“If that boy—”
“That boy,” her mother corrected, “is Governor Winters’s son—”
“—tries to flirt with me—” Macey went on, but Mrs. McHenry talked over her.
“And if appearing with that boy is going to give us a two-percent bump in Ohio, then you will appear with that boy.”
“Percentages.” Macey gave an exasperated sigh. “You know I don’t do math.”
Well, I have personally seen Macey McHenry do linear algebra without a calculator (after mastering our roommate Liz’s system, of course), but the girl in front of me wasn’t the Macey I knew from school. She wasn’t the girl on the suite’s TV either, smiling and waving and holding hands with her father on the national news. Instead she was the other kind of Gallagher Girl—the kind the agent had been expecting: the snobby kind, the spoiled kind, the kind who had crawled out of her parents’ limousine and into our school nearly a year before with combat boots and a diamond nose stud.
“This was the scene this morning as Senator James McHenry and his family arrived here in Boston to join Governor Winters and officially accept the vice presidential nomination,” the TV anchor was saying. But I doubt that Macey or her mother were even listening as they stared daggers at each other.
