“I don’t see any white there,” Susan Boone said mildly.

I looked at her like she was crazy. Why, that egg and that sheet were as white as ... well, as white as the hair streaming down her shoulders.

“Um,” I said. “Excuse me?”

Susan bent down so that she was looking at the egg on my same eye level.

“Remember what I said, Sam,” she said. “Draw what you see, not what you know. You know there is a white egg on a white sheet in front of you. But do you really see any white there? Or do you see the pink reflected from the sun in the window? Or the blue and purple of the shadows beneath the egg? The yellow of the overhead light, where it is reflected on the top curve of the egg. The faint green where the silk meets the table. Those are the colours I see. No white. No white at all.”

It didn’t seem to me that, in any part of this speech, there was anything remotely smacking of an attempt to stamp out my natural creativity and style. You have to learn the rules, David had pointed out, before you can break them. Susan Boone was really trying, just as he had said, to get me to see.

So I looked. I looked hard. Harder, really, than I’d ever looked at anything before.

And I saw.

It sounds dumb, I know. I mean, I’ve always been able to see. I have twenty-twenty vision.

But suddenly, I saw:

I saw the purple shadow beneath the egg.

I saw the pink light from the sun outside the window.

I even saw the little yellow moon of light reflected on the top of the egg.

And so, moving really fast, I picked up the first pencil I could reach, and started sketching.

Here is what I love about drawing:

When you are drawing, it is like the whole world around you ceases to exist. It is just you and the page and the pencil, and maybe the soft classical music in the background or whatever, but you don’t actually hear it because you are so absorbed in what you are doing. When you are drawing, you are not aware of time passing, or what is happening around you. When a drawing is going really well, you could sit down at one o’clock and not look up again until five, and not even have any idea that so much time has gone by until someone mentions it, because you have been so caught up in what you are creating.

There is really nothing in the world, I have found, that is like it. Watching movies? Reading? Not really. Not unless the story is really really good. And very few are. When you are drawing, you are in your own world, of your own creation.

And there is no world better than that.

Which is why, when you are that deeply engrossed in a drawing and something happens to bring you out of that world, it is about a hundred times as annoying as when you are doing Geometry or something and your sister comes barging into your room to ask if she can borrow a scrunchie or whatever. When you are drawing and someone does something like that, I think it would be almost justifiable to murder that person.

Of course, if the person is a big black crow, you would be even more justified.

“SQUAWK,” Joe the crow yelled in my ear as he yanked a half dozen hairs from the top of my head, then took off, his wings flapping noisily.

I screamed.

I couldn’t help it. I had been so involved in my drawing, I had been completely unaware of the bird’s approach, totally oblivious to his sneak attack. I didn’t scream so much because what he’d done hurt—although it did—but because I just wasn’t expecting it.

“Joseph,” Susan Boone cried, clapping her hands. “Bad bird! Bad bird!”

Joe fled to the safety of his cage, where he dropped my hairs and let out a triumphant, “Pretty bird!”

“You are not a pretty bird,” Susan Boone corrected him, like he could actually understand her. “You are a very bad bird.” Then she turned around and said to me, “Oh, Samantha, I am so sorry. Are you all right?”

I touched the raw place on my scalp Joe had created. As I did so, I looked around and noticed something: the light had changed. It was no longer pink. The sun had set. It was already after five, but to me, only about two minutes seemed to have passed since I’d started drawing, not nearly two hours.

“I forgot to lock his cage,” Susan was saying. “I’ll have to remember to do that every time you’re here. I have no idea why he is so obsessed with your hair. I mean, it is very bright, but. . .”

It was around this time that I began to notice that the bench next to mine was shaking. I looked over there to see if David was having a seizure or something, then realized he wasn’t seizing at all. He was laughing.

He noticed my gaze and said, between gasps from laughing so hard, “I’m sorry! I swear, I’m sorry! But if you could have seen your face when that bird landed on you . . .”

I can take a joke as well as the next person, but I did not happen to think this one was particularly funny. It hurts when someone—or something—pulls out your hair. Not as much as breaking your wrist, maybe, but still.

David, whose shoulders—not as big as Jack’s but still undeniably impressive as guys’ shoulders go—were still shaking with laughter, went, “Come on. You gotta admit. That was funny.”

Of course he was right. It had been funny.

But before I had a chance to confess this, Susan Boone was at my side, looking down at my drawing. Since she was looking at it, I looked at it too. I had, of course, been looking at it all afternoon. But this was my first chance to sit back and really see what I had done.

And I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was a white egg. Sitting on a piece of white silk. It looked exactly like the white egg and the white silk in front of me.

But I hadn’t used a single bit of white.

“There,” Susan Boone said, in a satisfied voice. “You’ve got it. I knew you would.”

Then she patted me on the head in a distracted way, right on the tender spot where her crow had stolen my hair.

But it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all. Because I knew Susan Boone was right: I had got it.

I had begun, finally, to see.

Top ten Duties of the US Teen Ambassador to the UN, as Perceived by Me, Samantha Madison:

10.  Sit around in the White House press secretary’s office and listen to him gloat over how high the President’s public approval rating has shot in the wake of the botched assassination attempt on him.

9.  Also listen to the press secretary moan about how the city is complaining about all the cops they keep having to dispatch to my house to keep away the press, and why can’t I just go on Dateline or 60 Minutes and get interviewed already. Then after they show it a million times, everybody will get sick of me and leave me alone.

Yeah. Like I have anything to say that the American viewing public will find even remotely interesting. As if.

8.  Make photocopies of the rules and regulations of the international From My Window art show for all of my artistic friends, of which I have one, my sister’s boyfriend and my soulmate, Jack Slater.

7.  Autograph photos of myself for all the kids who are writing in asking for signed photos of me. Though why anyone would want to hang a photo of me in their room is completely beyond me.

6.  Read my fan mail (after it has been irradiated and checked for razor blades and explosives). An enormous segment of the population seems to feel the need to write to me to tell me how brave they find me. Some of them even send me money. Unfortunately, this money is immediately put into a trust fund to send me to college, so it is not like I can buy CDs with it.

I also supposedly get a lot of letters from pervs but I don’t even get to see those. The press secretary keeps all those in a special file and won’t let me bring them to school to show Catherine.

5.  In spite of the fact that the UN is in New York, no one has shown any sign of actually taking me there. To New York, I mean. Apparently, actually going to the UN isn’t really part of the top ten duties of the Teen Ambassador to the UN.

4.  Bouncing a Superball off the side of the wall of the press secretary’s office, while it helps to pass the time while I am stuck in there, which I am supposed to be every Wednesday afternoon, is not technically a duty of the Teen Ambassador to the UN and only serves to annoy the press secretary and his staff, who confiscated the ball and told me I could have it back when my tenure as Teen Ambassador was over. Apparently they are unaware of the fact that you can buy Superballs on just about every street corner, and for less than a dollar.

3.  Teen Ambassadors to the UN are not encouraged to roam around loose in the White House hallways, however familiar with the layout they might be, as they could inadvertently, while checking to see if there happened to be a portrait of Dolly Madison hanging in the Vermeil Room, stumble across a peace summit.

2.  It is strongly advised that Teen Ambassadors to the UN do not dress all in black, as this, according to the White House press secretary, may give the public the false impression that the United States’s Teen Ambassador is a practising witch.

And the number one duty of the United States Teen Ambassador to the UN, so far as I can tell:

1.  Sit still. Keep quiet. And let the press secretary do his work.

“He said yes!”