The President looked down at me like I was mentally deranged. Maybe I was. I don’t know. All I know is, I was so mad, I was shaking. And I imagine my face was a very attractive shade of umber.

“Are you personally acquainted with the artist, or something?” he asked.

“No, I don’t know her,” I said. “But I know her painting is the best.”

“In your opinion,” the President said.

“Yes, in my opinion.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to change your opinion. Because that painting is not going to represent this country in any international art show.”

Then David’s dad turned his back on me and started talking to his other guests.

I didn’t say anything more. What could I say that I hadn’t said already? Besides, I had been dismissed.

David, who had come up behind me without my noticing, went, “Sam.”

I looked up at him. I had forgotten all about David.

“Come on,” he said.

I guess if I hadn’t already been so shocked about what had happened—between me and the President, I mean—I might have been more shocked that David was actually speaking to me. Speaking to me, and apparently trying, at least, to make me feel better about what had just happened. At least that’s what I had to conclude when he led me out of the Vermeil Room and back into the room where we’d sat that very first night I’d come to dinner, where he’d carved my name into the window sill.

“Sam,” he said. “It’s not that big a deal. I mean, I know it is to you. But it’s not, you know, life and death.”

Right. It wasn’t Sierra Leone or Utah. Nobody was getting their hands chopped off or being forced to marry, at the age of fourteen, a guy who already had three wives.

“I realize that,” I said. “But it’s still wrong.”

“Probably,” David said. “But you have to understand. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t necessarily know about that they have to consider.”

“Like what?” I wanted to know. “My choosing that painting is going to compromise national security? I don’t think so.”

David was taking off his tie like it had been bothering him.

“Maybe they just want a happy painting,” he said. “You know, one that shows the US in a positive light.”

“That’s not what the contest is about,” I said. “It’s supposed to show what a representative of each country sees from his or her window. The rules don’t say anything about what the person sees having to reflect positively on his or her country. I mean, I could see someone in China or something not being allowed to show a negative aspect of his nation, but this is America, for crying out loud. I thought we were guaranteed freedom of speech.”

David sat down on the arm of my chair. He said, “We are.”

“Right,” I said, very sarcastically. “All except the Teen Ambassador to the UN.”

“You have freedom of speech,” David said. He said it with a funny sort of emphasis, but at the time I was too upset to realize what he meant.

“Do you think you could talk to him, David?” I asked, looking up at him. Once again, he hadn’t turned on any lights in the room. The only light there was to see by spilled in from the windows, the bluish light coming in from the Rotunda. In its glow, David’s green eyes were hard to read. Still, I plunged on. “Your dad, I mean. He might listen to you.”

But David said, “Sam, I hate to disappoint you, but the one thing I make it a point never to discuss with my dad is politics.”

Even though David said he hated to disappoint me, that’s exactly what he ended up doing. Disappointing me, I mean.

“But it’s not fair!” I cried. “I mean, that painting is the best one! It deserves to be in the show! Just try, David, OK? Promise me you’ll try to talk to him. You’re his kid. He’ll listen to you.”

“He won’t,” David said. “Believe me.”

“Of course he won’t, if you don’t even try.”

But David wouldn’t say he’d try. It was like he didn’t even want to get involved. Which only made me more peeved. Because he was acting like it didn’t matter. He obviously didn’t understand how important it was. I thought he would, being an artist, and all. But he didn’t. He really didn’t.

I was so frustrated that I couldn’t help blurting out, “Jack would try.”

And even though I’d been saying it mostly to myself, David overheard.

“Oh, sure,” he said, in a mean way. “Jack’s perfect.”

“At least Jack is willing to take a stand,” I said, hotly. “You know, Jack shot out the windows of his own father’s medical practice with a BB gun in protest of Dr Slater using medications that had been tested on animals.”

David looked unimpressed. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, that was a pretty stupid thing to do.”

I couldn’t understand how David could say such a thing. How he could even think such a thing.

“Oh, right,” I said, with a bitter laugh. “Pretty stupid of him to take a stand against cruelty to animals.”

“No,” David said coolly. “Pretty stupid of him to protest against something that saves lives. If scientists don’t test medications on animals, Sam, before they use them on humans, they might make people sicker, or even kill them. Is that what Jack wants?”

I blinked at him. I hadn’t actually thought of it that way before.

“But hey,” David went on, with a shrug. “Jack’s a—what was it you called him? Oh, yeah. A radical. Maybe that’s what the radicals of today are rebelling against. Making sick people better. I wouldn’t know. I’m obviously too lacking in moral rectitude.”

And then David, like he couldn’t stand to be around me a second longer—like I was one of those gross hors d’oeuvres—turned around and left me sitting there. In the dark. Like the blind person Rebecca had accused me of being.

And the really sad part was, I was beginning to think she might be right. Because despite what Susan Boone had said, I had a feeling I wasn’t seeing anything. Anything at all.

When I got home from the White House that night, I was shocked to find Lucy in the living room, thumbing through a copy of Elle.