All-American Girl Read online

  I admitted that this was true. At the same time, however, I didn’t like the idea of anybody—even my soul mate—calling David names. Because David was a very nice person.

  Only I didn’t want to think about that. You know, about David being so nice, and my treating him the way I had. I mean, that kind of behavior is all very well for readers of Cosmo, but I’m really more of an Art in America kind of girl.

  Knowing that sleep was a long way off, but aware that Catherine, by the sound of her steady breathing, was no longer available, I got out my flashlight and opened the book the White House press secretary had given me, on the lives of the first ladies.

  Top ten little-known facts about Dolley Payne Todd Madison, wife of the fourth president of the United States of America:

  10. She spelled her name Dolley, not Dolly.

  9. Born in 1768, she was raised as a Quaker, eschewing colorful bonnets and clothes, as Quaker tradition dictated.

  8. She was married once before to a Quaker lawyer who died in a yellow fever epidemic.

  7. After marrying James Madison in 1794, Dolley acted as “unofficial first lady” during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, who was a widower.

  6. It was apparently around this time that Dolley decided God didn’t care if she wore bright colors, because she is described as having worn a gold turban with an ostrich feather tucked into it at her husband’s inaugural ball.

  5. The fact that Dolley abandoned her Quaker ways is further illustrated by the fact that during her husband’s presidency, she became the belle of Washington society. She was best known for her Wednesday evening receptions, where politicians, diplomats, and the general public gathered. These gatherings helped to soothe some of the tensions between Federalists, who were like today’s Republicans, and Republicans, who were like today’s Democrats, in a time of intense party rivalries.

  4. During the War of 1812, Dolley saved not only George Washington’s portrait but also tons of important government documents by pressing them against the sides of trunks. The day before the British attacked, she filled a wagon with silver and other valuables and sent them off to the Bank of Maryland for safekeeping, which just goes to show she was not only brave but also proactive.

  3. But the majority of U.S. citizens in 1814, when this all happened, were not very appreciative of Dolley’s actions, since they all hated her husband for starting the war in the first place. In fact, as the White House was burning down, Dolley went to the neighbors and knocked on the door, looking for sanctuary, and they told her to get lost. She didn’t find a place to stay until she lied about who she was.

  2. As if this was not enough, one of her sons turned out to be a profligate, which means loser, whose out-of-control spending nearly bankrupted the family.

  And the number-one little-known fact about Dolley Madison:

  1. She wasn’t really very attractive.

  20

  The next week was Thanksgiving. Susan Boone had class on Tuesday, but it was cancelled on Thursday, on account of the holiday.

  I figured that, when I saw David in the studio on Tuesday, I would say I was sorry for what had happened at Kris’s. I mean, even though Catherine insisted I hadn’t done anything wrong, and part of me felt like she was right, another part of me—a bigger part of me—disagreed. I figured at the very least I owed David an apology. I was going to ask him if he wanted to go bowling with me and Catherine and Paul the following Friday. I knew Lucy had a game that night, so there wouldn’t be a chance of our running into Jack. That way David would know I’d asked him out for him, and not to make Jack jealous.

  I didn’t know why it was so important to me that I make David understand he was wrong…that I wasn’t like the other girls he knew, that I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, especially a guy. Especially my sister’s boyfriend. That I liked to wear black. That the daisies on my boots had been my idea.

  I just really wanted to make everything between us okay again.

  Except that David didn’t come to class on Tuesday.

  David didn’t come to class, and it wasn’t like there was anybody there that I could ask why. You know, like if he was sick. I mean, Gertie and Lynn weren’t friends with David. I was. And I didn’t know why he wasn’t there. Was he sick? Had he left early for Camp David, where he and the rest of his family were going to spend Thanksgiving, according to the news and the folks in the press office? I didn’t know.

  All I knew was, as I sat there drawing the gourds Susan Boone had arranged on the table in front of us, my daisy helmet on my head to guard against aerial crow assaults, I felt pretty stupid.

  Stupid because of how disappointed I was that David hadn’t showed. Stupid because I’d actually thought it would be that simple—I’d just apologize, and that would be the end of it.

  But most of all, I felt stupid that I even cared. I mean, I didn’t even like David. Oh, sure, as a friend I liked him all right.

  And yeah, there was that freaky frisson thing that happened every once in a while when I was around him.

  But it wasn’t like just because of that I was going to forget all about Jack. Okay, yeah, Jack had acted like a jerk at Kris’s party. But that didn’t mean I’d fallen out of love with him, or anything. I mean, when you have loved someone as much and for as long as I have loved Jack, you totally see beyond jerky behavior and that kind of thing. The way I felt about Jack was deeper than that. Just like, I knew, the way he felt about me was deeper than the way he felt about Lucy.

  He just didn’t know it yet.

  Anyway, if David thought just by blowing off Susan Boone’s on Tuesday he’d be rid of me, he had, as Theresa would say, another think coming. Because, as teen ambassador to the UN, I went to the White House every Wednesday. So what I figured I’d do was, if David hadn’t left for the holidays yet, I’d just go, you know, find him. Sometime the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when Mr. White, the press secretary, wasn’t paying attention.

  Only that didn’t work out too well, either, because Mr. White was totally paying attention that day. That was on account of the fact that entries for the From My Window contest at the UN were pouring in. We were getting paintings from as far away as Hawaii and as close as Chevy Chase (Jack’s entry). Mr. White was doing a lot of complaining because there were so many paintings, we had nowhere to put them all. We could only pick one to send on to the U.S. Ambassador to the UN in New York.

  Some of the paintings were very bad. Some of them were very good. All of them were very interesting.

  The one that interested me most had been painted by a girl named Maria Sanchez, who lived in San Diego. Maria’s painting depicted a backyard with freshly laundered sheets hanging from a washline. Between the hanging sheets, which were fluttering in an unseen breeze, you could catch glimpses of this barbed-wire fence a pretty far ways away…but not far enough away that you couldn’t see that there were people sneaking through this hole they had cut in the wire. Some people had already got through the hole, and they were running away from men in brown uniforms, who had guns and sticks, and were chasing them. Maria called her painting Land of the Free? With a question mark.

  Mr. White, the press secretary, hated this painting. He kept going, “This contest is not about making political statements.”

  But I felt kind of differently about it.

  “The contest is about what you see from your window,” I said. “This is what Maria Sanchez of San Diego sees from her window. She is not making a political statement. She is painting what she sees.” Mr. White ground his teeth. He liked this painting that had come from Angie Tucker of Little Deer Isle, Maine. Angie’s painting was of a lighthouse and the sea. It was a nice painting. But somehow, I didn’t believe it. That that was what Angie saw every day from her window. I mean, a lighthouse? Come on. Who was she, anyway, Anne of Green Gables?

  For that reason, I didn’t think Angie’s painting was as good as Maria’s.

  Neither, surprisingly, was Jack’s.

  Oh, Jack’s
was good. Don’t get me wrong. Like all his paintings, Jack’s entry to the From My Window contest was brilliant. It depicted three disillusioned-looking young guys standing around in the parking lot outside of the local 7-Eleven, stamped-out cigarettes at their feet and broken beer bottles lying around, the shards of glass sparkling like emeralds. It spoke eloquently of the plight of urban youth, of the hopelessness of our generation.

  It was a good painting. A great painting, actually.

  Except that guess what?

  It was so not what Jack sees out of his window.

  I know this for a fact. That’s because the closest 7-Eleven to Jack’s house is all the way out in Bethesda. And no way could you see it from his window. Jack lives in a great big house with lots of tall leafy trees around it and a long circular driveway out front. And while I admit, the real view out of Jack’s window might be a bit on the boring side, in no way could I reward him for basically lying. Much as I loved him, I couldn’t, you know, let that affect my judgment. I had to be fair.

  And that meant that Jack’s entry was effectively out of the running.

  Mr. White and I had reached an impasse. I could tell he was bored of the argument and just wanted to get out of there. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and all. I thought I’d give him a break and went, “Well, Mr. White, listen. What do you say we cut our little visit short this week? I was thinking of stopping by the family quarters and just saying hi to David, you know, before he leaves for the holiday….”

  Mr. White shot me a look.

  “You aren’t stopping anywhere,” he said. “We still have a ton of work to do. There’s the International Festival of the Child coming up this Saturday. The president particularly wants you there….”

  I perked up upon hearing this. “Really? Will David be there?”

  Mr. White looked at me tiredly. Sometimes I got the feeling that Mr. White cursed the day I’d stopped Larry Wayne Rogers from killing his boss. Not that Mr. White wanted the president dead. Not at all. Mr. White worshiped the ground the guy walked on. It was me I think he would have been happy to be rid of.

  “Samantha,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t know. There will, however, be representatives from over eighty countries in attendance, including the president, and it would really help if you would, just this once, dress up a little. Try to look like a young lady and not a video jockey.”

  I looked down at my boots, black tights, the kilt that had once been red plaid that I had dyed black, and my favorite black turtleneck.

  “You think I look like a veejay?” I asked, touched by this unexpected compliment.

  Mr. White rolled his eyes and asked if there was anything I could do about my cast. It was looking a little worse for wear. As I’d told David I would, I’d decorated it in a patriotic motif, with eagles and the Liberty Bell and even a tiny celebrity portrait—of Dolley Madison. Fourteen girls had already asked me if they could have the cast when it came off. Theresa had suggested I auction it off on the Internet.

  “Because,” she said, “you could probably get thousands of dollars for it. They auctioned off chunks of the Berlin Wall after it fell. Why not the cast of the girl who made the world safe for democracy?”

  I didn’t know what I was going to do with my cast when it came off, but I figured I had time to figure it out. It wasn’t due to come off for another week.

  I could see Mr. White’s point, though. The cast had gotten kind of dirty, and parts of it were sort of crumbling off where I’d gotten it wet (it was very hard to wash my hair one-handed).

  “Maybe your mother could rig something up,” he said, looking kind of pained. “A nice sling to, um, hide it.”

  If I hadn’t already known from his attitude about the whole painting contest, I would have known it from the way he was eyeing my cast: Mr. White had no appreciation for art.

  By the time he was done yammering on about all the people who would be at the International Festival of the Child, it was five o’clock, and time to go home. No way I was going to be able to sneak off to find David now. I’d missed him once again.

  This didn’t exactly put me in a real festive holiday mood, know what I mean? I didn’t even care that we had four whole days off from school. Ordinarily four days of being Deutsch free would have delighted me. But for some reason this year it wasn’t so exciting. I mean, technically, it meant that, if David didn’t show at the International Festival of the Child, it would be five whole days until I saw him again. I could have called him, I guess, but that wasn’t the same. And I didn’t have his e-mail address.

  Even the fact that Theresa was in the kitchen baking when I got home didn’t cheer me up. It was just pumpkin pies (blech) for tomorrow. And they weren’t even for us. They were for Theresa’s own kids, and grandkids, too. What with being with us all week, the only chance Theresa had to get ready for Thanksgiving was when she was at our house. My mom didn’t mind. We always had Thanksgiving at my grandma’s in Baltimore, anyway, so it wasn’t like she needed the oven, or anything.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Theresa wanted to know when I came into the kitchen, dropped my coat and backpack, and started right in on the graham crackers without even complaining about how come we only got the good stuff when Jack came over.

  “Nothing,” I said. I sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the back of the novel Rebecca was reading. She’d apparently abandoned romance for sci-fi once again, since she held the latest installment in the Jedi Academy saga. I felt, all things considered, that she had made a wise decision.

  “Then stop with the sighing already.” Theresa was tense. Theresa was always tense before the holidays. She said it was because she never knew which one of his ex-wives Tito was going to show up with…or if he’d show up with an entirely new wife. Theresa said it was more than any mother should be forced to bear.

  I sighed again, and Rebecca looked up from her book.

  “If you’re upset because Jack’s not here,” she said in a bored voice, “don’t be. He and Lucy’ll probably be rolling back in a few minutes. They just walked down to the video store to get a copy of Die Hard. You know that’s Dad’s favorite holiday movie.”

  I sniffed. “Why would I be upset about Jack not being here?” I demanded. When Rebecca just rolled her eyes, I went, in maybe a louder voice than I ought to have, “I don’t like Jack, you know, Rebecca. In that way, I mean.”

  “Sure, you don’t,” Rebecca said—but not like she believed it—and went back to her book.

  “I don’t,” I said. “God. As if. I mean, he’s Lucy’s boyfriend.”

  “So?” Rebecca turned a page.

  “So I don’t like him like that, okay?” God, was I going to have to spend the rest of my life denying my true feelings to everyone I knew? I mean, at school everyone was all, Sam and David, Sam and David. Even the press, since our big “date,” had been all, Sam and David, Sam and David. There’d been something about it on the news. The national news. Not, like, the lead story, or anything, but one of those little human interest things five minutes before the news hour was up. It was totally humiliating. The reporters were all, “And Christmas isn’t the only thing in the air here in the capital. No, young love seems to be in the air, as well.”

  It was totally revolting. I mean, it was no wonder David hadn’t shown up at Susan Boone’s. The place had been crawling with reporters, a bunch of whom had yelled, as I’d darted past them, “Did you and David have a nice time at the party, Sam?”

  Which reminded me of something. I looked at Rebecca and went, in the snottiest voice I could, “Besides, if I supposedly like Jack so much, what’s with this frisson thing you said you sensed between me and David? Huh? How can I have frisson with one guy if I’m supposedly in love with someone else?”

  Rebecca just looked at me and went, “Because you are completely blind to what’s right in front of you,” then went back to her book.

  Blind? What was she talking about, blind? Thanks to Susan Boone, I had n
ever seen better in my life, thank you very much. Wasn’t I drawing the best eggs in the studio? And what about those gourds I’d done yesterday? My gourds had been better than anyone’s. My gourds had blown everyone else’s gourds out of the water. Even Susan Boone had been impressed. During critique at the end of class, she’d even said, “Sam, you are making enormous strides.”

  Enormous strides. How could a blind person be making enormous strides in ART class?

  I mentioned this to Rebecca, but she just went, “Yeah? Well, maybe you can see eggs and gourds, but you sure can’t see anything else.”

  I then said the only thing that an older sister can say to a younger one who is acting like she thinks she is all that. Lord knows, Lucy has said it to me often enough.

  After I said it, Theresa sent me to my room.

  But I didn’t care. I liked it better in my room anyway. In fact, if I had my way, I’d never come out of my room again, except maybe for meals and of course for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But that’s it. Because every time I leave my room, it seems like, I just get into trouble. I’m either saving people from getting assassinated or getting into arguments about Picasso or being told I’m blind.

  Well, that’s it. I’m staying in my room forever. And nobody can stop me.

  21

  They made me come out of my room to go to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving dinner.

  I tried to lock myself in there again the minute we got back, but unfortunately there was a message on the machine from Mr. White, reminding my parents about the International Festival of the Child, at which my attendance was required. Apparently, if I wasn’t there some crisis of world proportions would break out, so my mom said I had to go.

  But that didn’t mean I had to like it.

  I mean, let’s face it, this teen ambassador thing was getting old. It was worse than German, practically. Every time Jack saw me he was all, “So where’s my ticket to New York?” which was, of course, what the winner of the From My Window contest got, an all-expenses paid trip to New York. Plus, you know, international fame and celebrity.