Meg Cabot - All American Girl

Reaction Number Six, my parents (I saved the worst for last) :

“Oh, Sam, how wonderful! He’s such a nice boy! We couldn’t dream up such a lovely date for you. If only Lucy showed as much prudence as you do in picking her boyfriends. What time is he coming to get you? Oh, we have to make sure we have film for the camera. Just a few pictures, that’s all. Well, we have to memorialize the event. Our baby, going out with such a sweet boy. So well-mannered. And you know he goes to Horizon, so that means he’s tested in the ninety-ninth percentile. In the country. The whole country . He’s really going to make something of himself some day, maybe even follow in his father’s footsteps and go into politics. Such a nice, nice boy. If only Lucy could find a boy that nice, instead of that awful Jack.”

It was completely humiliating. I mean, trust me to get stuck going out on my first date with the kind of boy parents love. Not only does David not have any tattoos (at least, so far as I know) or ride a Harley (again, I’m only guessing here, but it seems unlikely), he is the son of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

OK? Could there BE anything geekier? I know we can’t help who our parents are, but come on. Instead of the single welfare mom or convicted felon that would really have driven my parents around the bend, I end up going out with a guy whose parents are not only still married, but also like the most influential couple in the country.

Life is so unfair.

I tried my best to enrage them (my parents, I mean) by dropping little hints about how David was coming to pick me up in his CAR (not really, of course: John would be driving, since David, at seventeen, was not old enough for a licence in the District of Columbia). Then I pointed out how we were going to go eat somewhere ALONE before the party (again, not strictly true, since the Secret Service would be there), as David had suggested, as we were leaving Susan Boone’s, that we grab something before the party.

But neither Mom nor Dad bit. It’s like just because the guy is the First Son or whatever, they completely trust him! In a million years they would never let Lucy go to a party with Jack—not without a huge fight beforehand. The only reason they capitulated this time and let her go was because they knew I would be there, too . . . well, with David and the Secret Service. But still. Me ! Her little sister ! I am supposedly the good one! In spite of everything I have done to try to convince them of the contrary—like dress entirely in black for a year, or my whole under-the-counter celebrity-drawing enterprise—they persist in thinking of me as the responsible one!

And my saving the President from being assassinated and being named Teen Ambassador to the UN certainly didn’t help things, let me tell you.

I am seriously considering flunking German, just to get back at them.

The way they’ve been acting lately, though, they’ll probably just be all, “Sam got an F in German. Isn’t that the most adorable thing you ever heard?”

Anyway, the night of the party, Mom and Dad followed through with their threat and were standing there in the living room with the camera when David rang the bell at seven sharp. Catherine had already come and gone, having been transformed by Lucy into a Seventeen magazine fashionplate. She was meeting Paul at Beltway Billiards, and then the two of them would meet us at Kris’s house in time for the party.

“Please,” I whispered urgently to David as I opened the door, “forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

David, who was in jeans and a black sweater, looked a little alarmed, but after he came all the way in and saw my parents, he relaxed.

“Oh,” he said, like the parents of the girls he goes out with come at him with an Olympus every day—and maybe they do. “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Madison.”

As if my mom and dad weren’t bad enough, prancing around with the zoom lens, Manet, excited at the prospect of meeting someone new, came barrelling in from the kitchen—all eighty pounds of him—and immediately buried his nose in David’s crotch. I tried to pull the dog away, apologizing for his bad behaviour.

“That’s OK,” David said, giving Manet a pat on his shaggy head. “I like dogs.”

Then Lucy had to get in on the act, floating down the stairs in her party outfit like she thought she was Susan Lucci or somebody, and then going, “Oh, David, it’s you. I thought it might be my boyfriend, Jack. You’ll meet Jack, of course, at the party. I think you two will really get along. Jack is an artist too.”

Then Rebecca wandered in, looked up at David and me, and went, “Oh, yes. Definite frisson,” before heading upstairs to her room, most likely in order to attempt to contact the mother ship.

If my family had tried on purpose to embarrass me as fully as possible, I do not think they could have done a better job.

Once we’d successfully escaped to the safety of the porch, David looked at me and asked, “What’s frisson?”

“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?”