She put the skull down on a little table. Then she went to go chastise Joe the crow, who had already successfully stolen a wad of my hair before I’d gotten a chance to don my daisy helmet.
I sat straddling my drawing bench, keeping my gaze carefully averted from the person sitting next to me. I had no idea whether David was happy or sad to see me, or if he simply didn’t care either way. I had not spoken to or seen him—except on TV—since the night of the Beaux Arts Trio and our argument about Jack. I had no idea if he’d seen my interview, or knew that I had, in fact, exercised my freedom of speech the way he’d suggested. Or that I’d basically admitted, right there in front of twenty million viewers, that I loved him.
I quizzed Rebecca about it at length, seeing as how she went to his school. But being eleven, Rebecca had no classes with David. She even had a different lunch period. She didn’t know if he’d seen it or not.
“Don’t worry,” Lucy kept saying. “He saw it.”
And Lucy, of course, would know. Lucy knew everything there was to know about boys. Hadn’t she gotten Jack back, as casually as she’d dumped him? One day they were broken up, and the next day they were sitting in the cafeteria together at school like they’d never been apart.
“Oh, hey, Sam,” Jack said, when I walked by their table, headed for my own. “Listen, sorry about that art show thing. I hope you aren’t, you know, sore at me, or anything. I was just kind of disappointed.”
“Um,” I said, totally confused. Where was Greg Gardner? But I think I covered pretty well by going, “No problem.”
And it wasn’t a problem. What did I care about Jack? I had way more important things to think about. Like David. How was I going to get David to believe that it was him I loved, not Jack? I mean, what if he hadn’t seen the interview? I couldn’t imagine how he could have missed it, since it had been the number-one-rated show for its time slot, and besides which had been extremely heavily advertised ever since Sunday, when I’d set the whole thing up.
Still, there was a chance he didn’t know. A chance I was going to have to tell him, to his face.
Which was somehow way worse than saying it in front of twenty million strangers.
And here I was, sitting right next to him, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. I mean, we’d smiled at one another when we’d come in, and David had been like, “Hey,” and I’d been like, “Hey,” back.
But that was it.
And as if fate hadn’t played enough cruel tricks on me lately, David was wearing a No Doubt T-shirt. My favourite band in the whole world, featuring Gwen Stefani, only the best singer in the entire universe, and the guy I had this huge colossal crush on was wearing one of their concert T-shirts.
Life can be so, so unfair.
And now my palms were sweating so badly I could barely hold on to my coloured pencils, and my heart was doing this weird Adrian Young drum solo inside my chest, and my mouth was all dry. Say something, I kept telling myself.
Only I couldn’t think of what to say.
And then it was time to draw, and the studio fell silent, except for the classical music on the radio, and everyone started working, and it was too late to say anything.
Or so I thought.
I was busy looking for the colours in the white cow skull in front of me, totally absorbed, as usual, in my drawing—because even being as hopelessly in love with David as I happened to be, I could still get caught up in my drawing . . .
... so caught up that when he happened to throw a little slip of paper into my lap, I jumped about a mile.
I looked down at the piece of paper. Then I looked over at him.
But he was bent over his own drawing. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the barely noticeable smile just tilting up the corners of his mouth, I wouldn’t have known the paper had come from him.
At least, until I opened it up.
There, written in the tiny, precise handwriting of a would-be architect, was the word:
I couldn’t believe it. David wanted to be friends. With me. Me. My heart pounding, I bent over and started to write,
But something stopped me. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if it was just that, because of everything that had happened, I had finally learned a thing or two, or if the invisible hand of my guardian angel, Miss Gwen Stefani, reached out and stopped me.
Whatever it was, I tore a new piece of paper off the edge of my drawing pad. And on it, I wrote, my heart in my throat but knowing—just knowing—it was now or never, and that I had to tell the truth:
Although I tried to pretend like I was thoroughly engrossed in my drawing, this time I really was watching David out of the corner of my eye. I watched him open the piece of paper I’d tossed to him, and I watched him read what I’d written. Then I watched his eyebrows go up.
Way up.
And when, a few seconds later, a new wad of paper showed up in my lap, I knew he’d tossed it there, because I’d seen him do that too.
Feeling like I couldn’t breathe, I opened the new note. On it, he’d written the words:
That was an easy one. In fact, it was practically a relief to write:
Because that was really how I felt.
Still, the last thing I expected was a note back from David saying how he really felt.
But that is exactly what I got.
And if I had ever been happy before—if there had ever been anything, anything at all that had ever made it feel as if joy was just bubbling up inside of me—that was nothing compared to how I felt when I opened the next folded slip of paper he threw into my lap, and saw that on it he had drawn a heart.
That was all. Just a tiny little heart.
For which there was only one explanation. I mean, really. And that was that David loved me. He loved me.
He loved me.
He loved me.
A week later, they had the award ceremony. The one where I got my presidential medal. You know, for valour and all of that.
I didn’t wear black. I didn’t even want to wear black. I didn’t care what I wore. When you are in love, that’s how it is. You don’t care about things like clothes, because all you can think about is the object of your affections.
Well, unless you’re Lucy.
But even though I didn’t care how I looked, my mom and Theresa and Lucy made sure I looked good. They put me in another suit—this one light blue—that later, after the awards ceremony, while we were all having cake in the Vermeil Room, David said matched my eyes.
Anyway, the award ceremony, as promised, was in front of the official White House Christmas tree in the Blue Room. It was way beautiful, with all the decorations and lights and everything.
It was also way serious. Everyone who was anyone was there, including all these colonels in fancy uniforms, and senators in suits, and my family and Theresa and Catherine and her family, and Candace Wu and Jack and Pete and Susan Boone, whom I’d invited especially.
The President made a speech about me. He made it in the capacity of my being the girl who’d saved his life, not my being a potential daughter-in-law, which I understood, of course. I mean, my dad said under no circumstances can I marry before the bonds he placed in my name when I was a baby mature, and that won’t be until I’m twenty-five.
Besides, I want to go to prom—oh, and have a career and all—before I can be a bride.
Anyway, the President’s speech made me feel way patriotic. It went, “Samantha Madison, I award you this medal for extreme bravery in the face of personal peril . . .” blah blah blah. Actually, it was kind of hard to pay attention, on account of David standing right there next to his dad, looking totally cute.