“Death Storm,” Catherine corrected me, her dark eyes bright. “And I wouldn’t have asked him at all, Sam, if I’d known you really weren’t going.”
“I said I wasn’t going. Remember? And hello, my mom and dad totally put the kibosh on it. Lucy’s not even allowed to go.”
“Yes,” Catherine said. “But she’s going to go anyway. You know she is. She’s just going to tell them she’s going somewhere else.”
“Duh,” I said. “But that doesn’t make it right. Besides, I am still on thin ice because of the whole C-minus in German thing. I mean, saving the President’s life kind of helped, but don’t think they aren’t still totally on my case—”
“Sam,” Catherine interrupted, her voice sounding kind of funny, like it was clogged. “Don’t you get it? Because of what you did—saving the President like that—everything can be different for us.” She looked around to make sure no one was listening, then took a step closer to me and said in a low, urgent voice, “We don’t have to be rejects any more. We have a chance to hang out with Lucy’s friends. We finally have a chance to see what it would be like to be Lucy. Don’t you want that, Sam? Don’t you want to know what it’s like to be Lucy?”
I looked at her like she was nuts.
“Cath, I know what it’s like to be Lucy,” I said. “It’s about doing backflips in the rain at football games and lying to your parents and separating your eyelashes with a safety pin.” Having gotten the notebooks I needed and put away my coat, I slammed my locker door shut. “I am sorry, but I have way better things to do than that.”
“Yeah,” Catherine said, her dark eyes so bright, I realized at last, because they were filled with tears. “Right. That’s fine for you, Sam. But what about me? I mean, Kris Parks has never taken the time to find out what the girl inside these stupid clothes is actually like.” Catherine fingered her prairie skirt. “Well, now is my chance, Sam. My chance to show them all that there is a person in here. This is the one time when they actually might listen. All I’m asking is that you let me have it.”
I stared at her. The bell had rung, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. “Catherine,” I said, shocked more by what she’d said than by the tears that accompanied it. “Are you ... I mean, do you really care what they think?”
She reached up to wipe her wet cheeks with a lace-trimmed sleeve. “Yes,” she said. “OK? Yes, Sam. I’m not like you. I’m not brave. I care what people say about me. All right? I care. And all I’m asking is that you give me this one chance to—”
“OK,” I said.
Catherine blinked up at me tearfully. “Wh-what?”
“OK.” I wasn’t happy about it, but what could I do? She was my best friend. “OK, I’ll go. All right? If it means that much to you, I’ll go.”
A slow smile spread across Catherine’s face. Her brown eyes were warm again.
“Really?” She gave a little hop. “Really, Sam? You mean it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “OK? I mean it.”
“Oh!” Catherine flung both her arms around my neck and gave me a joyful squeeze. Then she pulled away and said, “You won’t regret it! You will have a great time, I promise! I mean, Jack will be there!”
Then she ran down the hallway, since she was late for Bio.
I should have run, too, since I was late for Deutsch class. But instead I just stood there, wondering what I had just gotten myself into.
I was still wondering, all the way up until I walked into Susan Boone’s later that day, got to my drawing bench and saw what was sitting on it.
That’s because sitting on my bench was an Army helmet, dotted with White-Out daisies.
“Like it?” David wanted to know. He was grinning again. And for the second time in two days, the sight of that grin did something to me. It seemed to make my heart flip over in my chest. Frisson?
Or the burrito I’d had for lunch?
“I figured it was exactly what a girl like you needed,” David said. “You know, as long as you were continually getting assaulted by crows and armed assassins.”
It couldn’t be heartburn. It was too much of a coincidence that my heart had done that weird flippy thing at the exact moment David had smiled at me. Something else was going on. Something I did not like at all.
Trying to ignore my staggering heart, I put the helmet on. It was way too big for me, but that was OK, as I had a lot of hair to cover.
“Thanks,” I said, peering out from beneath the brim. I was touched—really touched—that he’d gone to the trouble. It was almost as cool as having my name carved into a White House window sill. “It’s perfect!”
It was perfect too. Later that day, when Joe hopped on to my shoulder, interrupting my drawing—which was of a shoulder of raw beef Susan Boone had brought from the butcher’s shop, telling us that after having found colour in a white egg on Tuesday, our challenge today was to draw something that had every colour in the rainbow in it but still retained its context as a whole—I didn’t mind, because this time Joe didn’t hurt me. In fact, he just sat there, looking kind of puzzled, pecking occasionally at the helmet and letting out little interrogative whistles.
Everybody laughed. I couldn’t help noticing that when David laughed, he looked even cuter than when he was smiling. He looked like the kind of guy who didn’t let stuff bug him. He looked like the kind of guy who could put up with a hundred Kris Parkses.
Which is the only explanation I can give for how it was that I found myself leaning over to him right before we all got up to put our drawings on the window sill for critique, and going softly—so softly I was worried he might not be able to hear me over the sudden pounding of my heart—“Hey, David. Do you want to go with me to this party on Saturday night?”
He looked surprised. For one pulse-stopping moment I thought he might say no.
But he didn’t. He smiled and said, “Sure. Why not?”
Top ten Reasons I Might Have Asked David to Kris Parks’s Party on Saturday Night:
10. Complete and utter lunacy brought on by inhaling too much turpentine.
9. Out of a sense of solidarity with Catherine, who seems to have developed a bad case of Stockholm syndrome, as she appears to have a desire to bond with the very same people who for so many years tormented her mercilessly—so much so that she is willing to risk the wrath of her parents by sneaking out to attend a party given by the ringleader of this group, with a boy she hardly knows.
8. His eyes.
7. How nice he had been that night at the White House, telling me about Dolly Madison. Plus getting me that burger. Oh, and carving my name on the window sill.
6. How nice he’d looked that night at the White House, with his kind of messy thick hair and long eyelashes and big hands.
5. He can draw. He really can. Not as well as Jack, but almost as well as me. Maybe even better than me, only in a different style. Plus you can tell he really likes to draw, that he feels the same way about it that Jack and I do, that it sucks him in the way it does us. Most people—like my sister Lucy, for instance—never get that feeling about anything.
4. The daisy helmet.
3. Because he has to go everywhere with the Secret Service, that means there will be adults in attendance and so my parents will have to let us go.
2. Everybody already thinks we are going out anyway.
AndAnd the number one—and most likely—reason I asked David to Kris’s party:
1. To make Jack jealous, of course. Because it is entirely possible that if he sees me with another boy, he will realize that he could, if he does not act soon, lose me, and that might galvanize him into admitting his true feelings for me at last.