“Oh, ha, ha, ha,” I laughed, like a dork. “I don’t know. It must be something she picked up at school.”
David frowned a little. “I go to the same school she does, and I never heard of it before.”
To distract him, in case he was thinking of going home after the party tonight and looking the word up, I squealed over his car. Although I had not taken Lucy’s advice on my ensemble—I was wearing my own clothes, a black skirt that went all the way down to my daisy-dotted boots, coupled with a sweater that, though V-neck, was also black—I did remember a few of her pointers, one of which had been, “Make a big deal out of his car. Guys totally have this thing about their cars.”
Except I am not sure it applies to all guys, because after I’d squealed about how much I liked his black four-door sedan, David looked at it kind of dubiously.
“Um. It’s not mine,” he said. “It belongs to the Secret Service.”
“Oh,” I said. Then I noticed that John from our art class was standing next to it. Also that an almost identical car was parked behind it, with two other Secret Service agents in it.
I said, feeling like some sort of explanation was necessary, “My sister told me guys like it when you get excited about their car.”
“Really?” David didn’t sound very surprised. “Well, she looks like someone who would know.”
It was at that moment that a reporter neither of us had noticed before jumped out from behind the bushes and went, “Samantha! David! Over here!” and snapped a few thousand photos.
I couldn’t really see what happened next, since all the flashes blinded me for a few seconds, but I heard a firm voice go, “I’ll take that,” and then a grunt and a smashing sound and the flashes were gone.
When I could see again, I realized that the firm voice belonged to a Secret Service agent—not John, another one—who was climbing back into the car parked behind David’s. The reporter was standing a few feet away on the sidewalk, looking chagrined, his camera in several different pieces in his hands. He was muttering something about freedom of the press . . . but not loudly enough for the Secret Service agent to overhear.
John opened one of the back doors to the sedan and said, looking apologetic, “Sorry about that.”
I climbed into the backseat without saying anything because what was there, really, to say?
David got in on the other side and shut the door. The inside of the Secret Service’s car was very clean. It smelled new. I hate new car smell. I thought about rolling down the window, but it was pretty cold out.
Then John slid behind the wheel and said, “We all set?”
David said, “I’m all set.” He looked at me. “You all set?”
“Um,” I said. “Yes.”
“We’re all set,” David said, to which John replied, “All right, then,” and we started to move. I kept my face averted from the window, since I noticed that my parents had come out on to the front porch and were standing there, waving to us. A reporter who hadn’t gotten his camera smashed took a picture of that, since taking pictures of David and me was so obviously verboten. I hoped my mom and dad would enjoy seeing a big colour photograph of themselves in tomorrow morning’s USA Today or whatever.
Inside the car, it was very quiet. Too quiet. There are only three things it’s OK to talk to guys about, Lucy had instructed me, earlier in the day, though I had not, actually, consulted her about this. Those things are:
1) him
2) you and him
3) yourself
Start by talking about him. Then slowly introduce the topic of you and him. Then swing the conversation around to yourself. And keep it there.
But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to say any of the things Lucy had advised me to say. I mean, the first thing, about complimenting his car, hadn’t really gone over all that well. I realized that, in going out with the President’s son, I was crossing into uncharted territory, the kind even Lucy had never before encountered. I was on my own here. It was a little scary, but I figured I could handle it.
I mean, it wasn’t as if he were Jack.
“Um,” I said, as John pulled on to 34th Street. “Sorry about my parents.”
“Oh,” David said, with a laugh. “No problem. So where to? What do you feel like eating?”
Since I only ever feel like eating one thing—hamburgers—I was not certain how to answer this question. Fortunately, David went on, “I made reservations at a couple of places. There’s Vidalia. It’s supposed to be pretty nice. And the Four Seasons. I didn’t know if you’d ever been there. Or there’s Kinkead’s, though I know how you feel about fish.”
I listened to this in growing panic. Reservations? He’d made reservations‘? I hardly ever found anything I liked to eat in restaurants that required reservations.
I don’t know if David was able to read the trepidation in my face, or if it was my silence that was more telling. In any case, he went, “Or we could blow the reservations off and get a pizza, or something. There’s some place I hear a lot of people go to—Luigi’s or something?”
Luigi’s was where Lucy and her crowd would be going before Kris’s party. While I knew we were going to see all of them in a few hours anyway, I didn’t think I could handle sitting at a table in front of all of them with David, knowing the whole time that we were all anyone in the restaurant was talking about. I doubted I’d be able to keep anything down. Besides, Jack would be there. How would I be able to pay attention to a thing David was saying when Jack was anywhere in the nearby vicinity?
“. . . or,” David said, with another glance at my face, “we could just grab a burger somewhere—”
“That sounds good,” I said, hoping I sounded appropriately nonchalant.
He gave one of those little secretive smiles. “Burgers it is, then,” he said. “John, make it Jake’s. And could we have a little music, please?”
John said, “Sure thing,” and hit a button in the dashboard.
And then Gwen Stefani’s voice filled the car.
No Doubt. David was a No Doubt fan.
I should have known, of course. I mean, anybody who likes Reel Big Fish has to like No Doubt. It’s like a law.
Still, it freaked me out when I realized David had Gwen in the car stereo. Because you know if I had a car, that’s who would be in my stereo too. Gwen, I mean.
And the weirdest part was, my heart did that thing again. Really. That flippy thing, as soon as I heard Gwen’s voice. Only not because, you know, of Gwen. No, it was because I realized then that David liked Gwen. Was that what Rebecca had been talking about? Was that frisson?
But how could I feel frisson for one person when my heart belonged to someone else? It didn’t make any sense. I mean, the only reason I had asked David out in the first place was to make Catherine happy. And maybe to make Jack jealous. I mean, I was completely and irrevocably in love with my sister’s boyfriend, who would one day realize that I, and not Lucy, am the girl for him.
So what was with the frisson already?
Figuring if I ignored it, maybe it would go away, I commenced doing so. And you know what? For a while, I thought it did. I mean, not that we didn’t have a good time, or anything. Jake’s, the place we went for dinner, was totally my kind of joint ... a dive in Foggy Bottom, with sticky tabletops and dim lighting. Nobody there paid the slightest bit of attention to the fact that I was the girl who saved the President, and that David was his son. In fact, I don’t think anybody looked at us at all, except the waitress, and of course John and the other Secret Service agents, who sat at a table a little ways from ours.