White House Rules (2 page)

Finally. They were alone.
Well, if you don't count the dude assigned to shadow us and a gazillion holiday travelers waiting to board their planes,
Sameera thought. As far as the eye could see, waiting people were reading newspapers, frowning at their laptop screens, chasing toddlers, or catching up on sleep in uncomfortable sitting positions. The agent was keeping his distance, but she could tell he was watching.

“Sorry about the spiritual interrogation, Bobby,” she said, as they boarded a walking escalator and leaned against the moving handrail. “When Mom's burned out, she says anything that pops into her head.”

“Didn't bother me,” Bobby answered. “I'm sure they're sick of making small talk with strangers. Running—and winning—a presidential campaign has got to be one of the most exhausting activities on the planet.”

“We're so looking forward to relaxing on the farm,” she said, relieved that he understood. “Dad plays hours of bridge with my uncle and grandparents. Mom curls up on the couch, eats chocolate, and reads ‘inspirational' novels. And I get to watch unlimited movies and eat all the fresh-baked cookies I want.”

“When do you move into the White House?” he asked.

“Right after the inauguration. I can't wait! And Ran's coming back with us.”

“That's great, Sparrow. How long is she going to stay?”

“Until June. And only because Mrs. Mathews, our housekeeper from Brussels, is coming to help out at Merry Dude Dairy Farm. Which, by the way, I still can't believe it's called.”

“Doesn't
meri dudh
mean ‘my milk' in Hindi?” he asked, as the walking escalator dumped them off.

Sameera almost tripped, and Bobby took her hand to steady her. It was the first time he'd done that, and he didn't let go even though she regained her balance.

“Yeah. And in Urdu, too,” Sameera said, relishing the feel of his strong fingers interlaced with hers. One steel bangle brushed lightly against the inside of her wrist.
This is so
not
the way a brother holds a sister's hand,
she thought, hopes rising by the minute.

“Why in the world did they name it that? I bet nobody for miles around understands a word of either language.”

“You're right. But the family was on the hunt to replace The Campbell Family Farm, which we all agreed was boring, so I suggested the phrase as a joke. Of course, they loved it, and now the milk they send everywhere travels in trucks labeled
MERRY DUDE DAIRY FARM
in English
and
MERI DUDH FARM
in Urdu.”
They accepted that name almost as quickly as they accepted me,
Sameera thought. She'd been lavished with affection and adored by her mother's family since the day she was adopted.

“Your cousin must do a lot of work on the farm if your parents had to hire a full-time house keeper to take her place.”

“She does. And if she leaves without a sub, our grandmother might be tempted to go back to working twenty-four/seven. Gran's doing a lot better, but she's still not supposed to overdo it.”

“My
dadu's
sick, too,” Bobby said suddenly.

By now, Sameera knew that the word
dadu
meant “grandfather” in Bengali. Even though the Ghosh family had been in the States since he was a baby, Bobby still used Bangla words for his parents, calling them Baba and Ma instead of Dad and Mom. “Does he have heart problems?” she asked.

“Heart, and a whole bunch of other things. Baba's driving himself crazy worrying. I keep telling him there's nothing he can do from halfway around the planet.”

“Can't you bring your grandfather to South Carolina?”

“I'm not sure what's going to happen. I just hope my father doesn't have a heart attack from the stress. Are you hungry, Sameera? There's a coffee stand over there.”

“Not really,” she said. “I know—let's check out that relaxation store. I can smell the candles from here.”

Reclining in two massage chairs, they talked nonstop, discussing family dynamics, Sameera's worries about her father becoming the world's number-one target for loonies with guns, and Bobby's hunt for the right major.
It's so easy to be with him,
Sameera thought, pressing the button to make her chair lean back even more. She forgot completely about the agent who was standing at the entrance. They got up only when Bobby noticed an elderly couple waiting patiently near a sign that read
FREE CHAIR TRIALS, FIVE MINUTES ONLY PLEASE
.

Their next stop was the coffee stand, where Bobby bought three blueberry muffins and offered one to the agent, who finally cracked a smile. Sameera treated all three of them to cappuccinos. The chairs were taken, so Bobby and Sameera sat cross-legged on an empty corner of the carpet to eat and drink.
And be merry,
Sameera thought, wishing the minute hand on her watch would stop galloping.

At a sunglass shack full of cheap designer imitations, Bobby tried on a flashy, oversize gold pair festooned with fake diamonds. “The DJ at that last place we went dancing would love these. They'd match his diamond and gold belly-button ring. Here, Sameera, try these on.” He handed her a pair of simple dark glasses. “You're famous now, you know. Shades can hide your secrets from the masses.”

She put them on and stared at herself in the mirror. In fifteen minutes she had to be back to board her plane. Time was running out, and they'd chatted about everything except…except the one thing she wanted to talk about most.

Make your move, girlfriend,
she told herself sternly, yanking off the glasses and turning to face him. “What if you don't want to hide your secrets?” she asked, looking straight into his eyes.

“Then you don't,” he said, moving closer and taking both her hands in his.

“No way!”

“It's her!”

“Sparrow Righton!”

Squealing or shrieking in exactly the same high pitch, a herd of Girl Scouts came stampeding toward them. The agent moved fast, arriving to stand right beside Sameera.

“Oh my gosh! It's her! It's really her!”

“Move over. I can't see.”

“Autograph! Autograph! Someone get an autograph!”

Bobby dropped Sameera's hands and backed away. She was alone in a jungle of khaki-clad nine-year-olds—and one Secret Ser vice agent. Quickly, she put on the shades Bobby had handed her.

“I'll sign just a few autographs, Bobby,” she called, trying to see over the green berets bobbing around her. “It shouldn't take more than a minute or two.”

But would it? Sharpie pens paired with random items like socks and stuffed animals were bobbing in front of her face. Some of the girls were so excited they were trying to hand her their boarding passes.

She signed and signed and signed. Then she posed for at least ten photos, smiling with one arm around a Girl Scout and one eye on Bobby, who was half hidden behind the sunglass shack. He was handing the clerk some money, she noticed, probably for the glasses she was still wearing.

“I have to go, girls,” Sameera said finally, pushing her way through the crowd of Scouts and hurrying to Bobby.

He handed her a flat, square package wrapped in holiday paper. “My flight's about to board,” he said.

“Mine, too. I'll call from Ohio.” She pulled out a larger, bulkier gift from her shoulder bag and tried to hand him a twenty-dollar bill to pay him back for the sunglasses.

“Forget about that,” he said. “Wear them and think of me.”

“There she is! With that guy!”

“Sparrow! Wait for us!”
The herd had found her again.

He tucked the package into his backpack, took her hand, and squeezed it, hard. “To be continued,” he said, as the Girl Scouts descended again.

She watched him jog over to the gate marked
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
, while absentmindedly signing her name across a Barbie doll's plastic face.

“Better hurry, Miss Righton,” the agent told her. “We're going to have to pat down everybody getting on that plane with you.”

Sameera signed one last T-shirt as she watched Bobby disappear into the jetway. “Sorry,” she told the Scouts. “My flight's leaving soon.”

“Already?”

“We've got so much to
ask
you. And
tell
you.”

“Can we come with you to your gate?”

Sameera glanced at the agent, who shook his head, a bit reluctantly, she noticed. She backed away from her fans' disappointed faces. “Uh, sorry, girls, you can't…it's protocol,” she said, feeling a twinge of guilt over her own power-mongering.

Four inches of snow blanketed the lawns the day after the First Family moved into the White House. An Austrian entourage was scheduled to arrive for an informal visit, and the new president and First Lady had already been fed, watered, personally trained, adorned, coiffed, and assigned their respective duties for the day. Now they were waiting in the Diplomatic Reception Hall to greet their visitors.

A bevy of broadcasters stood shivering under the South Portico in the brisk January wind. They informed their viewers that First Daughter Sparrow Righton, the pretty, articulate crowd-pleaser, who had stayed by her parents' sides throughout their ten-day presidential inaugural extravaganza, was nowhere in sight this morning. Nor was Miranda Campbell, Ohio dairy farmer's daughter and all-American beauty, who was rumored to be hunkering with her cousin inside the White House.

The reporters were right. Sameera and Miranda were sequestered in the cozy Lincoln Sitting Room on the second floor. They were accompanied by the Campbell family yellow Labrador retriever, Jingle, on temporary loan from Merry Dude Dairy Farm.

Sameera went to the window, pulled back the maroon velvet drapes, and took in the Christmas card–like view of frosted trees and gardens and the Washington Monument. The inauguration had been a constant stream of parties, parades, and revelry—fun, fun, fun, from start to finish. And the day before, an armored limo had transported the Righton family and Miranda from the hotel to their new address—1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Was she really here? Or was she dreaming?

A television camera facing the White House tilted upward, and Sameera shut the drapes quickly. She didn't mind the media attention, but she had no intention of showing up on the front page wearing baggy red-white-and-blue flannel pajamas that had been a Christmas present from her grandparents. She couldn't avoid being the subject of some camera attention, though, because Miranda was filming her with a tiny, state-of-the-art video camera that had been a gift from Sameera and her parents.

“Put that thing down, Ran. You filmed nonstop through the inauguration, and then all day yesterday while we were moving in. Besides, I'm still in my jammies.”

“But you look so cute.” Miranda herself was wearing an identical pair of pajamas, but while Sameera's were marked
PETITE
, her cousin's were extra long to accommodate a thirty-five-inch inseam.

Sameera perched in one of the stiff wing chairs by the roaring fire.
You can't relax in furniture like this,
she thought. The previous tenants obviously hadn't used this room as much as the Campbell-Righton cousins planned to.

Miranda pulled the other wing chair closer to the fire and wiggled her toes luxuriously. “This is the life, Sparrow. Fresh sheets and flowers in our rooms every day, hot meals sent up from the kitchen just when we want to eat, our clothes washed, pressed, folded, and put away. And
not a cow in sight
! Thanks to Mrs. Mathews, I get to feel like a princess for six whole months.”

“And thanks to the American taxpayers,” Sameera added, stretching and yawning. “I'm exhausted.”

The night before, after unpacking most of their stuff, the girls stayed up late exploring. They wandered through as many of the 132 rooms as they could, trying to find all thirty-five bathrooms and twenty-eight fireplaces; bowled a couple of games in the single-lane alley; watched portions of
The Sound of Music
in the theater (singing along like they always did); and played pool upstairs in the game room. Once they left the private residence on the second and third floors, a pair of Secret Ser vice guys tracked them like cats on the prowl.

“How do you like the code names the Cougars picked for us?” Miranda asked. “Cougar” was the retaliatory code name the girls were using for the Secret Ser vice agents.

Sameera started Jingle's daily rubdown, making his tail swing back and forth like a conductor's baton. “Dad's is okay. I sort of like Alpha Dog for him. But Dove for Mom? They obviously haven't gotten to know her very well, have they?”

“I like mine,” Miranda confessed.

“Yeah, it figures you'd get a sweet name like Peach,” Sameera said. “Meanwhile,
I
get stuck with Peanut.”

“I think it's cute, Sparrow.”

“Stop with the
cute
already. Someone on Sparrowblog commented once about how
cute
I was, and Bobby responded right away with a rant about how petite women are always labeled
cute.
He was so right. Stuffed animals are
cute
. And, okay, these pajamas are cute. But a person completely done with puberty should
not
be called cute.”

“Did he call this morning?” Miranda asked. “Or last night?”

Sameera terminated Jingle's massage abruptly. “Nope. I haven't checked my e-mail yet, but I'm not too hopeful. It's like he's disappeared off the face of the earth, Ran.” Bobby's total silence since she'd returned from Ohio was the only dark lining on her silver cloud.

“You were so busy with the inauguration, Sparrow. Maybe he was waiting until all that was done.”

“Maybe. But I just don't get it—before the holidays we were humming, Ran. We really were. We almost—at the airport—”

“But then those Girl Scouts crashed the party,” said her cousin, who knew the whole story. “You talked almost every day during the holidays, right?”

Sameera nodded. “But ever since we got back to D.C., he might be dead for all I know.”

“It
is
sort of weird,” Ran said. “Because the present he gave you was incredibly romantic.”

On Christmas morning in Maryfield, Sameera opened a framed photograph of a sparrow soaring over a canyon. Bobby had obviously taken it himself, because the initials
B.G.
were etched in tiny letters on the bottom-right corner of the photo. After admiring it from every angle and passing it around to her curious family, Sameera cringed at the thought of the generic Vote for Righton sweatshirt that she'd given him.

“He isn't trying to dump me, is he, Ran?” she asked.

Miranda shook her head. “You don't dump a friend with the silent treatment unless you're a jerk. And from what you've told me, Bobby Ghosh is anything but. I know you're worried, Sparrow, but I'm sure the guy's got a reason for his temporary muteness. Now pour me some more of that brew, will you?”

Along with the coffee, the girls were feasting on fresh-baked scones, clotted cream, jam, and chilled orange juice. And milk from Merry Dude Dairy Farm, of course, which was delivered twice a week directly from Ohio and stored in the private family fridge in the Residence. The rest of the breakfast had been wheeled up on a cart by a smiling usher named Jean-Claude, along with a folded copy of the
Washington Post
. Sameera ignored the paper; she got the news on her laptop, which she was itching to open right now.

“Mind if I use my camera again, Sparrow?” Miranda asked suddenly. “I haven't filmed the Residence in daylight yet, and I want to start with this room. The Lincoln Sitting Room. The place where Honest Abe himself came to chill when the Civil War was stressing him out.”

“Go ahead, Ran,” answered Sameera. “I need to post on Sparrowblog anyway. Maybe then I'll get a comment from him.”

It was hard to tell which cousin activated her own techno toy first, but Jingle settled himself on the Persian carpet in front of the fire, knowing he'd be on his own for a while.