Whatever. It didn’t really matter how they’d found out. The fact was, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, they were everywhere, these reporters. Outside our house. Outside Adams Prep. Outside the Bishop’s Garden, when I made the mistake of going to walk Manet there. Outside Potomac Video, for crying out loud, where they’d practically ambushed me and Rebecca the other day when we’d been returning her favourite movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And while I could fully appreciate that they had a deadline or whatever and needed a story, I could not for the life of me fathom why that story had to be about me. I mean, all I did was save the President. It’s not like I have anything to say.
“Excuse me,” Theresa yelled. She double-parked (it was unlikely the car was going to get towed with half a dozen cameramen draped over it) and, shielding me with her leopard-print raincoat, and using her elbows and purse as battering rams, ran with me to the studio door.
“Samantha,” the reporters yelled as we went barrelling through them. “How do you feel about the fact that Larry Wayne Rogers has been judged incompetent to stand trial due to mental illness?”
“Samantha,” someone else screamed. “What political party do your parents belong to?”
“Samantha,” another one called. “America wants to know: Coke or Pepsi?”
“Jesu Cristo” Theresa yelled at someone who made the mistake of tugging on her purse to keep us within microphone reach a little longer. “Hands off the bag! That’s Louis Vuitton, in case you didn’t notice!”
Then we burst into the bottom of the stairwell leading up to Susan Boone’s . . .
... practically running over David and John, who had apparently come in just seconds ahead of us, though I hadn’t noticed them in the crowd.
Theresa was so mad about someone having touched her purse, she couldn’t say anything except Spanish swearwords for a whole minute. John, David’s Secret Service agent, tried to calm her down by saying that he had called for police back-up and an officer was going to escort her back to her car. Also that the reporters would be held back by barricades when we came out again.
I looked at David, and noticed that he was smiling his secret little smile again. He had on a Blink 182 T-shirt under his brown suede jacket today, indicating that his musical taste was not, as I sometimes feared mine was, too restrictive. The shirt was black, which somehow seemed to bring out the green in his eyes more than ever. Either that, or it was just the lighting in the stairwell, or something.
“Hey,” David said to me, the secret smile getting a little wider.
I don’t know why, but something about that smile made my heart do this weird skittering thing.
But that, of course, was impossible. I mean, I don’t even like David. I like Jack.
Then for some reason I remembered Rebecca and her stupid frisson thing. Was that it? I wondered. Was it frisson when you saw a guy smile and it made your heart act all weird?
All I could say was, I was glad David didn’t go to Adams Prep and so hadn’t heard all the Lincoln Bedroom stuff that had been going around. I mean, it was bad enough I felt frisson for the guy. The last thing I needed was him knowing everyone in my entire school seemed to know it.
Just the thought that I could feel frisson for anyone but Jack put me in a really bad mood.
Or maybe it had been all the reporters. In any case, instead of saying hi or whatever to David, I went, “Doesn’t all that bother you?” I jerked my cast in the direction of the reporters. “I mean, that’s just scary, and you’re smiling.”
“You think the press is scary?” David asked. Now he wasn’t just smiling. He was laughing. “Aren’t you the girl who jumped on the back of a crazy man who was holding a gun?”
I blinked at him. Laughing, I couldn’t help noticing, David looked even better than when he was smiling.
But I quickly squelched any such notion and said, in a business-like way, “That wasn’t scary. It was just what I had to do. You’d have done it, if you’d been there.”
“I wonder,” David said, thoughtfully.
And then Theresa opened the door to go back out again, and all chance of having a conversation in the stairwell was lost in the shouts of the reporters. John kind of herded us up the stairs, and we went in and there were the benches, exactly as they’d been the last—and only—time I’d been there. The only real difference was that the fruit that had been on the table in the middle of the circle of benches was gone. Instead there was just this white egg sitting there. I thought maybe Susan Boone had forgotten part of her lunch, or something. Either that or Joseph was really Josephine and nobody had bothered to mention it to me.
“So,” David said, as we settled on to our benches and got our drawing pads all ready and stuff. “What’s it going to be today? Pineapple again? Or are you going to try for something a little more seasonal. . . squash, perhaps?”
“Would you shut up already,” I said, not loudly enough for anyone else to hear, “about the pineapple thing?” I couldn’t believe I had actually experienced frisson for a guy who did nothing but tease me.
“Oh, sorry,” David said, but he didn’t look very sorry. I mean, he was still smiling. “I forgot about you being a sensitive artist and all.”
“Just because I’m not willing,” I muttered, glaring at Susan Boone, who was over at the slop sink rinsing out some brushes, “to have my creative impulses stamped out by some art dictator doesn’t mean I am overly sensitive.”
Both of David’s eyebrows went up at the same time. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Susan Boone,” I said, sending a dirty look in the Elf Queen’s direction. “This whole draw-what-you-see thing. I mean, it’s bogus.”
“Bogus?” David had finally stopped smiling. Now he just looked confused. “How is it bogus?”
“Because where would the art world be,” I whispered, “if Picasso only drew what he saw?”
David blinked at me. “Picasso did only draw what he saw,” he said. “For years and years. It was only after he’d mastered the ability to draw whatever he was looking at with absolute precision that Picasso began experimenting with perceptions of line and space.”
I stared at him. “What?” I asked intelligently. I hadn’t understood a word he’d said.
David said, “Look, it’s simple. Before you can start trying to change the rules, you have to learn what the rules are. That’s what Susan is trying to teach us. She just wants you to learn to draw what you see first, before you move on to cubism, or pineapple-ism, or whatever-ism it is you choose eventually to espouse.”
It was my turn to blink. This was all news to me. Jack had certainly never said anything about getting to know the rules before trying to break them. And Jack knew all about breaking the rules. I mean, wasn’t that what he was always doing in order to show people—like his dad, and all those people at the country club, and Mr. Esposito, back at school—the error of their ways?
Then Susan Boone stepped away from the sink and clapped her hands.
“OK,” she said. “As I’m sure all of you know by now, there was some excitement last week after class—” This caused some laughter from Gertie and Lynn and the others. “—maybe a little more excitement for some of us than others—” Susan Boone smiled meaningfully at me. “But we’re all here now, and thankfully unscathed . . . well, for the most part. So let’s get back to work, shall we? See this egg?” Susan Boone pointed to the egg on the table in front of us. “Today I want you all to paint this egg. Those of you who are unaccustomed to paint may use coloured pencils or chalk.”