And if she looked as vexed as she felt, the guy was going to be able to market them as shots of the President’s daughter having an ugly breakup quarrel with her new blond male companion.
“Did they do this to you in high school, too?” Jack asked.
Meg shook her head. “Sometimes, but not that often.” Partially because, before she turned eighteen, most of the press felt uncomfortable about invading the privacy of a minor—especially when it was against her parents’ express wishes, partially because Preston had had a gift for keeping the media in line, and partially, of course, because at that point, she hadn’t been considered nearly as newsworthy.
One exception having been when a very famous, and handsome, movie star showed up at one of her tennis matches a few days after she was introduced to him at a White House screening, and judging from the size of the media presence, his publicist had made dozens of calls to alert them about the “date” before it took place. The guy—for whom she felt sorry, because he was almost certainly very gay, and trying to use her as a way to stay in the closet—had sat in a chair on the sidelines, cheering her on with such a complete lack of discrimination that he actually clapped when she doubled-faulted at one point. It had gotten so chaotic that she had had to call Preston during one of the changeovers, and have him come over to bring things under control.
Even though it made her feel ill, she offered to forfeit the match to her opponent—a very tall serve-and-volleyer from Madeira, who was classy enough not to accept. A move she may have regretted when she ended up losing in straight sets.
“Well,” Jack said, once they were in front of the building where her next class was. He hefted the knapsack. “You, uh, want me to carry this up for you?”
Meg shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m fine. And you’re going to be late, as it is.”
He glanced at his watch, and nodded, then shrugged.
Okay. It was going to be another awkward parting.
She needed to change the tone here, somehow. “So,” she said, slinging the knapsack over her shoulder, balancing cautiously on her good leg. “Was it really massive?”
He grinned. “Extremely massive,” he said.
45
SHE GOT AN A- on her Shakespeare midterm, and sat there staring at the marked blue book, wondering why in the hell she kept falling short of full-fledged A’s—although maybe it was worth reminding herself that she had—well—only skimmed a couple of the less engaging plays.
And it helped, somewhat, when she was one of the people Dr. Heidler singled out for having written unusually good essay answers—in her case, a comparative analysis of King Lear and Julius Caesar.
Because the surgery had been only two weeks earlier, there wasn’t much she could do at physical therapy, although an orthopedist and a hand surgeon both examined her, asking questions and jotting down lengthy observations, and it seemed that an acupuncturist was now going to join the local team, too. Dr. Brooks was up and getting alternative on her.
Vicky worked with her good leg for a while, helping her do some strengthening exercises, and she and Cheryl talked—without making any significant progress—about whether there were any new adaptive strategies she could use to cut her own food, if she was caught someplace without assistive utensils.
She and her father had packed a small supply of White House Easter souvenirs into her duffel bag, which she gave out to all of the patients on the Pediatrics floor, even though it was a week early. There were painted wooden eggs with her parents’ facsimile signatures, pins, aprons, illustrated books, specially-designed M&M’s and marshmallow peeps, and a few small posters which had gotten pretty badly bent inside the bag. The gifts seemed to be a big hit, and even though the Red Sox game had already started—it was on in a couple of the rooms—she concentrated on giving each child her undivided attention, and not allowing herself even to wonder what the score might be.
Much.
When she got back to her room and flipped on the television, it turned out that they were losing, 4–0 in the bottom of the fifth, but—no matter. It was only a game. She did not worship the very ground they regularly spat on.
They, not atypically, erupted for five runs in the sixth, and then, four more in the seventh, to take a 9–4 lead—before the bullpen coughed it up in the top of the eighth, and they ended up losing 10–9.
Luckily, it really was just a game—a mere diversionary piece of entertainment; fluff, even—so she wasn’t furious that they had lost in such an idiotic and predictable way.
She also didn’t have to fight a string of profanities after the last out, or the urge to hurl her cap at the screen.
Once she had finished the latest assigned readings in her psychology book, she knew she should make herself go to the dining hall, but she decided to lie down for a while, first—and didn’t wake up for almost three hours. After making her way out to the bathroom to wash her face and try to shake off the urge to go right back to sleep, she propped her pillows up and slouched on the bed, knowing that she really ought to check her messages, or do some more studying, but turned on ESPN, instead.
As soon as she heard that the damned Yankees had won their opener, the percolating idea of going over to the Snack Bar and getting some takeout lost its already limited charms. But the clip they showed of the President throwing out the first pitch at the Washington game cheered her up somewhat. The ball was something of a dying quail, but it did reach home plate on the fly—to her mother’s barely disguised relief, and the catcher didn’t do a very good job of pretending not to be amused. Linda or someone had talked her into suiting up in a home team jacket—the better to hide the bulletproof vest the Secret Service would have insisted that she wear to protect herself from any possible loons in the crowd. She walked towards the plate to shake hands with the various players and officials gathered there, and said something which made almost all of them laugh. Then, one of the guys seemed to point at her chest, which Meg found rather offensive, until she realized that he must be commenting on the small Red Sox pin she could just barely make out on her mother’s collar. Steven must have convinced her to put it on, to make up for the fact that she would, ever so briefly, be disloyally wearing another team’s jacket.
It was just late enough so that she shouldn’t call home to discuss the baseball events of the day, and her father and Steven were still probably spitting nails about the Boston bullpen, anyway, so it might be better to let them cool off overnight.
She heard movement in the hall, and saw Mary Elizabeth. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Mary Elizabeth said, wearing a plain white scoop neck t-shirt and black capri pants. “Are you in the middle of anything?”
Meg shook her head, and clicked off the television.
Mary Elizabeth nodded, and shifted her weight, not coming all the way into the room.
Oh, Christ, now what? Since she’d been out for most of the afternoon, and hadn’t left her room since she got back, what were the odds that she could have done anything to bug her? “What’s up?” Meg asked.
“I don’t know if it’s any of my business, but—look, I was wondering,” Mary Elizabeth said. “Are you coming back next year?”
Sort of a menacing question. “I don’t know,” Meg said. “Why?”
Mary Elizabeth frowned. “You mean, you might not?”
She might not have a choice. “Well, something bad might happen,” Meg said, “and then I wouldn’t be able to.”
“Okay,” Mary Elizabeth said, “but something bad might not happen, too.”
One could only hope.
“The room draw forms are due tomorrow,” Mary Elizabeth said.
In order to be entered into the housing lottery for September. Now, the oblique approach made sense. Meg grinned. “What, you want to make sure you end up picking a room as far away from me as possible?”
Mary Elizabeth looked uncomfortable. “No, it’s not that. I just—well—” She stopped. “Look. Are you signing up with anyone?”
Hell, no. “No,” Meg said. “I mean, I guess I assumed people wouldn’t want—” That sounded self-pitying. “I hadn’t given it any thought. I just figured I’d—get put somewhere or other.”
Mary Elizabeth nodded, and turned to go. “Okay. Never mind. I was thinking you might want to sign up with us.”
What? Meg stared at her.
“Or not,” Mary Elizabeth said.
How very bizarre. “But, you don’t even like me, remember?” Meg said. “Run! While you still can.”
Mary Elizabeth’s face reddened. “Well, better the devil you know, and all of that.”
Ah, sweet flattery. Always a clever strategy.
“I mean, if you don’t want to, that’s fine. I just—I don’t know.” Mary Elizabeth scowled. “I mean, maybe you think it’d be bad publicity hanging out with me.”
Yeah, she—and her mother’s administration, for that matter—were so famously homophobic. “No,” Meg said. “I’m just afraid we might slug each other a lot.”
“We might,” Mary Elizabeth said, with a half-smile. “But, we could try for a suite, get a little more space that way.” She gestured towards the hall. “Juliana wants you to come in with us, too, but she’s not sure if—well, you know. She’s worried about the way things were going before we went on break.”
So, the third-floor Sage E soap opera was going to be the Morgan soap opera, or Bryant, or Mark Hopkins, or wherever in the hell they ended up. Jesslyn was out of the question, but— “Tammy hoping to sign on for another tour, too?” Meg asked.
“God, no,” Mary Elizabeth said. “She’s had it. I mean, I don’t want that to sound—” She frowned. “Well, yeah, I guess she’s mostly just had it.”
Meg grinned. Fair enough.
“We were thinking Debbie would maybe come in with us,” Mary Elizabeth said. “You know her pretty well, right?”
The jolly jock from the fourth floor. Meg motioned in the direction of the security room. “You sure she’d want to go through all of this again?”
“She’s really relaxed about things,” Mary Elizabeth said. “That’s why Juliana and I figured she’d be good.”
It was all sort of last-minute, and random—but, why not? Seemed like as good an idea as any.
She wasn’t stunned when Mary Elizabeth didn’t stick around to chat—or when Juliana stopped by about half an hour later, while she was sitting at her desk answering email. Among other things, Neal had written to tell her that their mother had been grouching around and wearing Steven’s shoulder ice-wrap all night, because between her practice sessions on the private pitching mound on the South Lawn, and then behind the scenes at the stadium before the game, she had thrown her arm out, and needed it to recover in time to repeat her nervous public chore at Camden Yards on Friday. The staff was, she assumed, dithering about the dreadful possibility of a President with rotator cuff or labrum damage, and fetching and carrying twice as much as usual.
Juliana leaned in the doorway, holding a can of Red Bull. “Heard you and Mary Elizabeth talked. You know, about the housing stuff.”
Meg nodded, sending a “Lunch tomorrow?” email to Jack before turning around.
“You cool with it?” Juliana asked.
“If you are,” Meg said.
Juliana nodded, only somewhat tentatively, so Meg nodded, too.
“You did already put in your time,” Meg said.
Juliana shrugged, and drank some Red Bull. “Glutton for punishment, I guess.”
It was nifty, the way they were all so overjoyed about this. “If we end up with two doubles, Mary Elizabeth and I aren’t the logical choice to be roommates,” Meg said.
Juliana shook her head.
“I’m not sure if she thinks so, too,” Meg said, “or—”
“Oh, she definitely thinks so,” Juliana said.
Okay. “So, what are we going to do about that?” Meg asked.
Juliana rolled her eyes. “What do you think we’re going to do about it? Come on already, Meg.”
“Me with Debbie,” Meg said, “right?”
Juliana laughed, and finished off her drink. “Yeah. That’ll be perfect.”
New email appeared in her in-box, and she glanced at the computer screen—it was from Jack—but didn’t open it. Then, to make sure that she wouldn’t succumb to rudeness and keep glancing at it, she got up and moved over to the bed, waving Juliana to the chair.
Juliana sat down, taking a quick look at the return email address. “Wow. You can actually bring yourself not to read that right away?”
Extraordinary self-discipline.
“Simon can’t stand him,” Juliana said.
Meg nodded. “I know. I feel terrible about all of that.”
“No, you weren’t going to be a good couple, anyway,” Juliana said. “You would have pounded him into dust.”
Not on purpose.
Juliana glanced at the computer. “He’s nicer than everyone says, right?”
Meg nodded.
“He’d almost have to be,” Juliana said.
So she gathered. But she was still too busy trying to figure out what she thought herself to be ready to talk about it to other people. “This room draw stuff is scary for me,” she said.
Juliana shrugged. “We’re going to get on each other’s nerves sometimes, but we’ll just try to be nice about it, when it happens.”
Ideally, yes, but that wasn’t what she meant. “No, I just—it feels like tempting fate, to make plans way in advance,” Meg said.
Juliana swung her feet—black leather boots—up onto the desk. “Susan never talks about the future. I mean, not even what she’s going to be doing this summer or anything. You ever notice that?”
Hmmm. She knew, for example, that Juliana was going to wait on tables, and then spend part of August at her family’s lake house, Mary Elizabeth was going to be a gofer at an academic press, Tammy would be working as a camp counselor, Andy was staying in Williamstown because he was going to be an apprentice at the Theater Festival, Quentin was going to be in Madrid, taking a Spanish language immersion course, Khalid had gotten an internship at a laboratory where he would be helping research new protein rescue and ion transport therapies in the treatment of cystic fibrosis, and Dirk was planning to hike the Long Trail with a couple of friends. And Susan was—what? Going to run several miles every day? Spend time at the dojo? Beyond that, she couldn’t even guess what her plans might be.
“And everyone’s always going and telling her personal stuff all day long, so she can get away with it,” Juliana said.
Well, that was true enough. “Maybe she only talks to people like Courtney, because she thinks we’re dumb freshmen,” Meg said.
“Maybe, but I don’t think so.” Then, Juliana grinned. “Even though she definitely thinks we’re dumb freshmen a lot of the time.”
Yeah. They probably were, at that.
“So.” Juliana looked over at her. “What are you going to do this summer?”
She had absolutely no idea.
* * *
SINCE SHE ALREADY knew the guy didn’t like her, she was dreading getting her political science paper back the next morning. After a somewhat curt “I hope all of you enjoyed your breaks” welcome, their professor walked around the room, handing out their papers and making general comments about the degree he had mostly been pleased, but thought some of them had done unnecessarily facile and superficial work.
Before he gave her hers, he frowned at her, but then moved on to the next person without saying anything.
Not a good sign. All around her, she could hear rustling, and see that he seemed to have made extensive markings in blue pen on more pages than not on people’s papers, and then written a lengthy final comment on the back of the last page. There were some small sighs, and a few smaller smiles, as they all reacted to whatever grades they had been given.
For some reason, her paper looked—untouched. Pristine. As though he hadn’t even bothered reading it. But, no, she could now se
e that he had corrected a small typo on the second page, so he had gotten that far, at least. It was disheartening, though, since he had apparently paid a great deal of attention to everyone else’s efforts.
The only thing written on the back of hers was a blunt “Please see me after class.” Other than that, there were no comments, no criticisms—and no grade.
Terrific. God, if he disliked her enough so that she was actually going to flunk this class, the press would probably go wild with excitement and run with it all over the place.
Jesus, maybe she should just drop the course. She could explain—or, if necessary, have her father do it for her—that she had too many physical challenges to be able to carry a full academic load, and—yeah, that might work. It would be a major failure, in its own way, but much better than—oh, Christ, she was getting another frown. She hadn’t been listening to a single thing the guy was saying, and now he would hold that against her, too.
When the class period was finally over, a couple of people bolted up to Dr. Richardson’s desk, and it looked as though one of them was whining about his grade, while the other one—the girl who was so very glad that the President wasn’t her mother—had apparently gotten an A, and was hoping to bask in further praise about her brilliance, and overall acumen, for a few minutes.
Meg was going to leave—after all, if she dropped the class, there wasn’t much else he could do to her—but, she made herself stay in her seat, pretending that something had gone wrong with her splint, and that she needed time to adjust and reposition the straps properly.
Another class met in this same room immediately following theirs, and people started filing in, including one of the guys she’d met at dinner with Jack, and they exchanged nods.
“If possible, I’d like you to come over to my office with me, Miss Powers,” Dr. Richardson said, standing in front of her desk. “I have some grave concerns I’d like to discuss with you.”
She was startled enough to jump, which she instantly regretted. But, screw him—and his stupid dark hair, and unfriendly eyes. “I’m afraid I have another appointment right now, sir,” she said. “I think I could stop by in about twenty minutes, if that would be convenient.”
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