When Lucy just looked at me blankly, I tapped the cover of the DVD she was renting.

“Like him,” I said, pointing at Hellboy. “He looks evil, right? But he’s not. You can’t always judge people by how they look. Ugly people might be beautiful inside. And beautiful people might be ugly inside. That’s all I’m saying. Maybe Harold thinks your insides leave something to be desired.”

“Why?” Lucy demanded tartly. “I’m not evil. Or stupid, either, if that’s what you’re thinking. Just because I don’t know what waggish means is no reason—”

“Why do you even care, anyway?” I asked her—just to make sure, you know, that she wasn’t, against all laws of nature, falling for Harold. “Don’t you already have a boyfriend? Where is Jack, anyway?”

“Oh,” Lucy said, keeping her gaze on the floor again. “He didn’t come down this weekend. I told him not to. You know, on account of how Mom and Dad are so upset about this SAT thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, a little more sympathetically. “I heard about Bare Essentials. And cheerleading. That must suck.”

“Whatever,” Lucy said with a shrug. “I was kind of over cheerleading, anyway. It isn’t as much fun when you’re the one in charge. I mean, now that I’m a senior, I’m supposed to help make up the routines and stuff. It’s way too much responsibility. Know what I mean?”

I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard anyone refer to making up a cheerleading routine as too difficult of a responsibility. But I figured I had to take her word for it. I mean, God knew I had never made up a routine. Maybe it was hard. As hard as integrating the subject of a drawing with its background. Who knew?

“Was Jack mad?” I asked her. “I mean, how did he take it?” Because Jack is the sort of person who expects to be treated like he’s the most important thing in everyone’s life.

“Oh, he had a cow,” Lucy said cheerfully. “He wanted to know why he couldn’t be my tutor…like his scores were that much better than mine. Mom and Dad put the kibosh on that right away. They were all, How much studying will you two do, anyway? Plus Dr. and Mrs. Slater want him to concentrate on his own school stuff. He hasn’t really been paying much attention to it, coming down here every weekend, and all of that. He got an F on some project, and they were all bent out of shape about it.”

I could easily imagine this. The Slaters had to pull a lot of strings to get Jack into RISD in the first place, on account of his below-average grades. I guess his whole theory on how grades don’t prove anything didn’t really work out the way he’d planned.

“So I guess you’re really gonna miss him,” I said, trying to offer some sisterly solace. “Jack, I mean. While you two are apart, getting your grades and stuff back up.”

“I guess so,” Lucy said, a little vaguely. “Do you think Harold likes chocolate chip cookies? Because I was thinking I might make him some. As a sort of thank you, for tutoring me.”

“Mom and Dad are paying him to tutor you,” I pointed out. “You don’t have to make him cookies.”

“I know,” Lucy said. “But it never hurts to be nice to people.” She picked up the bag with the DVD in it. “Well, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Then, realizing maybe I was being ridiculous—I mean, LUCY? Falling for Harold Minsky? Please—I added, “And, uh, thank you, too. For the, um. You know. Package you left me.”

“Oh, no problem,” Lucy said, with a twinkle that caused one of the geeks to bump into the life-size Boba Fett cutout, then hasten to right it.

“Hey, Madison.” Stan suddenly appeared at my side, and stood blinking down at Lucy. “This a friend of yours?”

“My sister,” I said. “Lucy. Lucy, this is the night manager, Stan.”

“How do you do,” Lucy said politely, while Stan just stared down at Lucy as if she had stepped off the front of an Amazing Nurse Nanako video.

“Hi,” he breathed. Then, getting a hold of himself, he said, “Listen, Madison, you want to head home with your sister, go ahead. I’ll close up.”

I looked at the clock on the wall. There were fifteen whole minutes until my shift was up. And he was letting me go home early! God, it was great sometimes, having such a hot sister.

“Thanks, Stan,” I said, and grabbed my coat and backpack.

“Uh, wait a sec,” Stan said, as I started to slip beneath the counter to join Lucy.

Then I remembered and silently handed him my backpack, which he opened and quickly flicked through, while Lucy looked on, curious.

“There ya go,” Stan said when he was through, handing my bag back to me. “Have a nice night.”

“Thanks,” I said. “See ya.”

And Lucy and I walked out together into the crisp night air.

“Does he search everybody’s backpack before they leave,” Lucy wanted to know, as soon as the door had shut behind us, “or just yours?”

“Everyone’s,” I said.

“God,” Lucy said. “Doesn’t that make you mad?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The truth was, I had way bigger things to worry about than whether or not my bag got searched after work. I would have thought Lucy did, too. “Didn’t they search your bag at Bare Essentials?”

“No.”

“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “you can’t really make as much selling bras on eBay as you can selling stolen DVDs.”

“What, are you kidding?” Lucy snorted. “Some of those bras retail for as much as eighty bucks. I’m really surprised at you, Sam, putting up with that kind of treatment. From that Stan guy, I mean. It’s not like you.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do about it?” I grumbled. “Have a die-in?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “But something.”

Which was all well and good for her to say. I mean, Mom and Dad weren’t making her work anymore. I needed my job. If I wanted to pay for my art supplies, I mean.

I should have known, then. I mean, her showing up at Potomac Video like that should have been my first warning sign as to what was going on with Lucy.

But I was too involved in my own problems to pay attention to hers. Especially considering the fact that my problems? They were about to get a whole lot bigger.


 

Top ten ways I suck as a girlfriend:

10. Instead of going out with my boyfriend on Saturday night, I choose to fill in at work for someone who was arrested that day for protesting something my boyfriend’s father feels very strongly about.

9. Then I don’t call him.

8. My boyfriend, I mean. Even though he asked me to. Even after I get home from work that night, and I see on the news that hundreds of people were arrested for pretending to die in front of the very hotel he was having dinner in.

7. And when he (my boyfriend) calls, I let it go to voice mail. Because I just can’t deal.

6. Even though I know he’s probably hurting.

5. Because those people look as if they really, really hate his dad.

4. But I have too many problems of my own. Like, for instance, I need to decide if I agree with him. My boyfriend, I mean. About us being ready. For you-know-what.

3. I’m not sure I do.

2. At least, not most of the time.

And the number-one reason I suck as a girlfriend:

1. I don’t call him the next day, either. Or pick up the phone when he calls me.


7

“They were just all so…dirty.” That is what Catherine has to say about the protesters. The ones she saw on the news. The same ones who were outside the Four Seasons when Dauntra got arrested. The ones Dauntra was arrested with. “I mean, like they hadn’t bathed in weeks.”

“They were having a die-in,” I pointed out. “Pretending to be dead. So they were lying on the street. That’s why they looked dirty.”

“It wasn’t just street dirt,” Catherine said firmly, as she searched through the apples at the fruit and salad bar in the caf for one that wasn’t bruised into pulp. “They just looked…homeless. I mean, couldn’t they have worn nicer clothes?”

“They aren’t going to wear their Sunday best to lie in the street, Cath,” I said.

“Yeah, but I’m just saying. If they want people to be more sympathetic to their cause, you’d think they’d at least take out some of their piercings, or whatever. I mean, how are we supposed to relate to people like that? It’s bad enough they were totally dissing the president. Did they have to look so…grungy?”

“They weren’t dissing the president,” I said. “They were protesting his policies—”

Before I had time to go on, however, Kris Parks came bustling up to us, and was all, “What are you guys doing here? You said you’d help set up the gym!”

I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. It was Catherine who elbowed me and went, “For the town hall meeting tomorrow. Remember?”

“Oh, right,” I said, trying not to sound as bummed as I felt. Because the last thing I wanted to do was spend my lunch hour setting up folding chairs with Kris Parks and her hideous Right Wayers.

“Come ON,” Kris said, grabbing my arm. “I told everyone you’d show.”

Everyone turned out to be…well, everyone. Not just the Right Wayers and other people from Adams Prep, either, including my German teacher, Frau Rider, who kept wandering around, shouting, “Don’t spill that paint on the gym floor!”

No, Kris had also invited members of the press. To watch me, the girl who saved the president, set up folding chairs.

Not that many had actually shown up. Fortunately, most papers prefer to run stories that include real news, not stuff about some prep school’s efforts to get ready for a presidential visitation. Or maybe they’d caught on that the whole thing had just been a ploy on Kris’s part to get herself into the papers, and therefore add another clipping to her college admissions packets.