Meg Cabot - All American Girl

So what I did was, when no one was looking, I flicked the tomatoes off my plate and into the cloth napkin I had on my lap.

This worked surprisingly well. So well that when the next course came, and it turned out to be New England clam chowder, I ate all the chowder parts, and then again when no one was looking, I dropped all the clammy bits into my napkin.

By the time dessert was served, there was about a pound of food in my napkin including one piece of flounder stuffed with crabmeat; a vegetable medley of peas, carrots and baby onions; some scalloped potatoes; and a piece of onion foccacia.

It was very easy to hide all this food without anyone seeing me do it because the adults were having a very boisterous conversation about the economic situation in North Africa. The only thing I absolutely could not get away with not eating was a tomato cut up to look like a rose, which was served as a garnish on the dish of scalloped potatoes, and which the First Lady scooped up and put on my plate.

“A rose for a rose,” she said, with a nice smile.

What could I do? I had to eat it. Everyone was looking at me. I choked it down as best I could in one swallow, then gulped down about half of my glass of iced tea, which was what the under-twenty-one crowd got to drink. When I put the glass down, I saw Rebecca, who had started watching me very intently the minute the First Lady put the tomato on my plate, do the strangest thing: she lifted up her hands and pretended like she was applauding. Sometimes she does cute things like that, which make me suspect she might not be a robot after all.

It was right about then I realized something horrible: my napkin was leaking. All the food in it hadn’t stained my skirt yet, but it was about to. I had no recourse but to excuse myself, pretending like I was going to the ladies room. Then I slyly took my napkin with me, just crumpled loosely in my hand, like I had forgotten it was there.

Everywhere you go in the White House, there are Secret Service agents standing around. They are actually very nice men and women. When I came out of the dining room, I asked one of them where the nearest bathroom was, and she walked me there. Once I was safely locked inside, I dumped my dinner out in the toilet and flushed it away. I felt kind of bad, wasting all that food when there are people starving, you know, in Appalachia and all.

But what else was I supposed to do? It would have been rude just to leave it there on my plate.

The problem with the napkin, which was soaked through with crabmeat juice, was easily solved by the fact that the bathroom, which was very fancy, had all these cloth hand towels laid out for guests to use, and a gilt basket to throw them in when you were done. I washed my hands and used a couple of the hand towels, then threw them into the basket over the napkin. Whoever emptied the basket would just think I forgot and threw a napkin in there.

I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing—except for the fact that, you know, I was practically starving, having nothing in my stomach except a little lettuce and a tomato garnish—when, on my way back to the dining room, I practically ran into David, who appeared to be headed towards the same bathroom I had just vacated.

“Oh,” he said, when he saw me. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said. Then—because it was weird, him being the President’s son, and all—I tried to sidle away as quickly as possible.

Only I wasn’t quick enough, since he gave me that little smile of his and went, “So. What’d you do with the napkin, anyway?”

I couldn’t believe it. Busted! I was so busted!

I felt myself blush all the way to my horse-conditioned roots.

Still, I tried. I tried to pretend like I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Napkin?” I asked, thinking that, with my red hair and scarlet face, I probably resembled a big bowl of strawberry ice cream. “What napkin?”

“The one you hid your entire meal in,” David said, looking amused. His eyes seemed greener than ever. “I hope you didn’t try to flush it. The pipes in this building are pretty old. You could cause a massive flood, you know.”

It would be just my luck to cause a flood in the White House.

“I didn’t flush the napkin,” I said quickly, with a nervous glance at the Secret Service agent standing not far away. “I put it in the basket with the dirty hand towels. I just flushed the food.” Then I had a panicky thought. “But there was a lot of it. Do you really think it could clog the pipes?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking serious. “That was one big piece of flounder.”

Something about his expression—maybe the way one of his dark eyebrows was up, while the other was down, kind of the way Manet’s ears look when he’s ready to play—made me realize that David was kidding around.

I didn’t think it was so funny, though. I’d really been scared that I’d maybe broken the White House.

“That,” I said, in a whisper, so the Secret Service agent down the hall wouldn’t hear me, “isn’t very nice.”

I didn’t even think about the fact that he was, you know, the First Son or anything. I mean, I was just mad. They say all this stuff about redheads being hot-tempered. If you are a redhead and you get mad, you can just bet that someone is going to say something like, “Oooh, look out for the redhead. You know they’ve all got tempers.”

Which usually just makes me madder than ever.

Of course, I had flushed most of the dinner David’s mom had served to me down the toilet. In fact, maybe that was why I was so mad . . . because David had caught me doing something so wasteful. Yeah, I was mad, but I was pretty embarrassed too.

But I was more mad. So I turned around and started back towards the dining room.

“Aw, come on,” David said with a laugh, turning around and falling into step with me. “You have to admit, it was kind of funny. I mean, I really had you going there. You totally thought the pipes were going to explode.”

“I did not,” I said, even though that was exactly what I had been thinking. Also about the headlines in the paper the next day: Girl Who Saved President’s Life Causes White House Plumbing to Blow By Stuffing Entire Dinner Down Toilet .

“Yeah, you did,” David said. He was so much taller than I was, he only had to take one step for every two of mine. “But I ought to have known you can’t take a joke.”

I stopped dead in my tracks and whirled around to look up at him. He was pretty tall—taller than Jack, even—so I had to tilt my chin way up to look into those green eyes that Lucy admired so much. I didn’t even want to look at that other part of him she’d commented on.

“What do you mean, I can’t take a joke?” I demanded. “How would you even know whether or not I can take a joke? You barely know me!”

“I know you’re the sensitive artist type,” David said, with that same know-it-all grin he’d given his mom (“I did change for dinner”).

“I am not,” I said hotly, even though of course I totally am. In fact, I don’t even know why I bothered denying it. It was just that the way he said it made it sound like something bad.

Except of course that there’s nothing wrong with being a sensitive artist. Jack Slater is a living testament to that.

“Oh, yeah?” David said. “Then how come you didn’t come back to the studio after the Pineapple Incident?”

That was exactly how he said it too. Like it was capitalized. The Pineapple Incident.

I could feel myself turning red all over again. I couldn’t believe he was bringing up what had happened my first day at Susan Boone’s. I mean, talk about insensitive.