First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover

Chapter One

Excerpted from First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover (Dutton, June 2007)

© Copyright 2007 by Mitali Perkins

Eight buff, gorgeous guys from six different countries hoisted Sameera Righton onto their shoulders and paraded her along the river in front of the cheering crowd, chanting “SPARROW! SPARROW!” Then they tossed her into the water and then jubilantly hurled themselves in after her, cavorting to the music of the jazz band.

As her multicultural entourage of hunks splashed around her, Sameera wished someone could press a celestial pause button so she could savor the moment. She was celebrating much more than a first-place finish in a race. For months, she’d been griping long-distance to her cousin-slash-best-friend Miranda about staying in Europe to finish out her sophomore year. With Dad’s presidential campaign gathering steam in the States, her parents had become jet-setting celebrities traveling back and forth between the continents, and she’d been stuck in Brussels trying to grasp the mystery of isosceles triangles.

But now she was done. Done with school, done with the newspaper, done with packing and organizing. And last but not least, she’d coxed her team to this big end-of-the-season win. She was ready to join the campaign.

Her request for a heavenly pause button was denied. The band stopped playing; the crowd began to disperse. A dozen or so girls ranging from willow-thin to voluptuous beckoned to their soaked boyfriends. The guys obeyed, of course, but not one of them climbed out before throwing his arms around Sameera, holding her close, and kissing her good-bye.

“I’ll come up to visit you en La Casa Blanca next summer,” Adorable Antonio, the son of a Mexican banker, promised extravagantly. His girlfriend was the tall, toned Eritrean stunner tapping one stiletto on the shore who made Sameera feel like an oompa-loompa.

“Get one of those fancy guest rooms ready for me, too,” said Delectable David, the only other American on the team. “I hear they have an amazing movie theater inside the place.”

“Dad could lose, you know,” Sameera reminded her teammates, looking around at their affectionate faces.

After the California primary, which was only a few days away and predicted to be a slam-dunk for Dad, he’d have enough votes to win the Republican nomination. Then, in the November nationwide election, if he beat the Democratic candidate, James Righton would become the next President of the United States of America.

“No chance of him losing,” said Jacques, their coach, sighing. “Looks like he’s going all the way to the top, great for him, lousy for us. Where are we going to find a cox as good as you, Sparrow?”

“I wasn’t good when you recruited me,” Sameera told him, remembering that day in the fall of her freshman year when he’d asked her to join the team. “You just picked me because I was the smallest freshman in sight. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”

It had taken only one practice for Sameera to realize that she couldn’t sit like a lump and expect her backwards-facing team to get to the finish line safely. She started using the inflections of her voice and encouragement to get them to go where she wanted. She practiced steering and shifting her weight, mastered a cox box, and made charts about the strengths and weaknesses of each her teammates. And she learned how to issue commands from her gut, not her throat, which made all the difference.

“Hey, Coach,” Antonio said. “How’d you know a little bird like Sparrow could shout con mucha fuerza?”

Sameera made a face at the “little bird” comment, and Jacques ruffled her hair affectionately. “I could tell she had a bossy streak a mile wide. Stay in touch, sweetheart. I’m off to say goodbye to your mother.” He tucked in his shirt and surreptitiously sniffed an armpit as he headed for the parking lot, where Sameera’s Mom was leaning against the long, black U.S. Ambassador’s car.

“You haven’t blogged in days, Sparrow,” complained Amazing Ahmed, the muscular, soft-spoken son of the Pakistani Ambassador to NATO. “I’ve been checking in regularly and there’s nothing since your last post.”

“I know. I’ve been so busy. But I promised to keep you guys up to speed, didn’t I?”

Magnificent Matteo was the last to leave. “We will be cheering for you,” he whispered, kissing her on the lips right in front of his “novia,” who was also a Spaniard.

Sameera tried to keep her heart rate normal; a quick lip-on-lip kiss between friends was nothing in Europe. But did all of her teammates have to be so … beautiful? And couldn’t their girlfriends at least pretend to be threatened by their boyfriends’ obvious affection for the team coxswain?

She watched them saunter off into the sunset pair by pair, almost expecting credits to roll across the orange sky like they did in one of Miranda’s favorite chick flicks. Sameera preferred old black-and-white romances like Roman Holiday and Casablanca or romping old-style musicals like My Fair Lady. She and Miranda were both avid fans of makeover shows, getting teary-eyed together as they watched home, heart, or hair re-dos on the tube. Trivial pursuits compared to parents out saving the world, maybe, but the girls loved them.

The scene involving Sameera’s mother and Jacques looked like it belonged either in a chick flick or a makeover show, with Jacques bending low to kiss Mom’s manicured, red-tipped hand. Sameera still wasn’t used to the glam “after” version of her normally makeup-free, hairy-underarmed, out-of-shape, jeans-clad, tennis-shoe-wearing human-rights-activist mother. But Dad’s campaign staff had gathered an expensive team of three last-name-free Hollywood experts to take Mom in hand at the start of the campaign season last year. Thanks to “Camera-Ready Constance” (hair and makeup), “Vanessa: Stylist For The Stars” (fashion), and “Manuel: He Moves You,” (a personal trainer licensed to pummel famous middle-aged bodies into shape), Elizabeth Campbell Righton had achieved a look that had been labeled “twenty-first century First Lady.” She was tall, blonde, thin, and elegant in tailored suits, lip-liner, and French perfume, and guys of all ages worried about their body odor in her presence.

Sameera yanked off her t-shirt to squeeze the water out of it – an out-of-character move that she usually reserved for the privacy of the girls’ locker room. She never felt comfortable racing in a sports bra like some of the other coxswains. Sadly, nobody paid any attention to her brazen act. Hello? A girl just peeled off a wet t-shirt. But this was Europe, where a shirtless woman in June was as common as a pair of golden arches in an American mini-mall. Besides, a petite, flat-chested girl shaped like a twelve-year-old boy didn’t show up on the “sexy” radar anywhere on the planet. They probably think my sports bra’s an extra-small undershirt.

But all that was about to change. As soon as Sameera arrived in L.A., Vanessa and Constance were going to descend on her (Manuel-He-Moves-You focused only on bodies over thirty). The breaking news item on her myplace.com site this week:

The moment we’ve all been waiting for is upon us. I’m going to bring my friends (that’s you!) along for the amazing, never-been-reported-on-before journey of a President’s Daughter In The Making. Your good old blogger buddy is about to morph from drab to glam, from drudge to diva, from unknown spectator to talked-about celeb. Stay tuned for the inside scoop.

She always ended her blog posts with the same tagline:

Comments? Remember, keep them short, clean, and to the point. Peace be with you. Sparrow.