When Audrey Met Alice Read online

  I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. The cracks in the paint looked like the veins on leaves. That’s another surprising thing about 1600—the White House isn’t all that lavish, at least in the Residence. It’s a fancy building but a super-old one, and in places it looks its age. Something about being a historic site and belonging to the federal government makes renovations tricky. Though my room, the “Yellow Bedroom,” isn’t bad. It has buttery yellow walls—yellow’s my favorite color—and a nice view. Chelsea Clinton, another White House only child, lived in it.

  I turned onto my side to look at my alarm clock. It read 5:00 p.m., so Kim would probably be home from running club. I grabbed the phone and dialed out. The phone rang four times before someone in the Mehrotra residence picked up.

  “Hello?” It was Kim, slightly breathless.

  “First Friend! How was practice?” I decided after the election that Kim needed a title too—she’s been my best friend since kindergarten, after all. I even made her a “First Friend” T-shirt with the White House seal on it for her birthday last year.

  “It kicked my butt. Big time. Can you hear me wheezing?”

  “Whatevs, you know you’re going to run in the Olympics someday. What’s up?”

  “Omigod, so much. Did I tell you about the dance last weekend?”

  “Kim, I do still have Facebook, you know. I might not be at Hamilton but I’m online. All the time, actually.” That’s true; I’ve considered making a “First Friend” decal for my laptop too.

  “Doy. I meant, did I tell you about all the drama?”

  “No, but I want to hear all about it.” I paused. “Did Paul go?” I crossed my fingers.

  Kim paused before answering. “He did. With Tessa.”

  I sucked in a deep breath, and I swear I could feel my heart aching as my chest expanded with air. Paul had been my crush, for years. And Tessa had been my friend. “That’s cool.” My voice only cracked a little. “I don’t really have a crush on him anymore, anyway.” Not exactly true. I was trying to sound very mature and Zen about it—the opposite of how I felt. I felt like punching a hole through one of my historic walls.

  “Oh, good.” Kim sounded relieved. “Enough about boring old Hamilton. How’re you?”

  “Meh. Yesterday was supposed to be my movie screening party. But the Secret Service canceled it after a security breach.” I heard Kim gasp, so before she could freak out, I added, “It was a false alarm, but you know they take those way seriously.”

  “Thank goodness. But boo to canceling your party.”

  “Harrison and I still watched it, with way more punch and pizza than two people need. Everybody else decided to see the movie tonight, without me. Madeline arranged it.”

  “Rude!” I’d complained to Kim about Madeline’s unwavering iciness many times.

  “I also I found out my darling classmates refer to me as ‘Fido.’ You know, like a dog.” I shuddered. “Except they think it’s some kind of clever shorthand for First Daughter. Quint clued me in.”

  “That sucks, Fido,” Kim teased. “But I’m sure they don’t use it in a mean way. Remind me, who’s Quint? Is he why you don’t have a crush on Paul anymore?”

  “Just a guy from my music class.” Picturing Quint, especially his bright, brown eyes and toothy grin, made me smile. “He’s cool.”

  “That’s great!” Kim said, a little too cheerily. “Listen, I hate to do this, but I gotta go. If I finish my science homework, my mom is taking me and Tessa to Mickey’s Diner. Carbo-loading before the 5K, you know.” I closed my eyes and pictured the familiar, red vinyl counter stools that my friends and I loved to spin around on while we watched the cooks fry up our food. I could almost taste the pancakes. I felt an unwelcome pang of homesickness for St. Paul.

  “Okay, I’ll let you go. I got a package of books again, anyway. Advance copies of the new trilogy by the Aquatica lady about ninja centaurs. Well, the first book.”

  “You have to send one to me when you’re done! See? There are perks to your new house.”

  Kim was right. We hung up, and I leaned back into my bed, letting the receiver progress from silence to dial tone to screeching. I couldn’t get rid of the image of all my old friends hanging out without me. It felt like being excluded on the playground, except I couldn’t fault any of them for it. I might have stayed on my bed indefinitely, but the door to my room whipped open.

  “Oh! Miss Audrey, I didn’t think you were in here.” It was one of the housekeeping staff, Janet, come to collect my school uniform. Dirty clothes usually last about five minutes in 1600 before someone whisks them away—it sometimes feels like the employees simply hang around waiting for me, my mom, or dad to put down a coffee cup or shed a cardigan. It drives me insane because I feel like someone’s always watching me.

  “I haven’t changed yet. If you just give me a sec—” I started to shrug out of my navy blazer.

  “No, no, no! I’ll be back when you’re at dinner. Don’t trouble yourself, dear.” With that, Janet ducked out and shut the door.

  “Do I ever get a minute to myself in this place?” I sputtered as I rolled off my lofted bed. So much for the privacy of my room. I ripped off my uniform clothes and threw on some sweats. Clean, fresh, fabric softener–scented sweats that someone had washed in the past forty-eight hours. I wished that I could smell three-days-old pajama pants or slept-in sheets for a change, like a normal person.

  • • •

  “Debra! You are not going to believe the day I had,” I exclaimed as I bounded into the kitchen. My favorite place in 1600 is nothing like our kitchen at home—a spacious, sunny room with vintage red-and-white floral wallpaper, scuffed white cupboards and cabinets, and a cork floor. The White House kitchen is cramped and industrial, with pots and pans and high-tech light fixtures hanging over long stainless-steel tables. I think you’d need an advanced engineering degree just to turn on some of the fancy-shmancy ovens. Probably because the kitchen’s so dinky, there’s a separate sub-room just for refrigeration and a chocolate shop across the hall, where all the pastries and desserts for big State Dinners are made. I love the chocolate shop, which smells like an Easter basket year-round. Especially wonderful is the “cookie jar,” which is actually a big, rolling container with twenty types of cookies inside. Debra, one of the chefs, showed me where they keep the keys for it. When she’s on duty, though, she insists on making me ones from scratch. One of my first evenings in the White House, I had wandered downstairs and asked for a snack. Debra had pulled out a bag of chocolate chips and some flour before I finished my request.

  “You don’t need to make anything—an Oreo would be fine,” I’d said. I didn’t want to trouble her.

  She’d shaken her head. “Nuh-uh. Baking cookies is still my favorite culinary activity, despite studying at the CIA. Although, I can whip up a killer soufflé.”

  “The CIA? Like, in Langley?” Spies use soufflés to kill people? Shouldn’t that be secret?

  “Oh, no,” Debra had laughed. “The chef CIA, not the spy one. Culinary Institute of America in New York. That’s where I learned to be a pastry chef.”

  “Ha. That makes a little more sense.” I had smiled, imagining Debra as a cookie-baking spy. The superfast oven already had filled the room with the scent of butter and chocolate chips. It’d reminded me of home, and I had savored that familiar, happy twinge. Debra, and her cookies, quickly became my favorite thing about life at 1600.

  The night after my nonparty, she had enough pots and pans going that I knew she was making food for more than one. “Am I not eating alone tonight?” Many nights, I did—either in the kitchen while chatting with Debra, or up in my room while watching TV.

  “Not tonight, sweetness. Your parents are on their way home, so you can eat with them.” Debra looked up from the vegetables she was chopping. The knife was whipping up and down in a controlled frenzy. Perhaps you cou
ld train a spy at culinary school.

  “Seriously? I’m not Little Orphan Audrey tonight? Cool.” Now if only my parents would check their phones at the door. Unlikely.

  “Nope. Brace yourself for quality time with your parental units.”

  “Did I hear myself referred to as a ‘parental unit’?” My dad walked into the kitchen behind us. He was still wearing his lab coat, embroidered with JEFFREY RHODES, MD/PHD.

  “Dad! You’re actually home!” I hopped up to give him a hug. He smelled like lab soap.

  He ruffled my hair. “You’d think I’d been in Antarctica, not at Hopkins.” My dad’s research is on cancer treatment, and his grant was for an experiment on a protein called p53. So far, it looks like the mice in his lab with the p53 gene can fight off malignant tumors, which could be a huge breakthrough for human treatment. Sometimes Dad spends days at a time holed up at Hopkins, monitoring the progress. “First Gent” activities are squeezed into his downtime. Same with parental stuff. Sadly, I think the only way I could get more time to spend with him would be if I wore a mouse costume and pretended to be one of his subjects.

  “You might as well be there. I think the last time I saw you, I still had braces.”

  “Hey, now—I know you’ve been rid of metal mouth for months.”

  We went upstairs to the Family Residence Dining Room and sat down at the place settings some silent employee had whisked onto the table before we entered. My dad reached for his briefcase on autopilot and opened it, then stopped short of pulling out some lab reports and clamped it back shut. Maybe he sensed me glaring at the briefcase. “Tell me about your day while we wait for Mom.”

  “Well, right now my whole class is at the movies together. Without me.”

  My dad pressed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and examined me. “Bummer. But you and Harrison still got to see it before opening night, right? That’s pretty nifty.”

  Before I could respond, the door opened and my mom strode into the room, trailed by several aides and her chief of staff, Denise Colbert. Mom was nodding and mmm-hmmming as she finished signing several documents that the aides were holding in front of her. She stood up and pushed her silvery-blond hair, cut in a signature bob, behind one ear.

  “What about the statement regarding the gay-marriage legislation being proposed, Madam President? Are you ready to promote a stance on the issue? The special-interest groups are waiting.” Denise shoved another fat memo folder in front of my mom.

  Mom shook her head and passed it back to Denise, unopened. “I thought we discussed that this is a low-priority issue for now. I can’t afford to distract anyone from the peace summit or the energy initiatives.” I frowned. It isn’t low priority for some people, including Harrison and Max. I opened my mouth to say something, but my dad motioned to zip it. He never used to do that—my parents always encouraged me to share my opinions at the dinner table.

  My mom smiled as Denise stuck the folder into her overstuffed attaché case. “We’ll get to it, eventually. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m overdue for a family dinner.”

  Denise had already swept over to stand beside my dad’s chair, hovering like a vulture. “Jeffrey, I’d like to speak with you about school visits that we need representation at this month. I already spoke to Susan.” Susan Pierpont is my dad’s chief of staff. “Perhaps you can give me a call after dinner?” Denise never turns off work mode. I’m convinced that she works even while she sleeps, that the dream version of Denise composes e-mails and drafts memos and writes meeting agendas during every REM cycle.

  “Why don’t we set up the dates right now?” My dad stood up from his chair and started conferring with Denise. I swear, getting my whole family to sit down together is like herding cats.

  My mom, out of her staffers’ clutches, sat down at her place and smiled at me. “Hi, dear.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. Her heavy-lidded eyes betrayed the chronic tiredness her makeup artist works so hard to hide. She looked way older than she used to, but I knew better than to tell her that. “How are you doing?”

  “Decent. How’s, um, the country doing today?”

  She laughed. “It’s doing fine.” My dad sat back down at the table. Like clockwork, a kitchen employee materialized from behind the doors with plates full of food. Just a normal night at the Rhodes family dinner table, if eating scalloped potatoes at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue can ever be considered normal. And if I can’t consider it normal, I doubt anyone else can.

  Chapter 3

  Friends Academy is too fancy to have a normal bell. Instead, a recording of the theme from Mozart’s Sonata in C major tells us when fifty-five minutes are up. “Mozart stimulates the brain,” the smarmy guide had explained during my tour. Whether or not that’s true, I think using music as a bell is pretty cool; my public school in Minnesota used your typical earsplitting buzzer.

  On Friday when Mozart started wafting out the speakers at the end of second period, I lingered around my desk until the other kids filed out of the room. French class had been odieux. During small-group conversation practice, my partners, Stacia and Claire (who happen to be Madeline’s besties), refused to talk about anything but the fête at Madeline’s country house the coming weekend. Of course, she hadn’t invited me. I fiddled with my charm bracelet and tried to act like I wasn’t listening to the conversation. “Vas-tu à la fête, Audrey?” asked Stacia. “Je ne peux pas,” I replied. I hung my head and flipped to the index of my textbook as though I was looking for something. Is it too late to switch to independent-study Mandarin? The fewer classes with Madeline and her minions, the better.

  Quint was waiting outside the room when I slunk out at the tail end of the sonata snippet. “Who died, Rhodes?”

  I secretly love that he calls me by my last name. That is a good type of pet name for someone (in contrast to Fido). “My soul, a little.” I heaved my bag over my right shoulder. “Why—is it that obvious I’m miserable?”

  “To me, maybe. Your mouth is doing its frowny-face thing, you know, when you’re not exactly frowning but you’d like to be. Also, you’re superslouchy.” Quint smiled and continued before I could think of some snappy comeback. “Which is weird for you. What’s wrong?” How does he know so much about my posture and facial expressions? Thinking about Quint thinking about me made my heart flutter.

  “Madeline’s fête this weekend, which I wasn’t invited to. Not that I could go, anyway. I think there’s a State Dinner or something.”

  “I probably can’t, either,” Quint shrugged. “My parents are kinda strict about parties. I was only going to beg if you were going.” He quickly added, “You know, because you don’t go to a lot of parties.”

  I blushed and muttered thanks. I was glowing inside, knowing that he wanted me to be there.

  Everyone wanted to be around me when I first started at Friends. Some kids still do. It freaks me out, actually. I’d been popular back in St. Paul—a comfortable kind of popular, without social-climbing drama or anything. I’ve known all of my Minnesota friends since preschool and so with them my mother’s political rise wasn’t weird. Politics was simply what my mom did, like how Kim’s dad is chancellor at UM and Tessa’s mom is a Target exec and Paul’s dad runs the newspaper. In D.C., I can tell just by the way people look at me—the way their eyes search my face, like they are trying to see my mom in it—that they are more interested in my family than me.

  A week after starting school, my parents arranged a party at the White House for all fifty kids in my class. (All classes at Friends have exactly fifty students—no more and no less—so I’m the odd-duck fifty-first student in my class.) Everyone came except Quint, who was out of town. We took a tour, swam in the White House pool, and ate incredible food that Debra and the rest of the executive dining team had whipped up. I kept walking up to kids at the party and trying to start a conversation.

  “Hi, I’m Audrey. I don
’t think we’ve met,” I said to Alexander Wade.

  “Cool, I’m Alexander. Can I see the Lincoln Bedroom?”

  Or to Naveen: “Hi, Naveen! I’m glad you could make it.”

  “Yeah, me too. So are we going to get to hang out here all the time? Where’s the Situation Room?”

  I understood why everyone was excited about being in 1600, but I got a bit annoyed that they seemed more interested in finding the Oval Office than meeting me.

  So I hadn’t made many friends other than Quint. He was my lab partner in science my first semester at Friends, and he never seemed to care that I was no longer a normal person. Maybe that’s because his parents are big deals too: his dad is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and his mom is an important professor at Howard University. Lately I have developed the teensiest little crush on Quint, but there’s no way I’ll act on it. The logistics of me having a boyfriend are too complicated. For example, when Chelsea Clinton lived here, the Secret Service chaperoned all of her dates; I could expect at least the same. Awkward.

  “Earth to Audrey,” Quint said, waving his hand in front of my face. “Seriously, you look upset.”

  “It’s nothing. Nobody else needs to wallow in misery with me.” I paused. “But I have to admit I like having you for company.”

  “Then I shall call you Misery, because you love my company.”

  I punched his arm. “Dork!”

  “Watch it, Misery!” Quint laughed as he grabbed my hands. His palms were full of calluses from playing the drums, but his fingertips were soft and smooth. I tried to jerk out of his grasp, giggling as he held his grip. We stayed like that for a few minutes, until I heard an ahem behind us. I turned and saw Agent Simpkins tapping his watch. Mozart started playing his final warning, meaning passing time was almost up. Quint dropped my hands like a hot dish.