Dauntra, whose parents kicked her out of the house one night after she turned sixteen and got an eyebrow ring (and a twenty-year-old boyfriend), is currently studying graphic design at a community college. She’d dumped the boyfriend, but kept the eyebrow ring, and opted out of the whole SAT trap by refusing to take them, or to enroll in a school that required them. Dauntra has a lot of opinions like that. I actually think that she and Lucy’s boyfriend, Jack, have a lot in common that way.

“So what’d the ’rents do?” Dauntra wanted to know. “About your sister?”

“Oh,” I said. “They’re making her get a tutor. And cut back on the cheerleading to make time for it. The tutoring, I mean.”

“Typical,” Dauntra said. “I mean, them playing into the whole sick fallacy that those scores mean anything. Although if it means your sister spends less time in a miniskirt, undermining the feminist cause, I guess it’s a good thing.”

“Totally,” I said.

I thought about asking Dauntra what she thought I should do about David and the whole Thanksgiving thing. I mean, she is more experienced than I am—probably more than Lucy, too. I figured the advice from a woman of the world like Dauntra might be really valuable, not to mention insightful.

Only I couldn’t really figure out how to bring it up, you know? Like, was I just supposed to go, “Hey, Dauntra. My boyfriend asked me to spend Thanksgiving with him at Camp David, and you know what that means. Should I say yes or no?”

Somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So instead, I asked her, conversationally, “So, how’s the battle of the backpack going?”

Dauntra glanced darkly in Stan’s direction. “Stalemate,” she said. “He said if I didn’t like it, I could go work at McDonald’s.”

Dauntra’s convinced that the video store’s policy of having a manager go through employee backpacks before allowing them to leave after their shift is unconstitutional—even though I’d asked my mom about it, and she’d said, technically, it wasn’t. Dauntra refused to believe this, but it’s cool she even cares. Some people I know—well, okay, Kris Parks, to be exact—only pretend to care about issues because doing so looks good on their college applications.

“I was thinking about pouring Aunt Jemima all over the inside of my JanSport,” Dauntra went on, “so when Stan reaches inside it tonight, he gets a big handful of syrup. But I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good backpack.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see how that might hurt more than help. Besides, it isn’t Stan’s fault, necessarily. He’s just doing his job.”

Dauntra narrowed her eyes at me. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what all the Nazis said in their own defense after World War Two.”

I didn’t think searching someone’s backpack for stolen DVDs was quite the same as killing seven million people, but I didn’t figure Dauntra would appreciate me mentioning that out loud.

“Anyway,” she said, changing the subject, “how was that new art class? The life drawing one?”

“Oh,” I said. “Kind of, um, startling.” I still didn’t feel comfortable bringing up the David thing, so I just said, “Did you know life drawing meant nudes?”

Dauntra didn’t even look up from the manga she’d cracked open over the register’s keyboard.

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Oh,” I said, slightly let down. “Well, I didn’t. So I got to see my first—you know.”

That got her attention.

“The nude model was a GUY?” She looked up from the comic book—well, it was really a comic novel, or graphic novel. I should start trying to get the terminology correct, since someday I hope to write and illustrate mangas of my own. “I thought nude models were always women.”

“Not always, I guess,” I said.

“You know, some guy dropped his pants in front of me on the Metro the other day,” Dauntra said incredulously, “for free. I had to call the cops. And, like, this Susan Boone lady, she pays some guy money to do it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Dauntra shook her head in disbelief. “Did you feel violated? Because whenever a guy shows me his goods when I’m not interested in seeing them, I feel violated.”

“It wasn’t really like that,” I said. “I mean, you know. It was art.”

“Art.” Dauntra nodded. “Sure. I can’t believe a guy gets paid to show off his goods, and people call it art.”

“Well, not the showing-off-his-goods part,” I said. “But the drawings we make of it.”

Dauntra sighed. “Maybe I should take up being a nude model. I mean, you get paid just to sit there.”

“Naked,” I pointed out.

“So what?” Dauntra shrugged. “The human form is a thing of beauty.”

“Excuse me.” A tall guy in a beret—no, really, a French beret, although he didn’t happen to look French—approached the counter. “I believe you’re holding a film for me. The name is Wade, W-A-D—”

“Yeah, it’s right here,” I said quickly. Because the guy in the beret is a regular, and even though I’d only been working at Potomac Video for two months, I knew that if you didn’t head off Mr. Wade at the pass, he’d go on for as long as he could about his film collection, which is extensive, and mostly in black and white.

“Ah, yes,” he said, when I showed him the DVD we’d been holding for him. “The Four Hundred Blows. You know it, of course?”

“Of course,” I said, even though I had no idea what he was talking about. “That will be fourteen seventy-nine.”

“One of Truffaut’s finest,” Mr. Wade said. “I have it on video, of course, but it’s really the kind of film you can’t own enough copies of—”

“Thank you,” I said, bagging the DVD, then handing him the bag.

“A truly powerful work,” Mr. Wade went on. “A masterful piece of suspense…”

“Just how big were the guy’s goods, anyway?” Dauntra asked me, in a sweetly innocent voice.

Mr. Wade, looking suddenly alarmed, snatched up his bag and fled the store.

“Come again,” Dauntra called after him, and the two of us practically collapsed, we were laughing so hard.

“What was that all about?” Stan, the night manager, came out from behind the Westerns and eyed us suspiciously.

“Nothing,” I said, wiping tears of laughter from my eyes.

“Mr. Wade was so excited to get his new DVD, he wanted to rush home to watch it, that’s all,” Dauntra said, in a convincingly sincere voice.

Stan looked as if he didn’t believe us.

“Madison,” he said, “some anime fans were in here earlier and got the Neon Genesis Evangelions all out of order. See what you can do about that, will you?”

I said I would, and ducked out from behind the counter to go check on the anime section.

Later, after the post-dinner rush, Dauntra was reading another manga while I pulled out the materials the White House press secretary had given me the other day to prepare me for my big speech, and was going over them.

“What is all that?” Dauntra wanted to know.

“Stuff I gotta talk about on MTV next week,” I said. “At the town hall meeting at my school.”

Dauntra looked as if there were a bad taste in her mouth. “That stupid Return to Family thing?”

I blinked at her. “It’s not stupid. It’s important.”

“Yeah,” Dauntra said. “Whatever. God, Sam. Don’t you ever resent it, being used that way?”

“Used? How’m I being used?” I asked.

“Well, the president’s using you,” Dauntra said, “to spoon-feed his fascist new program to America’s youth.”

“Return to Family isn’t fascist,” I said. I didn’t mention that, even if I didn’t approve of it, I couldn’t exactly quit being teen ambassador. Not without making things exceedingly awkward with my boyfriend’s parents. “It’s a program that encourages families to spend more time together. You know, to take a night off from soccer practice and TV and just sit around and talk.”

“Yeah,” Dauntra said darkly. “On the surface, that’s all it is.”

“What are you talking about?” I waved the papers I was holding. “I’ve got it all right here. That’s what it is. The president’s Return to Family initiative, to—”

“—encourage people to take a night off from mindless sitcoms and talk to one another,” Dauntra finished for me. “I know. But that’s just the part of the Return to Family plan they’re telling you about. What about the rest of it? The parts they don’t want you to know about…yet?”

“You,” I said, “are paranoid. You’ve seen that Mel Gibson movie too many times.”

Conspiracy Theory is one of our favorite movies to watch in the store. Stan hates it, because whenever Mel and Julia Roberts kiss, or are about to, Dauntra and I find ourselves incapable of doing anything but stare at the screen.

“Well, didn’t he turn out to be right?” Dauntra asked. “Mel, I mean? There was a conspiracy.” She glanced over at the two-way mirror that separated us from the back office. The two-way mirror is supposedly there so Stan or whoever is back there can catch shoplifters. But Dauntra is convinced it’s really so the owners or whoever can spy on the employees. “It’s never good,” Dauntra added, “when the government starts putting its nose in our personal business, like how much time we spend together as families. Trust me on this one.”

I turned back to my paperwork with a sigh. I love Dauntra, and all, but sometimes I’m not so sure she’s all there, if you know what I mean. Who has time to worry about the government and what it’s up to when there are so many real problems out there? Like my boyfriend, for instance, apparently thinking we are going to have sex over Thanksgiving weekend.

I thought once more about asking Dauntra, you know, about David and me, and what she thought about the possible Turkey Day divestment of my virginity.

The thing is, I knew she’d be all for my losing it. I also knew that, if I told her, it would help dispel my good-girl image at the store, an image I couldn’t quite seem to shake, even with my newly dyed hair.