I looked sourly at his shirt. “Yeah, but they obviously don’t make you dress up.”
“Not for dinner. But I have to dress up all the rest of the time.”
I knew this wasn’t true, though. “You weren’t dressed up in drawing class.”
“Occasionally I get a reprieve,” he said, with another one of those grins. There was something kind of mysterious about those grins of David’s. Most of the time they seemed to be over some private joke he was having with himself. They made me kind of want to be let in on it. The joke, I mean. Whenever Jack thought of something funny, he just blurted it right out. Sometimes three or four times, just to be sure everyone heard it.
David seemed perfectly content to keep his witticisms to himself.
Which was kind of irritating. Because how was I supposed to know whether or not it was me he was laughing at?
Then David hit a button in a door, and an elevator slid open. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised there was an elevator in the White House, but I was. I guess because for a minute I forgot where I was, and thought I was just in a regular house. Also, they never showed the elevator on the school tours.
We got into the elevator, and David hit the down button. The door closed and we went down.
“So,” he said, as we rode. “Why’d you skip?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. Though of course I should have. “Skip what?”
“You know. Drawing class, after the Pineapple Incident.”
I swallowed hard.
“I thought you already had that all figured out,” I said. “You said it was on account of my being a sensitive artist, and all.”
The elevator door slid open, and David gestured for me to get out before following me. “Yeah, but I want to hear your version of why.”
Yeah, I bet he did.
But I was fully not going to give him the pleasure. He would only, I knew, make fun of me. Which would, in essence, be making fun of Jack. And that I would not stand for.
Instead I just went, lighly, “I don’t think Susan Boone and I exactly see eye-to-eye on the issue of creative licence.”
David looked at me, one eyebrow up and one down again. Only this time, I was pretty sure he wasn’t being playful.
“Really?” he said. “Are you sure? Because I think Susan’s pretty cool about that kind of thing.”
Yeah. Real cool. Cool enough to blackmail me into coming back to her class.
But I didn’t say this out loud. It seemed impolitic to argue with someone who might momentarily be supplying me with food.
We went down another hallway, this one not carpeted or very fancy. Then David opened another door and we were in a big kitchen.
“Hey, Carl,” David said, to a guy in a chef’s outfit who was busy putting whipped topping on a bunch of glasses of chocolate mousse. “Got anything good to eat around here?”
Carl looked up from his creations, took one glance at me and cried, “Samantha Madison! The girl who saved the world! How you doing?”
There were a lot of other people in the kitchen, all busily cleaning and putting things away. Theresa, I saw, had been wrong about the gold-rimmed plates. You could totally put them in the dishwasher, and in fact, the White House kitchen staff was doing so. But they all stopped when they saw me, and gathered around to thank me for keeping their boss from taking one in the head.
“What was the matter with the flounder?” Carl wanted to know, after congratulations had been issued to me from his staff. “That was real Maryland crab stuffed into it, you know. I bought it fresh this morning.”
David went over to the industrial-sized fridge and yanked it open. “I think it was just, too, you know.” For a guy who went to Horizon, David certainly didn’t talk much like a certified genius. “You got any more of those hamburgers we had for lunch?”
I brightened at the word hamburger. Carl saw this and went, “You want a burger? The lady wants a burger. Samantha Madison, I will make you a burger the likes of which you have never had in your life. You sit right there. Don’t move. This burger’s gonna knock your socks off.”
I was wearing pantyhose, not socks, of course, but I didn’t feel it was necessary to point this out. Instead I sat down on the stool Carl had indicated. David sat down on the one next to it and we watched as Carl, moving so fast he was almost a blur, threw two enormous hamburger patties on to a stovetop grill, and started cooking them for us.
It was weird to be in the kitchen of the White House. It was weird to be in the kitchen of the White House with the son of the President. It would have been weird to me to be with a boy anywhere, since I am not exactly popular with boys. I mean, I am not Lucy. I do not have boys calling me every five minutes ... or ever, for that matter.
But the fact that it was this boy, and this place, made it especially weird. I couldn’t figure out why David was being so ... well, I guess nice was the only word to describe it. I mean, teasing me about having potentially clogged a White House toilet hadn’t been so nice. But offering me a burger when I was practically starving had been pretty decent of him.
It had to be because I had saved his dad. I mean, why else? He was just grateful for what I had done. Which was fully understandable.
What wasn’t so understandable to me was why he was going so out of his way.
I became even more puzzled about this when, after Carl slid two plates in front of us—each of which contained a huge burger and a big pile of golden fries—and went, “Bon appéit, ya’ll,” David picked up both his plate and my own and said, “Come on.”
Taking hold of two cans of soda Carl passed to me from the big industrial fridge, I followed David back down the hallway to the elevator.
“Where are we going?” I asked curiously.
“You’ll see,” David said.
Ordinarily this would not have been enough of an answer for me. But I didn’t say anything more about it, because I was in too much shock on account of a boy being nice to me. The only boy who has ever been remotely nice to me in the past is Jack.
But Jack has to be nice to me, on account of my being his girlfriend’s sister. Also Jack is of course secretly yearning for me. It is even possible that the only reason he stays with Lucy is because he doesn’t know that I return his ardour. If I could ever get up the guts to tell him how I feel, everything could be completely different. . .
But David. David didn’t have to be nice to me. So why was he doing it? It couldn’t have been because he liked me, you know, as a girl. Because, um, hello, Lucy was right upstairs and down the hall. What guy in his right mind would rather be with me than with Lucy? I mean, that would be like choosing Skipper instead of Barbie.
When we came out of the elevator, instead of turning back towards the dining room where everyone else was, David turned in the other direction, towards this door at the opposite end of the hallway. Behind it, I soon saw, was a very formal living-roomy-type place, with big high windows that looked down the sloping lawn of the White House all the way to the Washington Monument, sticking all lit up into the night sky.
“How’s this?” David asked, putting the burgers down on a little table in front of the windows, then moving two big chairs close to the table.
“Um,” I said, because I was still in shock about—and plenty suspicious of—the fact that this cute, but somewhat weird, boy wanted to eat with me. Me, Samantha Madison. “Fine.”
We sat down, bathed in the outdoor lights from the Rotunda. It would have been almost romantic if there hadn’t been a Secret Service agent standing right outside the door. And oh, yeah, if David had been remotely interested in me in that way, which he definitely wasn’t, on account of the fact that to him I am just the strange Goth-type girl who saved his dad’s life, and who also likes to draw pineapples where there are none.