Not if I Save You First

  With so many bodies pressed so close he was almost anonymous here. Almost. But not quite.

  He was a little taller than average, his hair a little darker. Only 2 percent of the population had green eyes. But Logan’s most distinguishing feature was his shadow.

  As he pushed through the crowd of bodies on the dance floor he could feel the big man following in his wake. And a little part of Logan wanted to crawl in some hole and hide. At least until the election was over and America had a new president. Maybe he or she would even have a screwup son, if Logan was lucky. But Logan hadn’t been lucky in a really long time.

  The noise level dropped a decibel or two when he pushed out of the living room and down a hall that led to the kitchen, where the game was already underway.

  “Well, if it isn’t the first son and his shadow!” Logan’s least favorite person said two seconds after he walked through the swinging door.

  The light was a little bit brighter in here, the music a little bit softer. For once, Logan could actually hear himself think.

  “You should fold, Dempsey,” he said.

  “What?” Dempsey asked.

  Logan looked down at the table covered with brightly colored chips and overturned cards.

  “You should fold,” he said again. “You know, quit while you’re ahead.”

  Dempsey looked like he wanted to get out of his chair and fold Logan into a new shape, and he might have tried if not for Logan’s shadow.

  “What do you know about it?”

  Logan didn’t miss a beat. “I know you need a queen to make your straight, which means you’ve got an eight percent chance under the best of circumstances, which this isn’t, considering Peterson there is holding one already.”

  Now Dempsey really did get up. “You cheating or something?”

  “No.” Logan shook his head. “I’m paying attention.”

  Logan always paid attention. To everything. Sometimes two inches of bright red fabric was all that stood between life and death, after all. Once you came to grips with that, cards were easy.

  The whole table—the whole game—made sense to Logan with one glance. For a second, he wanted to join his friends. And he would have, if he hadn’t noticed long ago that they weren’t really his friends at all.

  The music got louder for one brief moment as the door behind him opened and closed. Logan didn’t turn around, though. Charlie had his back. So Logan wasn’t expecting it when an arm slid around his neck and a soft cheek pressed against his.

  “Logan!” the girl practically screamed. She slurred her words slightly and felt unsteady on her feet as she pulled Logan even closer. Then her phone was in her free hand and she was screaming, “Let’s take a selfie!”

  A bright flash filled the air and Logan’s eyes burned while Charlie yelled, “No phones!”

  “But my followers!” the girl complained as Charlie ripped the phone from her hands.

  “You’ll get this back at the end of the night,” Charlie told her. He slid the phone into his pocket and glanced at Logan as he questioned the girl, “How did you get this in here, anyway? We’ve got agents at the gate. They should have taken your phone.”

  The girl looked confused. “They did take my phone. That’s my backup phone.”

  Charlie wanted to groan, Logan could tell. “I’ve got to go talk to someone,” Charlie yelled over the still-pulsing music. He stepped toward the door but stopped himself.

  “Something wrong?” Logan asked as if he didn’t already know exactly what Charlie was thinking. “You can leave me alone for five minutes, you know.”

  “That’s what you said in Paris.”

  “I apologized for Paris,” Logan reminded him. “And Berlin. But I refuse to apologize for London because those scones I brought you were delicious.”

  “Rascal.” Charlie sounded like a man who couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry or just shake the boy he was paid to protect.

  “What? Are you afraid I’m going to sneak out and go to a wild party? Charlie, I’m at a wild party. Besides, I need to go to the bathroom. Or are you going to follow me in there, too?”

  “It was discussed after Buenos Aires.”

  At this, Logan shook his head. “Yeah. Well. We all have things we regret about Buenos Aires.”

  Logan eased closer to the bathroom, and Charlie eased toward the door.

  “Charlie, go! Yell at the new guys.”

  “You’ve got your panic button?” Now Charlie sounded like a little old lady and not a former Navy SEAL.

  “Of course,” Logan said. It was the one Secret Service rule he never, ever broke. That button had saved his mother’s life, and Charlie must have known it because he turned and pushed his way back through the crowded house.

  He was gone before Logan did, in fact, go to the bathroom, where he removed two items from his pocket.

  One was a small transmitter with state-of-the-art GPS and a button that, when pushed, could bring forth the hounds of war.

  Another was a hot-pink cell phone with a not-too-terrible picture of a pretty girl and the president’s son. Logan didn’t stop to wonder how long it would take Charlie to realize Logan had picked his pocket. He just posted the picture to her account. The girl had followers to consider, after all.

  Then he placed the panic button on the bathroom vanity, right where Charlie wouldn’t have to look for it. Just because it was a rule he’d never broken before didn’t mean there wasn’t a first time for everything.

  As he walked to the back door and across the dark, deep lawn, Logan never once looked back.

  It was ten minutes before Charlie realized that he was no longer in the bathroom.

  “Eight hours. You were gone for eight hours! What were you thinking?”

  The Oval Office was one of the most intimidating rooms in the world—at least that’s what the White House tour guides liked to say. But even though the room was powerful, Logan had figured out long ago that it had nothing on the man.

  The president’s suitcoat was draped over the back of his chair and his shirtsleeves were rolled up, his red power tie loosened. It was his working-man-stump-speech look—the one that went over well in midwestern mill towns. But in the Oval, it made him look like a man who had immense power at his disposal but would rather tear a person in two with his bare hands than bother calling in the marines.

  “Were you thinking?” the president yelled again, and Logan forced a shrug.

  “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s a big deal and when it’s not. That’s my right as long as I’m—”

  “President?” Logan guessed.

  “Your father,” the president finished.

  “News flash: You already got reelected,” Logan told him. “Unless you want to be Queen of England or something, you’ve run your last campaign.”

  “This isn’t about my presidency—”

  “I think the Secret Service would disagree,” Logan cut in, but his father never slowed down.

  “—this is about our family!”

  Only then did Logan let himself glance at his mother, who muttered, “Joseph.” His father spun on her.

  “He posted a picture online and then took a walk. For eight hours. No detail. No panic button. Do you know what could have happened to him?”

  “Yes, Joseph.” Her voice was soft but strong. Her whisper echoed through the room like a roar. “I know.”

  They didn’t talk about That Day. Not ever. Not in ages. But it was always there, simmering underneath the surface. In many ways, it was his father’s legacy: the thing his two terms in office would be remembered for the most.

  He was the president who had almost had his wife snatched out from under his nose.

  His was the White House with blood on the floors.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I forgot,” Logan’s father said, but that was a lie. He didn’t forget. None of them did. Maybe that’s why the president spun on Logan and snapped, “Secret Service pro
tocols exist for a reason. You of all people should know that.”

  “It was a selfie!” Logan couldn’t help but shout. “If that were illegal, then every kid in America would be locked up.”

  “It wasn’t just a selfie, and you know it! It was a beacon, transmitting your location to everyone in the world with a cell phone—a location from which you decided to wander off, unprotected. And you aren’t just another kid in America. You are the president’s son.”

  “Yeah.” Logan bristled. “That’s what they tell me.”

  Something in Logan’s tone seemed to break through his father’s armor, his rage began to fade into something closer to regret.

  “I know you didn’t choose this life. I know no teenager in their right mind ever would. But it is our life, and when I think about what could have happened … We all know what could happen!”

  “But it didn’t happen!”

  As soon as the words left Logan’s mouth, he knew he was going to lose. Worse, he knew he should.

  He was being stupid. He was being careless. He was being selfish and stubborn and almost too cliché for words. But he hadn’t been able to help himself. Not in London or Berlin or Buenos Aires. Logan really was his own worst enemy, which was saying something, he knew.

  “I’ll apologize to Charlie. I won’t do it again.”

  “Oh, I know you won’t do it again. But it’s too late to apologize to Charlie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Charlie got hoodwinked by a sixteen-year-old. Again. So Charlie doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “What? Did you transfer him to Treasury or—”

  “Charlie has a nasty habit of losing the president’s son, so now Charlie’s got to find a new job.”

  “You can’t do that!” Logan snapped. But the president smiled.

  “I can do anything. I’m not just the president of the United States. I’m your father.”

  “Joseph,” the first lady warned.

  “Come on, Dad. You’ve got, what? A year left in office? What are you going to do, lock me up until CNN stops caring about us?”

  For a moment, Logan’s parents seemed to consider the idea, but then a smile passed between them. Which was worse.

  “If the Secret Service can’t keep you offline and out of trouble, then we’re going to send you someplace where online and in trouble isn’t an option.”

  Logan didn’t even try to bite back his laugh. “Yeah, Mr. President. Good luck finding that.”

  Logan was already to the door, his hand on the knob, when his mother said, “Oh, we’ve already found it.”

  Dear Logan,

  We’ve been here six months already. I can’t believe it. Can you believe it? It feels like we just got here. And in other ways, it feels like I’ve never lived anywhere else. Like my old life was just a dream.

  Were you a dream?

  I told Dad that this has been a most excellent experience, but I’m ready to go back to our real life now.

  He just smiled and said this is our real life. I asked him when we were going back and he didn’t answer. Which is an answer all its own, isn’t it?

  Sometimes I think he doesn’t want to go back. And sometimes I think he can’t. We can’t.

  I just don’t know why.

  Maddie

  “Come here, kiddo. There’s something we need to talk about.”

  The last time Maddie’s dad had said those words she’d found herself on three planes (each progressively smaller than the last) within a week. So, needless to say, she wasn’t the good kind of excited as he pulled up a chair at their old, battered table.

  Maddie had never really understood why they had four chairs. It’s not like they did a lot of entertaining. Not unless you counted the time Maddie had forgotten to lock up her cereal in an airtight container and a bear had tried to break through the cabin’s front door. Which Maddie totally did not count. That bear hadn’t been invited and would never be welcome again.

  So she didn’t really trust the look in her Dad’s eyes when he glanced at the empty chair that wasn’t stacked high with library books.

  “Where are you going this time?” she asked because she knew him well. Too well.

  It had been just the two of them since Maddie was three and her mom had died. And that was before they’d moved to the middle of nowhere. For six years it had been just the two of them. If Maddie didn’t know her father, she didn’t know anyone. There were no other options.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said quickly. Guiltily. “Or, well, I’m not going right now.”

  “Then what is it?” It took a lot to scare Madeleine Rose Manchester. She’d seen her father take a bullet. When she got up to go pee in the middle of the night she usually carried a revolver. Fear and Maddie went way, way back, but she’d never seen her father look quite like he looked then.

  “Nothing’s wrong, kiddo. It’s just that … I’m expecting … I mean … I heard from DC.”

  That, at last, stopped Maddie’s heart from racing. At that point, Maddie’s heart wasn’t beating at all.

  Maddie thought her father had burned that bridge, salted the earth, gone as far off the edge of the map as possible, and then dropped straight down and landed here, smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

  “You’re not going back,” Maddie blurted because, it turned out, there was something worse than moving to a place where your best friends were either fictional or fur-covered. There was knowing your dad might take another bullet. “You quit,” she reminded him.

  “That’s right, kiddo. I did quit. And they wouldn’t have me anyway, even if I wanted to go back. Remember.” He patted the leg that still ached sometimes and pulled aside the collar of his shirt just far enough for her to see his second-biggest scar.

  “Yeah.” Maddie laughed. But it wasn’t funny. “Kind of hard to forget.”

  “I’m sorry, kiddo. What I’m trying to say is … the president and the first lady are sending us a surprise.”

  For a moment, Maddie couldn’t help herself. She thought about the ice-cream sundaes that the White House chef used to make. She remembered one time when the first lady let her try on the shoes she’d worn to the inaugural ball. She could almost smell the new leather of her favorite chair in the White House screening room.

  So when her dad got up and walked to the door she wasn’t really following him, not consciously. She just couldn’t stay behind.

  Maddie could never stay behind.

  “What’s the surprise?”

  As soon as they stepped off the porch, Maddie felt it. Or maybe she saw it. Heard it? She couldn’t be sure. She just knew that something big was coming. Ripples spread across the water of the lake, and the trees started to toss and sway.

  Glacier silt lined the banks of the lake, and it swirled like sand, stinging and blinding. A part of Maddie knew what she was going to see long before the helicopter appeared, hovering over the trees and then dropping softly to the ground.

  “What kind of surprise, Dad?” Maddie asked again as his arm went around her, pulling her tight. Maybe she knew the answer. And that’s why she pulled back, why she squeezed her eyes shut. It had nothing to do with the wind that swirled around her, full of silt and gravel and leaves.

  Maddie knew that as soon as she opened her eyes, she was going to see a ghost.

  But it turned out she didn’t have to see him to know him. She just had to hear the words, “Hey, Mad Dog.”

  It’s really her.

  Logan shook his head for a moment. He couldn’t be sure if he’d said the words out loud or not. Probably not. He glanced up at Mr. Manchester, studied his face. Definitely not. Maddie and her father weren’t looking at him like he was stupid. They were looking at him like he was different.

  And he was.

  Some guys hit puberty and turn into football players or wrestlers or big, hairy creatures who look like science-lab experiments or something. Logan had just … grown. Everywhere. It felt like his fingers
were a foot long. His feet seemed always at risk of bursting out of his shoes. His pants and his shirts, too. He was like the Incredible Hulk except not green and not quite so angry.

  Oh, he was definitely angry. But he could also feel it fading a little. Like he was still in the helicopter, looking down on the lake and about a million acres of wilderness and the tiny dot that was his destination. Logan’s anger looked smaller from there, like it was a long way off. And now there was only him and Mr. Manchester and a girl he used to know.

  “It’s you.”

  This time he for sure said it aloud because Maddie’s dad glanced at her, then held out his hand for Logan.

  “Good to see you, Rascal.”

  Mr. Manchester shook his hand like he was a man, but something about it made Logan feel more like a kid than ever. He’d been through probably twelve pairs of sneakers since he’d last seen the man, but in Mr. Manchester’s presence Logan felt as if he might be ten until the end of time.

  “You, too, sir,” Logan said. He watched Maddie listen to the words. She didn’t say a thing.

  “How are your parents, Logan?” It was the first time Mr. Manchester had ever called him by his first name. It made Logan pull back for a moment, rethink things. Remember that Maddie’s dad wasn’t the head of the president’s detail anymore. Now he was just Logan’s dad’s friend. And this wasn’t supposed to be fun.

  “My parents are well, sir. The president’s blood pressure was a little high the last time I saw him, but that’s to be expected.”

  “Yes. I imagine it is,” Mr. Manchester said, then smiled.

  “Is that why they’re punishing you?” Maddie asked. “I mean they are punishing you, right? Why else would anyone come here?”

  Logan watched her speak. Her voice was the same, but her mouth was different. Why had Logan never noticed her mouth before? Her bottom lip was fuller, but the top lip was shaped like a little bow, and he couldn’t decide which lip he liked more. He knew he was going to have to do a lot more looking in order to choose. And it suddenly felt imperative that Logan choose very, very well.