Long May She Reign (56 page)

A change-up, when she'd expected a fastball. “It was polite,” Meg said.

“It was
cavalier
,” Susan said, “and it pissed me off.”

Yeah, fine, she was an unbelievable loser for not letting herself give in to paralyzing terror and despair. It was
bad
to keep a stiff upper lip.

“For the record,” Susan said.

She had a vague rule that—no matter how infuriating it was—if she received a similar criticism from more than one person, it might have some validity. Meg sighed. “I have to get through the day somehow, Susan.”

Susan nodded, and rubbed her forehead for a second, so her headache must have come back. “I know. It's just hard to watch.”

It was also hard to
do
. For the record. She could see that Susan had a lot of work piled up on her desk, and God knows she had plenty of her own, but the thought of going up to her room and closing the door was a lonely one. Of course, she could always leave it open partway, but it wasn't as though people were inclined to drop by to see her indiscriminately.

“So, um, how far did you run today?” she asked, to prolong the conversation.

“I don't know,” Susan said. “Seven and a half, eight miles, I guess.”

Wow. She'd never thought to ask before, but— “How far do you usually go?”

Susan shrugged. “Four or five.”

So, she'd felt the need to run much harder, and farther, today. “You don't go out in the middle of nowhere, do you?” Meg asked. “I mean, you're careful, right?”

Susan smiled. “I usually stay pretty close to the campus, or head towards North Adams. But, if it's getting dark or anything, I make sure someone comes with me.”

Okay, good. Meg nodded, slouching against the doorjamb. The friends of Susan's she had met—primarily drama majors—mostly struck her as being an unusually uncoordinated lot, but there must be another runner or two hidden in there somewhere.

Susan cocked her head to one side. “What?”

“Nothing,” Meg said. “I just—” Could she bring herself to sit down and weep stormily, because she'd had a bad day—and because it had only been a few hours since she had experienced a tremendous romantic disappointment, and she wanted to indulge in a series of mordant, self-pitying remarks? No. In fact, she might not even subject
Beth
to this latest personal crisis. But, she would need to say something convincing, before Susan's bloodhound instincts kicked in. “I don't want to bother you or anything, but are you friends with a sophomore named Jill? I don't know her last name, but I think she's from Minnesota?”

“Blondish hair, wears it in a braid, looks like a jock?” Susan asked.

Meg nodded. Although actually, that description fit a fairly large percentage of the student body.

“Yeah, sure,” Susan said. “Jill Kiley. She's from Wisconsin, though. Why?”

One small worry eliminated, then. Meg shrugged. “She's in my Shakespeare class and she said she knew you. And—” She'd felt the need to double-check. “Small campus, that's all.”

Susan nodded, but still looked curious.

“She's a valedictorian,” Meg said.

Susan grinned. “Made an intuitive leap, did she?”

Precisely. She stood in the doorway for another moment, still not quite prepared to go up to her room and be by herself, but too shy to say so.

Susan looked at her, expectantly.

“I wasn't a valedictorian,” Meg said.

Susan shrugged. “Neither was I.”

That was a relief, since it would be demoralizing if she turned out to be one of the only non-valedictorians at the entire college. “You know, when you get right down to it, I didn't actually graduate from high school,” Meg said, “and I guess I was thinking about that on the way back here.”

Susan nodded.

“I missed the last couple of weeks of school—” And the prom, and graduation; the guy had mocked her, at length, about the former— “and they never made me take my finals, because—well, how could they, really? I mean, I didn't even get out of the hospital until
July
, and—” Too much information, maybe. So, Meg edged away from the door. “I'm sorry. I should let you study, and I should go do a bunch of stuff, too.”

“Colleen died at the end of January,” Susan said.

Meg stopped in her tracks, and then returned, tentatively, to lean against the doorjamb again.

Susan looked briefly at her bulletin board. “I wouldn't exactly say that I had a breakdown, but my grades pretty much went to hell for the rest of the my senior year. My teachers were nice about it, and mostly went ahead and gave me B's, but I didn't really deserve them.”

Meg nodded.

“And, ironically, Colleen
would
have been our valedictorian,” Susan said. “By a long shot. No one else in the class was even really close. So, the poor guy who ended up coming in first had no idea what to say in his speech. It was just sort of
there
, in the air all night.” Susan shrugged. “I don't know. We're both probably doing too much thinking today.”

Yes, that was the problem with brushes with mortality, regardless of how illusory they turned out to be.

“I think you would have been better off with a JA who didn't have quite so much baggage,” Susan said.

A JA without significant baggage might not think to watch her like a hawk on a consistent basis. Dirk, for example.

Which still didn't mean that her father hadn't been completely wrong to allow Susan to be selected, in the first place. “I think it's kind of the other way around.” Meg glanced over. “And, you know, it still isn't too late, if—especially after today—you want me to—”

“Don't finish that sentence,” Susan said instantly. “You will annoy me.”

But, if she were open to the idea, it would be easy enough to arrange—

“
Don't
,” Susan said. “In fact, go study now.”

It was always nice to be told what to do.

“Think there's a chance your grades are going to show up in the press?” Susan asked.

An excellent chance, since it happened more often than not. One of the most recent weekly celebrity tabloids had proclaimed, breathlessly, that she was having a scandalous affair with one of her Secret Service agents, the main proof for this being a photo some paparazzo creep had gotten of Jose catching her one afternoon when she slipped on the ice crossing Spring Street, and the article insisted that this was a view of the two of them in the aftermath of a torrid embrace. The writer had even quoted a psychologist—with the disclaimer that he had not actually treated the President's tragically troubled daughter professionally—who theorized that her sexual acting out was a desperate cry for help, and a poignant attempt to get the attention of her cold and unloving mother.

Of course, only the week before that, the very same tabloid had published the world-exclusive story that she was sleeping with her philosophy professor, as evidenced by a picture of him bending towards her when she asked him a question about a reading assignment on their way out of class one morning. This was thought to indicate that she was not only promiscuous, and frantic to get a passing grade at any cost, but that—given his age—she also might have unresolved feelings towards her father. Maybe even her
grandfather
. The fact that her professor was hard of hearing, and had leaned down because she hadn't spoken loudly enough when she first asked the question had not, apparently, been discovered by the crack reporters who penned the tale.

“Yeah,” she said aloud, aware that she had drifted a little, since Susan was looking at her with some combination of amusement and irritation. “My grades usually get published.”

“Do you want those brat tenth graders to think they scared you enough to screw up your midterms?” Susan asked.

Hell, no.

So, she went up to her room, and—after eating the last apple, a few baby carrots, and some of the cheese Preston had stocked inside her refrigerator—studied. Polished her political science paper, then finished her philosophy paper and began to edit it. She'd left her door open a few inches—and was gratified, and surprised, when Juliana, Mary Elizabeth, Khalid, and Andy
all
stopped by at various points to say hello—and maybe relieve their curiosity about whatever the hell had been going on with all of the extra agents and police officers hanging around earlier. Khalid, who missed his retriever/boxer mix terribly and even wore a custom-made t-shirt with her photo on it sometimes, was especially interested in—and wistful about—the dog teams.

At about eleven-thirty, when she heard movement out in the hall again, she turned, expecting that it would probably be Tammy—or maybe Susan, planning to hover, or criticize, but it was Jack, wearing a bright, flowered Hawaiian shirt and jeans, his hands jammed in his pockets.

“Same time, same place,” he said.

Was it really as easy as that?

“You going to tell me what I did was wrong?” he asked. “I mean, I was here, and you seemed to be
glad
I was here, and then—well, you
weren't
glad.”

Meg shrugged. “You happened to be in the room. That's all you did.” And, okay, he'd kind of yelled at her, too.

“So,” he said, “you go absolutely white, out of nowhere, whenever someone's in a room with you?”

If they triggered bad memories, yeah. She glanced at her computer, and clicked
SAVE
before she had a chance to forget, so that she wouldn't risk losing hours of work. “I really don't want to talk about it.” No, that wasn't firm enough. “In fact, I'm definitely
not
going to talk about it, but it didn't have anything to do with you.”

He half-smiled. “It's not you, Jack, it's
me
. Really.”

Something like that, yeah.

He sighed. “Meg, I've said that to people when I was trying to break up with them, and didn't want to hurt their feelings.”

How disappointing. “That's very boring,” Meg said. “Do me a favor and promise that if you break up with me, you'll think of something more creative.”

“Same to
you
,” he said.

She nodded, and waited.

“Oh,” he said.

She nodded.

“Can I come in for a while?” he asked.

She nodded.

33

HER MIDTERMS WENT
reasonably well, and by one o'clock on Friday, she was packed and ready to go. Her parents had wanted to fly up to Albany International to meet her—her father had damn near
insisted
—and she had made an ineffective argument that she should just take a commercial flight, with a few of her agents, and not have everyone make such a fuss. The uneasy compromise was that a small military jet would pick her up at one of the tiny local airports, and then take her directly to Andrews Air Force Base, and home. It seemed like a significant waste of the taxpayers' money, but—as her mother pointed out—firing up Air Force One and having the President, essentially, play hooky for a good chunk of the day was not terribly frugal, either.

A fair number of people from the dorm, including Juliana and Mary Elizabeth, had already left, so it was pretty quiet. Susan, to no one's surprise, was planning to stay an extra day, in order to wait until the very last person in the entry was safely off on his or her journey home. Then, presumably, she would spend the next two weeks in a state of suspended animation, until she could get back to school, and resume being an authority figure again.

Jack, who was planning to take the afternoon bus to Boston to visit a friend at Tufts on his way to Los Angeles, carried her computer and leather Camp David duffel bag downstairs for her. They had exchanged phone numbers, although she wasn't sure if either of them would get up sufficient nerve to call the other—she was sure
she
wouldn't—since whatever it was that they were doing was still at such a delicate, early stage.

“So,” he said, once they were outside, near the cast iron gates by the street.

“Yeah,” she said.

They stood there.

Then, he leaned over to kiss her, and she heard a camera start clicking away—right across the road, telephoto lens,
great
—and dodged the kiss, moving so that her back would be to the photographer, but making sure that her expression stayed pleasant, in case she was still within range.

“Oh, sorry,” Jack said, and jumped back, staying at a distance. Then, he frowned. “Except, is this some big secret? Like, so what if they see us?”

He had a point. “Just not a public display of affection,” she said. “It'll be the difference between being buried somewhere inside, or showing up on the cover.”

He grinned. “I
like
that phrase.”

Well, America was a free country, and he had every legal right to be—predictable. Pedestrian. “‘Public display of affection'?” she asked. “Or ‘showing up on the cover'?”

“‘Buried somewhere inside,'” he said.

On further reflection, that was even more predictable, but also kind of funny. Although still in the category of wishful thinking. Not that she couldn't feel herself blushing furiously. Nellie was the nearest agent, and Meg glanced over, hoping like hell that she hadn't overheard that one. Judging from her expression, she either hadn't, or wanted it to
seem
that way.

“I'm not going to see you for two weeks,” he said. “I'd really like to kiss you good-bye.”

And she wouldn't mind having him do so. She looked around until she caught Garth's eye. “I need a couple of minutes, okay?”

He nodded, and gestured to the nearby agents to adjust their protective positions accordingly. Brian and Ed were already on their way over to the photographer, in, she assumed, an attempt to discourage him from remaining in the area.