Ready or Not (11 page)

Top ten reasons it rules to be a teen in the United States (as opposed to elsewhere):

  10.   It's unlikely you'll end up being one of the 250 million children worldwide between the ages of four and fourteen who work a full-time job (unless you have parents like mine. The only reason they're not making me work forty hours a week instead of six is because it's against the law. Thank God).

    9.   Three hundred thousand kids a year are forced to serve as soldiers in armed combat by their governments or rebel insurgents. With guns, and everything (although, seriously, what government would give my sister Lucy a gun? She'd probably use it as a hair straightening iron).

    8.   Corporal punishment was abolished here ages ago, but in many countries today, it is still considered perfectly acceptable for teachers to cane children for tardiness or giving a wrong answer (although this would so cut down on the level of goofing off at Adams Prep, we might actually learn something for a change).

    7.   One hundred thirty million children in developing countries are not in primary school. The vast majority of them are girls (and as much as I hate school, I do realize it's
necessary
. I mean, so you can, like, get a better job than one at Potomac Video. Because $6.75 an hour does NOT go that far).

    6.   In some parts of the Middle East and India, if you're a girl who gets caught flirting with some dude you met at the mall or whatever, your male relatives can murder you and pretty much get away with it, because of the perception that you've disgraced their family (which basically means Lucy? Yeah, she would never have lived long enough to flunk the SATs if she lived in Saudi Arabia or wherever).

    5.   Instances of girls as young as seven being forced to marry are common in sub-Saharan Africa, where 82 million girls will end up married before the age of eighteen, whether they like it or not—most of them not (in the United States, this only happens in Utah. And maybe parts of, like, the Appalachians).

    4.   Globally, an estimated 12 million children under the age of five die every year, mostly of easily preventable causes. About 160 million children are malnourished (and not because they're just eating Pop-Tarts all day like I would if I could get away with it).

    3.   In Singapore, you have to get a special license to chew gum in public. If you don't have the license, and they catch you chewing gum, you can be publicly caned (although if people here in the United States had to get a license to chew gum, there would be a lot less cleaning up to do on the Metro).

    2.   In order to combat many of these rights abuses, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that seeks to address the particular human rights of children and to set minimum standards for the protection of their rights. There are only two countries standing in the way of the treaty being signed. One is Somalia.

The other is the United States.

Why? Because there's a clause in the treaty that suggests that girl victims of international war crimes be offered birth control counseling, and the religious right in the United States doesn't like that.

And the number-one reason it rules to be a teen in the United States:

    1.   Because this is still one of the few places on earth where you can mention how much something like the above sucks and not get thrown in jail for it.

          Unless you're Dauntra, I mean, and you mention it by pretending to be dead in the middle of the street.

David got to the studio before I did. When I walked in, he was already straddling his drawing bench, arranging his pencils on the seat in front of him.

The minute I saw him, my heart did that flippy thing it does whenever David walks into the room. That thing Rebecca calls frisson. It got even worse when David looked up and saw me standing there, and our gazes met, and he smiled.

“Hey, Sharona,” he said. “Long time no see.”

And it was like there was this invisible bungee cord between us. Because I suddenly found myself being propelled toward him, until I was standing with my arms wrapped around his head, holding his face to my stomach, since I hadn't even given him time to stand up and hug me back properly.

“Well,” David said in a strangled voice into the front of my shirt, “nice to see you too.”

“Sorry,” I said, letting go of his head—reluctantly—and lowering myself onto the bench beside his. “I just…I really missed you. I didn't realize how much until just now, when I saw you.”

“Well, that's flattering,” David said. “I guess.” Then he leaned over and said, “I missed you, too,” and kissed me.

For a long time.

So long that we didn't even notice the room was filling up with other people until Susan Boone herself cleared her throat, kind of noisily. Then we pulled guiltily apart, and saw that Terry was making himself comfortable, this time in more of a lounging pose, on the satin comforter Susan had laid across the raised platform.

Terry winked at me—I guess because of the intimate conversation he and I had had the last time I'd seen him—as Susan was fussing around with the comforter beneath him.

And I winked back, because, well, what else are you supposed to do when a naked guy winks at you?

Besides, it wasn't like I was freaked out anymore. About seeing a naked guy, I mean.

At least, I didn't think I was. I mean, I didn't feel freaked out.

But I guess I must have seemed freaked out, since about an hour and a half into our lesson, Susan Boone came over and asked me, quietly, if everything was all right.

I looked up at her, feeling kind of dazed, the way I always do when I'm concentrating on a drawing and someone interrupts me.

“Everything's fine,” I said. “Why?”

Which was when it hit me. Oh my God! What if Susan wasn't talking about what had happened during our last lesson, with me freaking out over Terry and all? What if she was talking about something else—like how I was thinking about having sex with David? I mean, she's an artist and all, and way more perceptive than, say, my mom and dad, so she might actually have figured it out. Was that what she meant when she asked if everything was all right?

And if so, what was I going to say?

“Well, I'm just concerned,” Susan said, looking at my drawing pad. “You seem to be concentrating so hard on getting the figure in, that you're completely neglecting everything else.”

Blinking, I looked where she was pointing. I'd rendered a highly realistic portrait, it was true, of Terry, in all his naked glory.

But it was also kind of true that he was just hanging there, basically in outer space.

“A drawing is like building a house, Sam. You can't start by hanging curtains. You have to build a foundation first.”

Taking my pencil from me, Susan sketched in a background behind the figure I'd drawn.

“Then lay floors,” she said, sketching the bench beneath Terry. Suddenly, he was no longer floating in space.

“You have to build your house from the ground up, starting with all of the boring bits…the plumbing and the wiring. Do you see what I'm getting at here? By going in and drawing all of this detail here”—she indicated the portrait of Terry—“you're decorating before you even have a house to stand in. You've got to stop concentrating so much on the
parts
,” she added, “and instead, start seeing the image as a
whole
.”

Susan, I realized, was right. I had been working so hard on getting Terry's face exactly right, I had neglected the other three quarters of the page. So now it was this huge piece of paper with a tiny head on it.

“I get it,” I said. “Sorry. I guess I just got…you know, carried away.”

Susan sighed. “I hope I didn't make a mistake,” she said softly. “Letting you and David take this class, I mean. I thought you were ready.”

I glanced at her kind of sharply.

“We
are
ready,” I said hastily. “I mean,
I
am. And David is, too. We both are.”

“I hope so,” Susan said with a faintly worried air. She laid a hand on my shoulder as she straightened and then walked away. “I really do.”

Not ready? Not ready for life drawing? As if! I worked furiously through the last fifteen minutes of class, anchoring Terry to a background, concentrating on showing the whole, and not the parts. I'd show Susan Boone who wasn't ready. See if I didn't!

But there wasn't enough time to really do what I'd wanted, and at the end, when it came time to critique everyone's drawings, Susan just shook her head at mine as it sat on the windowsill.

“You've rendered a highly realistic portrait of Terry,” she said, in a kind but firm voice, “but he's still hanging in midair.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. What did she mean, I wasn't ready? Who even cared about the stupid background? Wasn't the subject of the drawing the most important thing?

Terry sure seemed to think so. He strolled over and was like, “Hey, are you gonna keep that?” and pointed at my drawing of him.

“Um,” I said. I wasn't sure how to reply. The truth was, I had been about to wad the drawing up and throw it away. But I hesitated to admit it, because that would have been like saying I didn't think a portrait of Terry was worth framing and hanging over my fireplace—like he wasn't attractive enough, or something. And even though I thought he had a really weird job, I didn't want to insult him.

“Why?” I asked. Always a nice, safe answer for just about any occasion.

“'Cause if you don't want it, I'll take it,” Terry said.

I was touched. More than touched. I was flattered. He liked my portrait of him! Despite the fact that it wasn't integrated into any sort of background.

“Oh, sure,” I said, handing it over. “There you go.”

“Cool,” Terry said. Then, noticing that it lacked the artist's signature, he went, “Could you sign it for me?”

“Of course,” I said, and did so, then handed it back.

“Cool,” Terry said, again, looking at my signature. “Now I have a drawing by the girl who saved the president.”

I realized then that that's what he wanted—my autograph on a portrait of him, naked. Not that he'd especially liked my portrait.

But hey, I guess it was better than nothing.

“So,” David said, coming up behind me at the slop sink, where I was washing charcoal off my hands. “You ready?”

I have to admit, I kind of jumped. Not because he'd snuck up on me, but because of the question.

“I still haven't had a chance to ask them,” I blurted out, spinning around to face him. “I'm really sorry, David. Things have just been so crazy at home with Lucy and this tutoring thing—”

David looked down at me as if I had grown horns from my forehead, like Hellboy.

“I meant about the town hall meeting at your school,” he said. “My dad said we're giving you a lift.”

“Oh!” I laughed nervously. “That! Right! No, why should I be nervous?”

“No reason,” David said, a twinkle in his mossy green eyes. “I mean, it's just MTV. Millions of people will be watching it. That's all.”

The thing was, I'd had so much
else
to worry about, I hadn't really had time to think about it. What I was going to say at the town hall meeting, and all. I mean, I'd read the stuff the press secretary had given me, and even done a tiny bit of independent reading on my own, but…

The truth was, I was way more nervous about what I was going to do about the whole Camp David situation than I was about going on TV.

“Aw,” I said. “It'll be fine. It always is.”

Which is true. Going on TV with David's dad always had been fine, in the past. Not that we've done it that many times—I mean, it's not like we've ever paired up for
Crossfire
, or whatever. But I mean, like, at UN addresses, or the occasional fund-raiser that ended up being on C-Span.

And it had always worked out fine. I didn't see how tonight would be any different.

Until David and I pulled up to Adams Prep, and I saw the protesters. `

That's when I knew the town hall meeting was going to be very, very different than talking to a bunch of rich oil tycoons in a hotel ballroom. Because rich oil tycoons don't generally have to be held back by dozens of police officers as they attempt to storm the car you and your boyfriend show up in.

Or wave big signs in your face that say
KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT OF MY PANTYHOSE
.

Or accuse you of betraying your generation when you try to get out of the car, shielded by Secret Service agents and police officers in riot gear.

Or try to hit you with an old turkey sandwich as you're rushing into your school, which, for the evening, has been turned into a battle zone—them versus you.

But since that's how it's always been at Adams Prep—them versus me—I wasn't all that fazed.

Except for the fact that I'm pretty sure that within that horde of screaming protesters I spotted a girl with Midnight Ebony and Pink Flamingo hair.

Top ten things that suck about going on television:

  10.   If you are a guest on a talk show or newscast, the person interviewing you will have cue cards or a TelePrompTer telling him or her what to say. You will not. You are just out there on your own. And if they ask you a question you don't know the answer to, too bad for you.

    9.   Seeing yourself on the monitor. Yes, that really is how big your head looks to everyone else.

    8.   The five minutes before you actually go live. You're sitting there, so nervous you want to puke, while everyone else runs around, having a good time. Because
they
aren't the ones going on TV. So what do
they
care?

    7.   The makeup and hair person. No matter what you say, he/she will come up with a look for you that in no way resembles how you actually look in real life, and that will cause your grandmother to call you afterward and ask if you meant to look like Paris Hilton.

    6.   The host and/or reporter will ignore you, except when the camera is on, and then he/she will try to make it look as if you are best friends. That is just the way it is. Move on.

    5.   No matter what you might have heard to the contrary, the food from Craft Services in the green room will mostly be composed of whatever you hate most…in my case, this always means tomatoes.

    4.   You will never get your own dressing room, but will instead have to share the ladies' room with two quilting bee finalists from Pennsylvania who will keep going on about how nervous they are until you want to scream.

    3.   Inevitably, someone at the studio will call his or her niece or nephew on his or her cell phone and make you say hello to him or her, because you are the girl who saved the president, and the niece or nephew is a big fan of yours.

    2.   Then, when you get on the phone, the niece or nephew won't have the slightest idea who you are.

And the number-one worst thing about going on television:

    1.   Right after the camera turns off, and you remember everything that just came out of your mouth.

And you want to die.