! Now I have to go to some stupid, lame art class twice a week after school, when I could be, you know . . . watching TV.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “You so don’t get it, do you? You’re my sister. I can’t just stand by and let you become the biggest freak of the entire school. You won’t participate in extracurriculars. You wear that hideous black all the time. You won’t let me fix your hair. I mean, I had to do something. This way, who knows? Maybe you’ll be a famous artist. Like Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“Do you even know what Georgia O’Keeffe is famous for painting, Lucy?” I asked, and when she said no, I told her:

Vaginas. That’s what Georgia O’Keeffe was famous for painting.

Or as Rebecca put it, as she came ambling past with her nose buried in the latest installment of the Star Trek saga, with which she is obsessed, “Actually, Ms. O’Keeffe’s organic abstract images are lush representations of flowers that are strongly sexual in symbolic content.”

I told Lucy to ask Jack if she didn’t believe me. But Lucy said she and Jack don’t discuss things like that with one another.

I was all, “You mean vaginas?” but Lucy said no, art.

I don’t get this. I mean, she is going out with an artist, and yet the two of them never discuss art? I can tell you, if I ever get a boyfriend, we are going to discuss everything with one another. Even art. Even vaginas.

Catherine couldn’t even believe it about the drawing lessons.

“But you already know how to draw!” she kept saying.

I, of course, couldn’t have agreed more. Still, it was good to know I wasn’t the only person who thought my having to spend every Tuesday and Thursday from three thirty until five thirty at the Susan Boone Art Studio was going to be a massive waste of time.

“That is just so like Lucy,” Catherine said as we walked Manet through the Bishop’s Garden on Monday after school. The Bishop’s Garden is part of the grounds of the National Cathedral, where they have all the funerals for any important people who die in D.C. It is only a five-minute walk from where we live, in Cleveland Park, to the National Cathedral. Which is good, because it is Manet’s favorite place to chase squirrels and bust in on couples who are making out in the gazebo and stuff.

Which is another thing: who is going to walk Manet while I am at the Susan Boone Art Studio? Theresa won’t do it. She hates Manet, even though he’s fully stopped chewing on the electrical cords. Besides, according to Dr. Lee, the animal behaviorist, that was my fault, for naming him Monet, which sounds like the word no. Since changing his name to Manet, he’s been a lot better . . . though my dad wasn’t too thrilled with the five-hundred-dollar bill Dr. Lee sent him.

Theresa says that it is bad enough that she has to clean up after all of us; over her dead body is she cleaning up after my eighty-pound Old English sheepdog.

“I can’t believe Lucy did that,” Catherine said. “I’m sure glad I don’t have any sisters.” Catherine is a middle child, like me—which is probably why we get along so well. Only unlike me, Catherine has two brothers, one older and one younger . . . and neither of whom are smarter or more attractive than she is.

Catherine is so lucky.

“But if it hadn’t been Lucy, it would have been Kris,” she pointed out as we trudged along the narrow, twisty path through the gardens. “Kris was totally onto you. I mean about only charging her and her friends.”

Which had been, really, the beauty of the whole thing. That I’d only been charging girls like Kris and her friends, I mean. Everyone else had gotten drawings for free.

Well, and why not? When, as a joke, I drew a portrait of Catherine with her favorite celebrity of all time, Heath Ledger, word got around, and soon I had a waiting list of people who wanted pictures of themselves in the company of various hotties.

At first I didn’t even think about charging. I was more than glad to provide drawings to my friends for free, since it seemed to make them happy.

And then when the non-English-speaking girls in my school got wind of it and wanted portraits, too, well, I couldn’t very well charge them, either. I mean, if you just moved to this country—whether to escape oppression in your native land, or, like most of the non­English speakers at our school, because one of your parents was an ambassador or diplomat—no way should you have to pay for a celebrity drawing. You see, I know what it is like to be in a strange place where you don’t speak the language: it sucks. I learned this the hard way, thanks to Dad—who is in charge of the World Bank’s North African division. He moved us all to Morocco for a year when I was eight. It would have been nice if somebody there had given me some drawings of Justin Timberlake for free, instead of staring at me like I was a freak just because I didn’t know the Moroccan for “May I please be excused?” when I had to go to the bathroom.

Then I got hit by a bunch of requests for celebrity portraits from the girls in Special Ed. Well, I couldn’t charge people in Special Ed, either, on account of how I know what it is like to be in Special Ed. After we got back from Morocco, it was determined that my speech impediment—I said th instead of s, just like Cindy Brady—wasn’t something I was going to grow out of . . . not without some professional help. So I was forced to attend special speech and hearing lessons while everybody else was in music appreciation.

As if this were not bad enough, whenever I returned to my regular classroom, I was routinely mocked for my supposed stupidity by Kris Parks—who’d been my best friend up until I’d left for Morocco. Then whammo, I come back and she’s all, “Samantha who?”

It was like she didn’t even remember how she used to come to my house to play Barbies every day after school. No, suddenly she was all about “going with” boys and running around at recess, trying to kiss them. The fact that I, as a fourth grader, would sooner have eaten glass than allowed a fellow fourth grader’s lips to touch mine—particularly Rodd Muckinfuss, who was the class stud that year—instantly branded me as “immature” (the th instead of s probably didn’t help much, either). Kris dropped me like a hot potato.

Fortunately this only fueled my desire to learn to speak properly. The day I graduated from speech and hearing, I strode right up to Kris and called her a stupid, slobbering, inconsiderate simpering sycophant.

We haven’t really spoken much since.

So, figuring that people who are in Special Ed really need a break now and then—especially the ones who have to wear a helmet all the time due to being prone to seizures or whatever—I declared that, for them, my celebrity-drawing services were free, as they were for my friends and the non­English speakers at Adams Prep.

Really, I was like my own little UN, doling out aid, in the form of highly realistic renderings of Freddie Prinze Jr., to the underprivileged.

But it turned out that Kris Parks, now president of the sophomore class and still an all-around pain in my rear, had a problem with this. Well, not with the fact that I wasn’t charging the non­English speakers, but with the fact that it turned out the only people I was charging were Kris and her friends.

But what did she think? Like I was really going to charge Catherine, who has been my best friend ever since I got back from Morocco and found out that Kris had pulled an Anakin and gone over to the Dark Side? Catherine and I totally bonded over Kris’s mistreatment of us—Kris still takes great delight in making fun of Catherine’s knee-length skirts, which is all Mrs. Salazar, Catherine’s mom, will allow her to wear, being super Christian and all—and our mutual contempt for Rodd Muckinfuss.

Oh, yeah. I’m definitely going to give free drawings of Orlando Bloom to someone like Kris.

Not.

People like Kris—maybe because she was never forced to attend speech and hearing lessons, much less a school where no one spoke the same language she did—cannot seem to grasp the concept of being nice to anyone who is not size five, blond, and decked out in Abercrombie and Fitch from head to toe.

In other words, anyone who is not Kris Parks.

Catherine and I were talking about this on our way home from the cathedral grounds—Kris, I mean, and her insufferability—when this car approached us and I saw my dad waving at us from behind the wheel.

“Hi, girls,” my mom said, leaning over my dad to talk to us, since we were closest to the driver’s side. “I don’t suppose either of you is interested in going to Lucy’s game.”

“Mom,” Lucy said from the backseat. She was in full cheerleader regalia. “Do not even try. They won’t come, and even if they do, I mean, look at Sam. I’d be embarrassed to be seen with her.”

“Lucy,” my dad said in a warning tone. He needn’t have bothered, however. I am quite used to Lucy’s disparaging remarks concerning my appearance.

It is all well and good for people like Lucy, whose primary concern in life is not missing a single sale at Club Monaco. I mean, for Lucy, the fact that they started selling Paul Mitchell products in our local drugstore was cause for jubilation the likes of which had not been seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I, however, am a little more concerned about world issues, such as the fact that three hundred million children a day go to bed hungry and that school art programs are invariably the first things cut whenever local boards of education find they are working at a deficit.

Which is why at the start of this school year, I dyed my entire wardrobe black to show that

I was in mourning for our generation, who clearly do not care about anything except what’s going to happen on Friends next week, and

fashion trends are for phonies like my sister.

And yeah, my mom nearly blew a capillary or two when she saw what I’d done. But hey, at least she knows one of her daughters actually thinks about something other than French manicures.

My mom, unlike Lucy, wasn’t about to give up on me, though. Which was why, there in the car, she put on a bright sunshiny smile, even though there was nothing to feel too sunshiny about, if you ask me. There was a pretty steady drizzle going on, and it was only about forty degrees outside. Not the kind of November day anyone—but especially someone completely lacking in school spirit, like me—would really want to spend sitting in some bleachers, watching a bunch of jocks chase a ball around, while girls in too-tight purple-and-white sweaters—like my sister—cheered them on.

“You never know,” my mom said to Lucy from the front seat. “They might change their minds.” To us, she said, “What do you say, Sam? Catherine? Afterwards Dad is taking us to Chinatown for dim sum.” She glanced at me. “I’m sure we can find a burger or something for you, Sam.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Madison,” Catherine said. She didn’t look sorry at all. In fact, she looked downright happy to have an excuse not to go. Most school events are agony for Catherine, given the comments she regularly receives from the In Crowd about her Laura Ashley­esque wardrobe (“Where’d you park your chuck wagon?” etc.). “I have to be getting home. Sunday is the day of—”

“—rest. Yes, I know.” My mom had heard this plenty of times before. Mr. Salazar, who is a diplomat at the and makes all his kids stay home that day every week. Catherine had only been let out for a half-hour reprieve in order to return The Patriot (which she has seen seventeen times) to Potomac Video. The trip to the National Cathedral had totally been on the sly. But Catherine figured since technically a visit to a church was involved, her parents wouldn’t get that mad if they found out about it.

“Richard.” Rebecca, beside Lucy in the backseat, looked up from her laptop long enough to convey her deep displeasure with the situation. “Carol. Give it up.”

“Dad,” my mom said, glaring at Rebecca. “Dad, not Richard. And it’s Mom, not Carol.”

“Sorry,” Rebecca said. “But could we get a move on? I only have two hours on this battery pack, you know, and I have three spreadsheets due tomorrow.”

Rebecca, who at eleven should be in the sixth grade, goes to Horizon, a special school in Bethesda for gifted kids, where she is taking college-level courses. It is a geek school, as is amply illustrated by the fact that the son of our current president, who is a geek if there ever was one—the son, I mean; but now that I think about it, his dad’s one, too, actually—is enrolled there. Horizon is so geeky, they do not even hand out grades, just term reports. Rebecca’s last term report said: “Rebecca, while reading at a college level, has yet to catch up to her peers in emotional maturity, and needs to work on her ‘people skills’ next semester.”

But while her intellectual age might be forty, Rebecca acts about six and a half, which is why she’s lucky she doesn’t go to a school for regularly intelligent people, like Lucy and me: the Kris Parkses of the eleven-year-old set would eat her alive. Especially considering her lack of people skills.

My mother sighed. She was always very popular in high school, like Lucy. She was, in fact, voted Miss School Spirit. My mom doesn’t understand where she went wrong with me. I think she blames my dad. My dad didn’t get voted anything in high school, because, like me, he spent most of his time while he was there fantasizing about being somewhere else.

“Fine,” Mom said to me. “Stay home then. But don’t—”

“—open the door to strangers,” I said. “I know.”

As if anyone ever even came to our door except the Bread Lady. The Bread Lady is the wife of a French diplomat who lives down the street from us. We don’t know her name. We just call her the Bread Lady, because every three weeks or so she goes mental, I guess from missing her native country so much, and bakes about a hundred loaves of French bread, which she then sells from door to door in our neighborhood for fifty cents each. I am addicted to the Bread Lady’s baguettes. In fact, they are practically the only thing I will eat, besides hamburgers, as I dislike most fruits and all vegetables, as well as a wide variety of other food groups, such as fish and anything with garlic.

The only person who ever comes to our door besides the Bread Lady is Jack. But we are not allowed to let Jack into the house when my parents or Theresa aren’t home. This is because of the time Jack shot out the windows of his dad’s Bethesda medical practice with his BB gun as a form of protest over Dr. Ryder’s prescribing medications that had been tested on animals. My parents positively refuse to see that Jack was forced to take this drastic action in order to get his father to pay attention to the fact that animals are being tortured. They seem to think he did it just for the fun of it, which is so obviously untrue. Jack never does things just for the fun of them. He is seriously trying to make this world a better place.

Personally, I think the real reason Mom and Dad don’t want Jack in the house when they aren’t home is that they don’t want him and Lucy making out. Which is a valid concern, but they could just say so, instead of hiding behind the BB gun defense. It is highly unlikely Jack is ever going to shoot out OUR windows. My mom is fully on the side of the good guys, seeing as how she’s an attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Come on, you guys,” Lucy whined from the backseat. “I’m going to be late for the game.”

“And no drawing celebrities,” my mom called as Dad pulled away, “until all your German homework is done!”

Catherine and I watched them go, the sedan’s wheels scrunching on the dead leaves in the road.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to draw celebrities anymore,” Catherine said as we turned the corner.

Manet, spotting a squirrel across the street, dragged me to the curb, nearly giving me whiplash.

“I can still draw celebrities,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over Manet’s hoarse barking. “I just can’t charge people for them.”

“Oh.” Catherine considered this. Then she asked, in a pleading tone, “Then would you PLEASE draw Heath for me? Just once more? I promise I’ll never ask again.”

“I guess,” I said with a sigh, as if it were this very big pain in the neck for me.

Except of course it wasn’t. Because when you love something, you want to do it all the time, even if no one is paying you for it.

At least that’s how I felt about drawing.

Until I met Susan Boone.

Top ten reasons I wish I were Gwen Stefani, lead singer of the best ska band of all time, No Doubt:

10. Gwen can dye her hair whatever color she wants, even bright pink like she did for the Return of Saturn tour, and her parents don’t care, because they appreciate that she is an artist and must do these things as a form of creative expression. Mr. and Mrs. Stefani probably never threatened to cut off Gwen’s allowance the way my parents did that time I tried the thing with the Kool-Aid.

9. If Gwen chose to wear black every single day, people would just accept it as a sign of her great genius and no one would make ninja comments, like they do about me.

8. Gwen has her own place, and so her older siblings can’t come busting into her room whenever they want to, poking through her stuff and then telling their parents on her.

7. Gwen gets to write songs about her ex-boyfriends and sing them in front of everyone. I have never even had a boyfriend, so how could I have an ex to write about?

6. Free CDs.

5. If she were getting a C-minus in German on account of using all her class time to write songs, I fully doubt Gwen’s mother would make her take a songwriting workshop twice a week. More likely, she’d let Gwen drop German and write songs full time.

4. She has dozens of websites dedicated to her. When you put the words Samantha Madison in any search engine, nothing whatsoever about me comes up.

3. All of the people who were mean to Gwen in high school are probably totally sorry about it now and try to suck up to her. But she can just be like, “Who are you again?” like Kris Parks was about me when I got back from Morocco.

2. She can get any boy she wants. Well, maybe not ANY boy, but she could probably get the boy I want. Who, sadly, is my sister’s boyfriend. But whatever.

And the number-one reason I wish I were Gwen Stefani:

1. She doesn’t have to take art lessons with Susan Boone.

Theresa was the one who ended up driving me to the art studio after school the next day.

Theresa is used to chauffeuring us around, though. She has been with our family since we got back from Morocco. She does everything my parents are too busy working to do: drive us places, clean the house, do the laundry, cook the meals, buy the groceries.

Not, of course, that we don’t have to help out. For instance, I am completely in charge of Manet and everything to do with him, since I’m the one who wanted a dog so badly. Rebecca has to set the table, I clear it and put away the leftovers, while Lucy loads the dishwasher.

It mostly works out—if Theresa is supervising. If Theresa’s gone home for the night, things generally get a little messy. One of her unofficial duties is exacting discipline in our family, since Mom and Dad, in the words of Horizon, Rebecca’s school, sometimes “fail to set appropriate limits” for us kids.

On the way to Susan Boone’s that first day, Theresa was totally setting some limits. She was on to the fact that I had every intention of bolting the minute she drove away.

“If you think, Miss Samantha,” she was saying as we crawled down Burrito Alley, which is what people are calling Dupont Circle since lately so many burrito and wrap places have popped up all along it, “that I am not going in with you, you have another think coming.”

This is one of Theresa’s favorite expressions. I taught it to her. And it really is “another think coming,” not “ thing.” It’s a Southern saying. I got it out of To Kill a Mockingbird. I have worked very hard to acclimatize Theresa to our culture, since when she first started working for us she had just arrived here from Ecuador and didn’t know squat about anything to do with America.

Now she is so in touch with what’s hot and what’s not in the U.S. of A., MTV should hire her as a consultant.

Also, she only calls me Miss Samantha when she is mad at me.

“I know exactly what you are thinking, Miss Samantha,” Theresa said as we sat on Connecticut Avenue in a traffic jam caused, as usual, by the president’s motorcade. That is one of the problems about living in Washington, D.C. You can’t go anywhere without running into a motorcade. “I turn my back on you, and you run straight into the nearest Virgin Record Store, and that is the end of that.”

I sighed like this had never occurred to me, though of course I had fully been planning on doing exactly that. But I feel like I have to. If I don’t attempt to thwart authority, how will I retain my integrity as an artist?

“As if, Theresa,” is all I said, though.

“Don’t you ‘as if Theresa’ me,” Theresa said. “I know you. Wearing that black all the time and playing that punk rock music—”

“Ska,” I corrected her.

“Whatever.” The last of the motorcade passed by, and we were free to move again. “Next thing I know, you will be dyeing that beautiful red hair of yours black.”

I thought guiltily of the box of Midnight Whisper colorfast hair dye in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Had she seen it? Because in spite of what Theresa might think, having red hair is so not beautiful. Well, maybe if you have red hair like Lucy’s, which is the color they call titian, after the painter who invented it. But red hair like mine, which is the color—and consistency—of the copper wire they run through telephone poles? Not so lovely, let me tell you.

“And at five thirty,” Theresa went on, “when I come to pick you up, I will be going into the building to find you. None of this meeting you at the curb.”

Theresa really has the mom thing down. She has four kids of her own, all mostly grown, and three grandchildren, even though she’s only a year older than my mom. This is because, as she put it, her eldest son, Tito, is an idiot.

It was because of Tito’s idiocy that you could not pull anything over on Theresa. She had seen it all before.

When we finally got to the Susan Boone Art Studio, which was on the corner of R and Connecticut, right across from the Founding Church of Scientology, Theresa gave me a very dirty look. Not because of the Church of Scientology, but because of the record store Susan Boone’s studio was on top of. As if I’d had something to do with picking the place out!

Although I have to say, Static, one of the few record stores in town that I’d actually never been to before, looked tempting—almost as tempting as Capitol Cookies, the bakery next door to it. You could even hear the strains of one of my favorite songs thumping through the walls as we walked toward the store (we had to go around the block once and park a million miles away on Q Street; you could tell Theresa wasn’t going to be insisting on walking me to the door again after this). Static was playing Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains.” Which if you think about it really sums up my whole attitude about life, since the only time parents will actually let you stay inside and draw is when it is raining out. Otherwise it’s all, “Why can’t you go outside and ride your bike like a normal kid?”

But Susan Boone must have had her place soundproofed, because when we finished climbing the narrow, whitewashed staircase to her second-floor studio, you couldn’t hear Garbage at all. Instead all you could hear was a radio, softly playing some classical music, and another sound I could not quite identify. The smell, as we climbed, was comfortingly familiar to me. No, it didn’t smell like cookies. It smelled like the art room back at school, of paint and turpentine.

It wasn’t until we got to the door of the studio, and I pushed it open, that I realized what the other sound I’d been hearing was.

“Hello Joe. Hello Joe. Hello Joe,” a big black crow, sitting on top of, and not inside, a large bamboo cage, squawked at us.

Theresa screamed.

“Joseph!” A small woman with the longest, whitest hair I had ever seen came out from behind an easel and yelled at the bird. “Mind your manners!”

“Mind your manners,” the bird said as he hopped around the top of his cage. “Mind your manners, mind your manners, mind your manners.”

“Jesu Cristo,” Theresa said, sinking onto a nearby paint-spattered bench. She was already out of breath from the steep staircase. The shock of being yelled at by a bird had not helped.

“Sorry about that,” the woman with the long white hair said. “Please don’t mind Joseph. It takes him a while to get used to strangers.” She looked at me. “So. You must be Samantha. I’m Susan.”

Back in middle school, Catherine and I had gone through this stage where all we would read were fantasy books. We’d consumed them like M&Ms, by the fistful, J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks and Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander. Susan Boone looked, to me, like the queen of the elves (there’s almost always an elf queen in fantasy books). I mean, she was shorter than me and had on a strange lineny outfit in pale blues and greens.

But it was her long white hair—down to her waist!—and bright blue eyes, peering out of a lined and completely unmade-up face, that cinched it for me. Even the corners of her mouth curled upward, the way an elf’s would, even when there was nothing to smile about.

Back in the days when Catherine and I had gone around tapping on the backs of wardrobes, hoping to get transported to a land where there were fauns and hobbits, not Lunchables and Carson Daly, meeting someone like Susan Boone would have been a thrill.

Now it was just kind of weird.

I reached out and took the hand she’d stretched toward me, and shook it. Her skin was dry and rough.

“Call me Sam,” I said, impressed with Susan Boone’s grip, which wasn’t at all elflike: the woman could definitely have handled Manet in a pinch.

“Hi, Sam,” Susan Boone said. Then she let go of my hand and turned toward Theresa. “You must be Mrs. Madison. It’s nice to meet you.”

Theresa had caught her breath. Now she stood up and shook her head, saying that she was Mrs. Madison’s housekeeper, Theresa, and that she would be back at five thirty to pick me up.

Then Theresa left and Susan Boone took me by both shoulders and steered me toward one of the paint-spattered benches, which had no back, just a tall board along one end, against which leaned a large drawing pad.

“Everyone,” Susan Boone said as she pushed me down onto the bench, “this is Sam. Sam, this is—”

Then, exactly like brownies popping out from behind giant toadstools, the rest of the art class popped their heads out from behind huge drawing pads to look at me.

“Lynn, Gertie, John, Jeffrey and David,” Susan Boone said, pointing at each person as she said his or her name.

No sooner had the heads appeared than they disappeared again, as everyone went back to scribbling on their pads. I was awarded no more than a fleeting glance of Lynn, a skinny woman in her thirties; Gertie, a plump middle-aged woman; John, a middle-aged guy with a hearing aid; Jeffrey, a young African-American man; and David, who was wearing a Save Ferris T-shirt.

Since Save Ferris is one of my favorite bands, I figured at least I’d have somebody to talk to.

But then I got a closer look at David, and I realized the chances of him even talking to me were, like, nil. I mean, he looked kind of familiar, which meant he probably went to Adams with me. And I have been one of the most hated people at Adams ever since I suggested the school donate the money we raised selling holiday wrapping paper to the school’s art department.

But Lucy and Kris Parks and people like that wanted to go to Six Flags Great Adventure theme park.

Guess who won?

And the whole wearing-black-every-day-because-I-am-mourning-for-my-generation thing hasn’t exactly helped boost my popularity much, either.

David looked like he was about Lucy’s age. He was tall—well, at least from what I could see of him, sitting on the bench—with curly dark hair and these very green eyes and big hands and feet. He was kind of cute—though not as cute as Jack, of course—which meant that, if he did go to Adams, he probably hung out with the jocks. All the cute boys at Adams hang with the jocks. Except for Jack, of course.

So when David winked at me after I sat down, and said, “Nice boots,” I was completely shocked. Thinking that he was mocking me—as most of the boys who hang out with the jocks at Adams are wont to do—I looked down and realized that he, like me, was wearing combat boots.

Only David, unlike me, wasn’t making the satirical statement with his that I was making with mine, having decorated mine with daisies (of Wite-Out and yellow highlighter) one day in seventh period.

While I was busy turning bright red because this cute boy spoke to me, Susan Boone said, “We’re doing a still life today.” She handed me a pencil, a nice soft-leaded one. Then she pointed at a pile of fruit on a small table in the middle of the room and went, “Draw what you see.”

Then she walked away.

Well, so much for her trying to stamp out my individuality and natural ability. I was relieved to see I had been wrong about that. Telling myself to forget about Cute David and his boot comment—undoubtedly he was only being nice to me on account of me being the new kid, and all—I looked at the pile of fruit on the table, nestled against a wrinkled-up piece of white silk, and began to draw.

Okay, I thought to myself. This isn’t so bad. It was actually somewhat pleasant in the Susan Boone studio. Susan was interesting, with her elf queen hair and smile. A cute boy had said he liked my boots. The classical music playing softly in the background was nice. I never listen to classical music unless it’s playing in the background of some movie I’m watching, or something. And the smell of turpentine was refreshing, like hot apple cider on a crisp autumn day.

Maybe, I thought as I drew, this wasn’t going to be so bad. Maybe it would even be fun. I mean, there are a lot of worse ways to blow four hours a week, right?

Pears. Grapes. An apple. A pomegranate. I drew without much thinking about what I was doing. I wondered what Theresa was making for dinner. I wondered why I hadn’t taken Spanish instead of German. If I’d taken Spanish, I could have gotten help on my homework from two native speakers, Theresa and Catherine. No one I knew spoke German. Why had I taken such a dumb language in the first place? I’d only done it because Lucy had, and she’d said it was easy. Easy! Ha! Maybe for Lucy. But what wasn’t easy for Lucy? I mean, Lucy has everything: titian hair, a totally righteous boyfriend, the corner bedroom with the big closet . . .

I was so busy drawing and thinking about how much better Lucy’s life was than mine that I didn’t notice Joe the crow had hopped down off the top of his cage and wandered over to check me out until he’d yanked a few strands of my hair.

Seriously. A bird stole some of my hair!

I shrieked, causing Joe to take flight, scattering black feathers everywhere.

“Joseph!” Susan Boone cried when she saw what was happening. “Put down Sam’s hair!”

Obediently, Joe opened his beak. Three or four copper-colored hairs floated to the ground.

“Pretty bird,” Joe said, tilting his head in my direction. “Pretty bird.”

“Oh, Sam,” Susan Boone said, stooping down to pick up my hair. “I’m so sorry. He’s always been very attracted to bright, shiny things.” She came over and handed me back my hair, as if there was some way I could glue it all back onto my head.

“He’s not a bad bird, really,” Gertie said, like she was concerned I had gotten the wrong impression, or something, of Susan Boone’s bird.

“Bad bird,” Joe said. “Bad bird.”

I sat there with my hair lying in my outstretched palm, thinking that Susan Boone would do well to shell out five hundred big ones to an animal behaviorist, since her pet had some major issues. Meanwhile, fluttering back to the top of his cage, Joe wouldn’t take his beady black eyes off me. Off my hair, to be more exact. You could tell he really wanted to take another swipe at it, if he could. At least, that’s how it looked to me. Do birds even feel things? I know dogs do.

But dogs are smart. Birds are kind of stupid.

But not, I realized later, as stupid as humans can be. Or at least this particular human. Around five fifteen—I could tell because the classical music station had started doing the news—Susan Boone said, “All right. Windowsill.”

And everyone but me got up from the benches and propped his or her drawing pad, with the drawing facing into the room, on the windowsill. Windows ran around all three sides of the corner room, big, ten-foot factory-style windows, above a sill wide enough to sit on. I hurried to put my pad with the others, and then we all stood back and looked at what everyone had drawn.

Mine was clearly the best. I felt pretty bad about it. I mean, here I was on my very first day of class, already drawing better than everyone else in it, even the grown-ups. I felt sorriest for John: his drawing was just a big old mess. Gertie’s was blocky and smeared. Lynn’s looked as if a kindergartner had drawn it, and Jeffrey had drawn something unrecognizable as fruit.

UFOs, maybe. But not fruit.

Only David had drawn anything remotely good. But he hadn’t drawn quickly enough to finish his. I had gotten in ALL the fruit, and I had even added a pineapple and some bananas, to kind of balance it all out.

I hoped Susan Boone wouldn’t make too big a deal out of how much better my drawing was than everybody else’s. I didn’t want to make anybody feel bad.

“Well,” Susan Boone said. And then she stepped forward and started discussing each person’s drawing.

She was really quite diplomatic about the whole thing. I mean, my dad could probably have used her over in his offices, she was so tactful (economists are pretty good with numbers, but when it comes to human relations, they, like Rebecca, don’t do so well). Susan went on about Lynn’s dramatic use of line and Gertie’s nice sense of placement on the page. She said John had improved a lot, and everyone seemed to agree, which made me wonder how bad John had been when he started. David got an “excellent juxtaposition,” and Jeffrey a “fine detail.”

When she finally got to my drawing, I felt like slinking out of the room. I mean, my drawing was so obviously the best one. I really don’t mean to sound like a snob, but my drawings are always the best ones. Drawing is the one thing I can do well.

And I really hoped Susan Boone wasn’t going to rub it in. The rest of the class had to feel badly enough already.

But it turned out I needn’t have worried about how the rest of the class was going to feel as Susan Boone sang the praises of my drawing. Because when Susan Boone got to my drawing, she didn’t have a single nice thing to say about it. Instead, she peered at it, then stepped up to it and looked at it even more closely. Then she took a step back and went, “Well, Sam. I see that you drew what you knew.”

I thought this was a pretty weird thing to say. But then, the whole thing had been pretty weird so far. Nice—except for the hair-stealing bird, which hadn’t been so nice—but weird.

“Um,” I said. “I guess so.”

“But I didn’t tell you to draw what you know,” Susan Boone said. “I told you to draw what you see.”

I looked from my drawing to the pile of fruit on the table, then back again, confused.

“But I did,” I said. “I did draw what I see. I mean, saw.”

“Did you?” Susan Boone asked, with another of her little elf smiles. “And do you see a pineapple on that table?”

I didn’t have to glance back at the table to check. I knew there was no pineapple there. “Well,” I said. “No. But—”

“No. There is no pineapple there. And this pear isn’t there, either.” She pointed at one of the pears I had drawn.

“Wait a minute,” I said, still confused but getting defensive. “There are pears there. There are four pears there on the table.”

“Yes,” Susan Boone said. “There are four pears on the table. But none of them is this pear. This is a pear from your imagination. It is what you know to be a pear—a perfect pear—but it is not any of the pears you actually saw.”

I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about, but Gertie and Lynn and John and Jeffrey and David knew, apparently. They were all nodding.

“Don’t you see, Sam?” Susan Boone picked up my drawing pad and walked over to me. She pointed at the grapes I had drawn. “You’ve drawn some beautiful grapes. But they aren’t the grapes on the table. The grapes on the table aren’t so perfectly oblong, and they aren’t all the same size, either. What you’ve drawn here is your idea of how grapes should look, not the grapes that are actually in front of us.”

I blinked down at the drawing pad. I didn’t get it. I really didn’t. I mean, I guess I sort of understood what she was saying, but I didn’t see what the big deal was. My grapes looked a lot better than anybody else’s grapes. Wasn’t that a good thing?

The worst part of it was, I could feel everybody looking at me sympathetically. My face started getting hot. That is the thing about being a redhead, of course. You go around blushing something like ninety-seven percent of the time. And there is absolutely nothing you can do to hide it.

“Draw what you see, ” Susan Boone said, not in an unkind way. “Not what you know, Sam.”

And then Theresa, panting from her climb up the stairs, came in, causing Joe to start shrieking “Hello Joe! Hello Joe!” all over again.

And it was time to go. I thought I would collapse with relief.

“I’ll see you on Thursday,” Susan Boone called cheerfully to me as I put on my coat.

I smiled back at her, but of course I was thinking, Over my dead body will you see me on Thursday.

I didn’t know then, of course, how right I was. Well, in a way.

When I told Jack about it—what had happened at the Susan Boone Art Studio, I mean—he just laughed.

Laughed! Like it was funny!

I was kind of hurt by this, but I guess it was kind of funny. In away.

“Sam,” he said, shaking his head so that the long silver ankh he wears in one ear swayed softly. “You can’t let the establishment win. You’ve got to fight against the system.”

Which is easy for Jack to say. Jack is six foot four and weighs over two hundred pounds. He was assiduously courted by our school football coach after the team’s best linebacker moved to Dubai.

But Jack wouldn’t have any part of Coach Donnelly’s scheme to dominate our school district’s sectionals. Jack doesn’t believe in organized sports, but not because, like me, he is resentful of their draining valuable funds away from the arts. No, Jack is convinced that sports, like the Lottery, only serve to lull the proletariat into a false sense of hope that he might one day rise above his Bud-swilling, pickup-truck-driving peers.

It is very easy for a guy like Jack to fight against the system.

I, on the other hand, am only five foot two and do not know what I weigh, since Mom threw out the scale after seeing a news story on the prevalence of anorexia in today’s teenage girls, but it surely isn’t more than one ten or so. Plus I have never been able to climb the rope in PE, having inherited my father’s complete lack of upper-body strength.

When I mentioned this, however, Jack started laughing even harder, which I thought was, you know, kind of rude. For a guy who is supposed to be my soulmate, and all. Even if he maybe doesn’t know it yet.

“Sam,” he said, “I’m not talking about physically fighting the system. You’ve got to be more subtle than that.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table, polishing off a box of Entenmann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts Theresa had put out for us as an after-school snack. Entenmann’s is not what we normally get as after-school snack fare. My mom only wants us to have apples and Graham Crackers and milk and stuff. But Theresa, unlike my parents, doesn’t care about Jack’s grades or the political statements he likes to make with his BB gun, so when he comes over when she’s around, it’s always like a big party. Sometimes she even bakes. Once she made fudge. I am telling you, Lucy’s getting the one guy who will inspire Theresa to make fudge proves there is seriously no justice in the world.

“Susan Boone is stifling me creatively,” I said, indignantly. “She’s trying to make me into some kind of art clone . . .”

“Of course she is.”Jack looked amused as he bit into another doughnut. “That’s what teachers do. You tried to get a little creative, added a pineapple and POW! The fist of conformity came crashing down on you.”

When Jack gets excited, he talks with his mouth open. He did that now. Bits of doughnut went flying across the table and hit the back of the magazine Lucy was reading. She lowered her copy of Cosmo, looked at the bits of doughnut stuck to the back, looked at Jack, and went, “Dude, say it, don’t spray it.”

Then she went back to reading about orgasms.

See? See what I mean about her being oblivious to Jack’s genius?

I took a bite of my own doughnut. Our kitchen table, at which we generally only eat for breakfast and snacks, is located in this kind of glass atrium that juts out from the rest of the kitchen, into the backyard. Our house is old—more than a hundred years old, like most of the houses in Cleveland Park, which are all these Victorians with a lot of stained-glass windows and widow’s walks, painted bright colours. For instance, our house is turquoise, yellow and white.

The glass atrium the kitchen table is in was added on to our house last year. The ceiling is glass, three walls are made of glass, and the kitchen table, actually, is made out of this huge piece of glass. Everywhere I looked, I could see my reflection, since it was getting dark outside. And I didn’t much like what I saw:

A medium-sized girl with too pale skin and freckles, dressed all in black, with a bunch of bright red curly hair sticking straight out of the top of her head.

What I saw sitting on either side of my reflection I liked even less:

A delicately featured girl with no freckles in a purple-and-white cheerleader uniform, her own bright-red hair completely under control and only curling softly where it tumbled down from a barrette.

And:

A gorgeous, big-shouldered hunk with piercing blue eyes and long brown hair in torn-up jeans and an Army Navy surplus trenchcoat, eating doughnuts as if there were no tomorrow.

And there was me, in the middle. In between. Where I always am.

I saw a documentary on birth order on the Health Network, and guess what it said:

First born (aka Lucy): Bossy. Always gets what she wants. Kid most likely to be CEO of a major corporation, dictator of a small country, supermodel, you name it.

Last born (aka Rebecca): Baby. Always gets what she wants. Kid most likely to end up discovering a cure for cancer, hosting her own talk show, stepping up to the alien mother ship when it lands and being all, “Hey, welcome to Earth,” etc.

Middle child (aka me): Lost in the shuffle. Never gets what she wants. Kid most likely to end up a teen runaway, living on leftover Big Macs scrounged from Dumpsters behind the local McDonald’s for weeks before anyone even notices she is gone.

Story of my life.

Although if you think about it, the fact that I am left-handed indicates that I was probably, at one time, a twin. According to this article I read in the dentist’s office, anyway. There’s this theory that most lefties actually started out as one in a pair of a twins. One out of every ten pregnancies starts out as twins. One of out every ten people is left-handed.

Hey. You do the maths.

For a while I thought my mom had never told me about my dead twin to spare my feelings. But then I read on the Internet that in seventy per cent of pregnancies that begin as twins, one of the babies disappears. Just like that. Poof. This is called vanishing-twin syndrome, and generally the mothers don’t ever even realize that they were carrying two babies instead of just one because the other one gets lost so early in the pregnancy.

Not that any of this really matters. Because even if my twin had survived, I’d still be the middle child. I’d just have someone else to share the burden with. And maybe to have talked me out of taking German.

“Well,” I said, dropping my gaze from my reflection and scowling instead at the place mat beneath my elbows. “What am I supposed to do now? Nobody ever said anything to me about not adding things in school, when we had art. They let me add things all I wanted.”

Jack snorted. “School,” he said. “Yeah, right.”

Jack was having an ongoing and extremely bitter feud with our school’s administrative offices over some paintings he entered in an art show at the mall. Mr. Esposito, the principal of Adams Prep, where Jack and Lucy and I go, didn’t approve Jack’s entering these paintings in Adams Prep’s name—he never even saw them. So when they were accepted, he was peeved, because the subject matter of the paintings wasn’t what he considers Adams Prep‘ quality. The paintings are all of baseball-hatted teens slouching around outside a Seven Eleven. They are titled Studies in Baditude, Numbers One through Three, though at a recent board of trustees meeting, one irate parent called them Studies in Slackitude.

The Impressionists, I often remind Jack, when he is feeling down about this, weren’t appreciated in their day, either.

In any case, there is no love lost between Jack and the John Adams Preparatory School administration. In truth, were it not for the fact that Jack’s parents are major contributors to the school’s alumni foundation, Jack probably would have been expelled a long time ago.

“You’ve just got to find a way to fight this Susan Boone person,” Jack said. “I mean, before she drives out every creative thought in your head. You have got to draw what is in your heart, Sam. Otherwise, what is the point?”

“I thought,” Lucy said in a bored voice as she flipped over a page in her magazine, “that you’re supposed to draw what you know.”

“It’s write what you know.” Rebecca, down at the opposite end of the table from me, looked up from her laptop. “And draw what you see. Everyone knows that.”

Jack looked at me triumphantly. “You see?” he said. “You see how insidious it is, this thing? It’s even seeped into the consciousness of little eleven-year-old girls.”

Rebecca shot him an aggravated look. Rebecca has always been fully on my parents’ side on the whole issue of Jack.

“Hey,” she said. “I am not little.”

Jack ignored her. “Where would we be if Picasso had only drawn what he saw?” Jack wanted to know. “Or Pollock? Or Miro?” He shook his head. “You stay true to your beliefs, Sam. You draw from your heart. If your heart says put in a pineapple, then you put in a pineapple. Don’t let the establishment tell you what to do. Don’t let others dictate how—and what—you draw.”

I don’t know how he does it, but somehow, Jack always says the right thing. Always.

“So, are you going to quit?” Catherine, calling me later that evening to discuss our Bio assignment, wanted to know. Our Bio assignment was to watch a documentary on the Learning Channel about people who have body dysmorphic disorder. These are people who, like Michael Jackson, think they are horribly disfigured, when in reality, they are not. For instance, one man hated his nose so much, he slit it open with a knife, pulled out his own nasal cartilage and stuck a chicken bone in there.

Which just goes to show, no matter how bad you think something might be, it could always be much, much worse.

“I don’t know,” I said, in response to Catherine’s question. We had already fully discussed the whole chicken bone thing. “I want to. That class is filled with a bunch of freaks.”

“Yeah,” Catherine said. “But you told me there was one cute guy.”

I thought about familiar-looking David, his Save Ferris T-shirt, his big hands and feet, and his liking my boots.

And the way he had seen me totally and utterly crushed, like an ant, in front of him by Susan Boone.

“He’s cute,” I admitted. “But not as cute as Jack.”

“Who is?” Catherine asked, with a sigh. “Except maybe for Heath.”

So, so true.

“Will your mom let you quit?” Catherine wanted to know. “I mean, isn’t this supposed to be kind of a punishment for the C minus in German thing? Maybe you aren’t supposed to like it.”

“I think it’s supposed to be a learning experience for me,” I said. “You know, like how Debbie Kinley’s parents sent her to Outward Bound after she drank all that vodka at that party at Rodd Muckinfuss’s house? Art lessons are supposed to be like my Outward Bound.“

“Then you can’t quit,” Catherine said. “So what are you going to do?”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said.

Actually, I already had. Little did I know what I’d figured out was going to end up practically getting me killed.

Top ten Reasons I Would Make a Better Girlfriend for Jack than My Sister Lucy:

10. My love for and appreciation of art. Lucy doesn’t know anything about art. To her, art is what they made us do with pipe cleaners that summer we both went to Girl Scout Camp.

9. Having the soul of an artist, I am better equipped to understand and handle Jack’s mood swings. Lucy just asks him if he is over himself yet.

8. I would never demand, as Lucy does, that Jack take me to whatever asinine teen gross-out movie is currently popular with the sixteen to twenty-four crowd. I would understand that a soul as sensitive as Jack’s needs sustenance in the form of independent art films, or perhaps the occasional foreign movie with subtitles.

And by that I am not referring to Jackie Chan.

7. Ditto the stupid books Lucy makes Jack read. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is not appropriate reading material for a guy like Jack. The Virgin and the Gypsy by D. H. Lawrence would do far more to stimulate Jack’s already brilliant mind than any of Lucy’s pathetic self-help manuals. Although I have never actually read The Virgin and the Gypsy. Still, it sounds like a book that Jack and I could really get into. For instance we could take turns reading it out loud on a blanket in the park, which is something artists always do in movies. Just as soon as I am done rereading Fight Club, I will give The V. and the G. a try to make sure it is really as intellectual as it sounds.

6. On Jack’s birthday, I would not give him joke boxer shorts with Tweety Bird on them, the way Lucy did last year. I would find something highly personal and romantic to give him, such as sable paintbrushes or perhaps a leather-bound copy of Romeo and Juliet or one of Gwen Stefani’s wristbands or something like that.

5. If Jack were ever late to pick me up for a date, I would not yell at him the way Lucy does. I would understand that artists cannot be held to pedestrian constraints like time.

4. I would never make Jack go to the mall with me. If I ever went to the mall, which I don’t. Instead, Jack and I would go to museums, and I am not talking about the Aeronautical and Space Museum, which everyone goes to, or the Smithsonian to see Dorothy’s stupid ruby slippers, either, but actual art museums, with actual art, such as the Hirschorn. Perhaps we could even take drawing pads with us, and sit back to back on those couches and sketch our favourite paintings, and people would come up and look at what we were drawing and offer to buy the sketches, and we would say no because we would want to treasure the drawings forever as symbols of our great love for one another.

3. If Jack and I ever got married, I would not insist on a massive church wedding with a country-club reception, the way I know Lucy would. Jack and I would be married barefoot in the woods near Walden Pond where so many artistic souls have gone to receive succour.

And for our honeymoon, instead of a Sandals in Jamaica, or wherever, we would fully go to Paris and live in a garret.

2. When Jack came over to visit me, I would never read a magazine while he sat at our kitchen table eating doughnuts. I would engage him in friendly but spirited and intellectual conversations about art and literature.

And the number one reason I would be a better girlfriend for Jack than Lucy:

1. I would give him the loving support he so desperately needs, since I understand what it is like to be tortured by the burden of one’s genius.

Fortunately it was raining on Thursday when Theresa drove me to Susan Boone’s studio. That meant that the chances of her finding a parking space, scrounging around the backseat for an umbrella, getting out of the car and walking me all the way to the studio door were exactly nil.

Instead, she stopped in the middle of Connecticut Avenue—causing all the cars behind her to honk—and went, “If you are not out here at exactly five-thirty, I will hunt you down. Do you hear me? Hunt you down like an animal.”

"Fine,“ I said, undoing my seatbelt.

“I mean it, Miss Samantha,” Theresa said. “Five-thirty on the dot. Or I will double park and you will have to pay the impound fees if the station wagon gets towed.”

“Whatever,” I said, and stepped out into the pouring rain. “See you.”

Then I ran for the door to the studio.

Only I didn’t, of course, go up that narrow stairway. Well, really, how could I? I mean, I had to fight the system, right?

Besides, it wasn’t like I hadn’t completely humiliated myself in there the day before yesterday. Was I really just going to go waltzing back in like nothing had happened?

The answer, of course, was no. No, I was not.

What I did instead was, I waited about a minute inside the little foyer, with rainwater dripping off the hood of my Gore-tex parka. While I was in there, I tried not to feel too guilty. I knew I was taking a stand, and all, by boycotting Susan Boone. I mean, I was showing that I was fully on the side of art rebels everywhere.

But my parents were paying a lot of money for these art lessons. I had heard my father grousing that they cost almost as much per month as the animal behaviourist. Susan Boone, it turned out, was kind of famous. Just what she was famous for, I didn’t know, but apparently, she charged a bundle for her one-on-one art tutelage.

So even though I was fighting the system, I didn’t feel too good, knowing I was wasting my parents’ hard-earned money.

But if you think about it, I am actually the cheapest kid Mom and Dad have. I mean, they spend a small fortune on Lucy every month. She is always needing new clothes, new pom-poms, new orthodontia, new dermatological aids, whatever, in order to maintain her image as one of Adams Prep’s beautiful people.

And Rebecca, my God, the lab fees alone at Horizon pretty much equal the gross national product of a small underdeveloped nation.

And me? How much do Mom and Dad spend on me every month? Well, up until I got busted for the celebrity drawing thing, nothing, besides tuition. I mean, I’m supposed to wear my sister’s hand-me-down bras, right? And I didn’t even need new clothes this year: I just applied black Rit to last semester’s clothes, and voilà! A whole new wardrobe.

Really, as children go, I am a major bargain. I don’t even eat that much, either, seeing as how I hate almost all food except hamburgers, the Bread Lady’s baguettes and dessert.

So I shouldn’t have even felt guilty about ditching art class. Not really.

But as I stood there, the familiar scent of turpentine washed over me, and I could hear, way up at the top of the stairs, the faint sound of classical music, and the occasional squawk from Joe the Crow. I was suddenly filled with a strange longing to climb those stairs, go to my bench, sit down, and draw.

But then I remembered the humiliation I had endured the last time I’d been in that room. And in front of that David guy too! I mean, yeah, he wasn’t as cute as Jack, or anything. But he was still a guy! A guy who liked Save Ferris! And who had said he liked my boots!

OK, no way was I going up those stairs. I was taking a stand. A stand against the system.

Instead, I waited in the vestibule, praying nobody would come in while I was huddled there, and say, “Oh, hi, Sam. Aren’t you coming upstairs?”

As if anybody there would even remember my name. Except possibly Susan Boone.

But nobody came in. When two minutes were up, I cautiously opened the door and looked out at the rain-soaked street.

Theresa and the station wagon were gone. It was safe. I could come out.

The first place I went was Capitol Cookies. Well, how could I not? It looked so warm and inviting, what with the rain and all, and I happened to have a dollar sixty-eight in my pocket, exactly as much as a Congressional Chocolate Chunk. The cookie they handed me was still warm from the oven too. I slipped it into the pocket of my black Gore-tex raincoat. They don’t allow food in Static, where I was going next.

They weren’t playing Garbage there that afternoon. They were playing The Donnas. Not ska, but perfectly acceptable. I went over to where they had some headphones plugged into the wall, so people could sample the CDs they were thinking about buying. I spent a nice half hour or so listening to the Less Than Jake CD I’d wanted but couldn’t afford now that my mom had seen to it that my funding for such items was shut off.

As I listened, I snuck bits of cookie from my pocket into my mouth, and told myself that what I was doing wasn’t all that wrong. Fighting the system, I mean. Besides, look at Catherine: for years her parents have been forcing her to go to Sunday school while they attend mass. Since there is like a two-year age difference between Catherine and each of her brothers, all three of them were in different religion classes, so she never knew until this year that Marco and Javier, after their mom dropped them all off, were waving goodbye and then ducking around the corner to Beltway Billiards. She only found out when her class let out early one day and she went to look around for her brothers, and they were nowhere to be seen.

So basically for years Catherine’s been sitting there, listening to her religion teachers tell her to resist temptation, etc., while it turns out the whole time her brothers—and pretty much all the rest of the cool kids who go to her church—have been next door, getting high scores on Super Mario.

So what does Catherine do now? She waves goodbye to her mom just like Marco and Javier, and then she, too, goes to Beltway Billiards and works on her Geometry homework in the glow of Delta Force.

And does she feel bad about it? No. Why not? Because she says if the Lord really is all-forgiving, like they taught her in Sunday school, He will understand that she really does need the extra study time or she will flunk Geometry and never get into a good college and make a success of herself.

So why should I feel bad about skipping my drawing lesson? I mean, it is only a drawing lesson. Catherine, on the other hand, is skipping out on God.

Surely my parents, in the unlikely event they are to find out what I’ve done, will understand that I was merely trying to preserve my integrity as an artist. Of course they will understand this. Probably. Maybe. On a good day, anyway, when there haven’t been any PCBs found in some Midwestern town’s water supply, or too many plunges in the North African stock market.

If anybody at Static thought it was strange that this fifteen-year-old red-headed girl, dressed in black from head to toe, was hanging around for two hours, sampling CDs but not buying any, they didn’t say anything about it to me. The chick behind the counter, who had the kind of spiky black hair I’ve always wanted but have never had the guts to get, was too busy flirting with one of the other workers, a guy in plaid pants and a Le Tigre T-shirt, to pay any attention to me.

The other customers were ignoring me too. Most of them looked like college students, wasting time between classes. Some of them might have been in high school. One of them was a kind of old guy, like in his thirties, wearing Army clothes and carrying a duffel bag. For a while he was hanging out by the headphones near me, listening to Billy Joel. I was surprised that a place like Static even had any Billy Joel, but they did. This guy kept listening to ‘Uptown Girl’ over and over. My dad is actually a Billy Joel fan—he plays it all the time in the car, which makes driving with him mad fun, let me tell you—but even he is way over ‘Uptown Girl’.

My cookie was gone about midway through the Spitvalves’ second album. I reached into my pocket and found nothing but crumbs. I thought about going over to Capitol Cookies to get another, but then I remembered I was broke. Besides, by that time it was almost five-thirty. I had to go outside and wait for Theresa to pick me up.

I put my hood up and walked out into the rain. It wasn’t the steady downpour it had been when I’d arrived, but I figured the hood would keep anybody coming out of the Susan Boone Art Studio from recognizing me and being all, Hey, where were you, anyway?

As if any of them would have missed me.

It had gotten dark outside while I’d been in the record store. All the cars going by had their headlights on. And there were a lot more of them than before, because it was rush hour and everyone was trying to get home to be with their loved ones. Or maybe just to watch Friends. Whatever.

I stood on the kerb across from the Founding Church of Scientology, squinting into the light drizzle and headlights in the direction Theresa was supposed to come. As I stood there, I couldn’t help feeling kind of sorry for myself. I mean, there I was, a fifteen-year-old, left-handed, red-headed, boyfriendless, misunderstood middle-child reject, broke, standing in the rain after skipping her drawing class because she couldn’t take criticism. What was going to happen if I grew up and started my own celebrity portrait-painting business, or something? Was I just going to quit if it didn’t work out right away? Was I going to go hide in Static? Maybe I could just go ahead and get a job there, to make things easier. It didn’t seem like a very bad place to work, actually. I bet employees get a discount on CDs.

While I was standing there being ashamed of myself for being a quitter, the old guy who was such a big Billy Joel fan came out of Static and stood next to me, even though the crosswalk sign was green. I looked at him from the corner of my eye. He was messing around with something under his rain poncho, which was in a camouflage pattern. I wondered if he was a shoplifter. At Static I’d noticed they had a Wall of Shame, where they stuck up Polaroids of people who’d tried to swipe something. This dude looked as prime a candidate for the Wall of Shame as I’d ever seen.

And when, right after this, I saw all these flashing red lights coming out of the rain and darkness, I was like, Oh, yes, here come the cops. Mr. Uptown Girl is so busted.

Only it turned out the sirens didn’t belong to the cops at all. Instead, they were part of the President’s motorcade. First came the lead car, a black SUV with a rack of flashing red lights on its roof. Then came another black SUV and, behind it, a long black limo. Behind that were some more SUVs with flashing lights.

Instead of being excited that I was going to get to see the President go by—even though you can’t really see him when he’s in his limo because the windows are those weird ones the people inside the car can see out of, but the people outside the car can’t see into—I was like, Aw, crud. Because Theresa was probably somewhere behind the motorcade, which was crawling along at a snail’s pace. Not only was she going to be in a really bad mood by the time she finally picked me up, but no way was I going to miss David coming out of Susan Boone’s. He would probably see me standing out here and be like, Man, she’s weird, and never speak to me again. Not that I cared, because I am fully in love with my sister’s boyfriend. But it had been nice of him to notice my boots. Hardly anyone else ever had.

And, besides, when you live in DC, seeing the President go by is really no big deal, since he goes by all the time.

Then the strangest thing happened. The first SUV in the motorcade pulled up right in front of me . . . and stopped. Just stopped.

And the traffic light wasn’t even red.

Behind the first SUV, the second one stopped, and then the limo, and so on. Traffic was totally stopped behind them, all along Connecticut Avenue. Then these guys with these earpieces climbed out of the cars and all went towards the limo.

And then, to my utter astonishment, the President of the United States got out of his limo and walked into Capitol Cookies, a bunch of Secret Service guys clustered around him, holding up umbrellas and looking around and speaking into their walkie-talkies.

That’s right, just walked into Capitol Cookies, like he did it every day.

I didn’t know that the President liked Capitol Cookies. Capitol Cookies are good, and all, but they’re not the most famous cookies around, or anything. I mean, there’s just the one store.

And wouldn’t you think that if you were the President, you could get the owner to send you a personal supply of cookies, so you wouldn’t have to go ducking out of your limo, in the rain, just to get your hands on some? I mean, if I owned a bakery and I found out that the President of the United States liked my cookies, I would fully make sure he got a steady supply of them.

On the other hand, the people who owned Capitol Cookies would probably prefer to have the President be seen ducking into the store. That is way better publicity than you could ever get by privately shipping him his own supply.

And then, as I stood there in the dark and the rain, with the red lights from the top of the SUV in front of me flashing in my face, I saw Mr. Uptown Girl throw back his rain poncho.

And it turned out what he’d been doing under there had nothing to do with him being a shoplifter. Not at all. It turned out what he’d been doing under there had to do with a great big gun, which he brought out and pointed in the direction of the door to Capitol Cookies . . . the door through which the President, his cookies having been secured with miraculous swiftness, was just exiting.

I am not what most people would call a particularly brave person. I stick up for the kids at school who get picked on only because I remember what it was like to get picked on back when I lived in Morocco, and during the whole Speech and Hearing thing.

But that does not mean that I am the sort of girl to throw herself into the path of danger without the slightest concern for her own personal safety. I mean, the closest thing I have been in lately that could qualify as a physical altercation would be the last time Lucy and I wrestled over possession of the remote control.

And obviously I am not much for confrontations. I mean, yeah, I was striking a blow for the creative spirit by boycotting Susan Boone’s and all. But really, I was just too embarrassed to go back in there after my humiliation the last time.

But whatever. What I did next was so atypical of my normal behaviour that it was like someone else took over my body for a minute, or something. All I know is, one second I was standing there, watching Mr. Uptown Girl raise his gun to fire at the President as he exited Capitol Cookies . . .

. . . and the next, I had jumped him.

It turns out if you jump on to the back of a would-be assassin, and he isn’t expecting you to or anything, you can really throw off his aim. So the bullet Mr. Uptown Girl had meant to send speeding into the President’s head went speeding harmlessly off into the stratosphere instead.

Something else happens when you jump on to the back of a guy with a gun, though. He tends to be very surprised, and loses his balance, and falls over backwards on top of you, so that you get all the wind knocked out of you and your Gore-tex parka rides up and rainwater soaks through the seat of your pants and you get all wet.

Plus the guy lands on your right arm, and you hear a crunching sound, and it really, really hurts, and you can’t help wondering, Was that what I think it was?

But you don’t really get a chance to mull it over for very long because you are too busy trying to keep the guy from getting off another shot, which you do by yelling, “Gun! Gun! He’s got a gun!”

And even though by now everyone already knows this—that the guy has a gun, since they heard the stupid thing go off the first time—this seems to do the trick, since all of a sudden, about twenty Secret Service agents crowd around you, with their guns pulled out and pointed right into your face, all of them yelling, “Freeze!”

Believe me, I froze.

And then the next thing I knew, Mr. Uptown Girl was lifted off me—much to my relief: that dude was heavy—and then people started pulling on me too. Somebody pulled on the arm that the guy with the gun had landed on, and I yelled, “Ow!” really loud, but nobody seemed to hear me. They were all busy speaking into their walkie-talkies, saying things like, “Eagle is secure, repeat, Eagle is secure.”

Meanwhile, sirens started to wail. People came running out from the wrap places and burrito bars to watch.

And suddenly, all these cop cars and ambulances showed up from out of nowhere, practically, brakes squealing and rainwater getting sprayed all over the place.

It was just like something out of a Bruce Willis movie, only without the soundtrack.

And then one of the Secret Service agents started going through my backpack, while another stooped to pat down my ankles—like I might have a bowie knife or something strapped down there—while a third was digging around the pockets of my Gore-tex parka without even asking my permission (and ended up getting a handful of Capitol Cookie crumbs for his efforts).

He also jostled my right arm some more. I yelled, “OW,” again, only even louder than before.

Then the agent who was going through my pockets went, “This one seems to be unarmed.”

“Of course I’m unarmed,” I yelled. “I’m only in the tenth grade!”

Which is a totally lame thing to have said, because of course there are tenth graders who have guns. They just don’t happen to go to Adams Prep School. Only I wasn’t really thinking straight. In fact, I was almost crying. Well, you would have almost been crying, too, if

you were wet all over.

your arm was most likely broken—which actually wasn’t so bad, really, because it wasn’t my drawing arm or anything, and now I had a built-in excuse not to take part in volleyball, which Coach Donnelly is making everyone do in PE next week—but it still really, really hurt.

people were yelling but you couldn’t hear so well on account of Mr. Uptown Girl’s gun having gone off very close to your ear, probably causing hearing damage that for all you know might be permanent.

you had found yourself looking down the mouths of twenty or so guns. Or even one gun, for that matter. And

it was starting to seem pretty likely that your parents were totally going to find out about your skipping your drawing lesson.

I mean, any one of those things would have been upsetting. But I had all five.

Then this older agent came up to me. He looked a little less scary than the other agents, maybe because he stooped down until his face was level with mine, which was thoughtful of him.

He went, very seriously, “You’re going to have to come with us, miss. We need to ask you some questions about your friend over there.”

That was when it really hit me:

They thought Mr. Uptown Girl and I were buddies! They thought we’d been trying to kill the President together!

“He’s not my friend!” I wailed. I wasn’t almost crying any more. I was bawling my head off, and I didn’t even care. It was raining, I was wet all over, my arm was killing me, my ears were ringing, and the United States Secret Service thought I was some kind of international terrorist assassin, or something.

Heck, yeah, I was crying.

“I’ve never even seen him before today!” I hiccupped. “He pulled out that gun, and he was going to shoot the President, and so I jumped on him, and he fell on my arm and now it really hurts, and I just want to go ho-o-ome!”

It was really embarrassing. I was crying like a baby. Worse than a baby. I was crying the way Lucy cried the day her orthodontist told her she was going to have to keep her braces on for another six weeks.

Then a very surprising thing happened. The older Secret Service agent put his arm around me. He said something to the other Secret Service agents, then walked me away from them, towards one of the ambulances. Some paramedic types were standing there, waiting. They opened the doors to the back of the ambulance and the Secret Service agent and I climbed in.

It was nice inside the ambulance. I got to sit on a little gurney, out of the rain and cold. You could barely hear the sirens and stuff inside there. The paramedics were very nice too. They gave me a dry blanket to wrap around me in place of my Gore-tex parka. They were so jokey and nice, I stopped crying.

Really, I told myself. This wasn’t so bad. Everything was going to be OK.

Well, except when my parents found out about how I’d skipped drawing class. That part was not going to be OK.

But maybe they wouldn’t have to find out. Maybe the Secret Service agents would check me out and realize that I am not a member of any terrorist group out to draw attention to their cause, and let me go. Theresa was probably still stuck in all that traffic. By the time she pulled up, the whole thing might be over, and I could just get into the car, and when she asked, “What did you do today in class?” I could be like, “Oh, nothing.” Which would not even be a lie.

The paramedics asked me where I was injured. And even though I felt dumb being such a baby about my arm, considering how serious everything was with, you know, an attempt on the life of the President, and all, I showed them my wrist. I was somewhat gratified to see that it had already swelled to about twice its usual size. I was glad I hadn’t been crying over nothing.

While the paramedics were examining my arm, I looked over at the Secret Service agent, who was busy filling out a report of some kind that included my name, which he had got off my school ID, which had been inside my wallet in my backpack. I didn’t want to disturb him or anything, but I really needed to know how long this was all going to take. So I went, “Um, excuse me, sir?”

The Secret Service guy looked up. “Yes, sweetheart?” he asked. He obviously didn’t know that no one calls me sweetheart, not even my mother. Not since Morocco, when she caught me trying to flush my dad’s credit cards down the toilet (in revenge for him making us move to a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language).

The sweetheart thing threw me. I didn’t want to come out and just ask him how long this was all going to take, since it might seem ungracious. He was only doing his job, after all. So instead, after a few seconds during which I desperately tried to think up something else to ask, I went, “Um. Is the President OK?”

The Secret Service agent smiled at me some more. “The President is just fine, honey,” he said. “Thanks to you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Great. So, um, do you think it would be OK for me to go soon?”

The paramedics exchanged glances. They looked amused.

“Not with that arm,” one of them said. “Your wrist is broken, kiddo. We’ll need an X-ray to see how badly, but ten to one you’re going to have a nice big cast for all your new fans to sign.”

Fans? What was he talking about?

And I couldn’t get a cast! If I got a cast, my parents would want to know how I’d broken my arm, and then I’d have to admit that I’d skipped class.

Unless . . . unless I lied and told them I tripped. Yeah, I tripped and fell down the stairs to Susan Boone’s studio. Except what if they asked her?

Oh, God. I was such dead meat.

“Couldn’t I . . .” I was really grasping at straws, but I was desperate. “Couldn’t I just go to my own doctor tomorrow, or something? I mean, my arm really feels much better.”

Both the paramedics and the Secret Service agent looked at me like I was insane. OK, yeah, my arm had swollen up to the size of my thigh, and was throbbing the way hearts do during open-heart surgeries on the Learning Channel. But it actually didn’t hurt that much. Except when I moved.

“It’s just that our housekeeper is coming to pick me up,” I explained, lamely. “And if you guys take me to the hospital, and I’m not where I said I’d be, she’ll freak out.”

The Secret Service guy said, “Why don’t you give me a phone number where I can reach your parents? Because for you to receive the medical attention you need, we’re going to need to contact them.”

Oh, God! Then they’ll know for sure I skipped class!

But, really. What choice did I have? Yeah, that’d be none.

“Listen,” I said, low and fast. “You don’t have to tell my parents about this. I mean, of course you have to tell them about this, but not about how I skipped my drawing class and was hanging out in Static. I mean, you don’t have to tell them that part, do you? Because I don’t want to get in any more trouble than I’m already in.”

The Secret Service dude blinked at me like he didn’t really know what I was talking about. Which of course he didn’t. How could he? Drawing class? Static?

But he apparently thought he’d just better just go along with me—as if maybe I’d hit my head, too, when I’d fallen down—since he went, “Why don’t we wait and see.”

Well, it was better than nothing, I guess. I gave him my mom’s and dad’s work numbers, then closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the side of the ambulance.

Oh, well, I thought. Things could have been worse.

For instance, I could have a chicken bone where my nose should be.

Top ten Pieces of Incontrovertible Proof that Stopping a Bullet from Entering the Skull of the President of the United States of America Changes Your Life:

10. The ambulance you are riding in gets a police escort all the way to the hospital. George Washington University Hospital, to be exact. The same hospital they took President Reagan to, when he got shot.

9. Instead of having to visit the triage nurse upon arrival at the emergency room, like everyone else, you are wheeled in right away, ahead of all the gang-bangers bleeding from knife wounds, women in labour, people with pencils wedged into their eye sockets, etc.

8. Everywhere you are sent inside George Washington University Hospital, men in black suits with ear thingies follow you.

7. When they give you a hospital gown to wear because your clothes are wet, and you refuse to put it on because the back is all cut out, they give you another one, so you can wear one that opens in the front and one that opens in the back, thus covering all of you. No one else in the entire hospital gets two gowns but you.

6. You get your own private room with armed guards at the door, even though all that is wrong with you is your wrist.

5. When the doctor comes in to examine you, he goes, “So you’re the girl who saved the President!”

4. When you say in abject mortification, “Well, not really,” the doctor goes, “That’s not what I hear. You’re a national hero!”

3. When he tells you that your wrist is broken in two places and that you will have to wear a cast from the elbow down for six weeks, instead of giving you a lollipop or whatever, he asks for your autograph.

2. While you are waiting for the cast guys to come and fix your arm, you switch on your private room’s TV and see that on every channel there is a Breaking News bulletin. Then Tom Brokaw comes on and says that an attempt has been made on the life of the President. Then he says that the attempt was thwarted by the heroic act of a single individual. Then they show the picture of you from your school ID.

The one where you were blinking just as the photographer took the picture.

The one where your hair was looking particularly bushy and out of control.

The one you have never showed to anyone for fear of being publicly mocked and ridiculed.

And the number one way you can tell your life is over:

1. You scream so loudly when you see your hideous school photo on national television that about thirty Secret Service agents burst into your room, pistols drawn, demanding to know if you’re all right.

I guess even then it didn’t really hit me.

I mean, I knew. You know, that I had jumped on Mr. Uptown Girl’s back and kept him from firing that gun in the direction he’d meant to.

But it didn’t hit me that in doing so, I had actually saved the life of the leader of the free world.

At least, it didn’t hit me until my parents came bursting into my hospital room a little while later, after they’d put the cast on (and after I’d seen my face all over the major networks, as well as CNN, Headline News, and even Entertainment Tonight), both of them freaked beyond belief.

“Samantha!” my mom cried, falling all over me and jostling my busted arm, for which, I might add, no one had so much as offered me an aspirin. You would think that a girl who saved the life of the President would rank some type of painkillers, but apparently not. “Oh my God, we were so worried!”

“Hi, Mom,” I said, all faintly—you know, the way you talk when you’re faking sick. Because I hadn’t figured out whether the Secret Service guys had ratted me out yet about skipping my drawing class, so I wasn’t sure how much trouble I was in. I figured if they thought I was in a lot of pain, they’d lay off.

But they didn’t seem to have a clue about my skipping out on Susan Boone.

“Samantha,” my mom kept saying, sinking down on to the edge of my bed and pushing my hair around on my forehead. “Are you all right? Is it just your arm? Does anything else hurt?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just my arm. I’m fine. Really.”

But I still said it all faint, and stuff, just in case.

I needn’t have bothered. They were both completely clueless about the whole drawing lessons thing. They were just glad I was all right. My dad was able to joke about it, a little.

“If you wanted more attention from us, Sam,” he said, “all you had to do was ask. Throwing yourself in the path of a speeding bullet really wasn’t necessary.”

Ha ha ha.

The Secret Service guys gave us about five minutes for our tearful reunion before pouncing. It turns out there’d been a lot of stuff they’d wanted to ask me, but because I’m a minor they’d had to wait to interview me until my parents got there. This is just a small sample of some of the things they asked me about:

Secret Service:

Did you know the man who was holding the gun?

Me:

No, I did not know the guy.

Secret Service:

Did he say anything to you?

Me:

No, he did not say a word to me.

Secret Service:

Nothing? He didn’t say anything as he was pulling the trigger?

Me:

Like what?

Secret Service:

Like “This is for Margie,” or something like that.

Me:

Who’s Margie?

Secret Service:

That was just an example. There is no Margie.

Me:

He didn’t say anything at all.

Secret Service:

Was there anything unusual about him? Anything that caused you to pay special attention to him, out of all the people who were on the street?

Me:

Yes. He had a gun.

Secret Service:

Other than him having a gun.

Me:

Well. He seemed to like the song ‘Uptown Girl’ quite a bit.

And so on. It went on for hours. Hours. I had to describe what had happened between me and Mr. Uptown Girl like five hundred times. I talked until I was hoarse. Finally, my dad was like, “Look, gentlemen, we appreciate that you are trying to get to the bottom of this, but our daughter has been through a very traumatic event and needs to get some rest.”

The Secret Service guys were very nice about it. They thanked me and left . . . but a couple of them stayed around, just outside the door to my room, and wouldn’t leave. My dad told me after he came back with a Quarter Pounder for my dinner, since I absolutely could not bring myself to eat the food the hospital provided, which was some kind of stew with peas and carrots in it.

Like people in a hospital don’t feel sick enough already. This is what they give them to eat?

I wasn’t too happy about having to spend the night at the hospital when the only thing wrong with me was a broken arm, but the Secret Service guys kind of insisted on it. They said it was for my own protection. I said, “I don’t see why. You caught the guy, right?”

But they said Mr. Uptown Girl (only they didn’t call him that. They called him The Alleged Shooter) was invoking his right to remain silent, and they weren’t sure if he belonged to some terrorist organization that might choose to avenge itself against me for sabotaging its scheme to assassinate the President.

This of course caused my mother to flip out and call Theresa and tell her to make sure the front door was locked, but the Secret Service guy said not to worry, that they had already posted agents around the house for our protection. These agents, I later found out, were also keeping the hordes of press away from our front porch. This was somewhat distressing to Lucy, with whom I spoke on the phone a little before midnight.

“Ohmigod,” she gushed. “All I did was try to slip the folks from MSNBC a more flattering photo of you. I mean, they keep showing that hideous shot from your school ID. I was all, “Dudes, she is way more attractive than that” and I tried to give them that photo Grandma took at Christmas—you know, the one where you’re in that Esprit dress, which used to be cute until you dyed it black, but whatever. Anyway, I open the door and go out on the porch with the photo, and all these flashbulbs start going off and all these people start yelling, “Are you the sister? Would you care to comment on how it feels to be the sister of a national heroine?” and I was all set to say that it feels great, when these two suits practically push me back inside the house, telling me it is for my own protection. I am so sure. What I want to know, is plastering that hideous photo of you all over the television for my protection? I mean, really, people are going to think I am related to a hideous freak—which is how you look in that photo, Sam, no offence—and believe me, that is not going to do anyone any good whatsoever.”

It was good to know that however much some things might change, one thing, at least, always remained the same: my sister, Lucy.

So anyway, they made me spend the night in the stupid hospital. For observation, they said. But that wasn’t it, I’m sure. I’m sure they were still checking to make sure I didn’t secretly belong to any radical anti-government groups, and wanted to keep an eye on me in case I tried to escape and join my comrades, or whatever.

I tossed and turned quite a bit, unable to find a comfortable position to fall asleep in, because usually I sleep on my side, but it turns out the side I sleep on is the side I had the cast on, and I couldn’t sleep on the cast because it was all hard and lumpy and besides, any weight on it made my arm throb. Plus I missed Manet, which is kind of funny because he is so hairy and smelly you wouldn’t think I’d miss him stinking up my bed, but I totally did.

I had finally managed to doze off when my mom—who didn’t seem to have any problem at all sleeping in the bed beside mine, and who woke looking fresh as a daisy—got up and threw back the curtains to my hospital room window letting the morning light in. Then she went, in a manner that to someone who has hardly gotten any sleep and besides which has a very sore arm, might be somewhat irritating, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

But before I had time to ask what was so good about it (the morning, I mean), Mom went, in a shocked voice, as she looked out the window, “Oh . . . my . . . God.”

I got out of bed and came to see what my mom was Oh-my-Godding about, and was shocked to see that there were about three hundred people standing along the sidewalk in front of the hospital, all looking up in the direction of my room. The minute I appeared in the window, there was this roar, and all these people started pointing up at me and waving these posters and screaming.

My name. They were screaming my name!

My mom and I stared at each other, slack-jawed, then looked down again. There were news vans with huge satellite dishes on their roofs, and reporters standing around with microphones, and police officers everywhere, trying to hold back the huge crowd of people who had shown up, apparently just hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl who’d saved the life of the President.

Well, they caught a glimpse of me, all right. I mean, even though I was like three storeys up, they sure didn’t seem to miss me. Possibly that’s because I was in two hospital gowns and had this great big wad of red bed head coming out of my scalp, but whatever. They caught a glimpse of me, all right.

“Um,” my mom went as the two of us stood there, looking down at the big mess below. “I guess you should ... I don’t know. Wave?”

That sounded like a reasonable suggestion, so I lifted my good arm and waved.

More cheers and applause rose from the crowd. I waved again, just to make sure it was all because of me, but there was no doubt about it: those people were cheering. Cheering for me. Me, Samantha Madison, tenth grader and celebrity-drawing aficionado.

It was incredible. Like being Elvis, or something.

It was after I’d waved the second time that there was a knock on my door, and a nurse came in and went, “Oh, good, you’re up. We thought so when we heard the screaming.” Then she added, with a sunny smile, “A few things arrived for you. I hope you don’t mind if we bring them in now.”

And then, without waiting for a response from us, she held the door open. A stream of candy stripers holding floral arrangements—each one bigger than the last—came pouring into my room, until every last available flat surface, including the floor, was covered with roses and daisies and sunflowers and orchids and carnations and flowers I could not identify, all overflowing from these vases and making the room smell sickly sweet.

And there weren’t just flowers, either. There were balloon bouquets, too, dozens of them—red balloons, blue ones, white ones, pink ones, heart-shaped and metallic ones with Thanks and Get Well Soon written on them. Then came the teddy bears, twenty at least, of all different sizes and shapes, with bows at their throats and signs in their paws, signs that said things like, Just Grin and Bear It and Thank You Beary Much!

Seriously. I watched them come in and pile this stuff up, and all I could think was, Wait. Wait. There’s been a mistake. I don’t know anyone who would send me a Thank You Beary Much bear. Really. Not even as a joke.

But they just kept coming, more and more of them. The nurses, you could tell, thought it was pretty funny. Even the Secret Service guys, standing in the doorway, seemed to be smirking behind the reflective lenses of their sunglasses.

Only my mom seemed as stunned as I was. She kept running to each new bouquet and tearing open the card and reading the writing on it out loud, in tones of wonder:

“Thank you for your daring act of bravery.

Sincerely, the US Attorney General.”

“We need more Americans like you.

The Mayor of the District of Columbia.”

“For an angel on earth, with many thanks,

the people of Cleveland, Ohio.”

“With much appreciation for your bravery underfire,

the Prime Minister of Canada.”

“You on are an example for us all. . .

the Dalai Lama.”

This was way upsetting. I mean, the Dalai Lama thinks I’m an example? Um, not very likely. Not considering all the beef I have consumed in my lifetime.

“There’s a lot more downstairs,” one of the candy stripers informed us.

My mom looked up from a card written by the Emperor of Japan. “Oh?”

“We’re still irradiating most of the cards, and running the fruit and candy through the X-ray machines,” the Secret Service guys informed us.

“X-ray machines?” my mom echoed. “Whatever for?”

One of the agents shrugged. “Razor blades. Tacks. Whatever. Just in case.”

“Can’t be too careful,” the other agreed. “Lot of whackos out there.”

My mom looked as if she didn’t feel too good after that. All her daisy freshness drained right out of her. “Oh,” she said faintly.

It was right after that that my dad showed up with Lucy and Rebecca and Theresa in tow. Theresa gave me a knock on the back of the head for the scare I’d given her the day before.

“Imagine how I felt,” she said, “when the policeman told me I could not get through to pick you up because there’d been a shooting. I thought you were dead!”

Rebecca was more philosophical about the whole thing. “Sam’s not a member of the group with the highest risk of death from gun violence—males ages fifteen to thirty-four—so I wasn’t particularly worried.”

Lucy, however, was the one with the most urgent need to see me . . . and alone.

“C’mere,” she said, and pulled me into the room’s private bathroom, where she immediately locked the door behind her.

“Bad news,” she said, speaking low but fast—the same way she spoke to her fellow squad members when she felt they hadn’t been showing enough spirit during the human pyramid. “I overheard the chief hospital administrator ask Dad when you were ready for your press conference.”

“Press conference?” I sat down hard on the toilet. I really thought for a second I was going to pass out. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Of course not,” Lucy said, matter of factly. “You’re a national hero. Everyone is expecting you to give a press conference. But don’t worry about it. Big sister Lucy has it all under control.”

With that, she slung her gym bag into the sink. Whatever was inside it—and I was pretty sure it was probably the entire contents of the medicine cabinet she and I shared—clanked ominously.

“First things first,” she said. “Let’s do something about that hair.”

It was only because I was in such a weakened physical state, what with my sleepless night and cast and all, that Lucy got the upper hand in that bathroom. I mean, I just didn’t have the strength to fight her. I did scream once, but I guess the Secret Service couldn’t hear me over the sound of the shower, since they didn’t come busting in, guns drawn, to save me this time.

But it would have taken a troop of commandos to stop Lucy. She had been waiting for this moment since the day I hit puberty, practically. Finally she had me in a position where I was powerless to stop her. She had brought with her not only a complete set of clothes for me, but a small arsenal of beauty products that she seemed intent upon squirting at me as I stood trapped in the shower stall, my broken arm, in its plaster cast, sticking out like a tree branch.

“This is awapuhi,” Lucy informed me, shooting something that smelled vaguely fruity at my head. “It’s a special Hawaiian ginger extract. Use it to wash your hair. And this is an apricot body scrub . . .”

“Lucy,” I yelled, as awapuhi got in my eyes, and I couldn’t, having only one free hand, get it out. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“Saving you,” Lucy explained. “You ought to be thanking me.”

“Thanking you? For what? Permanently blinding me with Hawaiian ginger extract?”

“No, for attempting to transform you into something resembling a human being. Do you have any idea how humiliating it is for me to have people calling me—all night, they were calling me—going, ‘Hey, isn’t that your sister? What happened to her? Is she in some kind of cult?’”

When I opened my mouth to protest this unfair statement, Lucy just squeezed Aquafresh into it. While I choked, she went on, “Here, use this conditioner, it’s the kind groomers use on their horses right before a show.”

“I—” Soap still in my eyes, I couldn’t see Lucy, but I swung at her with my cast anyway, “—am not a horse!”

“I realize that,” Lucy said. “But you genuinely need this, Sam. Consider it an intervention ... an emergency beauty intervention.” Lucy reached into the shower and shoved me back under the spray. “Rinse and repeat, please.”

By the time Lucy was done with me, I’d been scrubbed, plucked, exfoliated and blow-dried within an inch of my life.

But I had to admit, I looked pretty good. I mean, I’d been kind of offended by the intervention comment. But under Lucy’s careful supervision—and detachable defuser—my hair soon lost its copper-wire stiffness and instead of sticking straight up from the top of my head was curling loosely to my shoulders. And though she didn’t quite manage to make my freckles disappear, Lucy did do something that made them not stand out so much.

I didn’t mind the Hawaiian root extract, the apricot scrub or the horse conditioner. I could handle the mascara and the foundation and the lip gloss.

But I fully drew the line when Lucy whipped, from her gym bag, a bright blue blouse and matching skirt.

“No way,” I said, as adamantly as I could, for someone who was wearing nothing but a hospital towel, and not even a very big one. “I will wear your lipstick. I will wear your eyeliner. But I am not wearing your clothes.”

“Sam, you don’t have any choice.” Lucy was already holding the blouse up. “All of your clothes are black. You can’t appear in front of middle America dressed all in black. People are going to think you’re a Satan worshipper. You are going to dress like a normal person for once in your life, and you are going to like it.”

On the words like it, Lucy jumped me. I would just like to point out that she had an unfair advantage over me because:

she is two inches taller and about ten pounds heavier than I am, and

she was not impaired by having one arm in a cast, and

she did not have to worry about clutching a towel around her, and

she has many, many years of reading Glamour magazine’s Do’s and Don’t’s section behind her, lending her style convictions superhuman strength.

Really. That is the only reason I gave in. That and the fact that Lucy had not brought any of my own clothes for me to wear, and the ones I had worn the day before had been taken away by the Secret Service for testing, since there was apparently gun residue on them from Mr. Uptown Girl’s shooting spree.

When I finally emerged from that bathroom, I was wearing my sister’s clothes, my sister’s makeup, and my sister’s hair products. I basically looked nothing like my usual self. Nothing at all.

But that was OK. Really, it was. Because I didn’t really feel like my usual self, either, on account of the no sleep and the people with the signs down on the street and all the Thank You Beary Much bears, but also thanks to the awapuhi and all.

So when I came out of that bathroom, I was already pretty weirded out. In fact, I didn’t think things could get much weirder than they already were.

And that was when my mom, who was standing there looking kind of nervous amidst all of the flowers and the balloons, went, “Um, Samantha. There’s someone here to see you,” and I turned around and there was the President of the United States.

Even though I have lived in Washington, DC, all my life—except for that year our family spent in Morocco—I have hardly ever seen the President of the United States—and there have been three of them since I was born—in person.

Oh, I have seen him driving past in motorcades, and of course I have seen him on TV. But except for the day before, at Capitol Cookies, I had never seen the President up close.

So seeing him then, standing in my hospital room with my mom and dad and Lucy and Rebecca and Theresa and the Secret Service agents and all the flowers and the balloons and stuff . . .

Well, it was pretty strange.

Plus, standing there beside him was his wife, the First Lady. I had never seen the First Lady in person before, either. I had seen her on TV and on the cover of Good Housekeeping magazine, touting her prize-winning brownies and all, but never in person. Up close, both the President and the First Lady looked bigger than they do on TV

Well, duh. Of course. But they also looked . . . I don’t know.

Sort of older, and more real. Like you could see wrinkles and stuff.

“So you’re the little lady who saved my life.”

That’s what he said. The President of the United States. Those were the first words the President said to me, in that deep voice I am forced to hear practically every night, when my parents make me change the channel from The Simpsons to the news.

And how did I reply? What did I say in response to the President of the United States?

I went, “Um.”

Behind me, I heard Lucy heave this satisfied sigh. That was because she was relieved she’d finished her beauty makeover on time. A few minutes earlier, and I might still have had bed head.

It apparently did not matter to Lucy that I sounded like an idiot. All she cared about was that I did not look like one.

“Well, I just had to stop by and ask if it was all right for me to shake the hand,” the President went on, in his big voice, “of the bravest girl in the world.”

Then he stuck out his big right hand.

I stared at that hand. Not because it was any different from anybody else’s hand. It wasn’t. Well, it was, of course, because it belonged to the President of the United States. But that wasn’t why I was staring at it. I was staring at it because I was thinking about what the President had said—about how I was the bravest girl in the world.

And interestingly, even though many of the notes my mother had read off the flowers and balloons and teddy bears had mentioned something along the same lines, this was the first time I actually thought about it. Me being brave, and all.

And the thing was, it simply wasn’t true. I hadn’t been brave. Being brave is when you have to do something because you know it is right, but at the same time, you are afraid to do it, because it might hurt or whatever. But you do it anyway. Like me defending Catherine from Kris Parks when she starts in on her about her Laura Ingalls Wilder dresses or whatever, knowing that Kris is just going to start in on me next. Now that’s brave.

What I did—jumping on to Mr. Uptown Girl’s back—hadn’t been brave, because I hadn’t really thought about the consequences. I had just done it. I saw the gun, I saw the President, I jumped. Just like that.

I wasn’t the bravest girl in the world. I was just a girl who’d happened to have the misfortune to be standing next to a guy who meant to assassinate the President. That’s all. I hadn’t done anything anyone else wouldn’t have done. Not at all.

I don’t know how long I would have stood there and stared down at the President’s hand if Lucy hadn’t poked me in the back. It really hurt, too, because Lucy has these really long nails that she files into points practically every night.

But I didn’t let it show that my big sister had just stabbed me in the back with one of her talons. Instead, I went, “Gee, thanks,” and stuck out my own hand to shake the President’s.

Except of course the hand I stuck out to shake was my right hand, the one in the cast. Everyone laughed, like it was this hilarious joke, and then the President shook my left hand, the one not encased in plaster.

Then the First Lady shook my hand, too, and said that she hoped my family and I would join her and the President for dinner at the White House sometime ‘when things have settled down a little’ so that they could really show their appreciation for what I’d done.

Dinner? At the White House? Me?

Thankfully my mother took over then, saying that we would be delighted to join the First Family for dinner sometime.

Then the First Lady turned and kind of noticed someone standing in the doorway to my hospital room. And her face brightened up even more than it already was and she went, “Oh, there’s David. May we introduce our son, David?”

And into the room walked David, the President’s son.

Who also happened to be David from my drawing class with Susan Boone. Save Ferris David. “Nice boots” David.

And now I knew why he looked so familiar.

Well, how was I supposed to know he was the son of the President of the United States?

He didn’t look anything like the guy I was used to seeing on the news, the geeky one who’d trailed along after his parents on the election campaign. That guy had never worn a Save Ferris T-shirt, much less a pair of combat boots. That guy had never seemed interested in art. That guy had always been dressed in dweeby looking suits, and had mostly just sat around looking interested in what his dad had to say, which was basically a lot of stuff that bored me very deeply and usually caused me to change the channel . . . although I know that as a citizen of this country and a member of this planet, I should be a lot more politically aware than I actually am.

Anyway, the fact is, after David’s dad became president, and David started going to school here in Washington, well, every time they showed him on the news he was in the goofy uniform all the kids who go to Horizon have to wear every day: khaki pants (skirt for girls), white shirt, navy blue blazer, red tie.

And although David certainly looked way better in his uniform than most Horizon attendees, with that dark curly hair and those green eyes and everything, he was still, you know, this huge geek. I mean, there wasn’t even the slightest chance that this guy was going to be on the cover of Teen People every other month, like Justin Timberlake. Not unless he started wind-surfing shirtless in Chesapeake Bay this summer, or something.

Even as I stood there staring at him, it was hard to believe this was the same guy who, only a few days ago, had said he liked my boots.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t so hard to believe. Because, you know, seeing him like this—up close, and not on TV, waving from the door of a plane, or in a still photo, looking up at his father from a seat off the side of some dais in Kentucky—he looked much more like the cool guy in the Save Ferris T-shirt who’d liked my boots than he did the President’s geeky son.

I really couldn’t say which of us, between the two, was more astonished to see the other. David seemed pretty astonished, and I don’t think it was because it was such a weird coincidence . . . you know, that we knew each other from drawing class. It wasn’t actually all that weird: obviously the reason the President had been in the area had been to meet David after class. The whole stopping-at-Capitol-Cookies-thing had just been because the commander-in-chief must have a little sweet tooth . . .

No, David wasn’t staring at me because he couldn’t place me. I think he was trying to figure out what had happened to me. I mean, last time he’d seen me, I’d been all in black, with daisy-studded combat boots and copper-wire hair and no make-up. Now here I was, in my sister’s skirt and Cole Haans loafers, with nicely smooth hair and lips that were supposed to look utterly kissable ... at least, that’s the result promised on the tube of gloss Lucy had smeared all over my mouth.

No wonder he was staring: I looked just like Lucy!

“Uh,” David said, for which I didn’t blame him one bit. “Hi.”

I came right back at him with a bitingly witty reply:

“Um. Yeah. Hi.”

David’s mom looked from him to me, and then back again. Then she went, in a curious voice, “Do you two know one another already?”

“Yeah,” David said again. He was smiling now. It was a nice smile. Not as nice as Jack’s, of course, but nice just the same. “Samantha is in my drawing class at Susan Boone’s.”

That was when it hit me.

Samantha is in my drawing class at Susan Boone’s.

This guy could totally blow the one thing I’d managed, so far, to keep my parents from finding out: the whole skipping art class thing.

And yeah, OK, what was the big deal, right? So my parents were going to find out I skipped drawing class. So what? I had saved the life of the President. That had to be a get-out-of-jail-free card, if anything was.

And it probably would work on my parents. They are not exactly the sternest disciplinarians on the planet.

But it would never, ever work on Theresa, to whom I’d given my solemn word I wouldn’t skip class. Much as Theresa esteems the President of this country that she has come to love so dearly, the minute she heard I’d disobeyed her, my life was going to be over with a capital O. No more Entenmann’s chocolate doughnuts for me after school. It would be granola bars and Graham Crackers from here on out. Theresa could forgive just about anything—bad grades, missed curfews, lost homework, dirt tracked in from the park all over her newly washed kitchen floor—but lying?

No way. Even if it had been for a totally good cause, such as preserving my creative integrity.

Which was why I did what I did next, which was throw David a pleading look, hoping against hope that he would understand. I didn’t see how he possibly could. I mean, he wasn’t wearing his Horizon uniform, but he still had on a button-down shirt and these pants with pleats in them. He looked like a guy who had never, not once in his life, disobeyed his parents, much less his extremely strict housekeeper. How could he possibly relate?

Still, if there was any chance, any chance at all, I could get him, like his dad’s Secret Service agents, not to mention that I hadn’t been in class last night . . .

“Oh, you have her at Susan Boone’s?” the First Lady asked my mother brightly. “Isn’t Susan wonderful David just loves her.” She reached out and touched her son’s shoulder in a gesture that was surprisingly momlike, for a lady who was married to the most important man in the Free World. “I’m just so glad David was late leaving the studio last night. Who knows what could have happened if he had walked out just as . . .”

She couldn’t finish that sentence. I guess she meant who knows what could have happened if David had walked out just as Mr. Uptown Girl started shooting. But the fact is, nothing would have happened. Because I had been there. And I had stopped it.

Please, David. I was sending thought waves at him as hard as I could. Please do not say anything about my not being there last night. Phase just for once in your button-down shirt, son-of-a-politician life, try to open your mind and receive my plea. I know you can do it, you love Save Ferris and so do I, so perhaps we can, on that level, communicate with one another. Don’t say anything, David. Don’t say anything. Don’t say any—

“I know exactly what you mean,” my mom said, reaching out and touching my shoulder exactly the way the First Lady had touched David’s. “I don’t want to think about what could have happened if the Secret Service agents hadn’t disarmed him so quickly . . .”

“I know,” the First Lady said. “Aren’t they marvellous?”

Amazingly, the conversation appeared to be turning away from Susan Boone. Well, except for the somewhat startling revelation that John—the middle-aged guy who couldn’t draw at all and who I’d thought was wearing a hearing aid—was, in actual truth, David’s own personal Secret Service agent, which was a little weird.

But how weird must David have found it to walk into the hospital room of the girl who’d saved his dad from an alleged assassin, only to find me there?

Except that after the initial shock had worn off, David seemed pretty OK with it. In fact, he seemed to find it kind of amusing. Like he was trying not to smile, but he couldn’t help it. Probably he was thinking about that pineapple. Just remembering it made my cheeks start heating up.

Oh my God. That stupid pineapple. Why me? I told myself I’d had a perfect right to draw that pineapple. That pineapple, I thought, had come from my heart, just like Jack had said.

Only if that were true, why did I still feel so embarrassed about it?

Finally, after what seemed like twenty more minutes of awkward chitchat, the President and his wife and David left, and we were all alone again.

As soon as the door had closed behind the First Family, my mom exhaled very gustily and sagged against my bed, which she’d hastily made while I’d been in the shower.

“Was that surreal,” she wanted to know, “or what?”

Theresa was in more shock than anybody. “I cannot believe,” she kept murmuring, “that I just met the President of the United States.”

Even Rebecca had to admit it had been interesting. “I can’t believe I didn’t get a chance to ask the President about Area 51,” she said ruefully. “I’d really like to know why the government feels it necessary to hide from us the truth about extraterrestrial visitations to this planet.”

Lucy’s thoughts on the matter were much less esoteric than Rebecca’s.

“Dinner at the White House,” she said. “Do you think it would be OK if I brought Jack?”

“NO,” both my parents said, loudly, and at the same time.

Lucy sighed dramatically. “That’s OK. It’ll be more fun to go without him. I can flirt with that Dave guy. He’s hot.”

You see? You see how little Lucy deserves a guy like Jack? I sucked in my breath, filled with indignation on Jack’s behalf ...

“Hello,” I said. “Don’t you have a boyfriend?”

Lucy just stared at me like I was nuts. “So?” she said. “Does that mean I can’t ever look at another guy? Did you get a load of David’s green eyes? And that butt—”

“That’s it,” my dad said. “No butts. There will be no discussions of anyone’s butt while I am in the room. And preferably while I am out of it, as well.”

“That goes double for me,” Mom said.

I heartily concurred. Imagine, looking at another guy’s butt, when she already had Jack’s to look at whenever she wanted!

But Lucy seemed completely oblivious to her own selfishness and disloyalty. She just shrugged and said, “Whatever,” before wandering over towards the window . . .

“Stay away from the window!” both my mom and I yelled.

But it was too late. A huge roar went up from the crowd standing outside. Lucy, startled at first, soon got over it and started waving like she thought she was the Pope, or somebody.

“Hello,” she called, even though there was no way they could hear her. “Hello, all you little people. Hello, Good Morning, America!

It was kind of funny that at that moment the door opened and a lady in a blouse with ruffles at the neck, who introduced herself as Mrs. Rose, the hospital’s chief administrator, went, to Lucy, “Miss Madison? Are you ready for your press conference?”

Lucy, her eyes wide, spun around.

“Not me,” she said. “Her.” And stabbed one of her pointy nails in my direction.

Mrs. Rose looked at me.

“Oh,” she said. Fine. Are you ready, then, dear? They just want to ask you a few questions. It will only take five minutes. And then you’ll be free to go home.”

I looked at my mom and dad. They smiled at me encouragingly. I looked at Theresa. She did the same. I looked at Lucy. She went, “Whatever happens, don’t touch your hair. I finally got it perfect. Don’t mess it up.”

I looked back at Mrs. Rose.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m ready, I guess.”

Top ten Things Not to Do at a Press Conference:

10. When the reporter from the New York Times asks you if you were scared when Larry Wayne Rogers (aka Mr. Uptown Girl) pulled a gun out from under his rain poncho, it is probably better not to say no, that you were relieved, because you’d thought he’d been pulling out something else.

9. Just because they put water out for you doesn’t mean you have to drink it. Especially if when you drink it, you accidentally miss your mouth because it is so slippery with lip gloss, and all the water goes dribbling down the front of your sister’s blouse.

8. When the reporter from the Indianapolis Star asks if you are aware that Larry Wayne Rogers attempted to shoot the President out of a desire to impress the celebrity with whom he was obsessed for many years—Billy Joel’s ex-wife, the model Christie Brinkley, about whom Billy wrote the song ‘Uptown Girl’—it is probably better not to say, “What a loser!” Instead, you should express your concern for the very serious problem of mental illness.

7. When a CNN news correspondent wants to know if you have a boyfriend, it would be cooler just to say, “Not at the current time,” than to do what I did, which was choke on my own spit.

6. Staring fixedly at Barbara Walters’ head, wondering if that is really her hair, or some kind of space helmet? Yeah, not such a good idea.

5. When Matt Lauer stands up to ask his question, it is probably best not to squeal into the microphone, “Hey! I know you! My mom has the hugest crush on you!”

4. If a piece of your own hair becomes affixed to your lip gloss, it would probably be better to brush it away with your hand, rather than trying to blow it out of the way as if you were Free Willy.

3. When a reporter from the Los Angeles Times asks if it is true that you just met the President and his family, and wants to know what that was like for you, you might want to come up with something more descriptive than, “Um. Fine.”

2. Just as a general thing, when you have saved the life of the leader of the Free World, most people really want to hear about that and, sadly, don’t care to hear a long-winded description of your dog.

And the number one thing not to do at a press conference:

1. Don’t forget your sunglasses. Otherwise, so many people will be snapping flash photos of you, all you will be able to see in front of you is a big purple blob, so when you descend from the podium, you will trip because you can’t see where you are going, and land in local news anchorwoman Candace Lu’s lap.

Here’s what happens when you stop a crazy guy from killing the President of the United States:

Suddenly, everyone—everyone in the entire world—wants to be your friend.

Seriously.

And I am not just talking about get-well balloons and Thank You Beary Much bears (all of which we donated to the children’s wing before leaving). When I got home from the hospital the day after that little incident outside Capitol Cookies, there were a hundred and sixty-seven messages on our answering machine. Only about twenty of them were from people I actually know and like, such as Grandma or Catherine or whoever. All the rest of them were from reporters or people like Kris Parks, who seemed to have forgotten all about the whole Speech and Hearing thing.

“Hi, Sam,” she sang into the machine, in her smarmy Kris Parks voice. “It’s me, Kris! Just calling to see if you want to come to my party next Saturday night. My parents are going to be in Aruba, so we’re going to have a blast! But it won’t be any fun unless you’re there.”

I couldn’t believe it. I mean, you would think Kris would at least try to be a little more subtle than that. She hadn’t invited me to a party at her house since the third grade, and here she was, making out like we’d never stopped being friends. It was unreal.

Lucy didn’t share my outrage, though. She just went, “Cool, party at Kris’s. I’m bringing Jack.”

To which both my parents replied, “Oh, no, you aren’t,” then added that we weren’t allowed to go to parties at which there wasn’t at least one parent in attendance. Especially with Jack, who got caught skinny-dipping in the Chevy Chase Country Club pool during last year’s Christmas ball (the Slaters were members, though, so the incident was hushed up. Unfortunately not enough to keep it from my parents, however. I suppose they would be happier if Lucy was going out with a guy who never questioned authority and meekly accepted what was doled out to him, like most people of our generation, instead of someone who thinks for himself, like Jack).

Lucy didn’t look too upset about my parents saying she wasn’t going to be allowed to take Jack to Kris’s party. Instead, she went to the window to wave some more at all the reporters who were out on our front lawn.

Kris Parks’s message wasn’t even the most unbelievable one, however. We also got calls from half the reporters who’d been at the press conference, wanting to know if they could arrange exclusive interviews with me. All the television news shows—like 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Dateline, 20/20—want to do a feature on me, and asked us to call them at our earliest convenience.

I am so sure. Like there is an hour’s worth of stuff to even say about me. My life so far has basically been just a long series of one humiliation after another. If they want to go in depth on my lisp and how I was cured of it by my irrational desire to call Kris Parks every bad S-word I could think of to her face, well then more power to them. But somehow I suspected they were after something a little more triumph of the human spirit-y.

Then there were the calls from the soda companies. Seriously. Coke and Pepsi wanted to know if I was interested in endorsement deals. Like I’m going to stand in front of a camera and go, “Drink Coke like me. Then you, too, can throw yourself at a crazed Christie Brinkley fan and get your arm broken in two places.”

Finally, but most disturbingly of all, was the call I had most been dreading. I’d actually hoped against hope that, when we played the messages back, this one wouldn’t be there. But I was wrong. So wrong.

Because message number one hundred and sixty-four contained the following, in an all-too-familiar voice:

“Samantha? Hi, this is Susan Boone. You know, from the studio. Samantha, I would really appreciate it if you would call me back as soon as you get this message. There are some things we need to talk about.”

Hearing this, I panicked, of course. That was it. All those pleas to the Secret Service guys had been for nothing. My cover was blown. I was dead.

I had to return Susan Boone’s call in secret—so no one would overhear what I suspected was going to be a lot of grovelling on my part—which meant that I had to hang around and wait while my dad called the phone company and got our number changed to a new, unlisted one. We had to do this on account of the fact that some of the one hundred and sixty-seven messages had been a little too effusive, if you know what I mean. Like some Larry Wayne Rogers-types—now rucked safely away in a maximum-security mental hospital, awaiting arraignment—who really, really wanted to meet me. Apparently, to them, my heinous school ID photo was not a turn-off at all.

The Secret Service guys recommended that we change our phone number and perhaps install an alarm system in the house. They were still hanging around outside, generally keeping people back, while some metro cops directed traffic along our street, which was suddenly getting four or five times the amount of traffic it usually got, with people who’d found out where I lived driving by very slowly, trying to catch a glimpse of me—though don’t ask me why. I am very rarely doing anything interesting. Most of the time I am just sitting in my room eating Pop-Tarts and drawing pictures of myself with Jack, but whatever. I guess people wanted to see what a real live hero looks like.

Because that’s what I am now, whether I like it or not. A hero.

Which is just another name, it turns out, for someone who was at the wrong place at the very worst possible time.

Anyway, when Dad was done dealing with the phone company, I called Susan Boone back—but not until after I’d consulted with Catherine.

“Dinner?” That was all Catherine could say. “You take a bullet for the President of the United States of America, and all you get out of it is dinner?”

“I didn’t take a bullet for him,” I reminded her. “And it’s dinner at the White House. And could we please stick to the subject at hand? What am I going to say to Susan Boone?”

“Anybody can have dinner at the White House, if they pay enough money.” Catherine sounded truly disgusted. ”I would think you’d get something better than just dinner. You should at least get a medal of valour, or something.”

“Well,” I said. “Maybe I will. Maybe they’ll give it to me at dinner. Now what should I say when I call Susan Boone?”

“Samantha,” Catherine said, in a voice that was as close to impatient as I’d ever heard her speak. “They don’t hand out medals at dinner. They have a special ceremony for that. And you saved the President’s life. Your drawing teacher is not going to care that you skipped her stupid class.”

“I don’t know, Cath,” I said. “I mean, Susan Boone is very serious about art. She might be calling to kick me out of her class, or something.”

“So? I would think you’d want to be kicked out. I thought you hated it, right?”

I thought about that. Had I hated it? Well, not the drawing part. That had been pretty fun. And the part where David had said he liked my shoes.

But the rest of it—the part where Susan Boone had tried to wipe out my right to creative expression and keep me from drawing from my heart, totally humiliating and embarrassing me in front of all those people, including, I knew now, the son of the President of the United States. That had been pretty mortifying.

On the whole, I decided, getting kicked out of Susan Boone’s art class would not be a bad thing at all.

So as soon as I hung up with Catherine, I dialled Susan Boone’s number, anxious to get the whole thing over with already.

“Um, hi,” I said, hesitantly, when she picked up. “This is Samantha Madison.”

“Oh, hello,” Susan Boone said. I heard a familiar cawing in the background. So Joe the Crow didn’t live at the studio, but travelled to and from it with his owner. Some life for a big, ugly, hair-stealing bird. “Thank you for returning my call, Samantha.”

“Um, no problem,” I said. Then, after a deep breath, I took the plunge: “Listen, I’m really sorry about the other day. I don’t know if you heard what happened—”

Susan Boone surprised me by chuckling. “Samantha, there isn’t a human being south of the North Pole who hasn’t heard what happened to you outside my studio yesterday.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I hurried to spill out the lie I’d made up. If I had been Jack, I’d have just told her the truth: you know, that I’d resented her attempt to subjugate my artistic integrity.

But since I am not Jack, I just blabbed the first thing that came into my head:

“The thing is, the reason I wasn’t in class was because it was raining really hard, you know, and I got really wet, and I didn’t want to come to class wet, you know, so I stopped into Static to dry off, you know, before class, and then I don’t know what happened, but I guess I just sort of lost track of time, and before I knew it—”

“Never mind that, Samantha.” Susan Boone, to my great surprise, interrupted me. I will admit it wasn’t the greatest lie, but it had been the best I could come up with at such short notice. “Let’s talk about your arm.”

“My arm?” I looked down at my cast. I was already getting so used to it, it was like it had always been there.

“Yes. Was the arm you broke the one you draw with?”

“Um. No.”

“Good. Then I’ll see you in class on Tuesday?”

I had an ungenerous thought, then. I thought that Susan Boone, like Coke and Pepsi, only wanted me to stay in her art school so she could use my celebrity to promote it.

Well, and why shouldn’t I have thought this? It wasn’t as if she’d fallen all over herself trying to tell me what a good artist I was or anything, the one time I had shown up for class.

“Listen, Mrs. Boone,” I said, wondering how on earth I was going to say what I had to say—about her stifling me creatively, and where would we be if someone had done that to Picasso—in a way that wouldn’t offend her. Because, you know, she seemed like a pretty nice lady, aside from the whole not-liking-my-pineapple thing.

“Susan,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Call me Susan.”

“Uh. OK. Susan. I really just don’t think that I have time for drawing lessons right now.” So what if there wasn’t a chance this was going to work. It was worth a try. And it was better than telling her the truth. And I mean it was entirely possible, what with the reporters camped outside on our lawn, and the rubberneckers cruising up and down our street, and all the sickos leaving messages on our answering machine, that my parents might completely forget about the whole art lesson thing. Under the circumstances, that C-minus in mine in German might not seem so dire . . .

“Sam,” Susan Boone said, in a no-nonsense voice. “You have a lot of talent, but you are never going to learn to draw really well until you stop thinking so much, and start seeing. And the only way you are ever going to do that is if you take the time to learn how.”

Learn how to see? Hello? Maybe Susan Boone thought it was my eyes, and not my arm, that had been affected by my little altercation outside her studio.

Too late, I realized what she was trying to do. Exactly what Jack had warned me about! She was trying to make me into an art clone! To make me start drawing with my eyes, and not my heart!

But before I could say anything like, “No, thank you, Mrs. Boone, I don’t care to be made into another one of your art automatons,” she went, “I will see you in class on Tuesday, or I am afraid I will have to tell your parents how much we all missed you yesterday.”

Whoa. Now that was harsh. Way harsh. Especially for the Queen of the Elves.

“Um,” I said. So much for fighting the system. All the fight went instantly out of me. “OK. I guess.”

Susan Boone said, “Good,” and hung up. Right before I heard the click, Joe went, in the background, “Pretty bird. Pretty bird.” Then, nothing.

She had me. She fully had me, and what’s more, she knew it. She knew it! Who would have thought that an elf queen could be so devious?

And now I was going to have to go back—go back to Susan Boone’s with everyone in the whole class knowing that I’d ditched last time. And probably knowing why I’d ditched too. You know, about the whole being publicly humiliated part during the critique session the class before.

God! It was all so unfair!

I was still sitting there, shaking my head over it, when Lucy came into my room without knocking, as was her custom.

“All right,” she said.

I should have known then and there that I was in trouble, because Lucy had a clipboard and a pen with her. Plus she was wearing her most executive outfit, the green plaid mini with a white shirt and sweater vest.

“I’ve got you down for lunch and shopping in Georgetown tomorrow with the girls,” she said, consulting the clipboard. “Then tomorrow night, you and Jack and I are going to see the new Adam Sandler. You’ll have to put in an appearance both at the show and then at Luigi’s afterwards for pizza. Then Sunday we’ve got brunch with the squad, then the game. Then Sunday night is dinner with the President. We can’t get out of it, I’ve already tried. But maybe if there’s time afterwards we can get someone to whizz us by Luigi’s again, just to see what’s up. Some of the gang show up there on Sunday nights to do their homework together. Then Monday—now, this is important, Sam, pay attention—Monday we are going to launch your new look. You are going to have to get up at least an hour before you usually do too. I mean, there can’t be any more of this rolling out of bed, putting on the first thing you see, then slouching into school like it’s community service and nobody’s going to care how you look, or something. You are really going to have to start making an effort. Besides, it’s going to take at least half an hour every day to do your hair.”

I blinked at her. “What,” I said, speaking slowly because my tongue felt like it was a dead weight, all of a sudden. “Are. You. Talking. About.”

Lucy looked heavenward, then flopped down on to my bed beside Manet and me.

“Your new social agenda, silly,” Lucy said. “I’m handling all your public appearances from now on, OK? You don’t even have to worry about it. Not that it’s going to be easy. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, let’s face it, your stock is pretty low. And it doesn’t help that you hang around with Catherine, who is nice, and all, but talk about fashion-challenged. But we might be able to overcome it if, you know, you just stop talking to her during school hours, or whatever. Now, the only thing I want to know is, did you dye all your clothes black? Are you sure you don’t have any holdouts?”

“Lucy,” I said. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I really couldn’t. “Get out of my room.”

Lucy tossed around some of her long silky hair. “Now, Sam, come on. Don’t be that way. Opportunities like this don’t come around all that often. You really have to grab them when they do. You know, like that brass ring, or whatever it is Dad’s always talking about. Although I can tell you, some guy offers me a ring made out of brass, I will so be, like, ‘See ya.’”

“LUCY!” I shrieked, picking up one of my shoes and hurling it at her. “GET OUT OF MY ROOM!!!!!”

Lucy ducked, then, looking offended, stood up to leave.

“God,” she said. “Try to do a person a favour. See if I ever help you again.”

Then, to my very great relief, she stomped from the room, leaving me alone in my unpopularity.

Top ten Things Gwen Stefani Would Never Be Caught Dead Doing:

10. Gwen Stefani would never, ever allow her sister to pick out her clothes for her. Gwen Stefani has devised her own unique and identifiable style. Gwen finds charming little tops in thrift shops and makes them look sporty and cool by tying them into a halter top, or whatever. Gwen would never ever wear the navy, grey and tan slacks her sister spent three hundred and sixty-five dollars on for her at Banana Republic.

9. If Gwen’s sister told her she was going to have to dump her best friend because of the bad clothes her mother makes her wear, Gwen would probably have just laughed dismissively, not thrown a shoe at her.

8. It is quite unlikely that Gwen Stefani, in an effort to avoid the reporters staked out in her front yard when it came time for her to walk her dog, would sneak out of the back of her house in a hooded sweatshirt, sunglasses, and a pair of her father’s khakis with the legs rolled up. Gwen would have strolled boldly out amongst the reporters and used their tireless interest in her as a vehicle with which to promote ska.

7. I highly doubt that Gwen Stefani would turn bright red if the man she secretly loved—who happens to be her sister’s boyfriend—told her that she looks nice in her dad’s rolled-up khakis.

6. Also, Gwen Stefani has too much integrity ever to fall in love with her sister’s boyfriend.

5. Probably if Gwen Stefani had saved the President of the United States from being assassinated, she wouldn’t hide in her house, embarrassed by the hordes of people telling her how brave she was. Gwen would write a song about it, filled with searing wit and self-deprecation. The video of it would probably feature Gwen’s ex, Tony Kanal, as the President, and that weird naked drummer as Larry Wayne Rogers.

But it would still never get higher than number five on

Total Request Live

, as ska is seriously underappreciated by Middle America.

4. If Kris Parks called Gwen Stefani, like she did me just now, and went, “Oh, hi, Gwen. So can you come? I mean, to my party next Saturday?” Gwen would probably say something witty and charming, not what I said, which was, “How did you get my new number?” forgetting, of course, that my sister Lucy had emailed our new number to practically everyone in the whole school for fear she might otherwise miss out on one of the many crucial social events taking place this weekend, such as pizza at Luigi’s or an all-night Pauly Shore filmfest at Debbie Kinley’s house.

3. I am thinking that if anybody ever tried to stifle Gwen’s creative impulses, she would never agree, even with the threat of blackmail, to go along with it.

2. Gwen Stefani would definitely never spend her Sunday afternoon, instead of doing the German homework her best friend had brought over for her, composing a letter to her sister’s boyfriend, outlining all the reasons why he should be with her and not her sister, then rip the letter into little pieces and flush it down the toilet instead of giving it to him.

And the number one thing Gwen Stefani would never, ever do?

1. Wear a navy-blue suit her mom had bought her from Ann Taylor to dinner at the White House.

I have been to the White House many times. I mean, if you live in the Washington, DC, area, starting in like the third grade they make you tour the White House practically once a year, then write a stupid report on it. You know, My Trip to the White House. That kind of thing.

I have been to all the rooms they show you on the tour: the Vermeil Room, the Library, the China Room, the Map Room, the East Room, the Green Room, the Blue Room, the Red Room, yadda yadda yadda.

But Sunday night was the first time I’d ever been to the White House not as part of a tour, but as an actual guest.

It was pretty weird. Everyone in the whole family was feeling the weirdness of it, except maybe for Rebecca. But since Rebecca had just gotten a new shipment of Star Trek books from Amazon, this was only to be expected.

Besides, I suspect Rebecca is secretly a robot and therefore immune to human emotion.

The rest of us, however, were totally freaked. I could tell my mom was especially nervous because she wore her power suit and her pearls, the ones she only wears to court, and she took away my dad’s cell phone and his Palm Pilot, so he couldn’t try to use any of them during dinner. Theresa—who, as an important part of our family, was of course invited as well—was in her Sunday best, which included purple high heels with sparkle clips on them, and didn’t yell at any of us once, not even when Manet came barrelling in from outside and shook out his fur and sprayed rainwater all over the newly vacuumed living-room rug. Even Lucy spent about two hours longer than usual on her beauty regime, and emerged looking like someone going to guest star on VIP, and not enjoy a nice meal with a family who lived, if you thought about it, only a little ways down the street from us.

“Now whatever you do, Sam,” Lucy said, as we pulled out of the driveway—which was no mean feat, since there were still hordes of reporters hanging around, trying to photograph our every move. They liked to do things like dive on to the hood of the station wagon to snap a quick one of Dad on his way to the Seven Eleven for more milk. Backing out of the driveway had gotten perilous because there was always two or three of them darting out from behind the car—“do not try to hide the food you don’t like under your plate.”

“Lucy!” I was nervous enough as it was. I fully did not need her making it worse. “God, I know how to act at a dinner party, OK? I am not a child.”

The thing is, at home when we have stuff I don’t like at dinner, I fully slip it under the table to Manet, who’ll eat anything—carrots, eggplant, peas, cantaloupe, chicken sausage, you name it. The First Family does not have a dog. They are cat people. Cats are nice and everything, but they are no help to finicky eaters like me. I highly doubted the First Cat was going to chow down on any cauliflower heads I slipped under the table.

So the question was, what was I going to do if they served broccoli (gag me) or worse, anything involving tomatoes or fish, two things I really cannot abide, and which tend to show up at most fancy meals? I knew I couldn’t hide it under my plate. Supposing somebody picked it up and saw all the food under it? That would be almost as embarrassing as having drawn a pineapple where there wasn’t supposed to be one.

It was weird turning on to Pennsylvania Avenue. Normally the part in front of the White House is completely closed off to cars. The only way you can go up to the fence in front of the President’s house is on foot.

But since we were special guests, we got to drive right up to the big barricade that blocks off the street. A bunch of policemen were there, and they checked our licence plate and my dad’s ID, and then they lowered the barricade into the ground and we drove over it.

Then we were in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which is the address of the White House.

But we weren’t the only people there, by any means. For one thing, there were cops all over the place, on horseback and bikes, as well as on foot. They were all standing around, talking to one another. They looked at our car curiously as we drove by. Lucy waved. Most of them waved back.

Cops weren’t the only ones standing around in front of the White House, though. There were guys selling FBI T-shirts and hats, and other guys with the life-size, cardboard cut-outs of the President that you could stand next to and get your picture taken.

And even though it was dark out, there were plenty of tourists, whole families, all asking one another to snap photos of them in front of the big, black, wrought-iron fence that surrounded the President’s house.

There were protestors too. Some of them had obviously been there a long time, since they had made a little shanty town of tents and plywood shacks, with banners about their cause strung in front of them. NO MORE MIKE, one said. Another said, LIVE BY THE BOMB, DIE BY THE BOMB. I have to admit that, as far as radicals went, they did not look like a very impressive bunch.

Then again, it was pretty cold out, and raining a little. Who wants to protest in drizzle?

Lastly, there were the reporters. There were a lot of reporters. Almost as many as had been standing in front of our house when we’d left. Only the White House had set aside a special place on the lawn for the reporters crowding its front yard. They had huge lights and all these stands with microphones set up, one for each network. When they saw our station wagon as we pulled up to the Northwest Appointment Gate—where the cops back by the first barricade had directed us to go—the reporters started surging forward, the camera people shining bright lights at our car.

“There she is!” I could hear them saying, even though all of our windows were up. “It’s her! Get the shot! Get the shot!”

The reporters weren’t the only ones trying to get pictures of our car, and us in it. All the tourists standing around in front of the wrought-iron fence turned around when they heard the commotion and started snapping shots of us too. It was kind of like pulling up in a limo in front of the Oscars, or whatever. Except that we were in a Volvo station wagon, and Joan and Melissa Rivers were nowhere to be seen.

A couple of guys in uniforms came out of the little house behind the gate, and looked over their shoulders at the horde of stampeding reporters. One of them stepped forward to block the path they were beating towards the car, while the other one waved us through the slowly opening gate.

While this was happening, my mom turned around in the front passenger seat and went, in a low, urgent voice, “Lucy, I would appreciate it if, just this once, you would not spend the entire meal talking about clothes. Rebecca, I know you have some questions you’d like to ask the President about the cover-up at Roswell, but I am personally requesting that you keep them to yourself. And, Samantha. Please. I am begging you: do not pick at your food. If you don’t like something, simply leave it on your plate. Do not sit there rearranging it for half an hour.”

I thought this unfair. When you rearrange your food, most people think you have eaten at least some of it.

Then we were driving through the open gates, past the reporters and the camera flashes and klieg lights, up to the front door of the White House.

When you are in front of it, even back where the iron fence is, on Pennsylvania Avenue, the house where the President lives actually looks quite small. That is because the Rotunda, which is the round thing with all the pillars that sticks out of the White House, is actually in the back of the house. The front, where the driveway is, isn’t nearly so impressive. In fact, whenever I saw it, I was always kind of, How do they fit all those rooms into such a small space, anyway?

But then you see a shot of the back of the house, which is the one they always show on the news or in movies and stuff, and you go, Oh, yeah, that’s how.

When we pulled up to the front of the house, a uniformed man who was standing at the front door snapped to attention, while another man came down to open my mom’s door.

Then we all stepped out on to this red carpet, and the front door opened, and there was the First Lady, saying, “Hello!” and ”Welcome!“ Right behind her stood the President, who shook my dad’s hand and said, “How are you doing, Richard?” to which my dad replied, “Fine, thanks, Mr. President.”

Then the President and his wife ushered us into the White House as casually as if we had just stopped by for a backyard barbecue, or something. Except of course you don’t wear pantyhose and a navy-blue suit from Ann Taylor to a backyard barbecue. I have to admit, even though everyone was being so welcoming and all, I felt pretty uncomfortable. Not just because of my stupid cast, either, or the fact that Lucy had made me use the horse conditioner again, so my hair felt unnaturally smooth, or even because I knew, just knew, that somehow or other cauliflower was going to end up on my plate.

No, I was freaking out because no matter how casual the President and his wife acted, we were in the White House.

And not in the parts you get to see on the public tour, either, but in the private family parts you never see, except on TV, and even then it is some set director’s idea of how he thinks the family’s private quarters look, and not the real thing. The decor actually looked to me a lot like a bed and breakfast, like one we once stayed in in Vermont. But then I thought maybe that wasn’t fair, since the President and his family had only been living there for a little less than a year, and maybe hadn’t really had a chance to settle in.

And besides, it wasn’t like this was their real house.

Then we were in the living room, and the First Lady was saying, “Sit down,” and ‘Let me get you something to drink,“ and I sat down, and in walked David . . .

And he looked exactly like he had that day in Susan Boone’s studio! He had on a Reel Big Fish T-shirt instead of Save Ferris. But other than that, it was like that other David, the one with the pants with the creases in them, didn’t even exist.

“Oh, David,” his mom said in dismay when she saw him. “I thought I told you to change for dinner.”

But David just grinned and reached for some of the mixed nuts in a bowl on the coffee table in front of me. “I did change for dinner,” he said.

I noticed that he only took salted cashew nuts, and left the brazil nuts in the bowl. I could relate to this. Brazil nuts are gross.

Then dinner was ready. We ate in one of the formal dining rooms. I could tell Lucy was very pleased by this, since her outfit, which was royal blue, went better with the decor in the formal dining room than with that of the private one. Theresa, too, was excited, because of the place settings. They were the formal White House china, and they had real gold rims. Theresa said you can’t put gold-rimmed plates in the dishwasher, but have to do them by hand. The idea that someone was going to have to hand wash her plate when she was done eating made Theresa very happy.

I was probably the only unhappy person in the room. That is because as soon as we sat down, I knew I was in big trouble, since the first thing they served us was a salad with these big cherry tomatoes in it. Fortunately the dressing was all right, it was just regular Ranch, so I ate all the lettuce around the tomatoes and hoped no one would notice that they were still sitting there.

Only unfortunately I was seated in a place of honour right next to the President, and he totally noticed. He leaned over and went, “You know those tomatoes were imported all the way from Guatemala. If you don’t eat them, there could be an international incident.”

I was pretty sure he was joking, but it wasn’t very funny to me. I didn’t want anyone to think I didn’t fully appreciate that they were having this nice dinner for us, or whatever.

So what I did was, when no one was looking, I flicked the tomatoes off my plate and into the cloth napkin I had on my lap.

This worked surprisingly well. So well that when the next course came, and it turned out to be New England clam chowder, I ate all the chowder parts, and then again when no one was looking, I dropped all the clammy bits into my napkin.

By the time dessert was served, there was about a pound of food in my napkin including one piece of flounder stuffed with crabmeat; a vegetable medley of peas, carrots and baby onions; some scalloped potatoes; and a piece of onion foccacia.

It was very easy to hide all this food without anyone seeing me do it because the adults were having a very boisterous conversation about the economic situation in North Africa. The only thing I absolutely could not get away with not eating was a tomato cut up to look like a rose, which was served as a garnish on the dish of scalloped potatoes, and which the First Lady scooped up and put on my plate.

“A rose for a rose,” she said, with a nice smile.

What could I do? I had to eat it. Everyone was looking at me. I choked it down as best I could in one swallow, then gulped down about half of my glass of iced tea, which was what the under-twenty-one crowd got to drink. When I put the glass down, I saw Rebecca, who had started watching me very intently the minute the First Lady put the tomato on my plate, do the strangest thing: she lifted up her hands and pretended like she was applauding. Sometimes she does cute things like that, which make me suspect she might not be a robot after all.

It was right about then I realized something horrible: my napkin was leaking. All the food in it hadn’t stained my skirt yet, but it was about to. I had no recourse but to excuse myself, pretending like I was going to the ladies room. Then I slyly took my napkin with me, just crumpled loosely in my hand, like I had forgotten it was there.

Everywhere you go in the White House, there are Secret Service agents standing around. They are actually very nice men and women. When I came out of the dining room, I asked one of them where the nearest bathroom was, and she walked me there. Once I was safely locked inside, I dumped my dinner out in the toilet and flushed it away. I felt kind of bad, wasting all that food when there are people starving, you know, in Appalachia and all.

But what else was I supposed to do? It would have been rude just to leave it there on my plate.

The problem with the napkin, which was soaked through with crabmeat juice, was easily solved by the fact that the bathroom, which was very fancy, had all these cloth hand towels laid out for guests to use, and a gilt basket to throw them in when you were done. I washed my hands and used a couple of the hand towels, then threw them into the basket over the napkin. Whoever emptied the basket would just think I forgot and threw a napkin in there.

I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing—except for the fact that, you know, I was practically starving, having nothing in my stomach except a little lettuce and a tomato garnish—when, on my way back to the dining room, I practically ran into David, who appeared to be headed towards the same bathroom I had just vacated.

“Oh,” he said, when he saw me. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said. Then—because it was weird, him being the President’s son, and all—I tried to sidle away as quickly as possible.

Only I wasn’t quick enough, since he gave me that little smile of his and went, “So. What’d you do with the napkin, anyway?”

I couldn’t believe it. Busted! I was so busted!

I felt myself blush all the way to my horse-conditioned roots.

Still, I tried. I tried to pretend like I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Napkin?” I asked, thinking that, with my red hair and scarlet face, I probably resembled a big bowl of strawberry ice cream. “What napkin?”

“The one you hid your entire meal in,” David said, looking amused. His eyes seemed greener than ever. “I hope you didn’t try to flush it. The pipes in this building are pretty old. You could cause a massive flood, you know.”

It would be just my luck to cause a flood in the White House.

“I didn’t flush the napkin,” I said quickly, with a nervous glance at the Secret Service agent standing not far away. “I put it in the basket with the dirty hand towels. I just flushed the food.” Then I had a panicky thought. “But there was a lot of it. Do you really think it could clog the pipes?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking serious. “That was one big piece of flounder.”

Something about his expression—maybe the way one of his dark eyebrows was up, while the other was down, kind of the way Manet’s ears look when he’s ready to play—made me realize that David was kidding around.

I didn’t think it was so funny, though. I’d really been scared that I’d maybe broken the White House.

“That,” I said, in a whisper, so the Secret Service agent down the hall wouldn’t hear me, “isn’t very nice.”

I didn’t even think about the fact that he was, you know, the First Son or anything. I mean, I was just mad. They say all this stuff about redheads being hot-tempered. If you are a redhead and you get mad, you can just bet that someone is going to say something like, “Oooh, look out for the redhead. You know they’ve all got tempers.”

Which usually just makes me madder than ever.

Of course, I had flushed most of the dinner David’s mom had served to me down the toilet. In fact, maybe that was why I was so mad . . . because David had caught me doing something so wasteful. Yeah, I was mad, but I was pretty embarrassed too.

But I was more mad. So I turned around and started back towards the dining room.

“Aw, come on,” David said with a laugh, turning around and falling into step with me. “You have to admit, it was kind of funny. I mean, I really had you going there. You totally thought the pipes were going to explode.”

“I did not,” I said, even though that was exactly what I had been thinking. Also about the headlines in the paper the next day: Girl Who Saved President’s Life Causes White House Plumbing to Blow By Stuffing Entire Dinner Down Toilet.

“Yeah, you did,” David said. He was so much taller than I was, he only had to take one step for every two of mine. “But I ought to have known you can’t take a joke.”

I stopped dead in my tracks and whirled around to look up at him. He was pretty tall—taller than Jack, even—so I had to tilt my chin way up to look into those green eyes that Lucy admired so much. I didn’t even want to look at that other part of him she’d commented on.

“What do you mean, I can’t take a joke?” I demanded. “How would you even know whether or not I can take a joke? You barely know me!”

“I know you’re the sensitive artist type,” David said, with that same know-it-all grin he’d given his mom (“I did change for dinner”).

“I am not,” I said hotly, even though of course I totally am. In fact, I don’t even know why I bothered denying it. It was just that the way he said it made it sound like something bad.

Except of course that there’s nothing wrong with being a sensitive artist. Jack Slater is a living testament to that.

“Oh, yeah?” David said. “Then how come you didn’t come back to the studio after the Pineapple Incident?”

That was exactly how he said it too. Like it was capitalized. The Pineapple Incident.

I could feel myself turning red all over again. I couldn’t believe he was bringing up what had happened my first day at Susan Boone’s. I mean, talk about insensitive.

“I’m not disputing that you’re a really good artist,” David went on. “Just that, you know, you’re kind of a hothead.” He cocked his head back towards the direction of the dining room. “And a bit of a picky eater. You hungry?”

I looked at him like he was crazy. In fact, I was pretty sure he was crazy. I mean, his taste in music and footwear not withstanding, it seemed to me that the First, Son had some screws loose.

Although he had admitted that I am a really good artist, so maybe he wasn’t that nuts.

Before I had a chance to deny that I was feeling hungry, my stomach did my talking for me, letting out, at just that moment, the most embarrassing rumbling sound, indicating that all it had in it was tomato garnish and a bit of lettuce and that this was unacceptable.

David didn’t even pretend, like a normal person, that he hadn’t heard it. Instead, he went, “I thought so. Listen, I was going to go see if I could round up some real food. Want to come?”

Now I was sure he was crazy. Not just because he had gotten up and left the table in the middle of dinner to go look for alternative food, but also because he was asking me to look for alternative food with him. Me. The girl he’d just caught throwing away a napkin-full of perfectly good dinner.

“I,” I said, completely confused, “I mean, we ... we can’t just leave. In the middle of dinner. At the White House.”

“Why not?” he asked, with a shrug.

I thought about it. I mean, there were a lot of reasons why not. Because it was rude, for one thing. I mean, think how it would look. And because . . . because you just don’t do things like that.

I mentioned this, but David looked unimpressed.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” he asked. Then, backing down the long, Persian-carpeted hallway, he went, “Come on. You know you want it.”

I didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, that dinner in there was for me and as the guest of honour, I knew I couldn’t just dine and ditch. Also, the First Son was clearly a crazy person. Did I want to go wandering around a strange house with a crazy person?

On the other hand, I was starving. And he had said I was a good artist . . .

I looked at the Secret Service agent to see what she thought. She smiled at me and made a motion like she was locking the side of her mouth and throwing away the key. Well, I decided. If she didn’t think it was such a bad thing to do, and she was an adult and all—one responsible enough to carry a side arm—maybe it was all right. . .

I turned around and hurried after David, who was halfway down the hall by that time.

He didn’t seem very surprised to see me there beside him. Instead, he said, like he was continuing some conversation we’d been having in a parallel universe, “So what happened to the boots?”

“Boots?” I echoed. “What boots?”

“The ones you were wearing the first time I met you. With the White-Out daisies on them.”

The boots he’d said were nice. Duh.

“My mom wouldn’t let me wear those boots,” I said. “She didn’t think they were appropriate for dinner at the White House.” I looked at him out of the corners of my eyes. “None of my own clothes are appropriate for dinner at the White House. I had to get all new clothes.” I tugged uncomfortably at my navy-blue suit. “Like this thing.”

“How do you think I feel?” David asked. “I have to eat dinner at the White House every single night.”

I looked sourly at his shirt. “Yeah, but they obviously don’t make you dress up.”

“Not for dinner. But I have to dress up all the rest of the time.”

I knew this wasn’t true, though. “You weren’t dressed up in drawing class.”

“Occasionally I get a reprieve,” he said, with another one of those grins. There was something kind of mysterious about those grins of David’s. Most of the time they seemed to be over some private joke he was having with himself. They made me kind of want to be let in on it. The joke, I mean. Whenever Jack thought of something funny, he just blurted it right out. Sometimes three or four times, just to be sure everyone heard it.

David seemed perfectly content to keep his witticisms to himself.

Which was kind of irritating. Because how was I supposed to know whether or not it was me he was laughing at?

Then David hit a button in a door, and an elevator slid open. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised there was an elevator in the White House, but I was. I guess because for a minute I forgot where I was, and thought I was just in a regular house. Also, they never showed the elevator on the school tours.

We got into the elevator, and David hit the down button. The door closed and we went down.

“So,” he said, as we rode. “Why’d you skip?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Though of course I should have. “Skip what?”

“You know. Drawing class, after the Pineapple Incident.”

I swallowed hard.

“I thought you already had that all figured out,” I said. “You said it was on account of my being a sensitive artist, and all.”

The elevator door slid open, and David gestured for me to get out before following me. “Yeah, but I want to hear your version of why.”

Yeah, I bet he did.

But I was fully not going to give him the pleasure. He would only, I knew, make fun of me. Which would, in essence, be making fun of Jack. And that I would not stand for.

Instead I just went, lighly, “I don’t think Susan Boone and I exactly see eye-to-eye on the issue of creative licence.”

David looked at me, one eyebrow up and one down again. Only this time, I was pretty sure he wasn’t being playful.

“Really?” he said. “Are you sure? Because I think Susan’s pretty cool about that kind of thing.”

Yeah. Real cool. Cool enough to blackmail me into coming back to her class.

But I didn’t say this out loud. It seemed impolitic to argue with someone who might momentarily be supplying me with food.

We went down another hallway, this one not carpeted or very fancy. Then David opened another door and we were in a big kitchen.

“Hey, Carl,” David said, to a guy in a chef’s outfit who was busy putting whipped topping on a bunch of glasses of chocolate mousse. “Got anything good to eat around here?”

Carl looked up from his creations, took one glance at me and cried, “Samantha Madison! The girl who saved the world! How you doing?”

There were a lot of other people in the kitchen, all busily cleaning and putting things away. Theresa, I saw, had been wrong about the gold-rimmed plates. You could totally put them in the dishwasher, and in fact, the White House kitchen staff was doing so. But they all stopped when they saw me, and gathered around to thank me for keeping their boss from taking one in the head.

“What was the matter with the flounder?” Carl wanted to know, after congratulations had been issued to me from his staff. “That was real Maryland crab stuffed into it, you know. I bought it fresh this morning.”

David went over to the industrial-sized fridge and yanked it open. “I think it was just, too, you know.” For a guy who went to Horizon, David certainly didn’t talk much like a certified genius. “You got any more of those hamburgers we had for lunch?”

I brightened at the word hamburger. Carl saw this and went, “You want a burger? The lady wants a burger. Samantha Madison, I will make you a burger the likes of which you have never had in your life. You sit right there. Don’t move. This burger’s gonna knock your socks off.”

I was wearing pantyhose, not socks, of course, but I didn’t feel it was necessary to point this out. Instead I sat down on the stool Carl had indicated. David sat down on the one next to it and we watched as Carl, moving so fast he was almost a blur, threw two enormous hamburger patties on to a stovetop grill, and started cooking them for us.

It was weird to be in the kitchen of the White House. It was weird to be in the kitchen of the White House with the son of the President. It would have been weird to me to be with a boy anywhere, since I am not exactly popular with boys. I mean, I am not Lucy. I do not have boys calling me every five minutes ... or ever, for that matter.

But the fact that it was this boy, and this place, made it especially weird. I couldn’t figure out why David was being so ... well, I guess nice was the only word to describe it. I mean, teasing me about having potentially clogged a White House toilet hadn’t been so nice. But offering me a burger when I was practically starving had been pretty decent of him.

It had to be because I had saved his dad. I mean, why else? He was just grateful for what I had done. Which was fully understandable.

What wasn’t so understandable to me was why he was going so out of his way.

I became even more puzzled about this when, after Carl slid two plates in front of us—each of which contained a huge burger and a big pile of golden fries—and went, “Bon appéit, ya’ll,” David picked up both his plate and my own and said, “Come on.”

Taking hold of two cans of soda Carl passed to me from the big industrial fridge, I followed David back down the hallway to the elevator.

“Where are we going?” I asked curiously.

“You’ll see,” David said.

Ordinarily this would not have been enough of an answer for me. But I didn’t say anything more about it, because I was in too much shock on account of a boy being nice to me. The only boy who has ever been remotely nice to me in the past is Jack.

But Jack has to be nice to me, on account of my being his girlfriend’s sister. Also Jack is of course secretly yearning for me. It is even possible that the only reason he stays with Lucy is because he doesn’t know that I return his ardour. If I could ever get up the guts to tell him how I feel, everything could be completely different. . .

But David. David didn’t have to be nice to me. So why was he doing it? It couldn’t have been because he liked me, you know, as a girl. Because, um, hello, Lucy was right upstairs and down the hall. What guy in his right mind would rather be with me than with Lucy? I mean, that would be like choosing Skipper instead of Barbie.

When we came out of the elevator, instead of turning back towards the dining room where everyone else was, David turned in the other direction, towards this door at the opposite end of the hallway. Behind it, I soon saw, was a very formal living-roomy-type place, with big high windows that looked down the sloping lawn of the White House all the way to the Washington Monument, sticking all lit up into the night sky.

“How’s this?” David asked, putting the burgers down on a little table in front of the windows, then moving two big chairs close to the table.

“Um,” I said, because I was still in shock about—and plenty suspicious of—the fact that this cute, but somewhat weird, boy wanted to eat with me. Me, Samantha Madison. “Fine.”

We sat down, bathed in the outdoor lights from the Rotunda. It would have been almost romantic if there hadn’t been a Secret Service agent standing right outside the door. And oh, yeah, if David had been remotely interested in me in that way, which he definitely wasn’t, on account of the fact that to him I am just the strange Goth-type girl who saved his dad’s life, and who also likes to draw pineapples where there are none.

And even if he did like me, you know, in a romantic way, there was the little fact that I am completely and irrevocably in love with my sister’s boyfriend.

Whatever. I was so hungry by then, I didn’t even care that David was only being nice to me because he felt sorry for me.

From the first bite, I knew: Carl was right. He really had made one of the best burgers I’d ever eaten. I bolted down roughly half of mine before surfacing for air.

David, who’d been watching me eat with a sort of stunned expression on his face—on the rare occasions when I do find something I like to eat, I have a tendency really to go for it—went, “Better?”

I couldn’t respond, because I was too busy chewing. I gave him a thumbs-up with my cast hand, though.

“So does it hurt?” he wanted to know, indicating my broken wrist.

I swallowed the huge wad of meat in my mouth. I really would like to be a vegetarian. Seriously. You would think an artist would be way more conscious of the suffering of others, even of the bovine variety. But hamburgers are just so good. I could never give them up.

“Not so much any more,” I said.

“How come nobody’s signed it?” he wanted to know.

“I’m saving it,” I said, looking down at the nice vast expanse of white plaster around my wrist, “For German class.”

He got my meaning. No one else had, except of course for Jack. Only true artists understand the lure of a blank white canvas.

“Oh, sure,” he said, knowingly. “That’ll be cool. So what are you going to go for? A sort of Hawaiian motif? Plenty of pineapples, I’m assuming.”

I gave him a very sour look. “I think I’m going to go for a patriotic theme,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Of course. What could be more fitting? You being a Madison, and all.”

“What does that have to do with it?” I wanted to know.

“James Madison,” David said, his eyebrows up again. “Fourth president. He’s a relation, right?”

“Oh,” I said, feeling like a dork. “Him. Yeah. No, I don’t think so.”

“Really?” David looked surprised. “Are you sure? Because you and his wife Dolly have a lot in common.”

“Me and Dolly Madison?” I laughed. “Like what?”

“Well, she saved a president too.”

“Oh, what,” I said, still laughing. “She gave old James the Heimlich or something?”

“No,” David said. “She saved a portrait of George Washington from being burned up with the rest of the White House when the British attacked it during the War of 1812.”

Wait a minute. The British had burned down the White House? When had this happened?

Obviously during a war we hadn’t learned about yet over at Adams Prep. We don’t have US History until eleventh grade.

“Whoa. Cool,” I said, meaning it. In history class they never tell you about cool stuff like First Ladies running around saving paintings. Instead all you ever get to hear about are the stupid pilgrims and boring old Abraham Lincoln.

“You sure you aren’t any relation?” David asked again.

“Pretty sure,” I said, regretfully. How cool would it be if I really were related to someone who had done something as brave as rescue a piece of fine art from a fire? Too cool for words, actually. Were we related to Dolly Madison? I mean, my mom frequently pointed out that I had to have inherited my artistic temperament from my dad’s side of the family, since there were no artists on hers. The Madisons had clearly been great art lovers throughout the ages.

Only it must have skipped a few generations, since I was the only one in the family that I knew of who could draw.

All of a sudden David got up and went to the window.

“Come here and look at this,” he said, moving aside the curtain.

I got up to follow him curiously, then saw that he was pointing down at the window sill. It was painted white, like the rest of the trim in the room . . .

But embedded deeply in the paint were words, words that had been carved into the sill. Looking closely, I could make out some of them: Amy . . . Chelsea . . . David . . .

“What is this?” I wanted to know. “The memorial First Kids window sill?”

“Something like that,” David said.

Then he pulled out something from the pocket of his jeans. It was one of those little Swiss Army knives. He started gouging into the wood. I probably wouldn’t have said anything about it if I hadn’t seen that the first letter he’d carved was an S.

“Hey,” I said, with some alarm. I mean, I am an urban rebel and all, but vandalism that isn’t for the sake of a good cause is still just that. Vandalism. “What are you doing?”

“Come on,” David said, grinning up at me. “Who deserves it more than you? Not only are you possibly related to a president, but you saved the life of one too.”

I looked nervously back over my shoulder at the door, behind which I knew stood a Secret Service agent. I mean, come on. Son of the President or not, this was destruction of public property. Not just public properly, but the White House. I’m sure you could go to jail for years for desecrating the White House.

“David,” I hissed, lowering my voice so no one would overhear me. “This isn’t necessary.”

Intent upon his work—he had gotten to the letter A now—David did not reply.

“Really,” I said. “I mean, if you want to thank me for saving your dad, the burger is enough, believe me.”

But it was too late, because he was already starting on the M.

“I suppose you think just because your dad is the President,” I said, “you can’t get in trouble for this.”

“Not that much trouble,” David said, as he carved. “I mean, I’m still a minor, after all.” He leaned back to admire his handiwork. “There. What do you think of that?”

I looked down at my name, Sam, right there with Amy Carter’s and Chelsea Clinton’s, not to mention David’s. I hoped a large family would not move into the White House next, as there would be no more room left on the window sill for the kids to add their names.

“I think you’re insane,” I said, meaning it. It was a shame, too, because he was so cute.

“Oh,” David said, folding up the Swiss Army knife and sticking it back in his pocket. “That really hurts, coming from a girl who flushes crab-stuffed flounder down the toilet and likes to throw herself at strange men with guns.”

I stared at him for a minute, completely taken aback.

Then I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was pretty funny, after all.

David started to laugh too. The two of us were standing there, laughing, when the Secret Service agent from the hallway came in and went, “David? Your father is looking for you.”

I stopped laughing. Busted again! I looked guiltily down at the window sill—not to mention the empty plates where the burgers had been.

But I didn’t have time to dwell on my misdeeds, because we had to get back to the dining room in a hurry. I mean, you don’t keep the President of the United States waiting.

When we got in there, though, it turned out the President hadn’t been the only one waiting. Everyone’s face was turned expectantly towards the doors. When David and I walked through them, to my very great surprise all the people in the room burst into applause.

At first I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, were they clapping because David and I had finally found our way back from the bathroom (they couldn’t possibly have known, could they, about the burgers, unless Carl had told them while serving the chocolate mousse)?

But it turned out the reason they were clapping had nothing to do with that. I found out why they were clapping when, on my way back to my seat, my mom suddenly stopped me and leaped up to give me a big hug.

“Oh, honey, isn’t it great?” she asked. “The President just named you teen ambassador to the United Nations!”

And all of a sudden that delicious burger felt like it might come right back up.

“So where’d you go then?” Lucy asked me, for like the nine hundredth time.

“Nowhere,” I said. “Leave me alone.”

“I’m only asking,” Lucy said. “Can’t I ask you a simple question? You don’t have to get all upset about it. Unless, of course, you were doing something . . . you know. Something you weren’t supposed to be doing.”

I had been, of course. Only not what Lucy thought. I’d just been eating burgers with—and having my initials carved into a White House window sill by—the son of the leader of the Free World.

“It’s just that you two looked—I don’t know . . .” Lucy was examining her lips in the mirror of her compact. She had spent about half an hour lining them that morning—her lips, that is—conscious that today, my first day back at school after the whole saving-the-President thing, a lot of people were probably going to be taking her picture.