All-American Girl Read online

  Really, I was like my own little UN, doling out aid, in the form of highly realistic renderings of Freddie Prinze Jr., to the underprivileged.

  But it turned out that Kris Parks, now president of the sophomore class and still an all-around pain in my rear, had a problem with this. Well, not with the fact that I wasn’t charging the non–English speakers, but with the fact that it turned out the only people I was charging were Kris and her friends.

  But what did she think? Like I was really going to charge Catherine, who has been my best friend ever since I got back from Morocco and found out that Kris had pulled an Anakin and gone over to the Dark Side? Catherine and I totally bonded over Kris’s mistreatment of us—Kris still takes great delight in making fun of Catherine’s knee-length skirts, which is all Mrs. Salazar, Catherine’s mom, will allow her to wear, being super Christian and all—and our mutual contempt for Rodd Muckinfuss.

  Oh, yeah. I’m definitely going to give free drawings of Orlando Bloom to someone like Kris.

  Not.

  People like Kris—maybe because she was never forced to attend speech and hearing lessons, much less a school where no one spoke the same language she did—cannot seem to grasp the concept of being nice to anyone who is not size five, blond, and decked out in Abercrombie and Fitch from head to toe.

  In other words, anyone who is not Kris Parks.

  Catherine and I were talking about this on our way home from the cathedral grounds—Kris, I mean, and her insufferability—when this car approached us and I saw my dad waving at us from behind the wheel.

  “Hi, girls,” my mom said, leaning over my dad to talk to us, since we were closest to the driver’s side. “I don’t suppose either of you is interested in going to Lucy’s game.”

  “Mom,” Lucy said from the backseat. She was in full cheerleader regalia. “Do not even try. They won’t come, and even if they do, I mean, look at Sam. I’d be embarrassed to be seen with her.”

  “Lucy,” my dad said in a warning tone. He needn’t have bothered, however. I am quite used to Lucy’s disparaging remarks concerning my appearance.

  It is all well and good for people like Lucy, whose primary concern in life is not missing a single sale at Club Monaco. I mean, for Lucy, the fact that they started selling Paul Mitchell products in our local drugstore was cause for jubilation the likes of which had not been seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  I, however, am a little more concerned about world issues, such as the fact that three hundred million children a day go to bed hungry and that school art programs are invariably the first things cut whenever local boards of education find they are working at a deficit.

  Which is why at the start of this school year, I dyed my entire wardrobe black to show that

  a) I was in mourning for our generation, who clearly do not care about anything except what’s going to happen on Friends next week, and

  b) fashion trends are for phonies like my sister.

  And yeah, my mom nearly blew a capillary or two when she saw what I’d done. But hey, at least she knows one of her daughters actually thinks about something other than French manicures.

  My mom, unlike Lucy, wasn’t about to give up on me, though. Which was why, there in the car, she put on a bright sunshiny smile, even though there was nothing to feel too sunshiny about, if you ask me. There was a pretty steady drizzle going on, and it was only about forty degrees outside. Not the kind of November day anyone—but especially someone completely lacking in school spirit, like me—would really want to spend sitting in some bleachers, watching a bunch of jocks chase a ball around, while girls in too-tight purple-and-white sweaters—like my sister—cheered them on.

  “You never know,” my mom said to Lucy from the front seat. “They might change their minds.” To us, she said, “What do you say, Sam? Catherine? Afterwards Dad is taking us to Chinatown for dim sum.” She glanced at me. “I’m sure we can find a burger or something for you, Sam.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Madison,” Catherine said. She didn’t look sorry at all. In fact, she looked downright happy to have an excuse not to go. Most school events are agony for Catherine, given the comments she regularly receives from the In Crowd about her Laura Ashley–esque wardrobe (“Where’d you park your chuck wagon?” etc.). “I have to be getting home. Sunday is the day of—”

  “—rest. Yes, I know.” My mom had heard this plenty of times before. Mr. Salazar, who is a diplomat at the Honduran embassy here in D.C., insists that Sundays are a day of rest and makes all his kids stay home that day every week. Catherine had only been let out for a half-hour reprieve in order to return The Patriot (which she has seen seventeen times) to Potomac Video. The trip to the National Cathedral had totally been on the sly. But Catherine figured since technically a visit to a church was involved, her parents wouldn’t get that mad if they found out about it.

  “Richard.” Rebecca, beside Lucy in the backseat, looked up from her laptop long enough to convey her deep displeasure with the situation. “Carol. Give it up.”

  “Dad,” my mom said, glaring at Rebecca. “Dad, not Richard. And it’s Mom, not Carol.”

  “Sorry,” Rebecca said. “But could we get a move on? I only have two hours on this battery pack, you know, and I have three spreadsheets due tomorrow.”

  Rebecca, who at eleven should be in the sixth grade, goes to Horizon, a special school in Bethesda for gifted kids, where she is taking college-level courses. It is a geek school, as is amply illustrated by the fact that the son of our current president, who is a geek if there ever was one—the son, I mean; but now that I think about it, his dad’s one, too, actually—is enrolled there. Horizon is so geeky, they do not even hand out grades, just term reports. Rebecca’s last term report said: “Rebecca, while reading at a college level, has yet to catch up to her peers in emotional maturity, and needs to work on her ‘people skills’ next semester.”

  But while her intellectual age might be forty, Rebecca acts about six and a half, which is why she’s lucky she doesn’t go to a school for regularly intelligent people, like Lucy and me: the Kris Parkses of the eleven-year-old set would eat her alive. Especially considering her lack of people skills.

  My mother sighed. She was always very popular in high school, like Lucy. She was, in fact, voted Miss School Spirit. My mom doesn’t understand where she went wrong with me. I think she blames my dad. My dad didn’t get voted anything in high school, because, like me, he spent most of his time while he was there fantasizing about being somewhere else.

  “Fine,” Mom said to me. “Stay home then. But don’t—”

  “—open the door to strangers,” I said. “I know.”

  As if anyone ever even came to our door except the Bread Lady. The Bread Lady is the wife of a French diplomat who lives down the street from us. We don’t know her name. We just call her the Bread Lady, because every three weeks or so she goes mental, I guess from missing her native country so much, and bakes about a hundred loaves of French bread, which she then sells from door to door in our neighborhood for fifty cents each. I am addicted to the Bread Lady’s baguettes. In fact, they are practically the only thing I will eat, besides hamburgers, as I dislike most fruits and all vegetables, as well as a wide variety of other food groups, such as fish and anything with garlic.

  The only person who ever comes to our door besides the Bread Lady is Jack. But we are not allowed to let Jack into the house when my parents or Theresa aren’t home. This is because of the time Jack shot out the windows of his dad’s Bethesda medical practice with his BB gun as a form of protest over Dr. Ryder’s prescribing medications that had been tested on animals. My parents positively refuse to see that Jack was forced to take this drastic action in order to get his father to pay attention to the fact that animals are being tortured. They seem to think he did it just for the fun of it, which is so obviously untrue. Jack never does things just for the fun of them. He is seriously trying to make this world a better place.

  Personally, I think
the real reason Mom and Dad don’t want Jack in the house when they aren’t home is that they don’t want him and Lucy making out. Which is a valid concern, but they could just say so, instead of hiding behind the BB gun defense. It is highly unlikely Jack is ever going to shoot out OUR windows. My mom is fully on the side of the good guys, seeing as how she’s an attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency.

  “Come on, you guys,” Lucy whined from the backseat. “I’m going to be late for the game.”

  “And no drawing celebrities,” my mom called as Dad pulled away, “until all your German homework is done!”

  Catherine and I watched them go, the sedan’s wheels scrunching on the dead leaves in the road.

  “I thought you weren’t allowed to draw celebrities anymore,” Catherine said as we turned the corner.

  Manet, spotting a squirrel across the street, dragged me to the curb, nearly giving me whiplash.

  “I can still draw celebrities,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over Manet’s hoarse barking. “I just can’t charge people for them.”

  “Oh.” Catherine considered this. Then she asked, in a pleading tone, “Then would you PLEASE draw Heath for me? Just once more? I promise I’ll never ask again.”

  “I guess,” I said with a sigh, as if it were this very big pain in the neck for me.

  Except of course it wasn’t. Because when you love something, you want to do it all the time, even if no one is paying you for it.

  At least that’s how I felt about drawing.

  Until I met Susan Boone.

  Top ten reasons I wish I were Gwen Stefani, lead singer of the best ska band of all time, No Doubt:

  10. Gwen can dye her hair whatever color she wants, even bright pink like she did for the Return of Saturn tour, and her parents don’t care, because they appreciate that she is an artist and must do these things as a form of creative expression. Mr. and Mrs. Stefani probably never threatened to cut off Gwen’s allowance the way my parents did that time I tried the thing with the Kool-Aid.

  9. If Gwen chose to wear black every single day, people would just accept it as a sign of her great genius and no one would make ninja comments, like they do about me.

  8. Gwen has her own place, and so her older siblings can’t come busting into her room whenever they want to, poking through her stuff and then telling their parents on her.

  7. Gwen gets to write songs about her ex-boyfriends and sing them in front of everyone. I have never even had a boyfriend, so how could I have an ex to write about?

  6. Free CDs.

  5. If she were getting a C-minus in German on account of using all her class time to write songs, I fully doubt Gwen’s mother would make her take a songwriting workshop twice a week. More likely, she’d let Gwen drop German and write songs full time.

  4. She has dozens of websites dedicated to her. When you put the words Samantha Madison in any search engine, nothing whatsoever about me comes up.

  3. All of the people who were mean to Gwen in high school are probably totally sorry about it now and try to suck up to her. But she can just be like, “Who are you again?” like Kris Parks was about me when I got back from Morocco.

  2. She can get any boy she wants. Well, maybe not ANY boy, but she could probably get the boy I want. Who, sadly, is my sister’s boyfriend. But whatever.

  And the number-one reason I wish I were Gwen Stefani:

  1. She doesn’t have to take art lessons with Susan Boone.

  3

  Theresa was the one who ended up driving me to the art studio after school the next day.

  Theresa is used to chauffeuring us around, though. She has been with our family since we got back from Morocco. She does everything my parents are too busy working to do: drive us places, clean the house, do the laundry, cook the meals, buy the groceries.

  Not, of course, that we don’t have to help out. For instance, I am completely in charge of Manet and everything to do with him, since I’m the one who wanted a dog so badly. Rebecca has to set the table, I clear it and put away the leftovers, while Lucy loads the dishwasher.

  It mostly works out—if Theresa is supervising. If Theresa’s gone home for the night, things generally get a little messy. One of her unofficial duties is exacting discipline in our family, since Mom and Dad, in the words of Horizon, Rebecca’s school, sometimes “fail to set appropriate limits” for us kids.

  On the way to Susan Boone’s that first day, Theresa was totally setting some limits. She was on to the fact that I had every intention of bolting the minute she drove away.

  “If you think, Miss Samantha,” she was saying as we crawled down Burrito Alley, which is what people are calling Dupont Circle since lately so many burrito and wrap places have popped up all along it, “that I am not going in with you, you have another think coming.”

  This is one of Theresa’s favorite expressions. I taught it to her. And it really is “another think coming,” not “thing.” It’s a Southern saying. I got it out of To Kill a Mockingbird. I have worked very hard to acclimatize Theresa to our culture, since when she first started working for us she had just arrived here from Ecuador and didn’t know squat about anything to do with America.

  Now she is so in touch with what’s hot and what’s not in the U.S. of A., MTV should hire her as a consultant.

  Also, she only calls me Miss Samantha when she is mad at me.

  “I know exactly what you are thinking, Miss Samantha,” Theresa said as we sat on Connecticut Avenue in a traffic jam caused, as usual, by the president’s motorcade. That is one of the problems about living in Washington, D.C. You can’t go anywhere without running into a motorcade. “I turn my back on you, and you run straight into the nearest Virgin Record Store, and that is the end of that.”

  I sighed like this had never occurred to me, though of course I had fully been planning on doing exactly that. But I feel like I have to. If I don’t attempt to thwart authority, how will I retain my integrity as an artist?

  “As if, Theresa,” is all I said, though.

  “Don’t you ‘as if Theresa’ me,” Theresa said. “I know you. Wearing that black all the time and playing that punk rock music—”

  “Ska,” I corrected her.

  “Whatever.” The last of the motorcade passed by, and we were free to move again. “Next thing I know, you will be dyeing that beautiful red hair of yours black.”

  I thought guiltily of the box of Midnight Whisper colorfast hair dye in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Had she seen it? Because in spite of what Theresa might think, having red hair is so not beautiful. Well, maybe if you have red hair like Lucy’s, which is the color they call titian, after the painter who invented it. But red hair like mine, which is the color—and consistency—of the copper wire they run through telephone poles? Not so lovely, let me tell you.

  “And at five thirty,” Theresa went on, “when I come to pick you up, I will be going into the building to find you. None of this meeting you at the curb.”

  Theresa really has the mom thing down. She has four kids of her own, all mostly grown, and three grandchildren, even though she’s only a year older than my mom. This is because, as she put it, her eldest son, Tito, is an idiot.

  It was because of Tito’s idiocy that you could not pull anything over on Theresa. She had seen it all before.

  When we finally got to the Susan Boone Art Studio, which was on the corner of R and Connecticut, right across from the Founding Church of Scientology, Theresa gave me a very dirty look. Not because of the Church of Scientology, but because of the record store Susan Boone’s studio was on top of. As if I’d had something to do with picking the place out!

  Although I have to say, Static, one of the few record stores in town that I’d actually never been to before, looked tempting—almost as tempting as Capitol Cookies, the bakery next door to it. You could even hear the strains of one of my favorite songs thumping through the walls as we walked toward the store (we had to go around the block once and park a m
illion miles away on Q Street; you could tell Theresa wasn’t going to be insisting on walking me to the door again after this). Static was playing Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains.” Which if you think about it really sums up my whole attitude about life, since the only time parents will actually let you stay inside and draw is when it is raining out. Otherwise it’s all, “Why can’t you go outside and ride your bike like a normal kid?”

  But Susan Boone must have had her place soundproofed, because when we finished climbing the narrow, whitewashed staircase to her second-floor studio, you couldn’t hear Garbage at all. Instead all you could hear was a radio, softly playing some classical music, and another sound I could not quite identify. The smell, as we climbed, was comfortingly familiar to me. No, it didn’t smell like cookies. It smelled like the art room back at school, of paint and turpentine.

  It wasn’t until we got to the door of the studio, and I pushed it open, that I realized what the other sound I’d been hearing was.

  “Hello Joe. Hello Joe. Hello Joe,” a big black crow, sitting on top of, and not inside, a large bamboo cage, squawked at us.

  Theresa screamed.

  “Joseph!” A small woman with the longest, whitest hair I had ever seen came out from behind an easel and yelled at the bird. “Mind your manners!”

  “Mind your manners,” the bird said as he hopped around the top of his cage. “Mind your manners, mind your manners, mind your manners.”

  “Jesu Cristo,” Theresa said, sinking onto a nearby paint-spattered bench. She was already out of breath from the steep staircase. The shock of being yelled at by a bird had not helped.

  “Sorry about that,” the woman with the long white hair said. “Please don’t mind Joseph. It takes him a while to get used to strangers.” She looked at me. “So. You must be Samantha. I’m Susan.”