I have been to all the rooms they show you on the tour: the Vermeil Room, the Library, the China Room, the Map Room, the East Room, the Green Room, the Blue Room, the Red Room, yadda yadda yadda.

But Sunday night was the first time I’d ever been to the White House not as part of a tour, but as an actual guest.

It was pretty weird. Everyone in the whole family was feeling the weirdness of it, except maybe for Rebecca. But since Rebecca had just gotten a new shipment of Star Trek books from Amazon, this was only to be expected.

Besides, I suspect Rebecca is secretly a robot and therefore immune to human emotion.

The rest of us, however, were totally freaked. I could tell my mom was especially nervous because she wore her power suit and her pearls, the ones she only wears to court, and she took away my dad’s cell phone and his Palm Pilot, so he couldn’t try to use any of them during dinner. Theresa—who, as an important part of our family, was of course invited as well—was in her Sunday best, which included purple high heels with sparkle clips on them, and didn’t yell at any of us once, not even when Manet came barrelling in from outside and shook out his fur and sprayed rainwater all over the newly vacuumed living-room rug. Even Lucy spent about two hours longer than usual on her beauty regime, and emerged looking like someone going to guest star on VIP, and not enjoy a nice meal with a family who lived, if you thought about it, only a little ways down the street from us.

“Now whatever you do, Sam,” Lucy said, as we pulled out of the driveway—which was no mean feat, since there were still hordes of reporters hanging around, trying to photograph our every move. They liked to do things like dive on to the hood of the station wagon to snap a quick one of Dad on his way to the Seven Eleven for more milk. Backing out of the driveway had gotten perilous because there was always two or three of them darting out from behind the car—“do not try to hide the food you don’t like under your plate.”

“Lucy!” I was nervous enough as it was. I fully did not need her making it worse. “God, I know how to act at a dinner party, OK? I am not a child.”

The thing is, at home when we have stuff I don’t like at dinner, I fully slip it under the table to Manet, who’ll eat anything—carrots, eggplant, peas, cantaloupe, chicken sausage, you name it. The First Family does not have a dog. They are cat people. Cats are nice and everything, but they are no help to finicky eaters like me. I highly doubted the First Cat was going to chow down on any cauliflower heads I slipped under the table.

So the question was, what was I going to do if they served broccoli (gag me) or worse, anything involving tomatoes or fish, two things I really cannot abide, and which tend to show up at most fancy meals? I knew I couldn’t hide it under my plate. Supposing somebody picked it up and saw all the food under it? That would be almost as embarrassing as having drawn a pineapple where there wasn’t supposed to be one.

It was weird turning on to Pennsylvania Avenue. Normally the part in front of the White House is completely closed off to cars. The only way you can go up to the fence in front of the President’s house is on foot.

But since we were special guests, we got to drive right up to the big barricade that blocks off the street. A bunch of policemen were there, and they checked our licence plate and my dad’s ID, and then they lowered the barricade into the ground and we drove over it.

Then we were in front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which is the address of the White House.

But we weren’t the only people there, by any means. For one thing, there were cops all over the place, on horseback and bikes, as well as on foot. They were all standing around, talking to one another. They looked at our car curiously as we drove by. Lucy waved. Most of them waved back.

Cops weren’t the only ones standing around in front of the White House, though. There were guys selling FBI T-shirts and hats, and other guys with the life-size, cardboard cut-outs of the President that you could stand next to and get your picture taken.

And even though it was dark out, there were plenty of tourists, whole families, all asking one another to snap photos of them in front of the big, black, wrought-iron fence that surrounded the President’s house.

There were protestors too. Some of them had obviously been there a long time, since they had made a little shanty town of tents and plywood shacks, with banners about their cause strung in front of them. NO MORE MIKE, one said. Another said, LIVE BY THE BOMB, DIE BY THE BOMB. I have to admit that, as far as radicals went, they did not look like a very impressive bunch.

Then again, it was pretty cold out, and raining a little. Who wants to protest in drizzle?

Lastly, there were the reporters. There were a lot of reporters. Almost as many as had been standing in front of our house when we’d left. Only the White House had set aside a special place on the lawn for the reporters crowding its front yard. They had huge lights and all these stands with microphones set up, one for each network. When they saw our station wagon as we pulled up to the Northwest Appointment Gate—where the cops back by the first barricade had directed us to go—the reporters started surging forward, the camera people shining bright lights at our car.

“There she is!” I could hear them saying, even though all of our windows were up. “It’s her! Get the shot! Get the shot!”

The reporters weren’t the only ones trying to get pictures of our car, and us in it. All the tourists standing around in front of the wrought-iron fence turned around when they heard the commotion and started snapping shots of us too. It was kind of like pulling up in a limo in front of the Oscars, or whatever. Except that we were in a Volvo station wagon, and Joan and Melissa Rivers were nowhere to be seen.

A couple of guys in uniforms came out of the little house behind the gate, and looked over their shoulders at the horde of stampeding reporters. One of them stepped forward to block the path they were beating towards the car, while the other one waved us through the slowly opening gate.

While this was happening, my mom turned around in the front passenger seat and went, in a low, urgent voice, “Lucy, I would appreciate it if, just this once, you would not spend the entire meal talking about clothes. Rebecca, I know you have some questions you’d like to ask the President about the cover-up at Roswell, but I am personally requesting that you keep them to yourself. And, Samantha. Please. I am begging you: do not pick at your food. If you don’t like something, simply leave it on your plate. Do not sit there rearranging it for half an hour.”

I thought this unfair. When you rearrange your food, most people think you have eaten at least some of it.

Then we were driving through the open gates, past the reporters and the camera flashes and klieg lights, up to the front door of the White House.

When you are in front of it, even back where the iron fence is, on Pennsylvania Avenue, the house where the President lives actually looks quite small. That is because the Rotunda, which is the round thing with all the pillars that sticks out of the White House, is actually in the back of the house. The front, where the driveway is, isn’t nearly so impressive. In fact, whenever I saw it, I was always kind of, How do they fit all those rooms into such a small space, anyway?

But then you see a shot of the back of the house, which is the one they always show on the news or in movies and stuff, and you go, Oh, yeah, that’s how.

When we pulled up to the front of the house, a uniformed man who was standing at the front door snapped to attention, while another man came down to open my mom’s door.

Then we all stepped out on to this red carpet, and the front door opened, and there was the First Lady, saying, “Hello!” and ”Welcome!“ Right behind her stood the President, who shook my dad’s hand and said, “How are you doing, Richard?” to which my dad replied, “Fine, thanks, Mr. President.”

Then the President and his wife ushered us into the White House as casually as if we had just stopped by for a backyard barbecue, or something. Except of course you don’t wear pantyhose and a navy-blue suit from Ann Taylor to a backyard barbecue. I have to admit, even though everyone was being so welcoming and all, I felt pretty uncomfortable. Not just because of my stupid cast, either, or the fact that Lucy had made me use the horse conditioner again, so my hair felt unnaturally smooth, or even because I knew, just knew, that somehow or other cauliflower was going to end up on my plate.

No, I was freaking out because no matter how casual the President and his wife acted, we were in the White House.

And not in the parts you get to see on the public tour, either, but in the private family parts you never see, except on TV, and even then it is some set director’s idea of how he thinks the family’s private quarters look, and not the real thing. The decor actually looked to me a lot like a bed and breakfast, like one we once stayed in in Vermont. But then I thought maybe that wasn’t fair, since the President and his family had only been living there for a little less than a year, and maybe hadn’t really had a chance to settle in.

And besides, it wasn’t like this was their real house.

Then we were in the living room, and the First Lady was saying, “Sit down,” and ‘Let me get you something to drink,“ and I sat down, and in walked David . . .

And he looked exactly like he had that day in Susan Boone’s studio! He had on a Reel Big Fish T-shirt instead of Save Ferris. But other than that, it was like that other David, the one with the pants with the creases in them, didn’t even exist.