“Nowhere,” I said. “Leave me alone.”

“I’m only asking,” Lucy said. “Can’t I ask you a simple question? You don’t have to get all upset about it. Unless, of course, you were doing something . . . you know. Something you weren’t supposed to be doing.”

I had been, of course. Only not what Lucy thought. I’d just been eating burgers with—and having my initials carved into a White House window sill by—the son of the leader of the Free World.

“It’s just that you two looked—I don’t know . . .” Lucy was examining her lips in the mirror of her compact. She had spent about half an hour lining them that morning—her lips, that is—conscious that today, my first day back at school after the whole saving-the-President thing, a lot of people were probably going to be taking her picture.

A lot of people did take her picture—and mine—as we walked out of our house and down to the station wagon (the Secret Service had suggested that for the next few weeks or so, it might not be such a good idea for Lucy and I to take the bus to school, so Theresa was driving us). So Lucy had been right about that, anyway.

What she wasn’t right about was that there was anything going on between me and David.

“. . . chummy,” she finished, snapping the compact shut. “Didn’t you think they looked chummy, Theresa?”

Theresa, who is not the world’s greatest driver, and who had been completely unnerved by all the photographers who had thrown themselves across the hood of the car in an effort to get my picture, only said a bunch of Spanish swearwords as the car ahead of us cut her off.

“I think you looked chummy,” Lucy said. “Definitely chummy.”

“There was nothing chummy about it,” I said. “We just ran into each other on the way out of the bathroom. That’s all.”

Rebecca, seated in the front seat, remarked, “I detected a frisson.”

Lucy and I both looked at her like she was crazy. “A what?”

A frisson,“ Rebecca said. A tremor of intense attraction. I detected one between you and David last night.”

I was flabbergasted. Because of course there’d been no such thing. I happened to be in love with Jack, not David.

Only of course I couldn’t say that. Not out loud.

“There was no frisson. There was absolutely no frisson. Where would you even get an idea like that?”

“Oh,” Rebecca replied, mildly. “From one of Lucy’s romance novels. I’ve been reading them, in an effort to improve my people skills. And there was definitely a frisson between you and David.”

No matter how many times I denied the existence of any frisson, however, both Rebecca and Lucy swore they’d seen one. Which doesn’t even make sense, since I highly doubt frissons, if they even exist, are detectable to the human eye.

And while David is cute and everything, I am totally one hundred per cent committed to Jack Slater, who, OK, does not exactly seem to love me back, but he will. One of these days, Jack will fully come to his senses, and when he does, I will be waiting.

Besides which, David so fully doesn’t like me that way. He was just being nice to me because I saved his dad. That’s all. I mean, if they’d heard the way he’d been teasing me about the whole pineapple thing, they so totally would give up on this frisson business.

But whatever. Everyone, it seemed, was determined to make my life a living hell: my sisters; the reporters staked out on my lawn; the manufacturers of certain brands of popular soft drinks, who would not stop delivering samples of their products by the caseload to my home; my own family. Even the President of the United States.

“What exactly does the teen ambassador to the United Nations do?” Catherine asked me later that day. We were standing in the lunch line, where we had stood together every weekday of my life, with the exception of my pre-K days, summers, national holidays, and that year I had spent in Morocco.

But unlike all the rest of those times, today everyone standing around us was staring at me and speaking in reverently hushed tones. One particularly shy freshman girl had come up and asked if it would be all right for her to touch my cast.

Oh, yeah. Nothing like being a national hero.

I was trying to downplay the whole thing. Really, I was. For instance, in direct defiance of Lucy’s orders, I had not risen an hour earlier for school in order to apply horse conditioner to my hair. I had not donned any of my new slacks from Banana Republic. I had on my normal, everyday, midnight-black clothes, and my hair was its normal, everyday, out-of-control mess.

Still, everyone was treating me differently. Even the teachers, who made jokes like, “For those of you who weren’t dining at the White House last night, did you happen to see the excellent documentary on Yemen on PBS?” and “Please open your textbooks to page two hundred and sixty-five—those of you who did not break your arm saving the life of the President, that is.”

Even the cafeteria workers were in on it. As I stepped up with my tray, Mrs. Krebbetts gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, “Here, honey,” then slipped me an extra piece of peanut-butter pie.

In the history of John Adams Preparatory School Mrs. Krebbetts has never slipped anyone an extra piece of peanut-butter pie. Everyone is scared of Mrs. Krebbetts, and with good reason: aggravate her, and she might deny you pie for a year.

And here she was, giving me extra pie. The world as I had once known it came crashing to an end.

“I mean, you must do something.” Catherine, having recovered from the pie incident, followed me to the table we traditionally shared with a number of girls who, like Catherine and I, were on the outer fringes of popularity—like the frozen tundra of the social geography of Adams Prep. Too anti-establishment to join the student council and not athletic enough to be jocks, most of us either played instruments or were in the drama club. I was the only artist. We were all just trying to get through high school so we could hurry up and get to college, where, we’d heard, things were better.

“I mean, teen ambassador to the UN. What are you in charge of? Is there a committee, at least?” Catherine wouldn’t let it go. “On world teen issues, or something?”

“I don’t know, Catherine,” I said, as we sat down. “The President just said he was appointing me as representative from the US. I assume there are representatives from other countries. Otherwise, what would be the point? Does anybody want an extra piece of pie?”

No one responded. That’s because everyone at the table was staring, but not at the pie. Instead, they were all staring at Lucy and Jack, who had suddenly plunked their trays down at our table.

“Hey,” Lucy said, breezily, as if she sat down at the unpopular girls’ table every day of the week. “What’s up?”

“How’d you get that extra piece of pie?” Jack wanted to know.

The thing of it was, Lucy and Jack weren’t the only ones from, you know, the other side of the caf who sat down at our table. To my astonishment, they were joined by about half the football team and a bunch of other cheerleaders too. I could see that Catherine was completely unnerved by this invasion. It was as if a bunch of swans had suddenly taken over the duck pond. All of us mallards weren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves in the face of so much beauty.

“What are you doing?” I whispered to Lucy.

Lucy just shrugged as she sipped her Diet Coke. “Since you won’t come to us,” she said, “we came to you.”

“Hey, Sam,” Jack said, whipping a pen out from the pocket of his black trenchcoat. “I’ll sign your cast for you.”

“Ooh,” cried Debbie Kinley, her pom-poms twitching excitedly. “Me, too! I want to sign her cast too.”

I yanked my arm out of their reach and went, “Uh, no, thanks.”

Jack looked crestfallen. “I was just going to draw a disaffected youth on it,” he explained. “That’s all.”

A disaffected youth would have been cool, I had to admit. But if I let Jack draw on my cast, then everybody would want to, and soon all that lovely whiteness would be a big old mess. But if I said only Jack could draw on it, then everyone would know about my secret crush on my sister’s boyfriend.

“Um, thanks anyway,” I said. “But I’m saving my cast for my own stuff.”

I felt bad about being mean to Jack. He was, after all, my soulmate.

Still, I wish he’d hurry up and realize it, and quit hanging out with Lucy and her dopey friends. Because these guys were acting like total idiots, tossing corn chips at one another and trying to catch them in their mouths. It was revolting. Also irritating because they kept jostling the table, making it hard for those of us who had to eat one-handed to keep our food steady. I realize that football players are very large and maybe can’t help shaking the table, but still, they could have shown a little restraint.

“Hey,” I said, when one of the corn chips landed in Catherine’s apple sauce. “Cut it out, you guys.”

Lucy, poring over a magazine article about how to get perfect thighs—which she, of course, already had—went, in a bored voice, “Geez. Just because she’s getting a medal, she thinks she’s all that,” which is totally unfair, because what was I supposed to do, just meekly accept the whole corn-chip-in-the-apple-sauce thing?

Catherine stared at me, wide-eyed. “You’re getting a medal too? You’re teen ambassador to the UN, and you’re getting a medal?”

Unfortunately so. A presidential medal of valour, to be exact. The ceremony was going to be held in December, when the White House was decorated all Christmassy, for optimum photogenic effect.

But I didn’t have time to reply. That’s because my second slice of pie suddenly disappeared and travelled down the row of football players like a frisbee in a game of keep-away.