by Meg Cabot
“Hey,” I said, with some alarm. I mean, I am an urban rebel and all, but vandalism that isn’t for the sake of a good cause is still just that. Vandalism. “What are you doing?”
“Come on,” David said, grinning up at me. “Who deserves it more than you? Not only are you possibly related to a president, but you saved the life of one too.”
I looked nervously back over my shoulder at the door, behind which I knew stood a Secret Service agent. I mean, come on. Son of the President or not, this was destruction of public property. Not just public properly, but the White House. I’m sure you could go to jail for years for desecrating the White House.
“David,” I hissed, lowering my voice so no one would overhear me. “This isn’t necessary.”
Intent upon his work—he had gotten to the letter A now—David did not reply.
“Really,” I said. “I mean, if you want to thank me for saving your dad, the burger is enough, believe me.”
But it was too late, because he was already starting on the M.
“I suppose you think just because your dad is the President,” I said, “you can’t get in trouble for this.”
“Not that much trouble,” David said, as he carved. “I mean, I’m still a minor, after all.” He leaned back to admire his handiwork. “There. What do you think of that?”
I looked down at my name, Sam, right there with Amy Carter’s and Chelsea Clinton’s, not to mention David’s. I hoped a large family would not move into the White House next, as there would be no more room left on the window sill for the kids to add their names.
“I think you’re insane,” I said, meaning it. It was a shame, too, because he was so cute.
“Oh,” David said, folding up the Swiss Army knife and sticking it back in his pocket. “That really hurts, coming from a girl who flushes crab-stuffed flounder down the toilet and likes to throw herself at strange men with guns.”
I stared at him for a minute, completely taken aback.
Then I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was pretty funny, after all.
David started to laugh too. The two of us were standing there, laughing, when the Secret Service agent from the hallway came in and went, “David? Your father is looking for you.”
I stopped laughing. Busted again! I looked guiltily down at the window sill—not to mention the empty plates where the burgers had been.
But I didn’t have time to dwell on my misdeeds, because we had to get back to the dining room in a hurry. I mean, you don’t keep the President of the United States waiting.
When we got in there, though, it turned out the President hadn’t been the only one waiting. Everyone’s face was turned expectantly towards the doors. When David and I walked through them, to my very great surprise all the people in the room burst into applause.
At first I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, were they clapping because David and I had finally found our way back from the bathroom (they couldn’t possibly have known, could they, about the burgers, unless Carl had told them while serving the chocolate mousse)?
But it turned out the reason they were clapping had nothing to do with that. I found out why they were clapping when, on my way back to my seat, my mom suddenly stopped me and leaped up to give me a big hug.
“Oh, honey, isn’t it great?” she asked. “The President just named you teen ambassador to the United Nations!”
And all of a sudden that delicious burger felt like it might come right back up.
“So where ’d you go then?” Lucy asked me, for like the nine hundredth time.
“Nowhere,” I said. “Leave me alone.”
“I’m only asking,” Lucy said. “Can’t I ask you a simple question? You don’t have to get all upset about it. Unless, of course, you were doing something . . . you know. Something you weren’t supposed to be doing.”
I had been, of course. Only not what Lucy thought. I’d just been eating burgers with—and having my initials carved into a White House window sill by—the son of the leader of the Free World.
“It’s just that you two looked—I don’t know . . .” Lucy was examining her lips in the mirror of her compact. She had spent about half an hour lining them that morning—her lips, that is—conscious that today, my first day back at school after the whole saving-the-President thing, a lot of people were probably going to be taking her picture.
A lot of people did take her picture—and mine—as we walked out of our house and down to the station wagon (the Secret Service had suggested that for the next few weeks or so, it might not be such a good idea for Lucy and I to take the bus to school, so Theresa was driving us). So Lucy had been right about that, anyway.
What she wasn’t right about was that there was anything going on between me and David.
“. . . chummy,” she finished, snapping the compact shut. “Didn’t you think they looked chummy, Theresa?”
Theresa, who is not the world’s greatest driver, and who had been completely unnerved by all the photographers who had thrown themselves across the hood of the car in an effort to get my picture, only said a bunch of Spanish swearwords as the car ahead of us cut her off.
“I think you looked chummy,” Lucy said. “Definitely chummy.”
“There was nothing chummy about it,” I said. “We just ran into each other on the way out of the bathroom. That’s all.”
Rebecca, seated in the front seat, remarked, “I detected a frisson.”
Lucy and I both looked at her like she was crazy. “A what?”
A frisson,“ Rebecca said. A tremor of intense attraction. I detected one between you and David last night.”
I was flabbergasted. Because of course there’d been no such thing. I happened to be in love with Jack, not David.
Only of course I couldn’t say that. Not out loud.
“There was no frisson. There was absolutely no frisson. Where would you even get an idea like that?”
“Oh,” Rebecca replied, mildly. “From one of Lucy’s romance novels. I’ve been reading them, in an effort to improve my people skills. And there was definitely a frisson between you and David.”
No matter how many times I denied the existence of any frisson, however, both Rebecca and Lucy swore they’d seen one. Which doesn’t even make sense, since I highly doubt frissons, if they even exist, are detectable to the human eye.
And while David is cute and everything, I am totally one hundred per cent committed to Jack Slater, who, OK, does not exactly seem to love me back, but he will. One of these days, Jack will fully come to his senses, and when he does, I will be waiting.
Besides which, David so fully doesn’t like me that way. He was just being nice to me because I saved his dad. That’s all. I mean, if they’d heard the way he’d been teasing me about the whole pineapple thing, they so totally would give up on this frisson business.
But whatever. Everyone, it seemed, was determined to make my life a living hell: my sisters; the reporters staked out on my lawn; the manufacturers of certain brands of popular soft drinks, who would not stop delivering samples of their products by the caseload to my home; my own family. Even the President of the United States.
“What exactly does the teen ambassador to the United Nations do?” Catherine asked me later that day. We were standing in the lunch line, where we had stood together every weekday of my life, with the exception of my pre-K days, summers, national holidays, and that year I had spent in Morocco.
But unlike all the rest of those times, today everyone standing around us was staring at me and speaking in reverently hushed tones. One particularly shy freshman girl had come up and asked if it would be all right for her to touch my cast.
Oh, yeah. Nothing like being a national hero.
I was trying to downplay the whole thing. Really, I was. For instance, in direct defiance of Lucy’s orders, I had not risen an hour earlier for school in order to apply horse conditioner to my hair. I had not donned any of my new slacks from Banana Republic. I had on my normal,
everyday, midnight-black clothes, and my hair was its normal, everyday, out-of-control mess.
Still, everyone was treating me differently. Even the teachers, who made jokes like, “For those of you who weren’t dining at the White House last night, did you happen to see the excellent documentary on Yemen on PBS?” and “Please open your textbooks to page two hundred and sixty-five—those of you who did not break your arm saving the life of the President, that is.”
Even the cafeteria workers were in on it. As I stepped up with my tray, Mrs. Krebbetts gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, “Here, honey,” then slipped me an extra piece of peanut-butter pie.
In the history of John Adams Preparatory School Mrs. Krebbetts has never slipped anyone an extra piece of peanut-butter pie. Everyone is scared of Mrs. Krebbetts, and with good reason: aggravate her, and she might deny you pie for a year.
And here she was, giving me extra pie. The world as I had once known it came crashing to an end.
“I mean, you must do something.” Catherine, having recovered from the pie incident, followed me to the table we traditionally shared with a number of girls who, like Catherine and I, were on the outer fringes of popularity—like the frozen tundra of the social geography of Adams Prep. Too anti-establishment to join the student council and not athletic enough to be jocks, most of us either played instruments or were in the drama club. I was the only artist. We were all just trying to get through high school so we could hurry up and get to college, where, we’d heard, things were better.
“I mean, teen ambassador to the UN. What are you in charge of? Is there a committee, at least?” Catherine wouldn’t let it go. “On world teen issues, or something?”
“I don’t know, Catherine,” I said, as we sat down. “The President just said he was appointing me as representative from the US. I assume there are representatives from other countries. Otherwise, what would be the point? Does anybody want an extra piece of pie?”
No one responded. That’s because everyone at the table was staring, but not at the pie. Instead, they were all staring at Lucy and Jack, who had suddenly plunked their trays down at our table.
“Hey,” Lucy said, breezily, as if she sat down at the unpopular girls’ table every day of the week. “What’s up?”
“How’d you get that extra piece of pie?” Jack wanted to know.
The thing of it was, Lucy and Jack weren’t the only ones from, you know, the other side of the caf who sat down at our table. To my astonishment, they were joined by about half the football team and a bunch of other cheerleaders too. I could see that Catherine was completely unnerved by this invasion. It was as if a bunch of swans had suddenly taken over the duck pond. All of us mallards weren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves in the face of so much beauty.
“What are you doing?” I whispered to Lucy.
Lucy just shrugged as she sipped her Diet Coke. “Since you won’t come to us,” she said, “we came to you.”
“Hey, Sam,” Jack said, whipping a pen out from the pocket of his black trenchcoat. “I’ll sign your cast for you.”
“Ooh,” cried Debbie Kinley, her pom-poms twitching excitedly. “Me, too! I want to sign her cast too.”
I yanked my arm out of their reach and went, “Uh, no, thanks.”
Jack looked crestfallen. “I was just going to draw a disaffected youth on it,” he explained. “That’s all.”
A disaffected youth would have been cool, I had to admit. But if I let Jack draw on my cast, then everybody would want to, and soon all that lovely whiteness would be a big old mess. But if I said only Jack could draw on it, then everyone would know about my secret crush on my sister’s boyfriend.
“Um, thanks anyway,” I said. “But I’m saving my cast for my own stuff.”
I felt bad about being mean to Jack. He was, after all, my soulmate.
Still, I wish he’d hurry up and realize it, and quit hanging out with Lucy and her dopey friends. Because these guys were acting like total idiots, tossing corn chips at one another and trying to catch them in their mouths. It was revolting. Also irritating because they kept jostling the table, making it hard for those of us who had to eat one-handed to keep our food steady. I realize that football players are very large and maybe can’t help shaking the table, but still, they could have shown a little restraint.
“Hey,” I said, when one of the corn chips landed in Catherine’s apple sauce. “Cut it out, you guys.”
Lucy, poring over a magazine article about how to get perfect thighs—which she, of course, already had—went, in a bored voice, “Geez. Just because she’s getting a medal, she thinks she’s all that,” which is totally unfair, because what was I supposed to do, just meekly accept the whole corn-chip-in-the-apple-sauce thing?
Catherine stared at me, wide-eyed. “You’re getting a medal too? You’re teen ambassador to the UN, and you’re getting a medal?”
Unfortunately so. A presidential medal of valour, to be exact. The ceremony was going to be held in December, when the White House was decorated all Christmassy, for optimum photogenic effect.
But I didn’t have time to reply. That’s because my second slice of pie suddenly disappeared and travelled down the row of football players like a frisbee in a game of keep-away.
“MAY I PLEASE HAVE MY PIE BACK?” I yelled, because I’d been planning on giving the extra piece to Jack.
Lucy, of course, didn’t know this. She just went, “God, it’s just a piece of pie. Believe me, you do not need the extra calories,” a typically Lucy remark to which I started to respond, until I was distracted by an all-too-familiar voice behind me.
“Hello, Samantha.”
I turned to see Kris Parks—looking like the perfect class president that she was, clad in Benetton from head to toe, including the pink cashmere sweater thrown oh-so-casually across her shoulders—simpering down at me.
“Here’s the invitation to my party,” Kris said, handing me a piece of folded paper. “I really hope you can come. I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I’d really like it if we could bury the hatchet and be friends. I’ve always admired you, you know, Sam. You really, really, um, stick to your convictions. And I didn’t mind paying for the drawings. Really.”
I just stared up at her. I couldn’t believe any of this was happening. Really, out of all of it—the caseloads of soda, the Thank You Beary Much bears, having dinner at the White House—the fact that Kris Parks—Kris Parks—was sucking up to me was the strangest thing of all. I was starting to know how Cinderella probably felt after the Prince finally found her and got the shoe to fit. Her stepsisters had probably sucked up to her pretty much the same way Kris Parks was sucking up to me.
The thing was, though, like Cinderella I totally didn’t have the heart to tell Kris where to go. I should have. I know I should have.
But it was like this: why? I mean, what was the point? So she’d been a bitch to me her whole life. Like my being a bitch back to her was going to teach her a lesson? Bitchiness was all she knew.
Kindness. That was what Kris Parks needed. An example to follow. Someone whose gracious behaviour she could emulate.
“I don’t know,” I said, slipping the invitation into my backpack instead of following my instincts and tossing it into the nearest trash receptacle. “I’ll have to see.”
Leave it to Lucy to ruin everything by going, without taking her gaze off the magazine in her hands, “She’ll be there.”
Kris sucked in her breath excitedly. “You will? Great!”
“Actually,” I said, shooting Lucy a glare that she missed because she was studying an article about proper cuticle maintenance, “I’m not sure I can go, Luce.”
“Sure you can,” Lucy said, flipping the page. “You and David and Jack and I can all go together.”
“David?” I echoed. “Who said anything about—”
“I just think it is so sweet,” Kris said with a sigh. “About you and the President’s son and all. When Lucy told me, I n
early died.”
“When Lucy told you what?” I demanded.
“Well, about the two of you going out, of course,” Kris said, in some surprise.
I really could have killed Lucy then. I mean, you should have seen what happened when Kris uttered these words. Catherine, who’d been gnawing on a chicken leg, watching the whole little drama unfold before her, dropped the chicken leg into her lap. All the cheerleaders stopped gossiping and turned to look at me like I was some kind of new sparkly nail polish, or something. Even Jack, who by then had gotten my piece of pie back, paused with a bite of it halfway to his lips and said, “No freakin‘ way.”
I mean, it was a little upsetting.
“Right,” I said. “Jack is absolutely right. No freaking way. I am not going out with him. OK? I am not going out with the President’s son.”
But Kris was already babbling, “Don’t worry about it, Sam, I am the soul of discretion. I won’t say a word to anyone. Do you think reporters will show up, though? I mean, at my party? Because if anyone wants to interview me, you know, that’s all right. They can even take my picture. If you want me to sign a waiver, or whatever . . .”
All this, while Lucy just sat there, flipping through her magazine. I couldn’t believe it. And I had thought the thing with the drawing lessons was bad?
“Hey,” Lucy said, for once noticing by my expression that I wasn’t exactly happy with her. “Don’t blame me. You’re the one who went all frisson on the guy, not me.”
“I do not,” I said, darting a look at Jack, to make sure he was listening, “like David. OK?”
“OK,” Lucy said. “Don’t get your panties in a—OW!”
Really, if anybody deserves to be pinched, and on a daily basis, it’s my sister Lucy.
Top ten Ways You Can Tell That You Have Suddenly Become One of the In Crowd:
10. Kris Parks invites you to one of her notorious make-out parties.
9. In PE Coach O’Donnell picks you as team captain for the first time all year, and when it comes to choosing players, all the good athletes actually beg to be on your team.