Long May She Reign (21 page)

They all stood there.

“Um, look,” Meg said. “Just so you know.”

Larry and Ed both tensed.

Christ, what were they expecting her to say? That she hated them, and what had happened to her was all their fault—even though they hadn't been assigned to her at the time? “I don't ever play games with this stuff,” she said.
Ever
. Once, right after they'd moved to Washington, she'd decided to give her agents the slip, just for fun—and her parents had been so incredibly furious that she had never tried it again. Her mother had yelled at her on live television, even. And now, of course, there was no chance in hell that she would take any kind of unnecessary risks. “If I tell you I'm going to be somewhere, or doing something, that's where I'm going to
be
. You don't have to worry that I'll try to pull a fast one on you.”

They nodded.

Okay. She nodded, too. With luck, they were always going to be where she expected
them
to be, too.

Except that she wasn't going to count on it.

13

SHE LIMPED BACK
to her room, deciding that she should probably get cleaned up for dinner—and check the location of the panic button in the bathroom, while she was at it. So, she pulled a small hand towel and her toothbrush and toothpaste out of her knapsack.

The bathroom was definitely spartan, and unappealing—two stalls, one of which was wheelchair-accessible, white walls, blue tiles, overhead lights that were too bright, a grim dark shower, and a larger one with a handrail and a white plastic shower bench. There were two round sinks, with a mirror above each one, and small built-in shelves, overflowing with plastic shower caddies full of shampoo, toothpaste, face cream, makeup, and blow-dryers and so forth, and a couple of hand towels hung from nearby hooks.

Three tall, very narrow shelves on the left—right by the god-damn panic button—were empty, which she figured meant they had been reserved for her. Seemed logical, anyway.

It was hard to open toothpaste tubes one-handed, and she stuck it under her right arm, so she could maneuver the toothbrush over there with her good hand, and use her upper arm muscles to squeeze some out. More often than not, this was an imprecise process, and a large glob would end up spilling on the floor.

Pretty weird to see all of this feminine stuff around—her brothers weren't big on mousse and Noxema and all, and she had never really shared a bathroom with her mother, except maybe on ski vacations, and that sort of thing. And now, the idea of having to use this space along with a bunch of strangers was very unpleasant, indeed.

A blond, round-faced girl came in, and stopped short when she saw her.

Meg's mouth was full of toothpaste, and she figured—just a guess—that this wasn't a real good time to spit, so she nodded, instead.

“I, uh—” The girl backed up towards the hall. “I mean, I forgot my—excuse me.” She left, the door swinging shut.

Great. Meg spit out the toothpaste. “Nice talking to you,” she said to the closed door, and then finished brushing her teeth.

She didn't want to go back out to the corridor, and face people she didn't know, but Christ, she couldn't hide in here indefinitely. So, she limped out as quickly as possible and hurried into her room.

Jesus.

Susan was going to show up soon, to make her go to dinner, and she was so tired that she just wanted to lie down on the damn bed that made her think of being handcuffed and terrified and alone, and sleep for about a decade.

However. Odds were, college people didn't nap. Or sit in their rooms, fighting off tears every other minute, either.

She wanted to turn on CNN, for comfort, but there was too high a chance that she might see
herself
, which would hardly be calming. So, she used her new room key—Christ, it had been a long time since she'd needed
keys
—to slit open the carton where she'd packed her favorite CDs. MP3s were easier, and more fun, and she liked her iPod and all, but she always had to be extra-careful, since illegally downloading music might make the Administration look bad, and—well. Yet another tedious compromise in her life. Beth emailed her pilfered music files constantly, of course, but they had such utterly different tastes that Meg usually just thanked her and stored them in an unused folder on her desktop.

Since it sounded as though every single person in the entire dorm was playing some kind of loud music, she might as well join the trend. Damn, this place was
noisy
. But, if a headache was inevitable, it would be better to have one of her own making, so she pulled out the Doors and turned up the volume as high as it would go. Call her old-fashioned, but most of the music she liked had come out before she was born. Hell, some of it predated her
parents
.

When the dreaded knock came, “Twentieth Century Fox”—one of her all-time favorites—was playing. Blasting, really. She swallowed, and opened the door, to see Susan standing there with three other girls, all of them wearing coats and scarves, ready to go out into the snow.

“Want to head over for dinner?” Susan asked, as though this hadn't already been planned.

No. “Um, yeah, okay,” Meg said, and coughed. “Let me, uh—I mean, I guess it's cold out there, so—” She moved clumsily over to her desk chair to pick up her Kevlar ski jacket.

“This is Meg, guys. And this is Tammy,” Susan said, indicating the somewhat pudgy blond girl to her right—the same one who had darted out of the bathroom earlier, “and,” she motioned towards a tall, solemn girl who had shoulder-length black hair and very white skin, “Mary Elizabeth. And this,” she pointed at a somewhat furtive-looking girl with glasses, who didn't appear to have washed her possibly brown hair recently, “is Jesslyn.”

They all nodded at one another, and then Meg turned off the CD and picked up her cane. Using the damn thing was only going to make her look more conspicuous, but it might help keep her from falling, so she couldn't leave it behind. Dr. Brooks had given her several easily-attached rubber cane tips with sharp, metal teeth, which she was supposed to use to dig into ice and snow, to make it easier to keep her balance. She even had crampons to strap onto her boots, if necessary, but that would probably be overkill for a short—she hoped—walk to the dining hall.

“You like the Doors,” Mary Elizabeth said flatly.

She
loved
the Doors. “Yeah,” Meg said. In all probability, Mary Elizabeth wasn't going to be enchanted by Joan Jett, either. Or the Stones. Or the Animals. Or even Julie Andrews. Looking at her in her thigh-length heavy peacoat and homemade wool scarf, Meg's guess was that Oberlin had been her first choice, but she hadn't gotten in—and was still pissed about it.

Tammy, on the other hand, her eyes wide and awed as she peeked into the room and saw all of the photographs, was wearing a puffy pink ski jacket, and gave every appearance of being delighted to be at this preppy Eastern school. Jesslyn seemed—well—weird, her movements abrupt and jittery, as though she had just taken a couple of handfuls of Ritalin, and chased them with a six-pack of Red Bull. She had on a badly-stained tan coat, what appeared to be an authentic, somewhat moth-eaten coonskin cap, black boots, black pants, and a black hooded sweatshirt which was about three sizes too big for her.

“Um, the stairs are fine,” Meg said, when Susan headed for the elevator.

Susan hesitated.

“Really,” Meg said. The five of them crammed together inside the elevator seemed like an experience worth avoiding. “At home, I always take the stairs.”

Larry, who had joined them in the hall,
didn't
glance at her when she said that, but she had a feeling that it had been his first instinct. The schedule had been set up so that some agents would always be at the dorm, standing guard; others would be with her; and still others would serve as advance security teams and do surveillance, all of which had to be costing the taxpayers an offensively high amount of money.

She was never sure if she should introduce her agents to people or not, although it had been easier when she had fewer. “Um,” she gestured towards him, “this is—”

“It's okay,” Larry said. “We've met.”

Meg nodded; her dormmates nodded; her agent nodded.

Swell.

The stairs took some effort—okay, a hell of a
lot
of effort—and she tucked the handle of her cane over her shoulder, so that she could grip the banister with her good hand, and make her painful way down to the first floor, having to go so slowly that it probably made the rest of them feel even more uncomfortable than taking the elevator together would have.

Only three agents—Kyle and Paula joined them down in front of the command post—were going to walk over with them, so at least a couple of the others must have gone on ahead.

When they got outside—it had stopped snowing, but it was really
cold
—a group of bored-looking reporters and camerapeople instantly perked up and came over to intercept them.

Oh, Christ.

Brian and Larry were trying to keep them at a distance, but there was an immediate clamor of questions, along with a disorienting number of flashbulbs and Minicam lights, and it was a struggle not to close her eyes—or look apprehensive.

“Are these your friends, Miss Powers?” someone shouted.

Now, how was she supposed to answer that? If she said they'd just met, it would sound as though she didn't
want
to be friends with them—but she couldn't claim to be their well-established chum, either. So, what the hell, she would answer the question she wanted to answer, instead of the one they'd asked. A simple tactic, taught to her long ago, by a powerful political figure of whom she was almost always fond.

“We're going to dinner,” she said, and tried to get past them by staying behind her agents—the blocking backs—who had formed a little wedge, with Kyle in the lead.

But, the reporters kept trying to jostle their way closer, waving tape recorders and microphones and talking all at once. There seemed to be more still cameras than usual, so a lot of the independent paparazzi must have arrived in force today, too.

“What do you expect to—”

“Are you afraid that—”

“Why didn't the President come—”

“Hey!” Kyle said, sounding quite lethal. “Let's back it off, okay?”

“Look, buddy,” one of the reporters said, “we're just trying to—”

“I'm doing
my
job, too,” Kyle said, and without actually elbowing anyone, he managed to clear a space for her to limp through.

Two more agents, a few campus police officers, and her father's deputy press secretary—what the hell had taken her so long?—had worked their way over to them, and Ginette began giving some terse instructions about where everyone should stand for the statement she was going to read, and Meg was able to start following Susan and the others across the quad.

“Sorry,” she said, too embarrassed to look at anyone.

“Wow, is it always like that?” Tammy asked.

Damn near. “Sometimes,” Meg said. “I apologize if they bothered you.”

“Wow,” Tammy said, again. The others didn't say anything—Susan maybe looked a little tense, Mary Elizabeth a little annoyed, and Jesslyn a little puzzled. Maybe. It was hard to tell, with total strangers.

The main freshman dining hall was downhill on the lower part of the campus, in a huge dorm complex called Mission. It seemed like an incredibly long walk, but maybe she was just tired. She also hadn't thought to bring a glove along, and although she could tuck her splint into her jacket out of the wind, the hand gripping her cane was exposed. And it really was
extremely
cold. Considering that she'd grown up in New England, she bloody well ought to have known better. And, as always, she felt like a jerk because she was moving so much more slowly than anyone else, although Susan was taking her time—downright ambling, in fact. Probably not her usual pace.

There were a lot of people pouring in and out of Mission, and despite the snow, a couple of guys were playing Frisbee in an open area to the left of the building, gregarious enough to suggest that they were showing off. One of them, a tall Mr. California type, kept throwing the Frisbee to—at?—girls walking by, most of whom ignored him, some of whom flipped it back. Or flipped him
off
. His long-haired friend seemed to find any of these responses equally hilarious.

Predictably, the I'm-God's-Gift guy whipped the Frisbee in their direction. Her agents were not amused; Meg paid no attention to it whatsoever. Tammy bent down and tossed it back. Badly.

Inside, there were ski-jacketed people everywhere, and the noise level was even more oppressive than the dorm had seemed. In fact, it was so crowded that, for a second, she thought she might lose her breath the way she had that time in the car with Preston, or lurch against the wall from the sudden wave of dizziness which was destroying her ability to see clearly.

The nearby conversations and shouted greetings abated somewhat as people recognized her, but the majority of them were too busy being cool to outright stare. Mostly.

The dining hall was down on the lower level, and the line stretched up a long flight of stairs, everyone loud and jovial and post–Winter Study vacation-tanned.

“Don't worry, it moves pretty quickly,” Susan said.

Meg nodded, clutching her cane and staying near the banister by the wall, wishing like hell she had had the nerve to bring her sunglasses along, or at least her Red Sox cap, so she could pull the brim down low over her face. She was trying to be unobtrusive, but since Garth was standing near the main door, and Kyle and Paula were spreading out in her general area, and Larry or someone was probably posted behind the food counters to watch out for rogue poisoners—all of them wearing their damned earpieces and looking much too old in their recently-donned college garb, anyone with half a brain would instantly know that she was someplace nearby.