“I was worried about you, Meg,” he said.
Oh.
“And then I have to listen to you going, ‘I’m fine, Mom, no problem,’” he said, “and it’s the President on the other end, and—it’s weird for me. I mean, if you want, we can act like you aren’t different, but you are.”
All of which was probably legitimate, but still frustrating—and a very strong indication that this nascent attempt to be a nondescript college freshman who did conventional things like date probably wasn’t going to work out.
“Anyway, I’m late for Ultimate,” he said.
She nodded.
“That’s it?” he asked.
More or less. “Have fun playing,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as perfunctory as she felt.
His nod back was not particularly friendly, and he started to leave, but then stopped again. “You want me to lie to you, instead of telling you how I actually feel? Say what I figure you want to hear, since that’ll make it that much easier to get you to sleep with me?” he asked. “Is that what you want? Because, I can do that. In fact, truth is, I’m really good at it.”
“You want me to kill you?” the guy had asked, in the same sort of angry, conversational way. “You want me to kill you right now?” Staring at her, with the half-smile, pressing her up against a filthy concrete wall, his arm jammed against her throat, pointing a gun right at her face the entire time. The muzzle touching her face, just below her left eye.
“What?” Jack asked uneasily.
She looked at him, trying to remember what room she was in, and what room she wasn’t in, and—it was hard to get her breath, and she had to swallow a couple of times.
“What is it?” he asked. “God, Meg, you look—what did I do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I just—never mind.” She sat down on the bed. “Um, have a good game. Uh—practice, I mean.”
“Is something wrong with your eye?” he asked.
She realized that she had brought her hand up to the spot where the gun had been, and dropped it. “No. It’s fine.”
“I really don’t have to go play,” he said. “It’s not like I’m not out there almost every day, so I could—”
She shook her head. “No, you should go—” right away, if possible— “and I should make some calls, and find out if it’s too late for me to do PT today.”
“You sure you’re okay?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she said.
He still hesitated by the door. “Am I going to see you tonight?”
Doubtful. “Well, I’m usually pretty wrecked after PT,” she said, “so—well—”
He sighed. “Just tell me no, Meg. It’s easier.”
If that’s what he wanted, then that’s what she would do. “No,” she said. “Probably not.”
He didn’t look happy to hear that, but he just nodded. “Okay, whatever.” He went out to the hall, closing the door behind him as he left.
Once she was sure he was gone, she couldn’t help touching her eye again. Jesus. That was one bout of terror she hadn’t expected.
She had to sit there for a few minutes, taking deep breaths, before she felt ready to limp out to the security room and let her agents know that she wanted to go down to the hospital.
When she walked into physical therapy—after, as usual, being stopped a few times on her way through the hospital by people who wanted to say hello, shake her hand, or even have her sign “Get Well” cards they were bringing to a friend or loved one—she must not have looked very good, because the first thing Vicky did was take her blood pressure.
“We’re not going to do any PT today,” she said, when she was finished and had marked the numbers down on her chart.
“Is it high?” Meg asked, not wildly interested in the answer.
Vicky rolled up the cuff and put it away. “For blood pressure, no. For you, yes.”
“Well, midterms,” Meg said, and shrugged.
Vicky rolled her eyes. “Meg, the Secret Service and FBI have been around here most of the day.”
Oh. Well, they would have been, wouldn’t they.
Which didn’t change the fact that Vicky summoned a couple of the doctors who had been waiting nearby, and she ended up having—what, her third? fourth?—comprehensive medical exam of the week. She seemed to pass muster—or, at any rate, no one suggested admitting her. But she felt pretty stupid when they asked her what she had had to eat so far that day, and she had no idea whatsoever.
Vicky scowled and left for a few minutes, returning with a chilled carton of vanilla-flavored nutritional supplement and a straw.
Meg sipped it, methodically, and while it didn’t make her feel any less shaky, Vicky stopped frowning when she finished.
When she got back to the dorm, her posted security was still higher than she wanted it to be, but at least the feeling of urgency had diminished. There seemed to be an aura of fear in the air, but she suspected that it had more to do with a building full of people frantically cramming for their remaining exams than it did with anything to do with her personally. For once, no one even seemed to be playing video games in the common room, which she could almost never remember happening before.
Although she knew she should immediately start studying, she turned on CNN to see what the top stories were. The day seemed to have been relatively quiet, but in due course, the President was shown at a Rose Garden bill-signing ceremony—an expansion of health-care options for small business owners, sole proprietors, and freelancers; good for her—and Meg leaned forward to study the way she looked. Judging from the angle of the sun, the footage must have been from some time before noon—and there was no sign whatsoever that she was waiting to find out whether her daughter was on the verge of being caught in the middle of a terrorist chemical attack. In fact, she appeared so relaxed and warm and funny, that it was possibly a little psychotic.
But, Meg saw her stiffen ever so slightly as she glanced at something—or, more likely, someone—off to the side; then, she continued her remarks without any noticeable distress. So, the someone, probably Glen, her chief of staff, must have given her a signal, with an update of the situation. Or, all things being equal, he might have been letting her know about something else going on in the world today.
But it was still fairly amazing that there had been a potentially huge story about to break, and yet, the media seemed to have missed it entirely.
So far, at least. After all, Hannah the Shark might not be the only one who had been nosing around today.
She still felt too restless to study, so she took the elevator down to the basement to get a soda from the vending machine, and then rode up to the second floor, where the common room was still, strangely, deserted.
But Susan’s door was open, and she tapped on it with her cane.
“Uh, hi,” she said.
Susan, who was at her desk studying, looked up. “Hi.”
“You got the word?” Meg asked.
Susan nodded. “Yeah. You okay?”
Depending upon one’s definition. Mostly, she was tired. “Sure,” Meg said. “I hope you didn’t get in trouble about your midterm.”
Susan shook her head, which was wrapped in a towel, so she must have just gotten out of the shower. “No, no problem. She just let me stay a while longer to finish.”
“Well, that’s good,” Meg said, and nodded a few times too many. “I mean, I’m glad.”
“Tenth graders,” Susan said, sounding disgusted.
Yeah. God-damn cretins. Just thinking about it made her grit her teeth.
Susan clasped her hands behind her head and leaned back in her chair, which tipped onto the two rear legs. “If you’re beating yourself up because you were spooked by the whole thing, that’s dumb. Why wouldn’t you have been?”
What, she looked scared? Meg stopped gritting her teeth. “I wasn’t.”
“I was,” Susan said.
Yeah, cleaning up a dorm full of dead and maimed freshmen would have been a messy task.
<
br /> Susan looked at her for a long minute, and then shifted her weight so that the front legs of her chair came banging back down onto the floor. “When you asked me if I wanted a specialty coffee, I wanted to deck you.”
A change-up, when she’d expected a fastball. “It was polite,” Meg said.
“It was cavalier,” Susan said, “and it pissed me off.”
Yeah, fine, she was an unbelievable loser for not letting herself give in to paralyzing terror and despair. It was bad to keep a stiff upper lip.
“For the record,” Susan said.
She had a vague rule that—no matter how infuriating it was—if she received a similar criticism from more than one person, it might have some validity. Meg sighed. “I have to get through the day somehow, Susan.”
Susan nodded, and rubbed her forehead for a second, so her headache must have come back. “I know. It’s just hard to watch.”
It was also hard to do. For the record. She could see that Susan had a lot of work piled up on her desk, and God knows she had plenty of her own, but the thought of going up to her room and closing the door was a lonely one. Of course, she could always leave it open partway, but it wasn’t as though people were inclined to drop by to see her indiscriminately.
“So, um, how far did you run today?” she asked, to prolong the conversation.
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “Seven and a half, eight miles, I guess.”
Wow. She’d never thought to ask before, but— “How far do you usually go?”
Susan shrugged. “Four or five.”
So, she’d felt the need to run much harder, and farther, today. “You don’t go out in the middle of nowhere, do you?” Meg asked. “I mean, you’re careful, right?”
Susan smiled. “I usually stay pretty close to the campus, or head towards North Adams. But, if it’s getting dark or anything, I make sure someone comes with me.”
Okay, good. Meg nodded, slouching against the doorjamb. The friends of Susan’s she had met—primarily drama majors—mostly struck her as being an unusually uncoordinated lot, but there must be another runner or two hidden in there somewhere.
Susan cocked her head to one side. “What?”
“Nothing,” Meg said. “I just—” Could she bring herself to sit down and weep stormily, because she’d had a bad day—and because it had only been a few hours since she had experienced a tremendous romantic disappointment, and she wanted to indulge in a series of mordant, self-pitying remarks? No. In fact, she might not even subject Beth to this latest personal crisis. But, she would need to say something convincing, before Susan’s bloodhound instincts kicked in. “I don’t want to bother you or anything, but are you friends with a sophomore named Jill? I don’t know her last name, but I think she’s from Minnesota?”
“Blondish hair, wears it in a braid, looks like a jock?” Susan asked.
Meg nodded. Although actually, that description fit a fairly large percentage of the student body.
“Yeah, sure,” Susan said. “Jill Kiley. She’s from Wisconsin, though. Why?”
One small worry eliminated, then. Meg shrugged. “She’s in my Shakespeare class and she said she knew you. And—” She’d felt the need to double-check. “Small campus, that’s all.”
Susan nodded, but still looked curious.
“She’s a valedictorian,” Meg said.
Susan grinned. “Made an intuitive leap, did she?”
Precisely. She stood in the doorway for another moment, still not quite prepared to go up to her room and be by herself, but too shy to say so.
Susan looked at her, expectantly.
“I wasn’t a valedictorian,” Meg said.
Susan shrugged. “Neither was I.”
That was a relief, since it would be demoralizing if she turned out to be one of the only non-valedictorians at the entire college. “You know, when you get right down to it, I didn’t actually graduate from high school,” Meg said, “and I guess I was thinking about that on the way back here.”
Susan nodded.
“I missed the last couple of weeks of school—” And the prom, and graduation; the guy had mocked her, at length, about the former— “and they never made me take my finals, because—well, how could they, really? I mean, I didn’t even get out of the hospital until July, and—” Too much information, maybe. So, Meg edged away from the door. “I’m sorry. I should let you study, and I should go do a bunch of stuff, too.”
“Colleen died at the end of January,” Susan said.
Meg stopped in her tracks, and then returned, tentatively, to lean against the doorjamb again.
Susan looked briefly at her bulletin board. “I wouldn’t exactly say that I had a breakdown, but my grades pretty much went to hell for the rest of the my senior year. My teachers were nice about it, and mostly went ahead and gave me B’s, but I didn’t really deserve them.”
Meg nodded.
“And, ironically, Colleen would have been our valedictorian,” Susan said. “By a long shot. No one else in the class was even really close. So, the poor guy who ended up coming in first had no idea what to say in his speech. It was just sort of there, in the air all night.” Susan shrugged. “I don’t know. We’re both probably doing too much thinking today.”
Yes, that was the problem with brushes with mortality, regardless of how illusory they turned out to be.
“I think you would have been better off with a JA who didn’t have quite so much baggage,” Susan said.
A JA without significant baggage might not think to watch her like a hawk on a consistent basis. Dirk, for example.
Which still didn’t mean that her father hadn’t been completely wrong to allow Susan to be selected, in the first place. “I think it’s kind of the other way around.” Meg glanced over. “And, you know, it still isn’t too late, if—especially after today—you want me to—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Susan said instantly. “You will annoy me.”
But, if she were open to the idea, it would be easy enough to arrange—
“Don’t,” Susan said. “In fact, go study now.”
It was always nice to be told what to do.
“Think there’s a chance your grades are going to show up in the press?” Susan asked.
An excellent chance, since it happened more often than not. One of the most recent weekly celebrity tabloids had proclaimed, breathlessly, that she was having a scandalous affair with one of her Secret Service agents, the main proof for this being a photo some paparazzo creep had gotten of Jose catching her one afternoon when she slipped on the ice crossing Spring Street, and the article insisted that this was a view of the two of them in the aftermath of a torrid embrace. The writer had even quoted a psychologist—with the disclaimer that he had not actually treated the President’s tragically troubled daughter professionally—who theorized that her sexual acting out was a desperate cry for help, and a poignant attempt to get the attention of her cold and unloving mother.
Of course, only the week before that, the very same tabloid had published the world-exclusive story that she was sleeping with her philosophy professor, as evidenced by a picture of him bending towards her when she asked him a question about a reading assignment on their way out of class one morning. This was thought to indicate that she was not only promiscuous, and frantic to get a passing grade at any cost, but that—given his age—she also might have unresolved feelings towards her father. Maybe even her grandfather. The fact that her professor was hard of hearing, and had leaned down because she hadn’t spoken loudly enough when she first asked the question had not, apparently, been discovered by the crack reporters who penned the tale.
“Yeah,” she said aloud, aware that she had drifted a little, since Susan was looking at her with some combination of amusement and irritation. “My grades usually get published.”
“Do you want those brat tenth graders to think they scared you enough to screw up your midterms?” Susan asked.
Hell, no.
&
nbsp; So, she went up to her room, and—after eating the last apple, a few baby carrots, and some of the cheese Preston had stocked inside her refrigerator—studied. Polished her political science paper, then finished her philosophy paper and began to edit it. She’d left her door open a few inches—and was gratified, and surprised, when Juliana, Mary Elizabeth, Khalid, and Andy all stopped by at various points to say hello—and maybe relieve their curiosity about whatever the hell had been going on with all of the extra agents and police officers hanging around earlier. Khalid, who missed his retriever/boxer mix terribly and even wore a custom-made t-shirt with her photo on it sometimes, was especially interested in—and wistful about—the dog teams.
At about eleven-thirty, when she heard movement out in the hall again, she turned, expecting that it would probably be Tammy—or maybe Susan, planning to hover, or criticize, but it was Jack, wearing a bright, flowered Hawaiian shirt and jeans, his hands jammed in his pockets.
“Same time, same place,” he said.
Was it really as easy as that?
“You going to tell me what I did was wrong?” he asked. “I mean, I was here, and you seemed to be glad I was here, and then—well, you weren’t glad.”
Meg shrugged. “You happened to be in the room. That’s all you did.” And, okay, he’d kind of yelled at her, too.
“So,” he said, “you go absolutely white, out of nowhere, whenever someone’s in a room with you?”
If they triggered bad memories, yeah. She glanced at her computer, and clicked SAVE before she had a chance to forget, so that she wouldn’t risk losing hours of work. “I really don’t want to talk about it.” No, that wasn’t firm enough. “In fact, I’m definitely not going to talk about it, but it didn’t have anything to do with you.”
He half-smiled. “It’s not you, Jack, it’s me. Really.”
Something like that, yeah.
He sighed. “Meg, I’ve said that to people when I was trying to break up with them, and didn’t want to hurt their feelings.”
How disappointing. “That’s very boring,” Meg said. “Do me a favor and promise that if you break up with me, you’ll think of something more creative.”
“Same to you,” he said.
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