The sweetheart thing threw me. I didn’t want to come out and just ask him how long this was all going to take, since it might seem ungracious. He was only doing his job, after all. So instead, after a few seconds during which I desperately tried to think up something else to ask, I went, “Um. Is the President OK?”
The Secret Service agent smiled at me some more. “The President is just fine, honey,” he said. “Thanks to you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Great. So, um, do you think it would be OK for me to go soon?”
The paramedics exchanged glances. They looked amused.
“Not with that arm,” one of them said. “Your wrist is broken, kiddo. We’ll need an X-ray to see how badly, but ten to one you’re going to have a nice big cast for all your new fans to sign.”
Fans? What was he talking about?
And I couldn’t get a cast! If I got a cast, my parents would want to know how I’d broken my arm, and then I’d have to admit that I’d skipped class.
Unless . . . unless I lied and told them I tripped. Yeah, I tripped and fell down the stairs to Susan Boone’s studio. Except what if they asked her?
Oh, God. I was such dead meat.
“Couldn’t I . . .” I was really grasping at straws, but I was desperate. “Couldn’t I just go to my own doctor tomorrow, or something? I mean, my arm really feels much better.”
Both the paramedics and the Secret Service agent looked at me like I was insane. OK, yeah, my arm had swollen up to the size of my thigh, and was throbbing the way hearts do during open-heart surgeries on the Learning Channel. But it actually didn’t hurt that much. Except when I moved.
“It’s just that our housekeeper is coming to pick me up,” I explained, lamely. “And if you guys take me to the hospital, and I’m not where I said I’d be, she’ll freak out.”
The Secret Service guy said, “Why don’t you give me a phone number where I can reach your parents? Because for you to receive the medical attention you need, we’re going to need to contact them.”
Oh, God! Then they’ll know for sure I skipped class!
But, really. What choice did I have? Yeah, that’d be none.
“Listen,” I said, low and fast. “You don’t have to tell my parents about this. I mean, of course you have to tell them about this, but not about how I skipped my drawing class and was hanging out in Static. I mean, you don’t have to tell them that part, do you? Because I don’t want to get in any more trouble than I’m already in.”
The Secret Service dude blinked at me like he didn’t really know what I was talking about. Which of course he didn’t. How could he? Drawing class? Static?
But he apparently thought he’d just better just go along with me—as if maybe I’d hit my head, too, when I’d fallen down—since he went, “Why don’t we wait and see.”
Well, it was better than nothing, I guess. I gave him my mom’s and dad’s work numbers, then closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the side of the ambulance.
Oh, well, I thought. Things could have been worse.
For instance, I could have a chicken bone where my nose should be.
Top ten Pieces of Incontrovertible Proof that Stopping a Bullet from Entering the Skull of the President of the United States of America Changes Your Life:
10. The ambulance you are riding in gets a police escort all the way to the hospital. George Washington University Hospital, to be exact. The same hospital they took President Reagan to, when he got shot.
9. Instead of having to visit the triage nurse upon arrival at the emergency room, like everyone else, you are wheeled in right away, ahead of all the gang-bangers bleeding from knife wounds, women in labour, people with pencils wedged into their eye sockets, etc.
8. Everywhere you are sent inside George Washington University Hospital, men in black suits with ear thingies follow you.
7. When they give you a hospital gown to wear because your clothes are wet, and you refuse to put it on because the back is all cut out, they give you another one, so you can wear one that opens in the front and one that opens in the back, thus covering all of you. No one else in the entire hospital gets two gowns but you.
6. You get your own private room with armed guards at the door, even though all that is wrong with you is your wrist.
5. When the doctor comes in to examine you, he goes, “So you’re the girl who saved the President!”
4. When you say in abject mortification, “Well, not really,” the doctor goes, “That’s not what I hear. You’re a national hero!”
3. When he tells you that your wrist is broken in two places and that you will have to wear a cast from the elbow down for six weeks, instead of giving you a lollipop or whatever, he asks for your autograph.
2. While you are waiting for the cast guys to come and fix your arm, you switch on your private room’s TV and see that on every channel there is a Breaking News bulletin. Then Tom Brokaw comes on and says that an attempt has been made on the life of the President. Then he says that the attempt was thwarted by the heroic act of a single individual. Then they show the picture of you from your school ID.
The one where you were blinking just as the photographer took the picture.
The one where your hair was looking particularly bushy and out of control.
The one you have never showed to anyone for fear of being publicly mocked and ridiculed.
And the number one way you can tell your life is over:
1. You scream so loudly when you see your hideous school photo on national television that about thirty Secret Service agents burst into your room, pistols drawn, demanding to know if you’re all right.
I guess even then it didn’t really hit me.
I mean, I knew. You know, that I had jumped on Mr. Uptown Girl’s back and kept him from firing that gun in the direction he’d meant to.
But it didn’t hit me that in doing so, I had actually saved the life of the leader of the free world.
At least, it didn’t hit me until my parents came bursting into my hospital room a little while later, after they’d put the cast on (and after I’d seen my face all over the major networks, as well as CNN, Headline News, and even Entertainment Tonight), both of them freaked beyond belief.
“Samantha!” my mom cried, falling all over me and jostling my busted arm, for which, I might add, no one had so much as offered me an aspirin. You would think that a girl who saved the life of the President would rank some type of painkillers, but apparently not. “Oh my God, we were so worried!”
“Hi, Mom,” I said, all faintly—you know, the way you talk when you’re faking sick. Because I hadn’t figured out whether the Secret Service guys had ratted me out yet about skipping my drawing class, so I wasn’t sure how much trouble I was in. I figured if they thought I was in a lot of pain, they’d lay off.
But they didn’t seem to have a clue about my skipping out on Susan Boone.
“Samantha,” my mom kept saying, sinking down on to the edge of my bed and pushing my hair around on my forehead. “Are you all right? Is it just your arm? Does anything else hurt?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just my arm. I’m fine. Really.”
But I still said it all faint, and stuff, just in case.
I needn’t have bothered. They were both completely clueless about the whole drawing lessons thing. They were just glad I was all right. My dad was able to joke about it, a little.
“If you wanted more attention from us, Sam,” he said, “all you had to do was ask. Throwing yourself in the path of a speeding bullet really wasn’t necessary.”