First Daughter

by Mitali Perkins

  “Why so early?” Sameera asked.

  “Tara’s asking them to come in two hours ahead of schedule. That way, we start the day camera-ready and can hit the polling places right after our tour. And guess what? Because they’re predicting a low voter turnout, they’d already planned a midday photo shoot on the beach to generate some interest. And when I suggested surfing, Tara leaped at the idea. You and your mother are going to get to see me hang-ten!” His grin made him look like a kid without a care in the world. If only the voters could see him now, Sameera thought.

  “Sounds great, Dad,” Sameera said. “I’m so glad we can do the tour. Get some sleep, Mom. G’night.”

  Mom hadn’t tuned in to the television and now she didn’t answer either member of her family. She was crouched over her laptop in a writing frenzy and didn’t seem to notice that Sameera and Dad were leaving the room.

  Have a freokin’ good time, Mom, Sameera thought, sending some mental goodwill in her mother’s direction.

  Chapter 13

  Looking as immaculate and wide awake as ever, Tara Colby met them in the salon, accompanied by Vanessa and Constance. It was a bonding experience to be made over together, Sameera realized, as she and her parents modeled different outfits, laughing and teasing each other. When Dad came out in one of Mom’s skirts and a floppy hat, he looked so ridiculous that even stretch-faced Vanessa’s tight lips moved in the memory of a smile.

  Sameera loved the combination that they settled on for her—tight jeans and a beaded pink T-shirt, sunglasses, a floppy straw hat banded with pink ribbon, and strappy, high-heeled faux-jewel-encrusted sandals. If only she didn’t have to don the uncomfortable body-shaper underneath the ensemble, but she didn’t complain when she checked herself out in the mirror. California words like hot and babe came to mind.

  With Mom and Dad attired in equally appropriate West Coast chic, a sleepy-looking Constance quickly touched up their hair and makeup (she slathered bronzing lotion with a “natural glow” over Sameera’s parents to fake a tan).

  “White dress. White sandals,” Vanessa grunted at Sameera, just before the Rightons left.

  Sameera nodded. “Got it.”

  “I’ll see you in your hotel room at around five o’clock, Sammy,” Constance said. “We’ll doll you up nicely for tonight.”

  “Meet me at Zuma Beach at noon,” Tara added as the Rightons ducked into the limo. “The press will be waiting for you at each voting station; we sent them a timed list of your appearances, so don’t be late.”

  Dad gave the driver directions to the house where he’d grown up. It was a big home on a bluff overlooking the ocean, gated now with an alarm system, but Dad said that the intense security was new. “We were a neighborhood then,” he said. “Kids playing on the street, riding bikes, playing Red Rover on summer nights ...” His voice trailed off.

  Sameera felt a pang that she’d never met the people who’d built the house and lived there for years—James Righton Sr. and Mary Righton, his wife of forty-three years. Would they have liked her? Would she have felt as close to them as she did to Gran and Poppa?

  “I can imagine you riding your bike down to the beach, Dad,” she told him as they cruised around the quiet, tree-lined streets. Her father had worked summers as a beachboy, setting up umbrellas and beach chairs, and as a lifeguard, racing into the waves to rescue people caught in riptides or in over their heads. He’s still into saving people, she thought.

  The limo took a detour, and Dad leaped out to buy a bouquet of stargazer lilies (“my mother’s favorites from a twenty-four-hour grocery store,” he muttered) before heading to the nearby cemetery. Sameera’s grandparents’ graves were simple, flat, side-by-side stones marked with crosses. Sameera and Mom helped Dad strew the lilies over them as the morning sun climbed higher in the sky.

  “Can we pray before we go, James?” Mom asked, reaching for his hand.

  “You go ahead, Liz,” he said, gazing into the distance at the blue line of the Pacific Ocean.

  As Mom recited the Lord’s Prayer in a low voice, Sameera reached for her father’s other hand. If only she could help him when it came to religion! But she had no easy answers herself to share.

  The three of them walked back in silence to the waiting limo; it was time to reenter the campaign fray. They stopped at several polling places throughout Los Angeles and even drove into Ventura County, all three of them shaking hands, making small talk, waving and smiling at the cameras, and kissing a few babies.

  At noon, the limo drove them to Zuma Beach, where Dad changed out of California casual into a wet suit. Sameera and Mom squinted into the sun, watching him catch waves on a borrowed surfboard while the cameras filmed nonstop. Dad was right; he hadn’t forgotten how to surf, even though he didn’t bend and swerve quite as smoothly as the twenty-somethings the campaign team had recruited to join him for the photo op.

  Sameera could have sworn that Mom was drooling as Dad showed off in his skintight Lycra. I hope the cameras aren’t zooming in on the lust in her eyes, she thought, anticipating correctly that her parents would disappear for an “afternoon nap” when they got back to the hotel.

  She herself seized the one quiet hour in this fast-paced day to check in to her myplace.com site. Comments were pouring in about her transformation the day before. First, she savored the comic book—style responses from her teammates: WOW! ZOWEE! GADZOOKS! KAPOW! Most of them thought she looked tremendous, although Amazing Ahmed claimed to worry that he might not feel comfortable teasing her like “a sister” anymore. Miranda’s wordless comment was a photo of herself with her hands on either side of her head, eyes wide and startled-looking, mouth forming a huge O. A couple of Sameera’s more radical newspaper buddies in Brussels asked her to alleviate concerns that she was selling out to The Man. Mrs. Graves tuned in with a typically strong opinion, arguing that she much preferred the simple “before” look to the “Barbie Doll version of our sweet Sparrow,” as she put it.

  Sameera described The Makeover briefly before weighing in with the truth about how it made her feel: For once in my life, I’m VISIBLE. Those of you who are naturally eye-catching don’t know what it’s like to walk into a room and feel like nobody notices you. There’s a downside to visibility, of course: I didn’t like the leers from middle-aged men, my made-up skin feels like it’s painted on with plastic (a good laugh might mess up my look, so I stay serious all the time), the do is so hair-sprayed that a head butt from me could take someone out, and the pointy shoes torture my toes until they confess all my sins.

  But on the whole, it’s fun to turn heads for a change. When you’re power-dressed on the outside, the eerie part is that you feel more powerful on the inside. I don’t get that. I’m not sure I like that. Okay, yesterday was mostly fogies and geezers (with the exception of one interesting girl I met), and today all the voters were over twenty-one, but tonight’s my first real event with people my age. We’re going to celebrate Dad’s winning the primary at a father-daughter dance. (Mothers are invited to watch and socialize, so Mom’s coming, too.) The problem is that I’m so zonked that I might make a total fool of myself. Comments? Keep them short, clean, and to the point. Peace be with you. Sparrow.

  She was powering down and fighting an immense wave of sleepiness when Tara came up to the room. “We clinched the primary, but nobody’s surprised. Get dressed and I’ll send Constance in, Sammy; she’ll do your mom first.”

  A shower helped a bit, and Sameera managed to slip into her dress, but she kept her eyes closed for a few blissful minutes while Constance made her up and fixed her hair.

  “You’re snoring, Sammy,” Constance told her.

  “Time to go!” called Dad from the living room, and Sameera staggered out on another newly acquired pair of fourinchers.

  Chapter 14

  “I don’t like it,” Dad growled when he saw his daughter in the white dress.

  “But it’s sexy and sweet, James,” Tara said. “That’s the look we need for tonight. A
ll the other daughters are going to be dressed in much more revealing outfits.”

  “She’s only sixteen, Tara. I don’t think ‘sexy’ is an appropriate way for her to dress.”

  Sameera yawned and plopped down on the couch. She felt about as sexy as a turtle.

  “Californians want their sixteen-year-olds to be a little on the glamorous side, James,” Tara said, giving one of those brittle laughs that made Sameera’s eardrums feel like they’d been scraped.

  “When it comes to my daughter, it doesn’t matter what anybody wants,” Dad said, lacing his normally courteous voice with the steely undercurrent that took down opponents in any debate. “I expect her to dress her age. And she’s wearing entirely too much lipstick.”

  “I agree,” said Mom, coming in and leaping into the discussion. “Can we take it down a notch? Last night she was offered wine to drink. And I saw men twice her age practically undressing her with their eyes. It was disgusting.”

  Sparrow didn’t have the energy to say anything. Did her mother have to be so ... crass? Besides, those weirdo-perverted types hadn’t really been ogling her body; they’d been checking out a body-shaper with underwire and padding, even if they didn’t know it.

  “Didn’t you see the coverage after her debut last night, James?” Tara asked, standing with her feet apart, arms folded across her chest. “They loved Sammy. They loved how she looked and how she sounded. They loved how the three of you looked together. And besides, you won today—this is a celebration.”

  Dad sighed, giving up as he glanced at his watch. That was another thing about him; he didn’t die on every hill. “You just look so ... different. I guess every father struggles when his daughter starts growing up.”

  STARTS growing up? I’m SIXTEEN, people!

  “I won’t be coming with you tonight,” Tara told them. “Just remember Wilder’s instructions, Sammy, and we should have a repeat of last night’s success.”

  They got stuck in traffic on the way to the dance. Battling to keep her eyes open as the limo crawled along, Sameera held together the slit in her dress so that Dad couldn’t see how much thigh it revealed. Not that he’d notice; he was ensconced in paperwork, and Mom was still working feverishly on her report.

  “I’m sad you’re leaving tomorrow, Sparrow,” Mom said, looking up from her laptop and rubbing her eyes wearily. “We’ll try to get to Maryfield for a couple of days in August. In the meantime, it’s good to know that you’ll get a nice long break.”

  “I am tired, Mom. How about you?”

  “Shattered. When I’m done with this report, I’m going to crash in our D.C. apartment with a good novel while your poor old dad plans the next phase of his campaign.”

  Dad peered at them over his reading glasses. “Tara warned me that anti-Republican reporters could turn up at this event tonight. Get ready for some unfriendly fire.”

  Vanessa had chosen strappy white sandals to match the dress, with heels so long and thin they looked like lethal weapons. As it turned out, Sameera was tempted to use them to defend herself more than once. Tara was right; reporters were swarming outside the entrance to the hotel, and they descended the minute the Rightons arrived. Not all of them were friendly, either.

  You’re a cute, doting, excited president’s daughter wannabe, Sameera’s tired brain told her when she discovered photographers and reporters inside the hotel, too. But it took a huge effort to stay in character.

  Trapped by half-a-dozen interrogators at the entrance to the ballroom, Sameera looked around desperately for help. Where was her mother? She glimpsed a crowd of women on a balcony smiling as they overlooked the dance floor, trying to catch sight of their daughters and husbands. Mom must be somewhere up there. And Dad was in a faraway corner of the huge room, facing a battalion of microphones of his own. Because she was so exhausted, new questions were throwing her off balance, so she stuck to one-word answers and relied on the nonverbals that Marcus had suggested.

  “Where were you born, Miss Righton?”

  “Pakistan.” Smile. Wave. Giggle-slash-manic-chuckle.

  “Has it been easy being raised by white parents? Do you wish they looked more like you?”

  “Uh-huh. I mean, no.” Giggle again.

  “Do you feel uncomfortable being the only minority in the room, Miss Righton?”

  Another reporter guffawed. “How about in the entire Republican Party?” he added.

  “Er ... I’ll have to talk that over with my father.” Oh no! She’d completely stopped making sense. They were looking at her like she was nuts.

  Dad came over and took her hand. “Dance with me, darling?” he asked. “They’re playing our song.”

  The reporters parted like the Red Sea, and Dad led her out to the dance floor, where other, less famous fathers were whirling their daughters around to the orchestra’s music.

  “What was happening back there?” Dad asked. “You looked besieged.”

  “I’m so tired that I think I’m babbling.”

  He sighed. “If they don’t like me, Sparrow, they’ll take anything you say and use it for their purposes. That’s the name of the game, especially from here on out.”

  “We haven’t danced in a while, Dad,” Sameera said, recognizing the three-quarter-time beat as a waltz. When she was seven years old, she and Dad had taken dancing lessons at the American Club in Cairo, along with a lot of other diplomats and their daughters. They’d always danced well together, and she loved it when they did.

  She closed her eyes as Dad spun her effortlessly around the room. Leaning her head against the front of his tuxedo, she let herself savor the feeling of floating safely in his arms, the way she always did when they danced. Dancing made her feel connected to him, without words, and she was so glad they were getting the chance to do it before they’d have to part ways again for the summer.

  But when the song ended, and they descended again, Dad had to shift his attention back to answering their questions. The mothers cloistered in the balcony upstairs were sipping cocktails and chatting; Sameera hoped Mom was holding up better than she was. She managed to ease out of the circle and head to the ladies’ room for the third time that night. There was a chaise longue in the entry, and she plunked herself down on it. She waited out ten more minutes, imagining a front-page shot of herself coming out of a door marked LADIES: “Righton’s Daughter Battles the Runs at Father-Daughter Dance.”

  A couple of girls about her age came in, giggling and whispering in unmistakable camaraderie. They fell silent when they caught sight of Sameera slumped on the chaise.

  “Hi,” she said, suddenly missing Miranda with a pang. Why did they have to live so far apart? I’ll see her soon, she comforted herself. I’ll be safe on the farm this time tomorrow.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.”

  More silence.

  “Congratulations,” one of them said. “Your dad’s clinched the nomination, I guess.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Aren’t you ... excited?”

  She couldn’t muster up the energy to be bubbly ... or fake. “Right now I’m so tired I can’t see straight. And a few of those reporters got in my face. It’s been a tough night.”

  The girls exchanged glances. “Stick with us,” one of them said. “We know how it is; my dad’s the CEO of his company. And hers is a senator.”

  “Yeah, we’ll protect you.”

  They put Sameera between them, and arm in arm the three of them reentered the ballroom just as Dad and Mom were heading up front for their first appearance as the Republican presidential candidate—and family. Sameera’s female escorts accompanied her all the way to the foot of the stage, where she climbed the stairs to join her parents.

  “Hang in there, sweetheart,” Dad muttered to Sameera just before turning to grin and lift both hands high, bringing a roar of applause from the crowd.

  “Thank you, California!” he said.

  Sameera managed to make herself smile Sammy’s smile one more time,
focusing on the two girls’ faces in the front row. If only she were in Maryfield, dancing wordlessly to blaring music in Miranda’s room or lolling on the family room couches watching a flick. Or even back in the hotel room, blogging about surviving this night. Anywhere safe. Anywhere private.

  Thankfully, Dad kept his speech short. As the crowd cheered and stomped their approval, a DJ appeared out of nowhere and put on a hip-hop record, cranking up the bass. Someone switched off the chandeliers and turned on some strobe lights. Everyone over twenty-five got the message and raced for the exits.

  As reporters surrounded her parents and hustled them out of the loud, now dimly lit ballroom, Sameera’s self-appointed teen girl guards flanked her again. Before she knew what was happening, she was in the center of a singing, pulsating solidarity of dancing daughters. For the first time that night, she felt protected from curious eyes and cameras, and she let her body relax into the joyous beat of the music.

  Chapter 15

  Tara strode into the Presidential Suite on Sunday morning, pulled a folder full of newspaper and magazine clippings out of her briefcase, and spread them across the table in the living room. “I hear you zonked last night and didn’t tune in to the news,” she told Sameera. “Here’s what you missed.”

  Sameera had slept most of the morning, then packed and dressed for the flight; her parents had been out and about, so they were still getting ready in their room. She took a deep breath before looking at the clippings; she had purposely avoided the news to give herself a break. The first thing that struck her was how dark she looked in the photos. She’d loved the feel of the pristine white silk dress Vanessa had chosen, but in the newspapers and magazines, the color made Sameera look like a black-and-white graphic imported into a full-color spread.

  “I would have brought these up yesterday, but your parents thought you needed a rest,” Tara said. “I thought it was important for you to see this before you left.”