Which is the only explanation I can give for how it was that I found myself leaning over to him right before we all got up to put our drawings on the window sill for critique, and going softly—so softly I was worried he might not be able to hear me over the sudden pounding of my heart—“Hey, David. Do you want to go with me to this party on Saturday night?”

He looked surprised. For one pulse-stopping moment I thought he might say no.

But he didn’t. He smiled and said, “Sure. Why not?”

Top ten Reasons I Might Have Asked David to Kris Parks’s Party on Saturday Night:

10.  Complete and utter lunacy brought on by inhaling too much turpentine.

9.  Out of a sense of solidarity with Catherine, who seems to have developed a bad case of Stockholm syndrome, as she appears to have a desire to bond with the very same people who for so many years tormented her mercilessly—so much so that she is willing to risk the wrath of her parents by sneaking out to attend a party given by the ringleader of this group, with a boy she hardly knows.

8.  His eyes.

7.  How nice he had been that night at the White House, telling me about Dolly Madison. Plus getting me that burger. Oh, and carving my name on the window sill.

6.  How nice he’d looked that night at the White House, with his kind of messy thick hair and long eyelashes and big hands.

5.  He can draw. He really can. Not as well as Jack, but almost as well as me. Maybe even better than me, only in a different style. Plus you can tell he really likes to draw, that he feels the same way about it that Jack and I do, that it sucks him in the way it does us. Most people—like my sister Lucy, for instance—never get that feeling about anything.

4.  The daisy helmet.

3.  Because he has to go everywhere with the Secret Service, that means there will be adults in attendance and so my parents will have to let us go.

2.  Everybody already thinks we are going out anyway.

AndAnd the number one—and most likely—reason I asked David to Kris’s party:

1.  To make Jack jealous, of course. Because it is entirely possible that if he sees me with another boy, he will realize that he could, if he does not act soon, lose me, and that might galvanize him into admitting his true feelings for me at last.

   At least, I hope so.

I began to regret having asked David to Kris’s party almost immediately. Not because I didn’t think we’d have a good time together, or whatever. I mean, except when he was teasing me about being a sensitive artist, David was an OK sort of guy.