Meg Cabot - All American Girl

But unlike all the rest of those times, today everyone standing around us was staring at me and speaking in reverently hushed tones. One particularly shy freshman girl had come up and asked if it would be all right for her to touch my cast.

Oh, yeah. Nothing like being a national hero.

I was trying to downplay the whole thing. Really, I was. For instance, in direct defiance of Lucy’s orders, I had not risen an hour earlier for school in order to apply horse conditioner to my hair. I had not donned any of my new slacks from Banana Republic. I had on my normal, everyday, midnight-black clothes, and my hair was its normal, everyday, out-of-control mess.

Still, everyone was treating me differently. Even the teachers, who made jokes like, “For those of you who weren’t dining at the White House last night, did you happen to see the excellent documentary on Yemen on PBS?” and “Please open your textbooks to page two hundred and sixty-five—those of you who did not break your arm saving the life of the President, that is.”

Even the cafeteria workers were in on it. As I stepped up with my tray, Mrs. Krebbetts gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, “Here, honey,” then slipped me an extra piece of peanut-butter pie.

In the history of John Adams Preparatory School Mrs. Krebbetts has never slipped anyone an extra piece of peanut-butter pie. Everyone is scared of Mrs. Krebbetts, and with good reason: aggravate her, and she might deny you pie for a year.

And here she was, giving me extra pie. The world as I had once known it came crashing to an end.

“I mean, you must do something .” Catherine, having recovered from the pie incident, followed me to the table we traditionally shared with a number of girls who, like Catherine and I, were on the outer fringes of popularity—like the frozen tundra of the social geography of Adams Prep. Too anti-establishment to join the student council and not athletic enough to be jocks, most of us either played instruments or were in the drama club. I was the only artist. We were all just trying to get through high school so we could hurry up and get to college, where, we’d heard, things were better.

“I mean, teen ambassador to the UN. What are you in charge of? Is there a committee, at least?” Catherine wouldn’t let it go. “On world teen issues, or something?”

“I don’t know, Catherine,” I said, as we sat down. “The President just said he was appointing me as representative from the US. I assume there are representatives from other countries. Otherwise, what would be the point? Does anybody want an extra piece of pie?”

No one responded. That’s because everyone at the table was staring, but not at the pie. Instead, they were all staring at Lucy and Jack, who had suddenly plunked their trays down at our table.

“Hey,” Lucy said, breezily, as if she sat down at the unpopular girls’ table every day of the week. “What’s up?”

“How’d you get that extra piece of pie?” Jack wanted to know.

The thing of it was, Lucy and Jack weren’t the only ones from, you know, the other side of the caf who sat down at our table. To my astonishment, they were joined by about half the football team and a bunch of other cheerleaders too. I could see that Catherine was completely unnerved by this invasion. It was as if a bunch of swans had suddenly taken over the duck pond. All of us mallards weren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves in the face of so much beauty.

“What are you doing?” I whispered to Lucy.

Lucy just shrugged as she sipped her Diet Coke. “Since you won’t come to us,” she said, “we came to you.”

“Hey, Sam,” Jack said, whipping a pen out from the pocket of his black trenchcoat. “I’ll sign your cast for you.”

“Ooh,” cried Debbie Kinley, her pom-poms twitching excitedly. “Me, too! I want to sign her cast too.”

I yanked my arm out of their reach and went, “Uh, no, thanks.”

Jack looked crestfallen. “I was just going to draw a disaffected youth on it,” he explained. “That’s all.”

A disaffected youth would have been cool, I had to admit. But if I let Jack draw on my cast, then everybody would want to, and soon all that lovely whiteness would be a big old mess. But if I said only Jack could draw on it, then everyone would know about my secret crush on my sister’s boyfriend.

“Um, thanks anyway,” I said. “But I’m saving my cast for my own stuff.”

I felt bad about being mean to Jack. He was, after all, my soulmate.

Still, I wish he’d hurry up and realize it, and quit hanging out with Lucy and her dopey friends. Because these guys were acting like total idiots, tossing corn chips at one another and trying to catch them in their mouths. It was revolting. Also irritating because they kept jostling the table, making it hard for those of us who had to eat one-handed to keep our food steady. I realize that football players are very large and maybe can’t help shaking the table, but still, they could have shown a little restraint.

“Hey,” I said, when one of the corn chips landed in Catherine’s apple sauce. “Cut it out, you guys.”

Lucy, poring over a magazine article about how to get perfect thighs—which she, of course, already had—went, in a bored voice, “Geez. Just because she’s getting a medal, she thinks she’s all that,” which is totally unfair, because what was I supposed to do, just meekly accept the whole corn-chip-in-the-apple-sauce thing?

Catherine stared at me, wide-eyed. “You’re getting a medal too? You’re teen ambassador to the UN, and you’re getting a medal?”

Unfortunately so. A presidential medal of valour, to be exact. The ceremony was going to be held in December, when the White House was decorated all Christmassy, for optimum photogenic effect.

But I didn’t have time to reply. That’s because my second slice of pie suddenly disappeared and travelled down the row of football players like a frisbee in a game of keep-away.

“MAY I PLEASE HAVE MY PIE BACK?” I yelled, because I’d been planning on giving the extra piece to Jack.

Lucy, of course, didn’t know this. She just went, “God, it’s just a piece of pie. Believe me, you do not need the extra calories,” a typically Lucy remark to which I started to respond, until I was distracted by an all-too-familiar voice behind me.

“Hello, Samantha.”

I turned to see Kris Parks—looking like the perfect class president that she was, clad in Benetton from head to toe, including the pink cashmere sweater thrown oh-so-casually across her shoulders—simpering down at me.

“Here’s the invitation to my party,” Kris said, handing me a piece of folded paper. “I really hope you can come. I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I’d really like it if we could bury the hatchet and be friends. I’ve always admired you, you know, Sam. You really, really, um, stick to your convictions. And I didn’t mind paying for the drawings. Really.”

I just stared up at her. I couldn’t believe any of this was happening. Really, out of all of it—the caseloads of soda, the Thank You Beary Much bears, having dinner at the White House—the fact that Kris Parks— Kris Parks —was sucking up to me was the strangest thing of all. I was starting to know how Cinderella probably felt after the Prince finally found her and got the shoe to fit. Her stepsisters had probably sucked up to her pretty much the same way Kris Parks was sucking up to me.

The thing was, though, like Cinderella I totally didn’t have the heart to tell Kris where to go. I should have. I know I should have.

But it was like this: why? I mean, what was the point? So she’d been a bitch to me her whole life. Like my being a bitch back to her was going to teach her a lesson? Bitchiness was all she knew.