Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
chapter 5
Chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
chapter 29
chapter 30
chapter 31
chapter 32
chapter 33
chapter 34
chapter 35
chapter 36
chapter 37
chapter 38
chapter 39
chapter 40
Dutton Children’s Books | I division of penguin Young Readers Group
PUBLISHED BY THE PENGUIN GROUP
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Pengum Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORI , England
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Mitali Perkins
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Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
www.penguin.com/youngreaders
eISBN : 978-1-101-00695-5
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Timothy
Chapter 1
Eight buff, gorgeous guys from six different countries hoisted Sameera Righton onto their shoulders and paraded her along the river in front of the cheering crowd, chanting “SPARROW ! SPARROW!” Then they tossed her into the water and jubilantly hurled themselves in after her, cavorting to the music of the jazz band.
As her multicultural entourage of hunks splashed around her, Sameera wished someone could press a celestial pause button so she could savor the moment. She was celebrating much more than a first-place finish in a race. For months, she’d been griping long-distance to her cousin-slash-best friend Miranda about staying in Europe to finish out her sophomore year. With Dad’s presidential campaign gathering steam in the States, her parents had become jet-setting celebrities traveling back and forth between the continents, and she’d been stuck in Brussels trying to grasp the mystery of isosceles triangles.
But now she was done. Done with school, done with the newspaper, done with packing and organizing. And last but not least, she’d coxed her team to this big end-of-the-season win. She was ready to join the campaign.
Her request for a heavenly pause button was denied. The band stopped playing; the crowd began to disperse. A dozen or so girls ranging from willow thin to voluptuous beckoned to their soaked boyfriends. The guys obeyed, of course, but not one of them climbed out before throwing his arms around Sameera, holding her close, and kissing her good-bye.
“I’ll come up to visit you en La Casa Blanca next summer,” Adorable Antonio, the son of a Mexican banker, promised extravagantly. His girlfriend was the tall, toned Eritrean stunner tapping one stiletto on the shore, and making Sameera feel like an Oompa Loompa.
“Get one of those fancy guest rooms ready for me, too,” said Delectable David, the only other American on the team. “I hear they have an amazing movie theater inside the place.”
“Dad could lose, you know,” Sameera reminded her teammates, looking around at their affectionate faces.
After the California primary, which was only a few days away and predicted to be a slam dunk for Dad, he’d have enough votes to win the Republican nomination. Then, in the November nationwide election, if he beat the Democratic candidate, James Righton would become the next president of the United States of America.
“No chance of him losing,” said Jacques, their coach, sighing. “Looks like he’s going all the way to the top, great for him, lousy for us. Where are we going to find a cox as good as you, Sparrow?”
“I wasn’t good when you recruited me,” Sameera told him, remembering the day in the fall of her freshman year when he’d asked her to join the team. “You just picked me because I was the smallest kid in sight. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”
It had taken only one practice for Sameera to realize that she couldn’t sit like a lump and expect her backward-facing team to get to the finish line safely. She started using the inflections of her voice and encouragement to get them to go where she wanted. She practiced steering and shifting her weight, mastered a cox box, and made charts about the strengths and weaknesses of each of her teammates. And she learned how to issue commands from her gut, not her throat, which made all the difference.
“Hey, coach,” Antonio said. “How’d you know a little bird like Sparrow could shout con mucha fuerza?”
Sameera made a face at the “little bird” comment, and Jacques ruffled her hair affectionately. “I could tell she had a bossy streak a mile wide. Stay in touch, sweetheart. I’m off to say good-bye to your mother.” He tucked in his shirt and surreptitiously sniffed an armpit as he headed for the parking lot, where Sameera’s mom was leaning against the long, black U.S. ambassador’s car.
“You haven’t blogged in days, Sparrow,” complained Amazing Ahmed, the muscular, soft-spoken son of the Pakistani ambassador to NATO. “I’ve been checking in regularly and there’s nothing since your last post.”
“I know. I’ve been so busy. But I promised to keep you guys up to speed, didn’t I?”
Magnificent Matteo was the last to leave. “We will be cheering for you,” he whispered, kissing her on the lips right in front of his “novia,” who was also a Spaniard.
/> Sameera tried to keep her heart rate normal; a quick lip-on-lip kiss between friends was nothing in Europe. And she certainly wasn’t in love with Matteo. But did all of her teammates have to be so ... beautiful? And couldn’t their girlfriends at least pretend to be threatened by their boyfriends’ obvious affection for the team coxswain?
She watched them saunter off into the sunset pair by pair, almost expecting credits to roll across the orange sky like they did in one of Miranda’s favorite chick flicks. Sameera preferred classic black-and-white romances like Roman Holiday and Casablanca or romping old-style musicals like My Fair Lady. She and Miranda were both avid fans of makeover shows, getting teary-eyed together as they watched home, heart, or hair redos on the tube. Trivial pursuits compared to parents out saving the world, maybe, but the girls loved them.
The scene involving Sameera’s mother and Jacques looked like it belonged either in a chick flick or a makeover show, with Jacques bending low to kiss Mom’s manicured, red-tipped hand. Sameera still wasn’t used to the glam “after” version of her normally makeup-free, hairy-underarmed, out-of-shape, jeans-clad, tennis-shoe-wearing, human-rights-activist mother. But Dad’s campaign staff had gathered an expensive team of three last-name-free Hollywood experts to take Mom in hand at the start of the campaign season last year. Thanks to “Camera-Ready Constance” (hair and makeup), “Vanessa: Stylist for the Stars” (fashion), and “Manuel: He MovesYou” (a personal trainer licensed to pummel famous middle-aged bodies into shape), Elizabeth Campbell Righton had achieved a look that could easily be labeled “twenty-first-century first lady.” She was tall, blonde, thin, and elegant in tailored suits, lip liner, and French perfume, and guys of all ages worried about their body odor in her presence.
Sameera yanked off her T-shirt to squeeze the water out of it—an out-of-character move that she usually reserved for the privacy of the girls’ locker room. She never felt comfortable racing in a sports bra, like some of the other coxswains. Sadly, nobody paid any attention to her brazen act. Hello? A girl just peeled off a wet T-shirt. But this was Europe, where a shirtless woman in June was as common as a pair of golden arches in an American minimall. Besides, a petite, flat-chested girl shaped like a twelve-year-old boy didn’t show up on“sexy” radar anywhere on the planet. They probably think my sports bra’s an extra-small undershirt.
But all that was about to change. As soon as Sameera arrived in L.A., Vanessa and Constance were going to descend on her (Manuel: He Moves You focused on bodies over thirty). The breaking news item on her myplace.com site this week:The moment we’ve all been waiting for is upon us. I’m going to bring my friends (that’s you!) along for the amazing, never-been-reported-on-before journey of a President’s Daughter in the Making. Your good old blogger buddy is about to morph from drab to glam, from drudge to diva, from unknown spectator to talked-about celeb. Stay tuned for the inside scoop.
She always ended her blog posts with the same tagline:
Comments? Remember: keep them short, clean, and to the point. Peace be with you. Sparrow.
chapter 2
Sameera folded her first-class seat from a bed into a chair again and peered down at the flat plains of Kansas. They were almost there. Get some sleep, Dad had advised. You’re going to have to hit the ground running. He was right. The next few days promised to be a tornado of activity. But after the California primary, she’d be heading off to spend the summer in Maryfield, Ohio. She’d have time to relax on the farm and take stock of her first plunge into fame before rejoining her parents just before the Republican National Convention in the fall.
Mom was hunched over her laptop, working on a report about internally displaced people. These people were attacked by their own country’s army and couldn’t flee across the border. Hiding in jungles, mountains, or caves in their own countries, they weren’t technically refugees, so they didn’t get much international aid money. Mom’s hope was that this report would convince international foundations and charities to reserve some of their dollars for IDPs.
Sameera groped under the seat for her own laptop, safely ensconced in the waterproof, airtight case her parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday. Dad claimed that if either she or Mom were caught stark naked in a fire, they’d both grab their laptops and run for the hills. He was probably right. These days, Sameera mostly used her computer to blog and to track her father’s campaign.
Her myplace.com site and blog could be accessed only by a list of twenty-nine “buddies,” which included Miranda, her crew guys, the newspaper staff in Brussels, a few keeper friends from schools she’d attended in Cairo, Moscow, and London, and Mrs. Graves, the ancient but techno-savvy Maryfield librarian, who’d begged to be added last summer and was the only person over twenty on the list.
Sameera reread her most recent post: My Top Four Campaign Goals (Not Listed in Order of Importance): (1) Get the Makeover—check out the “after” version and let me know what you think; (2) Explore America—might be there to stay this time; (3) Give YOU the Skinny on Life As a Celeb; and (4) Help Dad Win. Comments? Remember: keep them short, clean, and to the point. Peace be with you. Sparrow.
She certainly wasn’t anywhere close to being a celebrity yet. So far, the press had summed up her existence as a brief postscript to her parents’ list of accomplishments: “Righton, previously a popular three-term congressman and currently serving as Ambassador to the North American Treaty Organization, has been married for thirteen years to Elizabeth Campbell, a human-rights activist who consults for organizations like Amnesty International, Bread for the World, and the United Nations. The couple has one adopted daughter.” Sameera had no idea why reporters wanted to announce immediately that she and her parents weren’t genetically connected. In the international trade and aid circles where the Rightons traveled, lots of kids were adopted, and it wasn’t a big deal.
She opened the mailbox she had created in her e-mail account for Tara Colby, a staffer whom she’d privately nicknamed the “Bench,” short for “The Bossy Wench.” Tara was in charge of spinning James Righton’s personal life for the media; she’d been the one who’d hired Constance, Manuel, and Vanessa to morph Mom’s image from middle-aged hippie to Middle-America hip. The Bench had started sending memos a few weeks ago, and Sameera reread a few of the crisp, terse commando-style e-mails that had come barreling across the Atlantic. Wow. The woman would probably make a great coxswain.
The most recent memo listed some questions that Tara thought reporters might ask Sameera along with ready-made answers. I’d better look at them again, Sameera thought. Not that she came up with anything I haven’t thought of myself
Q.Why did you wait so long to join your father’s campaign?
A. I had a TON (emphasize) of responsibilities to finish, like coxing and writing for the paper.
That Tara-generated answer was half true. The other half was Sameera’s parents wanting her to have as “ordinary a life for as long as possible.” Some ordinary life, Sameera thought. Three years in an orphanage in Pakistan. Being adopted by parents whose job descriptions included simple tasks like putting an end to global warming and eradicating poverty. Moving every three years to a new diplomatic post. The closest she ever came to feeling ordinary was during the summers she spent on the farm in Maryfield.
Q. How do you feel about your father’s strong stand against terrorism? (Or any other political question)
A. Dad’s going to be the best president America’s ever had. Mom and I know him better than anybody. He’s loyal, smart, and good to the core.
That was true, too, even though she’d never say anything that cliché. Dad’s campaign team was spinning his image into something called “crunchy conservatism,” hoping that he could be pro-environment, pro-peace-and-justice, pro-free-enterprise, and pro-family-values at the same time. This was convincing his supporters, but his opponents were skeptical. It helped that he’d served three terms as a congressman and fifteen years in the foreign service, so he knew how to make th
ings happen inside the country and around the globe. Last year, for example, he’d brokered a groundbreaking antiterrorist treaty between fifty-three nations that had made headlines everywhere. He was perfect for the job, in Sameera’s opinion, and that’s what she planned to tell the reporters.
Q. Do you know anything about your birth parents in Pakistan? Do you hope to find them?
A. No, I don’t. Maybe someday.
Sameera rolled her eyes. She’d been answering unwanted inquiries about her adoption from strangers for years—she certainly didn’t need the Bench to get her ready for those. A couple of years ago, just before they’d moved to Brussels, she’d wrestled heavily with the fact that she wasn’t the biological child of her parents. Curiosity about her birth family still came in cycles, but the bottom line was she was grateful to them for giving her life, and to Mom and Dad for raising her.
Q. What’s it like to have such high-powered parents?
A. I’m proud of them. They’re proud of me, too.
Okay. She could say that now. But that didn’t mean a younger version of herself hadn’t struggled with guilt over their differences. It was easier for Sameera to pick a savory new recipe for the chef to try out, plan new borders for the gardens, and redecorate and create a cozy retreat for her stressed-out parents than to save people hiding in the jungle. In Brussels, she’d come to accept that both skill sets were important and had commandeered the job of managing the Residence from Mom, with Mrs. Mathews’s expert help, of course.
“Earth to Mom. Earth to Mom. We’re almost there.”
Mom sighed, powered down her laptop, stretched out her legs, and rotated her ankles. She was five foot ten in bare feet; Dad was six three; Sameera was barely five foot one. “I’ll have to pull some all-nighters to finish this freakin’ report.”
First Daughter Page 1