The President's Daughter

  Well, actually, now that he mentioned it … . “I’m awake,” she said.

  A couple of people laughed.

  “Well, I am,” she said to the class in general.

  “She thinks, therefore she is,” Rick Hamilton said, and more people laughed.

  Meg blushed, but returned the cocky grin he gave her, deciding that he was probably the sexiest—

  “Meghan,” Mr. Bucknell said impatiently.

  Meg focused towards the front of the room. “Uh, yes, sir?”

  “We were discussing the Iowa Caucus, and I thought you might be able to give us some insights on the subject,” he said.

  What did that have to do with early American history? Oh. Right. Nothing whatsoever. “Um, well.” She searched for something to say. “It’s a week from tomorrow.”

  “Does your mother have any specific campaign strategy?” he asked.

  The man never quit. She looked at Beth, who scribbled a note that said “Tell him about the bribes.” Which wasn’t much help.

  Christ, this was the only class she had with Rick Hamilton all day, and her teacher seemed to go out of his way to embarrass her. If only he would just give her a break already, and not—Rick really was incredibly good-looking. Arrogant grin, wavy hair, really sexy eyebrows. She had a thing for guys with acrobatic eyebrows. Usually, the only way she could ever stay awake in this class was by trying to stare at him without getting caught. Beth and Sarah Weinberger almost always got caught. Meg figured she had about a .500 average. Not that he’d be interested in her, anyway; he always went for the tall, blond—

  “Meghan ?” Mr. Bucknell sounded very testy, practically choking himself with his tie.

  “I’m sorry,” Meg said. “I just really don’t know anything.”

  “Oh, come on, she must have mentioned something,” he said. “You spent the entire weekend with her.”

  Nothing like having a private family life. Was every class for the rest of the year going to be like this? She looked at Rick, who obviously thought that—damn it. He caught her that time. Flushing, she looked down at her desk. Now, he would know that she liked him. God, what a day.

  “What about the debate?” Mr. Bucknell asked. “Does she have any special strategies for the debate?”

  Other than showing up on time? Meg shook her head.

  Mr. Bucknell frowned. “Well, what about positions? Like gun control. How is she going to handle gun control?”

  All he had to do was check her voting record on that one. “I’m kind of not supposed to comment on that,” she said quietly.

  “What?” He took a step backwards, looking so theatrically stunned that most of the class laughed.

  “That’s telling him, Meg!” someone shouted.

  “Well, class.” Mr. Bucknell’s eyes made a slow sweep of the room. “What would this school be like if all of our students went around saying, ‘No comment’?”

  The same people laughed again.

  “The next thing you know, Meghan will be taking the Fifth,” he said.

  Which was, of course, her right, as guaranteed by the Constitution.

  In the meantime, a few people were laughing, but everyone else was giving her sympathetic looks, switching back to her side.

  “Maybe you’d feel better having an attorney with you in class,” he said, and Meg made herself meet his gaze, not looking away until he did.

  Then, she stared down at her books. Why couldn’t her mother be a psychologist? Or a writer? Or a nurse? Or a professional tennis player? Only then, her gym teachers would be after her—she could hear it now: “Well, Wimbledon’s coming up. Meg, do you think you can give us some insights?”

  Would she have to be Catholic to join a convent?

  The bell rang, and she gathered up her books, wanting to get out of the room as soon as possible.

  “Don’t forget,” Mr. Bucknell said. “I want the answers to the chapter seventeen questions handed in by tomorrow. And, Meghan, would you mind staying after for a minute?”

  Yes. Meg paused, halfway to the door.

  “Tell him yes,” Beth said, right behind her.

  “Meghan.” Mr. Bucknell didn’t sound as though he was in the mood for any smart answers.

  Meg sighed and sat back down. When everyone else was gone, Mr. Bucknell leaned against the table near the front of the room, folding his arms.

  “I don’t think I asked you anything too terrible,” he said. “We just want to share the experience. I think we’re very fortunate to have a major candidate’s daughter in here, and I’ve been trying to get some good discussions going. We can all learn a lot from this.”

  Meg moved her jaw. “I’m not supposed to go around talking about things.”

  “No one is asking you to give away private campaign information,” he said mildly.

  Yeah. Sure.

  He smiled at her. “I was thinking that you might be able to get her to come in one day and speak to the class.”

  Meg shrugged, wondering when, exactly, her mother would find time to do something like that, when she didn’t even have time to come home.

  “Meg, I really don’t mean to put you under any pressure,” he said.

  Then, how come he kept doing it? Meg didn’t say anything.

  “If you’re having some difficulties with the idea of your mother being a candidate, you should share that,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I’m not.”

  “It would be perfectly natural,” he said.

  “But I’m not.” She checked the clock. “I’m sorry, but I kind of have to get going.”

  He sighed, unfolding his arms. “Maybe in the future, we can both try to be a little more cooperative.”

  Meg nodded, standing up to leave.

  “I was very impressed with your paper on the Louisiana Purchase,” he said. “You seem to have a real grasp of the material.”

  Flattery would get him nowhere. “Thank you,” she said.

  Beth and Sarah were waiting for her in the hall.

  “So?” Beth asked.

  Meg glanced over her shoulder to make sure she had closed the door on her way out. “He wants me to try and be a little more cooperative. I told him he’d have to speak to my attorney about that.”

  “Wow.” Sarah’s eyes widened. “What’d he say?”

  Meg and Beth grinned.

  “Well, I don’t know.” Sarah shrugged self-consciously. “Meg might do that.”

  “I bet you said, ‘yes, sir, anything you say, sir,’” Beth guessed.

  “I told him I’d get back to him,” Meg said.

  Beth made her hand into a microphone. “Tell me, Miss Powers. What’s your mother’s position on gun control?”

  “Well.” Meg leaned back against a locker, assuming a pseudo-thoughtful, pseudo-intellectual stance—standing like any one of a number of her mother’s aides. “The Senator is a little torn on this issue. She carries several guns in her purse, but she doesn’t like the idea of just any old person being able to get one. Also, she’s sponsored several bills on teacher executions, and—”

  “Wow,” Sarah said. “Does she really carry a gun?”

  HER FATHER GOT home later than usual that night, having had to appear at a couple of fund-raisers, in lieu of her mother. On Thursday, he was going to fly out to Iowa to be with her for the last few days before the caucus. Even though a relatively small percentage of eligible voters in the state participated in it, the whole thing was a big deal because it was the first real vote of any kind. Iowa was pretty conservative, but Meg figured her mother had a halfway decent chance since she was inclined to be a centrist on non-social issues, and her voting record had always had a distinct pro-agriculture bias. The general consensus seemed to be that a high turnout would be in her favor, because her campaign seemed to be bringing a lot of first-time voters into the process.

  “Daddy!” Neal saw him first, as Meg, her brothers, and Trudy sat watching television after dinner. “We missed you!”

 
Their father bent to hug him. “Well, I missed you, too.”

  “I’ve got your dinner warm in the oven, if you’re hungry, Russell,” Trudy said.

  “Thank you, that sounds great.” He straightened up, rubbing a tired hand across the back of his neck, and then loosening his tie. “But, don’t worry, I can get it myself.”

  “Don’t be silly. It won’t take but a minute.” She bustled out to the kitchen.

  “How’d they go?” Meg asked, opening her math book to make it look as if she’d been doing homework.

  “Not bad. Crowded.” He yawned, taking off his jacket, making Neal laugh by putting it on Kirby. “Your mother call? I kept getting her voice-mail.”

  “Yeah.” Steven opened his science book, which had also been untouched all evening. “She said hi.”

  “Don’t be a jerk.” Meg reached across the couch to hit him. “She said for you to call her back around eleven, Dad.”

  “Guess what?” Neal climbed onto their father’s lap. “She said she had a meeting with the President today and everything! He called her up to talk to her!”

  “He wants her support on that trade bill,” Meg said. Not that he was likely to get it.

  Her father glanced over. “Been keeping up lately?”

  Meg shrugged. At school, she worked just hard enough to get good grades—candidates’ children were kind of supposed to, but C-Span and political websites and things like Meet the Press were different. She liked knowing what was going on. Sometimes, when Mr. Bucknell actually did manage to get the class into a political discussion, she would have to chew her pen or drum on her desk to keep from joining in. If she said anything, people would probably think she was showing off, or had asked her mother for the answer. Like, instead of running for the school’s Senate, she was just a class officer, and she and Beth would sit in the back during meetings, being attitude problems. They never volunteered for anything, although when they were assigned to committees, they did whatever needed to be done quickly and responsibly. Being an attitude problem was one thing; being ill-bred was quite another.

  After watching television for a while, she went upstairs to check her email, and maybe even do some homework. Mostly, she got A minuses, with a few solid A’s here and there—and, when she screwed up, an occasional A plus. The truth was, getting straight A’s made people expect too much, and—well, she wasn’t one to overachieve. Academically, anyway.

  She did some French and chemistry, and then moved over to her bed to read, Vanessa joining her. Lately, she’d gotten pretty hooked on mysteries, and right now she was going through a long-running series about a Boston detective named Spenser.

  Hearing her father laughing and talking downstairs, she glanced at the clock and saw that it was just past eleven. Well, so, he hadn’t wasted any time calling her mother. The fact that he sounded so cheerful made her feel very warm and safe—her parents hadn’t always gotten along so well.

  The worst time that she could remember had been before Neal was born. It had been when she was six and seven, so parts of that whole period were kind of blurry, but she remembered the tension. She definitely remembered the tension.

  It had started around the time her mother had been elected to the Senate, moving up from the House of Representatives. Her workload and constituency had gotten bigger, and suddenly, she was home even less often than before. Then, when she was home, her father did a lot of work at his office, while she and Steven spent most weekends with her mother. And they didn’t eat dinner together. She remembered for sure that they all didn’t eat dinner together.

  In those days, she never understood what was going on if she got up early on a Saturday morning to watch television, and found her father asleep on the couch. It just seemed weird. She remembered how unhappy her parents had been, and the extra-hard hugs she got from them separately. The low angry voices in the kitchen, then the back door slamming and her father not coming back until almost too late to say good night to them. Once, coming into the dining room, she found her mother crying, and had been terrified, because parents weren’t supposed to do that. Then, during the week, when her mother wasn’t there, her father would be quiet and sad, getting furious if she and Steven did something like spill milk, and then being sad again and grabbing them in the very hard hugs. It had been scary because Meg couldn’t understand what was going on, and no one ever talked about it. At any rate, not to her.

  Sometimes she heard things, though. Her mother sounding very bitter once and saying to her father, “See you at Christmas,” as she left for Washington. Which had completely spooked her, because it was July. “We’ve done separation,” her father had said another time. “Maybe we should have a trial ‘togetherness.’” That time, her mother had slammed the back door. Steven was too young to pay much attention, but Meg had friends at school whose parents had gotten divorced, and they would all talk about how their fathers didn’t live at their houses anymore, and Meg had worried that that might happen to them, which would mean that she and Steven would be all alone.

  One day, her father did leave, and Trudy took care of them. He came back after what seemed like years, but was probably only three or four days. He took her and Steven out to this really neat hamburger restaurant, and told them they were all moving to Washington. They went to a little house in Virginia, where about half of the kids in her new elementary school had a parent—usually a father—who worked on Capitol Hill with her mother.

  It was kind of funny—funny-strange, as opposed to funny-amusing—because right after they moved down, her mother was getting sick a lot and would go to bed early. She was also getting fat. Her parents explained about this new little brother or sister that neither she nor Steven were too excited about, and sometimes Meg would put her hand on her mother’s stomach to feel it kick. It kicked hard. And suddenly, her father was helping her mother around, and bringing her special things they never bought, like potato chips.

  When the baby came, she and Steven decided that it was very ugly. They began to like it, especially when it smiled, and they got used to calling it Neal. As he got older, he wasn’t as red and ugly anymore, and she and Steven decided that he was very beautiful. Her parents had always thought he was beautiful. And Neal was such a damn happy baby, that having him around made the house feel much more relaxed.

  About a year later, they moved back to Massachusetts, and her father was made a full partner at his law firm. In Washington, he had worked at home mostly, flying back to Boston usually only one day a week. Trudy had lived in a small apartment above the garage while they were in Virginia, and Meg sometimes wondered whether part of the reason they went back to Boston so soon was because Trudy had been more homesick than anyone—and her parents couldn’t afford to lose her. Meg, personally, was glad to go back, and be at her old school, with her old friends again.

  Her parents still fought pretty often—and if she or her brothers ever asked them if they thought they might get divorced, her mother would invariably pause and say something like, “Well, not so far today,” and her father would say, “Don’t be so hasty, Kate, it’s still early.” And then—most of the time, luckily—her parents seemed to be amused by that. Anyway, her father was much more cheerful, and her mother’s face lost the dark circles under her eyes that even make-up had never really been able to hide. Meg still got all hung up if they argued about anything, but now it was usually just squabbling and snapping, instead of outright warfare.

  Too tired to read any more, Meg dropped the mystery next to her bed and turned her light off. It was good to hear her father still talking downstairs—that meant that things were okay. Win or lose, a Presidential campaign couldn’t be all that great for a marriage. Especially when the last time her mother had tried for a more responsible political position—except, she wouldn’t worry about that right now. Not with her father’s tone sounding so light and stress-free.

  She was pretty sure that if her mother lost the nomination, things would be just fine. And—well, she would never
admit it aloud—but, she sort of hoped that it would work out that way.

  Okay, she definitely hoped that it would work out that way.

  7

  FRIDAY NIGHT, ONE of the seniors on the tennis team, Monica Jacobs, had a party. Definitely the social event of the season. Meg was glad that her father was in Iowa—he would have asked a lot of questions about whether parents were going to be there, if there would be alcohol, and that kind of stuff. Trudy’s questions tended to be less demanding, although she did want to know who was driving, and told Meg to stay out of cars with young men. Meg said she would do her best.

  She got a ride with Ann Mason, who was also a senior, and had her license. Beth came too, along with three other juniors they knew. Meg was never sure what she thought about these parties, which were always a lot more wild than she expected. She couldn’t decide if her parents let her go because they didn’t know what the parties were like, or because they trusted her. Both were possible. One thing, she always made sure she rode with someone like Ann, who she knew wasn’t going to get drunk or anything if she had to drive. Massachusetts driving laws were strict, and Ann, fortunately, was the responsible type.

  “I have to get the car back by one,” Ann said, parking in front of Monica’s house. “So, don’t anyone go off with anyone. Or,” she corrected herself, “if you do, be back by twelve-thirty.”

  “Watch yourself,” Beth said out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Yeah,” Meg said. “You should talk.” Meg, always afraid of publicity, had never gone off with anyone, except at a dance once. Beth was more inclined towards the occasional casual fling.

  They had arrived fashionably late, and the party was already crowded and very noisy, music blasting. Meg unzipped her ski jacket, looking around at the darkened entrance hall and living room, lots of people shouting, some of them dancing, and a few already making out in corners. She could hear somewhat drunken male laughter, and figured that the football team was out in full force.

  “Let’s get rid of our coats,” Beth said, and Meg followed her.