Suddenly, everyone—everyone in the entire world—wants to be your friend.

Seriously.

And I am not just talking about get-well balloons and Thank You Beary Much bears (all of which we donated to the children’s wing before leaving). When I got home from the hospital the day after that little incident outside Capitol Cookies, there were a hundred and sixty-seven messages on our answering machine. Only about twenty of them were from people I actually know and like, such as Grandma or Catherine or whoever. All the rest of them were from reporters or people like Kris Parks, who seemed to have forgotten all about the whole Speech and Hearing thing.

“Hi, Sam,” she sang into the machine, in her smarmy Kris Parks voice. “It’s me, Kris! Just calling to see if you want to come to my party next Saturday night. My parents are going to be in Aruba, so we’re going to have a blast! But it won’t be any fun unless you’re there.”

I couldn’t believe it. I mean, you would think Kris would at least try to be a little more subtle than that. She hadn’t invited me to a party at her house since the third grade, and here she was, making out like we’d never stopped being friends. It was unreal.

Lucy didn’t share my outrage, though. She just went, “Cool, party at Kris’s. I’m bringing Jack.”

To which both my parents replied, “Oh, no, you aren’t,” then added that we weren’t allowed to go to parties at which there wasn’t at least one parent in attendance. Especially with Jack, who got caught skinny-dipping in the Chevy Chase Country Club pool during last year’s Christmas ball (the Slaters were members, though, so the incident was hushed up. Unfortunately not enough to keep it from my parents, however. I suppose they would be happier if Lucy was going out with a guy who never questioned authority and meekly accepted what was doled out to him, like most people of our generation, instead of someone who thinks for himself, like Jack).

Lucy didn’t look too upset about my parents saying she wasn’t going to be allowed to take Jack to Kris’s party. Instead, she went to the window to wave some more at all the reporters who were out on our front lawn.

Kris Parks’s message wasn’t even the most unbelievable one, however. We also got calls from half the reporters who’d been at the press conference, wanting to know if they could arrange exclusive interviews with me. All the television news shows—like 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Dateline, 20/20—want to do a feature on me, and asked us to call them at our earliest convenience.

I am so sure. Like there is an hour’s worth of stuff to even say about me. My life so far has basically been just a long series of one humiliation after another. If they want to go in depth on my lisp and how I was cured of it by my irrational desire to call Kris Parks every bad S-word I could think of to her face, well then more power to them. But somehow I suspected they were after something a little more triumph of the human spirit-y.

Then there were the calls from the soda companies. Seriously. Coke and Pepsi wanted to know if I was interested in endorsement deals. Like I’m going to stand in front of a camera and go, “Drink Coke like me. Then you, too, can throw yourself at a crazed Christie Brinkley fan and get your arm broken in two places.”

Finally, but most disturbingly of all, was the call I had most been dreading. I’d actually hoped against hope that, when we played the messages back, this one wouldn’t be there. But I was wrong. So wrong.

Because message number one hundred and sixty-four contained the following, in an all-too-familiar voice:

“Samantha? Hi, this is Susan Boone. You know, from the studio. Samantha, I would really appreciate it if you would call me back as soon as you get this message. There are some things we need to talk about.”

Hearing this, I panicked, of course. That was it. All those pleas to the Secret Service guys had been for nothing. My cover was blown. I was dead.

I had to return Susan Boone’s call in secret—so no one would overhear what I suspected was going to be a lot of grovelling on my part—which meant that I had to hang around and wait while my dad called the phone company and got our number changed to a new, unlisted one. We had to do this on account of the fact that some of the one hundred and sixty-seven messages had been a little too effusive, if you know what I mean. Like some Larry Wayne Rogers-types—now rucked safely away in a maximum-security mental hospital, awaiting arraignment—who really, really wanted to meet me. Apparently, to them, my heinous school ID photo was not a turn-off at all.

The Secret Service guys recommended that we change our phone number and perhaps install an alarm system in the house. They were still hanging around outside, generally keeping people back, while some metro cops directed traffic along our street, which was suddenly getting four or five times the amount of traffic it usually got, with people who’d found out where I lived driving by very slowly, trying to catch a glimpse of me—though don’t ask me why. I am very rarely doing anything interesting. Most of the time I am just sitting in my room eating Pop-Tarts and drawing pictures of myself with Jack, but whatever. I guess people wanted to see what a real live hero looks like.

Because that’s what I am now, whether I like it or not. A hero.

Which is just another name, it turns out, for someone who was at the wrong place at the very worst possible time.

Anyway, when Dad was done dealing with the phone company, I called Susan Boone back—but not until after I’d consulted with Catherine.

“Dinner?” That was all Catherine could say. “You take a bullet for the President of the United States of America, and all you get out of it is dinner?”

“I didn’t take a bullet for him,” I reminded her. “And it’s dinner at the White House. And could we please stick to the subject at hand? What am I going to say to Susan Boone?”

“Anybody can have dinner at the White House, if they pay enough money.” Catherine sounded truly disgusted. ”I would think you’d get something better than just dinner. You should at least get a medal of valour, or something.”

“Well,” I said. “Maybe I will. Maybe they’ll give it to me at dinner. Now what should I say when I call Susan Boone?”

“Samantha,” Catherine said, in a voice that was as close to impatient as I’d ever heard her speak. “They don’t hand out medals at dinner. They have a special ceremony for that. And you saved the President’s life. Your drawing teacher is not going to care that you skipped her stupid class.”

“I don’t know, Cath,” I said. “I mean, Susan Boone is very serious about art. She might be calling to kick me out of her class, or something.”

“So? I would think you’d want to be kicked out. I thought you hated it, right?”

I thought about that. Had I hated it? Well, not the drawing part. That had been pretty fun. And the part where David had said he liked my shoes.

But the rest of it—the part where Susan Boone had tried to wipe out my right to creative expression and keep me from drawing from my heart, totally humiliating and embarrassing me in front of all those people, including, I knew now, the son of the President of the United States. That had been pretty mortifying.

On the whole, I decided, getting kicked out of Susan Boone’s art class would not be a bad thing at all.

So as soon as I hung up with Catherine, I dialled Susan Boone’s number, anxious to get the whole thing over with already.

“Um, hi,” I said, hesitantly, when she picked up. “This is Samantha Madison.”

“Oh, hello,” Susan Boone said. I heard a familiar cawing in the background. So Joe the Crow didn’t live at the studio, but travelled to and from it with his owner. Some life for a big, ugly, hair-stealing bird. “Thank you for returning my call, Samantha.”

“Um, no problem,” I said. Then, after a deep breath, I took the plunge: “Listen, I’m really sorry about the other day. I don’t know if you heard what happened—”

Susan Boone surprised me by chuckling. “Samantha, there isn’t a human being south of the North Pole who hasn’t heard what happened to you outside my studio yesterday.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I hurried to spill out the lie I’d made up. If I had been Jack, I’d have just told her the truth: you know, that I’d resented her attempt to subjugate my artistic integrity.

But since I am not Jack, I just blabbed the first thing that came into my head:

“The thing is, the reason I wasn’t in class was because it was raining really hard, you know, and I got really wet, and I didn’t want to come to class wet, you know, so I stopped into Static to dry off, you know, before class, and then I don’t know what happened, but I guess I just sort of lost track of time, and before I knew it—”

“Never mind that, Samantha.” Susan Boone, to my great surprise, interrupted me. I will admit it wasn’t the greatest lie, but it had been the best I could come up with at such short notice. “Let’s talk about your arm.”

“My arm?” I looked down at my cast. I was already getting so used to it, it was like it had always been there.

“Yes. Was the arm you broke the one you draw with?”

“Um. No.”

“Good. Then I’ll see you in class on Tuesday?”

I had an ungenerous thought, then. I thought that Susan Boone, like Coke and Pepsi, only wanted me to stay in her art school so she could use my celebrity to promote it.

Well, and why shouldn’t I have thought this? It wasn’t as if she’d fallen all over herself trying to tell me what a good artist I was or anything, the one time I had shown up for class.

“Listen, Mrs. Boone,” I said, wondering how on earth I was going to say what I had to say—about her stifling me creatively, and where would we be if someone had done that to Picasso—in a way that wouldn’t offend her. Because, you know, she seemed like a pretty nice lady, aside from the whole not-liking-my-pineapple thing.