Secrets of a First Daughter Read Free Page A

her favor. Who’d smuggled unflattering photos of me to the press. Who acted like I hailed from Hicksville, USA, because I liked wearing jeans and T-shirts (today’s sartorial choice: Psycho Bunny) instead of pastel minis and stilettos.
    Brittany’s frost-green eyes slid over me and her gloppy-glossed lips curdled into that poo-smelling expression she wore whenever she saw me.
    â€œAbbott,” she cooed. Her voice sounded like honey—with a fly drowning in it. “Surprise, surprise. So Mommy President can’t get you out of taking the SAT? She gets you out of everything else.” She sneered at George, stationed in the doorway.
    I ignored the jab at my mom. “What are you doing here, Whittaker? I thought you aced your test.” I remembered hearing her brag all over school that her scores were in the highest quadrant and that all the Ivies were after her.
    She smirked. “I did. I’m…trying to get a higher score.”
    Oh really. Now it was my turn to smirk. I recognized a white lie when I heard it.
    Brittany coolly tossed a lock of flat-ironed hair over her shoulder and checked the oversize LCD screen on the most expensive-looking calculator I’d ever seen, one with about a million buttons. Despite her best efforts she still looked a little uncomfortable. For the first time ever, I felt a teensy iota bad for her.
    Sure, she’d made my first few weeks of senior year a living hell. But she’d recently gotten the mother of all comeuppances when she was arrested for assaulting the president of the United States. She pulled my mother’s hair at a press conference, thinking it was me wearing a wig. The Secret Service took her down for breaching the president’s bubble of security—and those guys don’t mess around. Mom had the charges dropped, but the resulting firestorm of bad publicity prompted AOP’s student council to strip Brittany of her class presidency and give it to the person who had earned the second-highest number of votes in the election.
    Me.
    Actually, if I thought about it, things had gone from bad to worse for Brittany. She no longer ruled the school’s social calendar nor did her posse of minions follow heraround like obedient puppies anymore. I also think her father, Senator Chet Whittaker, leader of the opposition party and my mother’s main political adversary, must have grounded her because I hadn’t seen her at any school events in a while.
    Eep. Am I feeling bad for Brittany? The thing is, she wasn’t wrong about me impersonating my mother that night at the American Business Leaders banquet. Her timing had been a little off, that’s all. And thank gawd it was, because if she had caught me playing my mom, my mother’s presidency would have been finished. Mom and I only agreed to the switch due to a super-secret conference she needed to attend to avoid a possible nuclear war in Africa.
    The smell of licorice snapped me back to attention. The proctor was moving through the aisles and had slapped a test booklet in front of me.
    Focus, Morgan. Focus. Twenty-five minutes per section does not leave a lot of time for daydreaming.
    Mindful of Max’s hints, I worked steadily through page after page of algebra equations, feeling semiconfident. Pencils scratched; the clock on the wall ticked. A few coughs and sighs of frustration punctured the quiet. After about fifteen minutes, I lifted my head to uncrick my neck muscles. Next to me, Brittany was staring at her test booklet, and I couldn’t help but notice all the bubbles in her testsheet had been filled in.
    No way. Not even a genius like Max would be done with an SAT math test after fifteen minutes. And she hadn’t even scribbled any problem sets in her test booklet.
    Then I noticed Brittany’s hand protectively cupping that ridiculous calculator. I could see the letters A, C, D, A glowing between her fingers on the LCD screen.
    An awful suspicion