The auditorium was more crowded than it had been all semester. Amazing to see how many people never bothered coming to class. Either they were all smarter than she was, or they were all taking it Pass-Fail. Or maybe both.
There were no aisle seats available in the back, so she had to cross awkwardly in front of a few people, trying not to bang any of them with her cane. A girl who was reading People looked up at her, blushed, and put the magazine away.
Oh, Christ, it was Monday. The magic week of the 25 Most Intriguing People of the Year issue. Terrific. Plus, so many seats were already taken—since they had to leave one between each person—that she didn’t have much choice other than to sit here. Next to her Big Fan.
She moved her jaw, sat down, took out a pen, and then shoved her knapsack under her seat, never looking to her right where the girl was.
“I wasn’t reading about you,” the girl said defensively.
Meg uncapped the pen, staring straight ahead. The pen actually had the Presidential Seal on it, which probably made her look arrogant, but—too late now.
“I just like to read People, okay?” the girl said.
Meg glared at her. “I didn’t tell you not to.”
The girl glared back. “Maybe you’re too exalted for me to sit next to?”
Anyone who treated her normally—was rude, say—won points in her book. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my damn business what you read.”
The girl shrugged. “It didn’t occur to me that you’d be sitting right next to me.”
That would be kind of a nightmare, to be reading peacefully, and have one of the very people walk by and get all offended. The professor was just beginning to hand out blue books, so there was still time before the exam began.
Curious, Meg tried to see the magazine, now hidden under the girl’s notebook. “Am I on the cover?”
The girl, who was wearing a tight black midriff-baring tank top—in December—nodded and pulled it out to show her.
There she was, nestled right among the movie stars, athletes, and, of course, British royalty. Although she herself was partial to the notion of a Queen, Meg had always had her doubts about whether the American public was quite as monarchically-fond as the media seemed to think.
The shot of her was the same damned one they always used—in a wheelchair, the day she came home from the hospital, looking small and damaged, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
“I knew they’d pick that stupid picture,” she said aloud.
The girl studied the cover. “It isn’t very good of Brad Pitt, either.”
True. Meg laughed. “No, it really isn’t, is it?” She knew without checking that this girl was a high-top Converse All-Stars type, and her guess was—purple. She looked down, and saw that her guess was correct. On the left foot, anyway. The girl was wearing a green one on her right foot. “Did they make me out to be this pensive, delicate sort of recluse?”
The girl nodded. “I think they said that we cried for you, we laughed with you, and throughout it all, we admired you.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Then, Meg raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty good recall for someone who didn’t read the article.”
The girl’s face turned red. “I might have skimmed it.”
Just maybe. “Is that horrible picture of me lunging for the volley in there?” Meg asked. To illustrate, vividly, the tragic physical decline from able-bodied athlete to pathetic cripple.
“I think so, yeah,” the girl said. “I mean, I don’t know, but it shows you playing tennis.”
Before the kidnapping, the one she saw constantly was a photo someone had snapped of her slumped forward, with her head in her hands, sitting on a bench in the hospital hallway after her mother was shot. The damn thing had been in just about every Year-in-Review magazine that came out. The President’s daughter, caught in a moment of private grief. Grief that got splashed all over every supermarket check-out line in America. Overseas, too, for all she knew.
The boy on her other side passed her a stack of blue books, and she took one, then handed the rest to the girl.
“Did you study for this?” she asked.
The girl shook her head.
Oh. “Do you think it will be hard?” Meg asked.
The girl shook her head.
Oh. Meg frowned. “Did you take this Pass-Fail?”
The girl nodded.
Which she should have done herself, but if she had, she wouldn’t be able to transfer the credit. Since she was now committed to leaving.
Maybe.
Probably.
Almost definitely.
She looked over at the girl again. “Do you understand parallax?”
The girl shook her head, quite nonchalant about the whole thing.
“Neither do I,” Meg said, and reached over to take the small pile of exams from the boy next to her and pass them along.
“You may begin,” the professor said, once everyone was reasonably quiet.
Meg turned over her test and read the first question. Parallax.
Naturally.
7
AFTER THE EXAM was over, she felt so shaky that she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to make it through another two hours of test-taking. There wasn’t enough time to get anything to eat, but she stopped at a vending machine and drank a Coke in about five big gulps. Maybe the combination of sugar and caffeine would be enough to do the trick.
She must have looked unsteady on her feet—God knows she felt that way—because her agents seemed to be worried, and she had the sense that they were exchanging glances, especially when she had a small dizzy spell and had to stop for a minute.
“Do you need to sit down?” Brian—who was a stocky former Army Ranger—asked, suddenly right by her elbow.
Meg shook her head, feeling slightly invaded, and wishing he would just leave her alone.
Now, Paula was coming over, too, and Meg was going to tell both of them to back the hell off already—except that Paula was holding out a PowerBar.
“Eat this,” she said.
Meg shook her head. “No, I’m fine, I just—”
“Eat it, Meg,” Paula said. “Okay? You look like you’re about to pass out.”
She wanted to argue, but they both looked so concerned, that she nodded, said thank you—and ate the damn thing.
Which tasted pretty good, actually.
In contrast to Astronomy, everyone in her English class seemed anxious, and she couldn’t decide whether that made her feel better, or worse. The black molded plastic chair felt even more uncomfortable than usual, and she hadn’t been able to find an empty left-handed desk in the back row, so she was going to have to twist her body to one side in order to be able to write. The lights in the room seemed unusually bright, and she wished that she could put on her sunglasses, but she was afraid that it would look too weird.
“Good afternoon,” Dr. Raleigh said. She was decked out in an ankle-length madras dress, the colors only bleeding slightly, and although her hair usually hung loose, today it was arranged in an ornate thick French braid, so she must be feeling celebratory about getting to give a major exam. “Please turn all of your cell phones off, and put everything under your desks, please.”
“We can’t keep our pens?” someone asked, and most of the class laughed.
“You may keep your pens,” Dr. Raleigh said—big of her—and passed out the tests. “There are five essay questions. I would like you to choose three to answer, and you should spend equal time on each. Please be as specific as possible.” She paused. “You have two hours.”
All around her, Meg could hear paper rustling and blue books being opened. She picked up her test sheet, feeling sick to her stomach.
The questions were terrifying. The first one said: compare and contrast Fitzgerald and Hemingway, in terms of both style and philosophy. The second question was: select four of the novels and discuss why each one has a uniquely American vison. Oh, great, the vision thing. The third one read: choose
three of the novels, describe the roles that women and minorities play, and explain how each book is a product of its era.
Jesus Christ. Meg put her test down, her hand trembling. At the moment, she couldn’t even remember which books they had read.
Everyone else was writing; she could hear them. Was she the only idiot in the room? She heard a small flapping sound, and stiffened. Someone was turning a page already?
Two hours. She only had two hours. They were all scribbling away, and right now, she didn’t know if she could spell her name right. Meghan did have an “h,” right? Maybe her parents hadn’t actually wanted the Gaelic form, after all, maybe—she gripped her pen, trying to stop shaking.
It was a test. It was only a test. It wasn’t life or death—she knew what life and death situations were like, and this was only—but, Christ. She couldn’t remember anything.
She bent over the paper, rereading the question. How was she going to choose three, if she didn’t know the answers to any of them? Oh, God.
Something grazed her arm, and she damn near flew out of her seat. Then, she saw her professor bending down next to her.
“Relax,” Dr. Raleigh said. “It’s not that important.”
Not that important? It was a final. Meg swallowed, horrified to find herself on the verge of tears. Yet again.
“You’ve done excellent work all semester,” Dr. Raleigh said. “This won’t affect that.”
Meg looked around, and saw that everyone else was crouched over their blue books, writing industriously. “I don’t want special treatment,” she said, keeping her voice low.
“You’ve done A work,” Dr. Raleigh said. “Just relax.”
A couple of people glanced at her covertly as their professor returned to the front of the room, and Meg pretended not to notice.
A test. Only a test. Okay. Meg took a deep breath, read the questions one more time, and then picked up her pen.
They probably weren’t the most sparkling and incisive essays ever written, but she managed to finish the exam, handing it in a couple of minutes before the two hours were up. After she turned her blue books in—she had gone through one and a half, Dr. Raleigh reached out to shake her hand. Her left hand, luckily, but Meg was still caught off-guard, and had to awkwardly shift her cane out of the way so she could return the handshake.
“I’ve enjoyed having you in class this semester,” Dr. Raleigh said.
Yeah, what with all four oddball comments she’d made. “Thank you.” Meg knew she should say something else, but her mind was as much of a tabula rasa as it had been all morning. “It was very interesting.”
“I hear you’re going to be transferring next semester,” Dr. Raleigh said. “Good luck up there.”
Which was very nice of her.
Especially since, odds were, she was going to need it.
* * *
BY WHITE HOUSE standards, they had a quiet Christmas. There were, of course, lots of parties—for the staff, the press corps, the Secret Service, the Foreign Service, members of Congress, and all of their respective families. There were also innumerable other receptions being held, including one for a group of homeless families who were enrolled in an ambitious job training program and also helping build new housing units for themselves—which had given her father a few chances to hammer locally, another for a highly-decorated Army unit which had just returned from a lengthy peacekeeping mission overseas, an afternoon tea for cancer survivors, and a party for handicapped children, featuring a jovial White House electrician dressed as Santa Claus and a lot of outrageously good-looking, mostly well-meaning, celebrities. Plus, her parents—her father, in particular—were making daily visits to veterans’ hospitals, nursing homes, drug treatment centers, hospices, and the like.
Meg skipped all of the major public events, like the Congressional Ball, and the Kennedy Center Honors, but she steeled herself to make appearances at most of the parties in the Residence, especially the ones which included children, or anyone who was physically challenged. Seeing people who were small, and sick—and beaming away, or were completely crippled, but still full of joy and enthusiasm, really made her feel selfish for worrying so much about her own, relatively manageable problems. One little girl in a wheelchair really broke her heart by complimenting her cane prowess. And when a bright-eyed boy, about eleven years old, who’d recently undergone a liver transplant, asked her to show him where and how she had used the rock to break her hand, she found herself quite willing to do it, making the story—she’d had plenty of experience with little boys, after all—as harmlessly gross as possible, with just enough gore to keep him happy. His response was “Cool!”, and she’d laughed, and said, “Yeah, well, don’t try it at home.”
The White House looked excessively festive, with wreaths and trees and garlands and ribbons and lights galore. The pastry chef had created the traditional towering homemade gingerbread house, and her father was a good sport about having to appear on all of the morning network news shows to talk about the history of White House Christmases past and present. He even read The Night Before Christmas aloud on a nationally televised holiday special, sitting in a rocking chair in front of the fireplace in the Blue Room, wearing bright-red suspenders, in what her mother generally described as his “Daddy Walton” mode.
Every year, Christmas at the White House had a different theme, and this year’s was “Our Global Community,” with exhibits explaining various traditions and customs, complete with handicrafts from countries all over the world, most of which had been made by children. It was all a little cloying, but also very well-intentioned.
The huge tree in the Blue Room had been donated by a family farm in Wisconsin, and smaller trees had been placed in strategic spots throughout the entire complex. The tree in the family quarters, from the same Wisconsin farm, was still alive, in a big plastic container, so that it could be replanted outdoors after the holidays were over. The First Family, being a Good Environmental Role Model. Vanessa and the other cats thought the dirt was great, and kept climbing into the planter, and scratching clods all over the floor in the Yellow Oval Room. Neal and Steven kept pretty busy sweeping the dirt up—no point in upsetting White House purists, or the staff, any more than necessary—and one night, very late, she even saw her mother bent down by the tree with a little broom and dustpan. She kind of wished she had a camera handy, so she could post the photo on the Internet, and caption it: What the President really does with her time.
They went up to Camp David early on Christmas Eve, which—because it was a secure, well-guarded military facility—meant that most of their agents, and as many members of the White House staff as possible, would have a chance to spend Christmas with their own families.
Of course, normally, they probably would have headed off to Stowe or someplace, and skied all week, and Meg insisted that they still should, but the rest of the family must not have wanted to remind her that she couldn’t participate anymore. Although she would, admittedly, have felt envious, and maybe even bitter, the entire time, it didn’t seem fair that everyone else had to suffer because of her misfortunes. And, in the wake of the holiday parties, she had to remind herself that they were pretty minor misfortunes, in the scheme of things.
Albeit, extremely major for her.
By New England standards, the weather was very warm—even up in the mountains, and on Christmas night, she sat on the patio outside Aspen, the First Family cabin. There were some lights around—other cabins and buildings, and that sort of thing, but it was also dark and woodsy, with trees everywhere. Very much, in a lot of ways, like the forest she’d dragged herself around for all those days—which was the main reason she had been avoiding Camp David ever since. But she must be doing better, because while the idea of being in the midst of so much nature made her feel edgy, she was able to sit outside by herself without falling apart.
Or, anyway, so far. It helped that it was getting foggy, and she couldn’t see all that much.
The rest of h
er family was inside the cabin, and the sound of Christmas carols playing drifted through the open windows. Her mother was still probably making holiday phone calls to a long, carefully researched, staff-provided list of service members stationed around the world, and Meg wasn’t sure what her father was doing, but her brothers were almost certainly busy trying out all of their new video and computer games. Right after dinner, they had screened one of the new Christmas movies—First Family fringe benefit—and they had more to watch later, if they wanted.
She hadn’t been able to get very good gifts—just one quick Sunday afternoon shopping trip with Preston, but it was always hard to go into stores unnoticed, anyway. And even more difficult to keep gifts a surprise, what with photographers all over the place. She’d had to get Preston to leave her alone—except for several agents—in the Men’s Department for a few minutes, so she could pick out the most outrageous, yet tasteful, tie possible for him.
The majority of the gifts she had been given—mostly, of course, from her parents—were different from any presents she’d ever gotten before. College stuff. Yet another new laptop computer, pens, pencils, highlighters, large plastic paper clips, legal pads, lots of software, a little voice-activated tape recorder, in case she wanted to record her lectures, an iPod with massive amounts of storage space, fancy headphones, a special tray with a handle to use in the dining hall, a folding rocker knife for the same purpose, a very thick terry-cloth bathrobe—because shrugging one on was often easier than trying to use towels one-handed, books, several pairs of sunglasses, and all kinds of other things. So many gifts, that it was more than a little obscene. Steven’s present had been a sweatshirt with the slogan “The Queen Is Not Amused,” which she was already wearing, and Neal had selected a video game for her that revolved around soldiers and many complicated missions behind enemy lines. Not her kind of thing at all, but she had been careful to act wildly excited about it, to make him happy.
She looked at the trees, her leg propped up on a small pillowed bench. The woods were dark and intimidating, no question about it, so maybe she should go inside. There were guards everywhere, so there wasn’t much chance that anyone could infiltrate the compound, but what if—she heard the cabin door open, and stopped gripping the arm of her chair so that she would be able to appear calm, and relaxed, and full of holiday cheer.
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