All American Girl

by Meg Cabot

  On the plus side, it was black. On the minus side, it was made out of velvet and was very scratchy and looked stupid with my now raggedy old cast. My mom tried to make a sling for me out of this big lace shawl of hers, but it kept coming untied, so finally I just left it on my chair.

  Plus I had to wear pantyhose. Black pantyhose, but still.

  You would think there’d be something a little exciting about attending a private concert at the White House, in the Vermeil Room, which is all gold, with the President and the First Lady, the Prime Minister of France and his wife, and some other important foreign supporters of the rights of children. You would think so, but you would be wrong. It was all extremely boring. The White House wait staff were walking around serving glasses of champagne—7-Up for those of us who weren’t yet twenty-one, of which I appeared to be the only one—and these gross hors d’oeuvres.

  I joked that the 7-Up was a particularly fine vintage, but nobody got it, everybody there being pretty much humourless . . .

  Except for David, of course. But I didn’t notice he was there until after I’d told my little joke. And when I did, of course—notice David, I mean—I practically spat a mouthful of 7-Up at the Ambassador to Sri Lanka.

  He—the ambassador—looked at me like I was crazy. But that was better than how David was looking at me, which was like I was something furry that had crawled across his salad plate. His mom, I saw, had made him dress up too. But since he had no stupid cast on one of his arms, David actually looked good. Really good. In fact, in his dark suit and tie, he looked hot.

  When I realized I was thinking this, however, I almost started choking again. David? Hot? Since when had I started thinking of David that way? I mean, sure, I’d always thought of him as cute. But hot?

  And then all of a sudden I felt hot—though whether it was because I’d realized I thought of David as hot, or because I was merely experiencing the consummate embarrassment a girl feels when she bumps into a guy she’d used to try to make another guy jealous—I couldn’t say. All I know is, my face turned about as red as my hair. I know because I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the gilt-framed mirrors on the wall.

  Was this, I wondered, part of the whole frisson package? Because if it was, I wanted nothing more to do with it. Rebecca could have her stupid frisson back. It sucked as much as the hors d’oeuvres.

  David, of course, was too mature, and too much of a gentleman, to snub me. He came up and said, with another one of those smiles that was just polite, nothing else, “Hi, Sam. How are you doing?”

  I had to choke back what I wanted to say—which was ‘Terrible, thanks. And you?“—and just give him the standard, ”Fine, thanks,“ since I didn’t think it would be too cool to get into the whole thing—you know, my apology—in front of all the celebrants for the International Festival of the Child.

  “How about you?” I asked. “We missed you on Tuesday at Susan’s.”

  David’s green eyes were cool. “Yeah,” he said. “Couldn’t be there. Prior commitment.”

  “Oh,” I said. Which wasn’t what I wanted to say at all. What I wanted to say was, David, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, all right? I mean, I know what I did was horrible. I know I’m a terrible person. But could you please, please, please forgive me?

  Only I couldn’t say that. For one thing, it would smack—just slightly—of grovelling. For another, David’s dad came up to the front of the room and asked us all to take our places as the concert was about to begin.

  So we all filed into the room where the concert was and sat down. I ended up sitting behind and sort of off to the side of David. So I had a pretty solid view of him through the whole thing. Well, of his left ear, mostly, but still.

  And I swear, I didn’t hear a note those famous musicians played. All I could think, as I stared at the back of David’s left ear, was: how am I going to make this right? It kind of surprised how much I wanted to. Make it right, I mean. But I did.

  After the concert, everyone went up and shook hands with the Beaux Arts Trio. The President introduced me to them as the girl who had saved his life and the US Teen Ambassador to the UN. The cellist raised my hand to his lips and kissed it. It was the first time any guy outside of my immediate family had ever kissed any part of my body. It felt weird. But that was probably only because he was so old.

  “And what,” the pianist wanted to know, “does the Teen Ambassador to the UN do?”

  The President told him about the From My Window contest. Then he added, with a laugh, “And she’s been giving Andy a run for the money.”

  Andy was the first name of Mr. White, the press secretary. And I had not been giving him a run for the money, that I knew of. In fact, I had surrendered all of my Superballs to him, and had even stopped begging to look at the perv letters.

  “Apparently,” the President said, in a jokey voice, “there’s some disagreement over which entry to the art contest best represents American interests.”

  This surprised me. I had not been aware before that David’s dad knew what was going on in the press office.

  “There’s no disagreement,” I said, even though the President hadn’t exactly been talking to me, and also, there most certainly was a disagreement. “Maria Sanchez’s painting is the best one. It’s my pick for winner.”

  I wasn’t, you know, trying to start an international incident or anything. I didn’t even really think about what I was doing. You know, arguing with the President of the United States. It—the thing about Maria Sanchez—just sort of came out before I stopped to think about it.

  The President said, “If Maria Sanchez is the artist of that painting with the illegal aliens, it is not the one going to New York.”

  Then he turned and said something in French to the Prime Minister, who laughed.

  And I forgot all about David looking like such a hottie in his suit. I forgot all about how I wanted to apologize to him, and how rotten I felt over the way I’d treated him. I forgot all about my uncomfortable dress and pantyhose. All I could think about was the fact that the President had given me this one thing to do—this teen ambassador thing—supposedly as a reward or something for saving his life . . .

  And I was happy to do it, even though, you know, I kind of was beginning to feel like I was being under-utilized. I mean, there were a lot more important issues out there for teens that I could have been bringing international attention to than what kids see out their window. I mean, instead of sitting in the White House press office for three hours after school every Wednesday, or attending International Celebration of the Child concerts, I could have been out there alerting the public to the fact that in some countries, including this one, it is still perfectly legal for men to take teen brides—even multiple teen brides! What was that all about?

  And what about countries like Sierra Leone, where teens and even younger kids routinely get their limbs chopped off as ‘warnings’ against messing with the warring gangs that run groups of diamond traffickers? And hello, what about all those kids in countries with unexploded land mines buried in the fields where they’d like to play soccer, but can’t because it’s too dangerous?

  And how about a problem a little closer to home? How about all these teenagers right here in America who are taking guns to school and blowing people away? Where are they getting these guns, and how come they think shooting people is a viable solution to their problems? And why isn’t anybody doing anything to alleviate some of the pressures that might lead someone to think bringing a gun to school is a good thing? How come nobody is teaching people like Kris Parks to be more tolerant of others, to stop torturing kids whose mothers make them wear long skirts to school?

  These are important problems that I, as US Teen Ambassador, should have been addressing. But what did they have me doing instead? Yeah, that’d be counting paintings.

  And you know, it was starting to occur to me that the whole teen ambassador thing had just been made up; a way for the President—who I was starting to think cared m
ore about his image than he did about the teens of this country—to look good. You know, giving a high-profile job to the girl who’d saved his life, and all.

  But I didn’t say all that. I should have. I totally should have.

  But I was conscious of all these people—the Beaux Arts Trio; the French Prime Minister; the Ambassador to Sri Lanka; not to mention David—standing there, listening. I couldn’t make a speech like that in front of all those people. I mean, I couldn’t even talk to the reporters who hounded me every day, and all they wanted to know was which I liked better, Coke or Pepsi.

  I had a lot of views about stuff—that was certainly true. What I did not have was a lot of confidence about expressing them to anyone but my family and friends.

  But there was one thing I knew I had to do. I had to get Maria’s painting into the From My Window show in New York. I had to.

  And so I put my hand on the President’s arm and said, “Excuse me, but that painting has to go to New York. It is the best painting. Maybe it doesn’t show America at its best, but it is the best painting. The most honest painting. It has to be entered in the show.”

  There was a kind of silence after I said this. I don’t think every single person in the room was looking at me. But it sure felt like it.

  The President said, looking very surprised, “Samantha, I’m sorry, but that isn’t going to happen. You’re going to have to pick another painting. How about the one with the lighthouse? That’s a good representation of what this country’s all about.”

  Then he started talking to the Prime Minister some more.

  I couldn’t believe it. I had just been dismissed. Just like that!

  Well, you know what they say about redheads. What happened next, I couldn’t stop. I heard myself saying the words, but it was like some other girl was saying them. Maybe Gwen Stefani was saying them, because I sure wasn’t.

  “If you didn’t want the job done right,” I said to the President, loudly enough so that it seemed to me that a lot of the waiting staff and most of the other guests, including the Beaux Arts Trio, turned to look at me, “then you shouldn’t have given it to me. Because I am not going to pick another painting. All the rest of the paintings are of what people know. That painting—Maria’s painting—is of what one person sees, every day, from her window. You may not like what Maria sees, but keeping everyone else from seeing it isn’t going to make it any less real, or make the problem go away.”

  The President looked down at me like I was mentally deranged. Maybe I was. I don’t know. All I know is, I was so mad, I was shaking. And I imagine my face was a very attractive shade of umber.

  “Are you personally acquainted with the artist, or something?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t know her,” I said. “But I know her painting is the best.”

  “In your opinion,” the President said.

  “Yes, in my opinion.”

  “Well, you’re just going to have to change your opinion. Because that painting is not going to represent this country in any international art show.”

  Then David’s dad turned his back on me and started talking to his other guests.

  I didn’t say anything more. What could I say that I hadn’t said already? Besides, I had been dismissed.

  David, who had come up behind me without my noticing, went, “Sam.”

  I looked up at him. I had forgotten all about David.

  “Come on,” he said.

  I guess if I hadn’t already been so shocked about what had happened—between me and the President, I mean—I might have been more shocked that David was actually speaking to me. Speaking to me, and apparently trying, at least, to make me feel better about what had just happened. At least that’s what I had to conclude when he led me out of the Vermeil Room and back into the room where we’d sat that very first night I’d come to dinner, where he’d carved my name into the window sill.

  “Sam,” he said. “It’s not that big a deal. I mean, I know it is to you. But it’s not, you know, life and death.”

  Right. It wasn’t Sierra Leone or Utah. Nobody was getting their hands chopped off or being forced to marry, at the age of fourteen, a guy who already had three wives.

  “I realize that,” I said. “But it’s still wrong.”

  “Probably,” David said. “But you have to understand. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t necessarily know about that they have to consider.”

  “Like what?” I wanted to know. “My choosing that painting is going to compromise national security? I don’t think so.”

  David was taking off his tie like it had been bothering him.

  “Maybe they just want a happy painting,” he said. “You know, one that shows the US in a positive light.”

  “That’s not what the contest is about,” I said. “It’s supposed to show what a representative of each country sees from his or her window. The rules don’t say anything about what the person sees having to reflect positively on his or her country. I mean, I could see someone in China or something not being allowed to show a negative aspect of his nation, but this is America, for crying out loud. I thought we were guaranteed freedom of speech.”

  David sat down on the arm of my chair. He said, “We are.”

  “Right,” I said, very sarcastically. “All except the Teen Ambassador to the UN.”

  “You have freedom of speech,” David said. He said it with a funny sort of emphasis, but at the time I was too upset to realize what he meant.

  “Do you think you could talk to him, David?” I asked, looking up at him. Once again, he hadn’t turned on any lights in the room. The only light there was to see by spilled in from the windows, the bluish light coming in from the Rotunda. In its glow, David’s green eyes were hard to read. Still, I plunged on. “Your dad, I mean. He might listen to you.”

  But David said, “Sam, I hate to disappoint you, but the one thing I make it a point never to discuss with my dad is politics.”

  Even though David said he hated to disappoint me, that’s exactly what he ended up doing. Disappointing me, I mean.

  “But it’s not fair!” I cried. “I mean, that painting is the best one! It deserves to be in the show! Just try, David, OK? Promise me you’ll try to talk to him. You’re his kid. He’ll listen to you.”

  “He won’t,” David said. “Believe me.”

  “Of course he won’t, if you don’t even try.”

  But David wouldn’t say he’d try. It was like he didn’t even want to get involved. Which only made me more peeved. Because he was acting like it didn’t matter. He obviously didn’t understand how important it was. I thought he would, being an artist, and all. But he didn’t. He really didn’t.

  I was so frustrated that I couldn’t help blurting out, “Jack would try.”

  And even though I’d been saying it mostly to myself, David overheard.

  “Oh, sure,” he said, in a mean way. “Jack’s perfect.”

  “At least Jack is willing to take a stand,” I said, hotly. “You know, Jack shot out the windows of his own father’s medical practice with a BB gun in protest of Dr Slater using medications that had been tested on animals.”

  David looked unimpressed. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, that was a pretty stupid thing to do.”

  I couldn’t understand how David could say such a thing. How he could even think such a thing.

  “Oh, right,” I said, with a bitter laugh. “Pretty stupid of him to take a stand against cruelty to animals.”

  “No,” David said coolly. “Pretty stupid of him to protest against something that saves lives. If scientists don’t test medications on animals, Sam, before they use them on humans, they might make people sicker, or even kill them. Is that what Jack wants?”

  I blinked at him. I hadn’t actually thought of it that way before.

  “But hey,” David went on, with a shrug. “Jack’s a—what was it you called him? Oh, yeah. A radical. Maybe that’s what the radicals of today are rebelling against. Making sick pe
ople better. I wouldn’t know. I’m obviously too lacking in moral rectitude.”

  And then David, like he couldn’t stand to be around me a second longer—like I was one of those gross hors d’oeuvres—turned around and left me sitting there. In the dark. Like the blind person Rebecca had accused me of being.

  And the really sad part was, I was beginning to think she might be right. Because despite what Susan Boone had said, I had a feeling I wasn’t seeing anything. Anything at all.

  When I got home from the White House that night, I was shocked to find Lucy in the living room, thumbing through a copy of Elle.

  “What are you doing here?” I blurted out, before I was able to restrain myself. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t seen Lucy home on a Saturday night since her twelfth birthday. “Where’s Jack?”

  Had they, I thought, broken up at last? Had seeing me with another guy at Kris Parks’s party finally made Jack realize his true feelings for me?

  But the bigger question was, if it had, why didn’t I feel happier about it? I mean, why would it actually make me feel sick to my stomach? Unless that was the result of that one hors d’oeuvres I accidentally scarfed before I realized how gross they were . . .

  “Oh, Jack’s in the TV room,” Lucy said in a bored voice. She was, I saw, doing her numerology chart. “He has to read some book for English class . . . Wuthering Heights. The report’s due Monday, but of course he never read it. And they told him if he flunks English, they won’t let him graduate in May.”

  I took off my coat and the lace sling and flopped on to the couch beside her. “So he’s reading it now? At our house?”

  “God, no,” Lucy said. “It’s on TV He’s upstairs watching it. I tried, and even though it’s got Ralph Fiennes, I just couldn’t take it. What do you think of this skirt?” She flipped to a page in the centre of the magazine.

  “It’s nice, I guess.” My mind seemed to be working at a very sluggish pace, even though all I’d had to drink at the International Festival of the Child was 7-Up. “Where’re Mom and Dad?”