Yeah. Real cool. Cool enough to blackmail me into coming back to her class.

But I didn’t say this out loud. It seemed impolitic to argue with someone who might momentarily be supplying me with food.

We went down another hallway, this one not carpeted or very fancy. Then David opened another door and we were in a big kitchen.

“Hey, Carl,” David said, to a guy in a chef’s outfit who was busy putting whipped topping on a bunch of glasses of chocolate mousse. “Got anything good to eat around here?”

Carl looked up from his creations, took one glance at me and cried, “Samantha Madison! The girl who saved the world! How you doing?”

There were a lot of other people in the kitchen, all busily cleaning and putting things away. Theresa, I saw, had been wrong about the gold-rimmed plates. You could totally put them in the dishwasher, and in fact, the White House kitchen staff was doing so. But they all stopped when they saw me, and gathered around to thank me for keeping their boss from taking one in the head.

“What was the matter with the flounder?” Carl wanted to know, after congratulations had been issued to me from his staff. “That was real Maryland crab stuffed into it, you know. I bought it fresh this morning.”

David went over to the industrial-sized fridge and yanked it open. “I think it was just, too, you know.” For a guy who went to Horizon, David certainly didn’t talk much like a certified genius. “You got any more of those hamburgers we had for lunch?”

I brightened at the word hamburger. Carl saw this and went, “You want a burger? The lady wants a burger. Samantha Madison, I will make you a burger the likes of which you have never had in your life. You sit right there. Don’t move. This burger’s gonna knock your socks off.”

I was wearing pantyhose, not socks, of course, but I didn’t feel it was necessary to point this out. Instead I sat down on the stool Carl had indicated. David sat down on the one next to it and we watched as Carl, moving so fast he was almost a blur, threw two enormous hamburger patties on to a stovetop grill, and started cooking them for us.

It was weird to be in the kitchen of the White House. It was weird to be in the kitchen of the White House with the son of the President. It would have been weird to me to be with a boy anywhere, since I am not exactly popular with boys. I mean, I am not Lucy. I do not have boys calling me every five minutes ... or ever, for that matter.

But the fact that it was this boy, and this place, made it especially weird. I couldn’t figure out why David was being so ... well, I guess nice was the only word to describe it. I mean, teasing me about having potentially clogged a White House toilet hadn’t been so nice. But offering me a burger when I was practically starving had been pretty decent of him.

It had to be because I had saved his dad. I mean, why else? He was just grateful for what I had done. Which was fully understandable.

What wasn’t so understandable to me was why he was going so out of his way.

I became even more puzzled about this when, after Carl slid two plates in front of us—each of which contained a huge burger and a big pile of golden fries—and went, “Bon appéit, ya’ll,” David picked up both his plate and my own and said, “Come on.”

Taking hold of two cans of soda Carl passed to me from the big industrial fridge, I followed David back down the hallway to the elevator.

“Where are we going?” I asked curiously.

“You’ll see,” David said.

Ordinarily this would not have been enough of an answer for me. But I didn’t say anything more about it, because I was in too much shock on account of a boy being nice to me. The only boy who has ever been remotely nice to me in the past is Jack.

But Jack has to be nice to me, on account of my being his girlfriend’s sister. Also Jack is of course secretly yearning for me. It is even possible that the only reason he stays with Lucy is because he doesn’t know that I return his ardour. If I could ever get up the guts to tell him how I feel, everything could be completely different. . .

But David. David didn’t have to be nice to me. So why was he doing it? It couldn’t have been because he liked me, you know, as a girl. Because, um, hello, Lucy was right upstairs and down the hall. What guy in his right mind would rather be with me than with Lucy? I mean, that would be like choosing Skipper instead of Barbie.

When we came out of the elevator, instead of turning back towards the dining room where everyone else was, David turned in the other direction, towards this door at the opposite end of the hallway. Behind it, I soon saw, was a very formal living-roomy-type place, with big high windows that looked down the sloping lawn of the White House all the way to the Washington Monument, sticking all lit up into the night sky.

“How’s this?” David asked, putting the burgers down on a little table in front of the windows, then moving two big chairs close to the table.

“Um,” I said, because I was still in shock about—and plenty suspicious of—the fact that this cute, but somewhat weird, boy wanted to eat with me. Me, Samantha Madison. “Fine.”

We sat down, bathed in the outdoor lights from the Rotunda. It would have been almost romantic if there hadn’t been a Secret Service agent standing right outside the door. And oh, yeah, if David had been remotely interested in me in that way, which he definitely wasn’t, on account of the fact that to him I am just the strange Goth-type girl who saved his dad’s life, and who also likes to draw pineapples where there are none.

And even if he did like me, you know, in a romantic way, there was the little fact that I am completely and irrevocably in love with my sister’s boyfriend.

Whatever. I was so hungry by then, I didn’t even care that David was only being nice to me because he felt sorry for me.

From the first bite, I knew: Carl was right. He really had made one of the best burgers I’d ever eaten. I bolted down roughly half of mine before surfacing for air.

David, who’d been watching me eat with a sort of stunned expression on his face—on the rare occasions when I do find something I like to eat, I have a tendency really to go for it—went, “Better?”

I couldn’t respond, because I was too busy chewing. I gave him a thumbs-up with my cast hand, though.

“So does it hurt?” he wanted to know, indicating my broken wrist.

I swallowed the huge wad of meat in my mouth. I really would like to be a vegetarian. Seriously. You would think an artist would be way more conscious of the suffering of others, even of the bovine variety. But hamburgers are just so good. I could never give them up.

“Not so much any more,” I said.

“How come nobody’s signed it?” he wanted to know.

“I’m saving it,” I said, looking down at the nice vast expanse of white plaster around my wrist, “For German class.”

He got my meaning. No one else had, except of course for Jack. Only true artists understand the lure of a blank white canvas.

“Oh, sure,” he said, knowingly. “That’ll be cool. So what are you going to go for? A sort of Hawaiian motif? Plenty of pineapples, I’m assuming.”

I gave him a very sour look. “I think I’m going to go for a patriotic theme,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Of course. What could be more fitting? You being a Madison, and all.”

“What does that have to do with it?” I wanted to know.

“James Madison,” David said, his eyebrows up again. “Fourth president. He’s a relation, right?”

“Oh,” I said, feeling like a dork. “Him. Yeah. No, I don’t think so.”

“Really?” David looked surprised. “Are you sure? Because you and his wife Dolly have a lot in common.”

“Me and Dolly Madison?” I laughed. “Like what?”

“Well, she saved a president too.”

“Oh, what,” I said, still laughing. “She gave old James the Heimlich or something?”

“No,” David said. “She saved a portrait of George Washington from being burned up with the rest of the White House when the British attacked it during the War of 1812.”

Wait a minute. The British had burned down the White House? When had this happened?

Obviously during a war we hadn’t learned about yet over at Adams Prep. We don’t have US History until eleventh grade.

“Whoa. Cool,” I said, meaning it. In history class they never tell you about cool stuff like First Ladies running around saving paintings. Instead all you ever get to hear about are the stupid pilgrims and boring old Abraham Lincoln.

“You sure you aren’t any relation?” David asked again.

“Pretty sure,” I said, regretfully. How cool would it be if I really were related to someone who had done something as brave as rescue a piece of fine art from a fire? Too cool for words, actually. Were we related to Dolly Madison? I mean, my mom frequently pointed out that I had to have inherited my artistic temperament from my dad’s side of the family, since there were no artists on hers. The Madisons had clearly been great art lovers throughout the ages.

Only it must have skipped a few generations, since I was the only one in the family that I knew of who could draw.

All of a sudden David got up and went to the window.

“Come here and look at this,” he said, moving aside the curtain.

I got up to follow him curiously, then saw that he was pointing down at the window sill. It was painted white, like the rest of the trim in the room . . .

But embedded deeply in the paint were words, words that had been carved into the sill. Looking closely, I could make out some of them: Amy . . . Chelsea . . . David . . .

“What is this?” I wanted to know. “The memorial First Kids window sill?”