Meg Cabot - All American Girl

“Saving you,” Lucy explained. “You ought to be thanking me.”

“Thanking you? For what? Permanently blinding me with Hawaiian ginger extract?”

“No, for attempting to transform you into something resembling a human being. Do you have any idea how humiliating it is for me to have people calling me—all night, they were calling me—going, ‘Hey, isn’t that your sister? What happened to her? Is she in some kind of cult?’”

When I opened my mouth to protest this unfair statement, Lucy just squeezed Aquafresh into it. While I choked, she went on, “Here, use this conditioner, it’s the kind groomers use on their horses right before a show.”

“I—” Soap still in my eyes, I couldn’t see Lucy, but I swung at her with my cast anyway, “—am not a horse!”

“I realize that,” Lucy said. “But you genuinely need this, Sam. Consider it an intervention ... an emergency beauty intervention.” Lucy reached into the shower and shoved me back under the spray. “Rinse and repeat, please.”

By the time Lucy was done with me, I’d been scrubbed, plucked, exfoliated and blow-dried within an inch of my life.

But I had to admit, I looked pretty good. I mean, I’d been kind of offended by the intervention comment. But under Lucy’s careful supervision—and detachable defuser—my hair soon lost its copper-wire stiffness and instead of sticking straight up from the top of my head was curling loosely to my shoulders. And though she didn’t quite manage to make my freckles disappear, Lucy did do something that made them not stand out so much.

I didn’t mind the Hawaiian root extract, the apricot scrub or the horse conditioner. I could handle the mascara and the foundation and the lip gloss.

But I fully drew the line when Lucy whipped, from her gym bag, a bright blue blouse and matching skirt.

“No way,” I said, as adamantly as I could, for someone who was wearing nothing but a hospital towel, and not even a very big one. “I will wear your lipstick. I will wear your eyeliner. But I am not wearing your clothes.”

“Sam, you don’t have any choice.” Lucy was already holding the blouse up. “All of your clothes are black. You can’t appear in front of middle America dressed all in black. People are going to think you’re a Satan worshipper. You are going to dress like a normal person for once in your life, and you are going to like it .”

On the words like it , Lucy jumped me. I would just like to point out that she had an unfair advantage over me because:

she is two inches taller and about ten pounds heavier than I am, and

she was not impaired by having one arm in a cast, and

she did not have to worry about clutching a towel around her, and

she has many, many years of reading Glamour magazine’s Do’s and Don’t’s section behind her, lending her style convictions superhuman strength.

Really. That is the only reason I gave in. That and the fact that Lucy had not brought any of my own clothes for me to wear, and the ones I had worn the day before had been taken away by the Secret Service for testing, since there was apparently gun residue on them from Mr. Uptown Girl’s shooting spree.

When I finally emerged from that bathroom, I was wearing my sister’s clothes, my sister’s makeup, and my sister’s hair products. I basically looked nothing like my usual self. Nothing at all.

But that was OK. Really, it was. Because I didn’t really feel like my usual self, either, on account of the no sleep and the people with the signs down on the street and all the Thank You Beary Much bears, but also thanks to the awapuhi and all.

So when I came out of that bathroom, I was already pretty weirded out. In fact, I didn’t think things could get much weirder than they already were.

And that was when my mom, who was standing there looking kind of nervous amidst all of the flowers and the balloons, went, “Um, Samantha. There’s someone here to see you,” and I turned around and there was the President of the United States.

Even though I have lived in Washington, DC, all my life—except for that year our family spent in Morocco—I have hardly ever seen the President of the United States—and there have been three of them since I was born—in person.

Oh, I have seen him driving past in motorcades, and of course I have seen him on TV. But except for the day before, at Capitol Cookies, I had never seen the President up close.

So seeing him then, standing in my hospital room with my mom and dad and Lucy and Rebecca and Theresa and the Secret Service agents and all the flowers and the balloons and stuff . . .

Well, it was pretty strange.

Plus, standing there beside him was his wife, the First Lady. I had never seen the First Lady in person before, either. I had seen her on TV and on the cover of Good Housekeeping magazine, touting her prize-winning brownies and all, but never in person. Up close, both the President and the First Lady looked bigger than they do on TV

Well, duh. Of course. But they also looked . . . I don’t know.

Sort of older, and more real. Like you could see wrinkles and stuff.

“So you’re the little lady who saved my life.”

That’s what he said. The President of the United States. Those were the first words the President said to me, in that deep voice I am forced to hear practically every night, when my parents make me change the channel from The Simpsons to the news.

And how did I reply? What did I say in response to the President of the United States?

I went, “Um.”

Behind me, I heard Lucy heave this satisfied sigh. That was because she was relieved she’d finished her beauty makeover on time. A few minutes earlier, and I might still have had bed head.

It apparently did not matter to Lucy that I sounded like an idiot. All she cared about was that I did not look like one.

“Well, I just had to stop by and ask if it was all right for me to shake the hand,” the President went on, in his big voice, “of the bravest girl in the world.”

Then he stuck out his big right hand.

I stared at that hand. Not because it was any different from anybody else’s hand. It wasn’t. Well, it was, of course, because it belonged to the President of the United States. But that wasn’t why I was staring at it. I was staring at it because I was thinking about what the President had said—about how I was the bravest girl in the world.

And interestingly, even though many of the notes my mother had read off the flowers and balloons and teddy bears had mentioned something along the same lines, this was the first time I actually thought about it. Me being brave, and all.

And the thing was, it simply wasn’t true. I hadn’t been brave. Being brave is when you have to do something because you know it is right, but at the same time, you are afraid to do it, because it might hurt or whatever. But you do it anyway. Like me defending Catherine from Kris Parks when she starts in on her about her Laura Ingalls Wilder dresses or whatever, knowing that Kris is just going to start in on me next. Now that’s brave.

What I did—jumping on to Mr. Uptown Girl’s back—hadn’t been brave, because I hadn’t really thought about the consequences. I had just done it. I saw the gun, I saw the President, I jumped. Just like that.

I wasn’t the bravest girl in the world. I was just a girl who’d happened to have the misfortune to be standing next to a guy who meant to assassinate the President. That’s all. I hadn’t done anything anyone else wouldn’t have done. Not at all.