We interrupt your regular programming
I wasn’t sure exactly what to wear to an event like watching Megan destroy an entire presidential campaign, so I settled on a navy suit with a white button-down shirt and a conservative tie. At the last minute I added a little American flag lapel pin and grinned at myself in the mirror. When I got downstairs I headed straight for the study. Levi was waiting and patted the spot on the couch next to him. He looked me up and down and nodded his approval. “I like the little flag pin, it adds a certain amount of sarcasm or irony or whatever.”
Spence walked in and he was wearing khaki’s and a blue blazer. I raised an eyebrow at how he was dressed but he just pointed at Levi and then sat down next to me. He handed me my phone and said, “I turned it off again. I swear the last time I picked it up it was about to spontaneously combust.” I stared at it and then slipped it into my pocket.
Rob walked in wearing the standard federal-agent black suit and I caught a glimpse of a shoulder holster under his jacket. He was wearing sunglasses but he put them in his pocket after he stumbled on the edge of an oriental carpet. He held up a black pouch about the size of a FedEx envelope and pointed at Levi’s phone. “All of ‘em in here, fellas.” Dave walked in wearing a gray suit and when Rob showed him the bag of phones he dropped his in along with the rest of them.
Spence frowned. “Why do we—”
Rob raised a finger to his lips and we all tossed our phones into the bag. He walked over to the corner of the room where a few laptops were sitting on a table and he stacked them up and carried them out of the room. He closed the doors behind him when he came back and said, “I don’t want anybody turning on these things remotely to listen in. This bag won’t let any signals in or out.”
Dave stared at him. “You mean you—the government, they really can turn those things on and listen? I thought that was just some crazy liberals screaming right-wing conspiracy bullshit.”
“I’m not saying anything else, Dave, but in case you haven’t noticed the current administration is pretty fucking right wing.” Dave looked worried and took a seat in a leather recliner.
Brent stuck his head in the door, saw all the suits and ties, and walked over to me and handed me a couple pills. “These are supposed to be twice as strong as Xanax, good luck. We’re dissecting something in biology—a sheep or a homeless guy or something, and I don’t want to miss it.” He walked back out of the room.
Dave was flipping through the channels and asked Levi, “What kind of mood, what kind of spin are we looking for here?”
Levi looked at the three TV’s on the wall. “Put the center one on Fox, put the left one on CNN—that seems appropriate.” He wrinkled his brow and pointed at the right screen. “Put that one on...the Fashion Channel. I want to see the supermodel spin on this, you know, for a little humor.”
Ella walked in and I was stunned to see her in sweat pants and a Hawthorne sweatshirt. She was balancing several boxes of doughnuts and a huge cup of coffee from Starbucks. She set all of it on the table in front of us and settled in to another recliner next to Dave. We were all staring at her and she said, “You know I wasn’t gonna miss this shit.” She pointed at Rob. “Is he FBI or Secret Service?”
Rob nodded at her. “Secret Service. And do you mind refilling my coffee, Miss? Maybe bring a fresh pot from the kitchen?” The rest of us ducked down and watched Ella’s reaction.
She smiled at him and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She looked at him and said sweetly, “I see you have a gun under that jacket. That’s a good thing, that’s fortunate for you, Honey. Because that’s the only thing keeping you alive right now, that’s the only thing stopping me from walking over and chewing your skin off. Now, why don’t you pass a few of those doughnuts over here and shut the hell up.”
Megan Speaks
We watched the screens and I wondered if Megan had chickened out or her father had her locked in the White House basement, then the Fashion Channel switched over to a live feed from the Willard. She was wearing a cocktail dress and the fashion model commentators were speculating on which designer she was wearing, whose shoes she had on her feet. Her hair was drifting in waves to her shoulders and her makeup was perfectly toned for the lights and the cameras.
Dave pointed at the woman standing off to the right and said, “I think that’s Gloria Allred.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think Megan has a nanny.”
Rob pointed at the screen and talked through a mouth full of doughnut. “That guy standing off to the side is Mike, he’s been her agent for the last three years. We shared a pair of binoculars when Foster and Megan would meet in the bushes and—”
Ella spoke up. “I don’t want to hear about that. I already know enough about Foster’s sex life to give me nightmares. His room is like some kind of DNA volcano.” She pointed at the other guy in a plain dark suit. “Does she have two agents watching her?”
I shook my head. “That guy’s assigned to my father, I think.”
“I wonder,” Spence pondered, “if that means your father’s going to show his face at this thing?”
I hadn’t even considered that. I slumped in my seat and waited for Megan to start.
She stood at the podium and smiled at the cameras. “Good Morning. I have a short statement to make and then I’ll be happy to field questions from all of you.” She cleared her throat and read from the teleprompter in front of her.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press, today I stand before you as one of the happiest women on the planet. Few people are able to find true love in their lifetime, and I have been blessed with finding that love at the peak of mine. Over the summer I found true happiness, true love, and my life has changed forever.”
“No shit,” I commented.
My father walked up to the podium and held Megan’s hand.
Their lips locked and Ella spit out a chunk of doughnut when it was obvious there was a lot of tongue action happening between the two of them.
“It’s like watching a plane crash in slow motion, only a little more disturbing,” Dave said.
My father cleared his throat and looked at the press. “Megan and I truly are blessed—”
“By Satan, maybe,” Spence speculated.
The reporters had snapped out of their shock and began screaming and it was clear whatever the rest of the speech Megan had planned wasn’t going to happen.
A guy that I recognized from TMZ screamed over the crowd. “Megan! How long has the President known about this?”
She pouted a little. “He’s been so selfish about his time lately that he probably never had a clue. He’s like that, he’s a terrible multi-tasker.”
Quinn spoke up from behind me and asked, “Did anybody else hear the sound of the President’s re-election campaign coming to a grinding halt?”
The guy followed up with, “But he’s aware of it now, right?”
She nodded. “I would hope so, I changed my Facebook status and sent my mother a text.”
I swallowed the last of a chocolate-glazed doughnut and said, “That puts a whole new spin on ‘It’s Complicated’ as a relationship status.”
A woman from MSNBC called out. “Aren’t you a little concerned about what this will do to your parents?”
She shook her head and smiled. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry, and I do what I want. They’ll get over it.”
“She should write Hallmark cards,” Ella said.
Somebody from the second row of the press asked, “What about you, Senator? How has your family taken the news.”
“Let’s see him weasel out of that one,” Dave muttered. I looked at my father and then at Dave, and I couldn’t decide whether I was angry or hurt.
“As you know, I’m divorced from my children’s mother. And any family discussion with my sons will remain private, it’s a family matter.”
“Have you discussed this with the President?”
I’d never seen him look flust
ered on stage before but he was visibly shaken by that question. “I considered the, uh, initial discussion regarding this matter to be a private conversation between Megan and her father. I’m aware that this...situation will likely cause understandable discomfort between the President and me. We have daily discussions regarding the campaign, and I would assume this matter will be, uh, addressed during our scheduled meeting today.”
A girl from NBC asked, “But Senator, this would have to end your, uh, participation in the President’s re-election campaign, right?”
My father winced a little and said, “As I stated, we’ll be talking later today. I’m fairly certain he’ll evaluate this situation and plot a course that moves the party, and the nation, to a swift resolution of any issues that may have been created by this—I mean, I’m sure he’ll be sharing his views with me this afternoon.”
“You’ve got to know,” a guy who occasionally filled in for the regular weather guy on the Today Show said, “you’ve got to imagine the President’s reaction won’t be positive. For someone to choose a woman over service to the country, it’s really unprecedented.”
Megan spoke up and said, “There was a guy in England who gave up being President to marry somebody he loved. It was some woman, Simple Wallis or Wally Simpson or whoever, from the US, and that had to have been true love—he definitely didn’t give up everything because she was hot or anything—I mean, have you seen pics of her? This Edward guy just walked away from his job and they were happy.”
Ella pointed at Megan on the screen and said, “That dumbass thinks Edward was the ‘President’ of England. She has it all wrong.”
“Right,” I agreed. “My father’s not the President, it is different.” Ella flung a jelly doughnut at me and it nailed me in the forehead.
“So.” Megan had lost interest in the whole thing. “Any other questions?”
A supermodel from the back row called out, “Megan, who are you wearing? And where did you get those shoes?” Megan beamed at the cameras as I was wiping grape jelly off my forehead.
While she rattled on about clothes and shoes I studied my father’s face. He had a smile that I recognized from the campaign trail, it was a confident display of teeth and twinkling eyes that he could probably reproduce while an angry beaver was chewing on his nuts.
By now every channel that Levi flipped past had the same scene playing out, with just a slightly different camera angle.
I looked around and realized two rows of my fraternity brothers were standing behind the couch and watching in silence. Some of the guys had on nothing but a towel around their waist, a few had on underwear, and some of them had backpacks slung over a shoulder and were wearing jeans and t shirts with our letters across the chest. Ella frowned at all of them and shook her head as she grabbed the last doughnut off the table. “You fools,” she said sternly to all of them, “that’s no way to dress for a funeral.”
Doomsday Pool Party
I cleared my throat and announced, “I think I need to get out of here for a little while—you know, drive around and clear my head.”
Levi shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all. I figure you have about an hour—and that’s optimistic—before the vultures show up.” He pointed at Rob and said, “I need my phone back, now. I have the campus and town police departments on standby and I think we might need all of them.” Rob passed out phones and when he got to me I shook my head. He left it in the pouch and nodded. I considered pulling an Ashley and stomping it to death but then I remembered that I had a bunch of pics on it that I hadn’t posted on the internet yet.
“Okay, so I have an hour of freedom left.” I stood up and Rob hopped up from the couch and stood beside me. “I’m...I’m gonna take Rob—”
“Of course you’re going to take Rob,” Levi said. “That’s his job or whatever.”
“Yeah, but I’m gonna take him to get...” I studied his suit. “I’m going to take him shopping. I mean he needs some less obvious shit to wear, and I can’t have him coming and going in my underwear and jeans and shit all the time.”
Dave laughed. “It wouldn’t be the first time some guy left your room in your underwear.”
I realized everybody was staring at me and I turned red. “He means that brand Rob, not my personal—”
Rob nodded but sounded a little doubtful. “Well, sure Foster. I figured you have...samples you pass out, or whatever.”
Ella and Dave were almost hysterical with laughter and I gave them the finger as they walked out the door.
Levi was already juggling two phones, a laptop, and a tablet so I shrugged and turned to Rob. “Looks like it’s just you and me, we’ll take my car.”
I started walking out the side door to the parking lot but Rob stopped me with a hand on my chest. He put his sunglasses on and said, “Remember the drill, Foster. Let me go first and check things out, stay close, and be vigilant. Where’s your car?”
I pointed at it and he grinned. “Sweet. You better let me do the driving, Foster—just for your own safety.” We climbed in and he cranked the engine, revving it like he was about to start a Formula One race or something. He came to a violent stop as we got to the end of the driveway, there were local cops setting up barricades and traffic cones. One of them walked over to the car and motioned for Rob to roll down his window. He looked around on the door and the console and asked, “How do I roll down my window?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure you can. I’ve never been able to find the switch. And if you find a cup holder or an ashtray let me know.”
He opened his door and the officer tugged on the rim of his hat and nodded. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”
Rob told him, “We’re just running out to do a few errands, we’ll be right back.”
The cop shook his head. “No can do. The campus police are running this show, and I have strict orders not to let this...thing out of the parking lot.” He leaned in further and pointed at me. “And this guy here, well he shouldn’t be leaving either. We don’t have enough officers here to give him an escort, not yet.”
I was stumped and frustrated. “Look, I’ll be back in like fifteen minutes. I don’t need an escort, I already have one.” I nodded at Rob and he pulled his ID out and flashed it at the guy.
The cop responded by pointing at the badge on his shirt. “I don’t really care if this guy driving you is the President—oops, no offense—you gentlemen aren’t leaving the parking lot.” He put his hand on the butt of his gun for emphasis. Rob reached under his jacket and I leaned over to put myself between the two of them.
“Hey, look everybody! You two are supposed to be protectin’ me, not starting a fuckin’ gunfight! So let’s stop this pissin’ contest before it gets out of control. I’m heading out of here with my Secret Service agent, and we’re on official business—I’m taking him clothes shopping.” Rob nodded and tried to look serious. “And the last time I checked this is America and not France or Pakighafstan or wherever—I think the first amendment gives me the right to take my agent wherever I want to. And without a search warrant for this car you can’t stop us.” I tried to remember all the law I had seen on TV. “And without probable cause you can’t search us. I haven’t even had time to smoke a joint in this car, so you can just back the fuck off, okay?”
The cop looked speechless and kicked a couple of cones out of our way. Rob revved the engine and after about ten seconds I checked the dash. “You may want to slow down. You’re either going 55 or 115, and I think the speed limit is like 25 on this road.” We flashed past the bars and restaurants and I noticed a convenience store on the right. “Pull in there, I could use a cold beer.”
Rob parked and I started to climb out of the car but he stopped me. “Stay right here, Foster. Levi would kill me if somebody snapped a pic of you coming out of this place with beer—”
“And cigarettes, I think I could use cigarettes. And...salt and vinegar chips? Yeah, anything salty like that to get the doughnut taste o
ut of my mouth.” I handed him a hundred and told him, “Get something you like, too. If we’re going to be roomies you’ll need snack food.” He nodded and went inside. I searched the car and found a joint and a lighter in a little mesh pocket on the side of the console. I didn’t want to light up inside the car because I figured Rob would be pissed if his government-issue suit started to smell like pot, so I got out of the car and lit the joint.
He walked out of the store with a twelve-pack of beer under one arm and some plastic bags overflowing with junk food in his other hand. He saw me and barked, “Get back in that car, now!”
I shrugged and handed the joint to a girl putting gas in her Honda and she smiled at me. “Pay it forward, or Chive on, something like that,” I told her.
I knew by the look on Rob’s face he wasn’t happy and he started to lecture me before he’d even put the car in gear. “So, far, Foster—so far you, and I admit with my help, have broken about every rule that Levi has on his list. It’s only been like twenty minutes since the press conference and I think we’re headed down the wrong road here. Do you get it?”
“Yeah, but no! The store I’m looking for is definitely on this road, I’m sure of it.” I popped open a beer and pulled one of Brent’s magic pills out of my pocket. I washed it down and told him, “I’m a little disappointed in you, too, Rob. Why didn’t you buy bottled beer? I hate drinking out of cans.” Rob reached under his jacket for his gun and I shut up.
We found the place I was looking for and Rob frowned as he pulled into the parking lot. “A thrift store, Foster? Really?” He tapped the dash on the car and told me, “If money’s a problem I can use my card and expense it. I hope you didn’t spend all of your allowance on this car.”
I climbed out and headed to the front door with Rob on my heels. He was doing this 360-degree thing with his neck, like he was expecting a ninja assassin to attack us in the Hawthorne Consignment and Thrift parking lot. I tucked my beer under my jacket and led him in. We walked over to the men’s section and I started sorting through the t shirts spread out on a table. “Here.” I handed him an odd greenish tee that had Call Me Maybe? across the chest. “You’re about my size, only with a little smaller arms and less-defined abs. I’ll just pick out stuff that would fit me.” I picked out the ugliest and most out-of-date shirts I could find and loaded him up. I popped open my beer and pointed at another table. “Time’s wastin’, let’s find you some shorts and jeans.”
Foster's Fall (Foster's Life) Page 5