The Kid Who Became President (6 page)

That night, I had my first Fireside Internet Chat with America. Lane came over to the White House so he could sit next to me as I typed my answers to people's questions into the computer. We figured people would be asking some tough questions about the economy and foreign policy, so Lane would be able to help me with the answers.

it said on computer screens all across America at exactly eight o'clock,

The account's user image was a little fireplace with a simulated fire burning. A computer-generated version of “Hail to the Chief” came out of the speaker, one of Lane's clever little touches.

We waited a few seconds and then the responses came scrolling up the screen faster than I could read them:

“This isn't working out quite the way I planned,” Lane said. “Ask them if they have any questions.”

After an hour, we logged off. The people of America
did
seem to approve of me. But Lane and I decided to abandon the Fireside Internet Chat for the time being.

Once I understood how the White House and the presidency basically worked, I was ready to put the wheels of government into motion. I encouraged Chief of Staff Lane Brainard to prepare a full schedule for me. The more appointments I had during the day, I figured, the more I would be able to accomplish, the more good I could do for the country.

Lane told me exactly how to handle my appointments. When somebody entered the Oval Office, he explained, I should shake hands, greet him or her, chat for a few minutes, and pose for a photo. Then I should look at my watch and apologize that I couldn't spend more time with the person. Lane would escort the guest out and whisk in the next appointment.

“Bring 'em on,” I said.

My first appointment was with a group of newspaper editors. I shook hands, made a little small talk, posed for photos, and told them I was sorry I couldn't spend more time with them. They seemed thrilled to be in the White House and didn't complain when twenty minutes were up.

I barely had the chance to catch my breath when Lane brought in a senior citizens' group. After twenty minutes they were gone, replaced by a women's group.

A group of disabled veterans was next, followed by some Elvis impersonators, who sang a song. Then came a garden club. Some animal lovers. An organization that wanted to abolish Daylight Saving Time.

One after another they came and went. I presented some people with plaques that Lane had made up. People gave me gifts. I met with a team of kids who almost won the Little League World Series. A writer from
Boys' Life
interviewed me. I was introduced to some people who contributed money to my campaign just so they could get their picture taken with me and put it on their walls at home.

After a while, I gave up trying to pay attention to who they were and why they were there. I just shook hands, said hello, posed for pictures, and they were gone.

Mayors came and went. Senators. Governors. There might have been a few kings in there, though I'm not sure, because after a while they all blended in with one another. It didn't matter how important they were. Lane shuffled them in and out of the Oval Office like they were customers at Taco Bell.

It was mind-numbing. After a few hours of meeting and greeting, my head was spinning. The barrage of camera flashes was giving me afterimages — black spots floating before my eyes.

“Keep smiling,” Lane said between appointments. “You're doing great.”

The parade through the Oval Office continued. I met with some college kids who built a car that runs on moose turds. A barbershop quartet sang “Sweet Adeline” to me. Then I met the ambassador from a foreign country I'd never heard of. He was followed by the Michigan Apple Queen. Or maybe she was the Wisconsin Cheese Queen. Whoever she was, she was wearing a crown and left something edible that made a stain on my desk.

One after another, the endless parade continued, and everybody had a picture taken with me.

“We're going to get great press coverage tomorrow,” Lane said gleefully. “Wait until you see the headlines. You're doing a terrific job. These people love you. Keep smiling.”

After a few more appointments, it was getting late in the afternoon. I was totally exhausted. It was a relief when Lane said there was only one more appointment left on the day's schedule.

“Who is it?” I asked wearily.

“An organization that calls itself CMLMIMD, sir.”

“What does that stand for?”

“I don't know.”

“Send 'em in,” I said, suppressing a yawn. Lane brought two men and a woman into the Oval Office.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, President Moon,” the woman said as she curtsied and shook my hand.

“The pleasure is all mine,” I replied. Lane had told me that anytime someone said what a pleasure it was to meet me, I should always reply that the pleasure was all mine.

“President Moon,” one of the men said, clearing his throat nervously, “we realize you're busy so we won't waste your time with small talk.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “It's been a long day.”

“For about one hundred years,” the man continued, “people have been calling breakfast the most important meal of the day. We believe that, in fact,
lunch
is far more important than breakfast. And we believe it is a gross injustice to perpetrate this hoax on the American people.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “What's the name of your organization?”

“The CMLMIMD, sir,” the other man chimed in. “The Committee to Make Lunch the Most Important Meal of the Day.”

“Would you excuse me for one moment?” I asked, and pulled Lane aside to talk in private.

“Are these people nuts?” I whispered.

“I'm not sure,” he whispered back.

“Who cares which is the most important meal of the day?”

“Moon, they apparently care a lot.”

“Why am I wasting my time with these bozos?”

“They contributed five million dollars to your campaign, Moon.”

“So what?”

“It could be argued that you wouldn't have been elected president without their help.”

I went back to the smiling CMLMIMD people. “I'm sorry,” I said. “Please continue.”

“It is our belief,” the lady said, “that lunch has been a second-class citizen for too long. Lots of people skip breakfast or just wolf down a Pop-Tart. We feel the time is long overdue to right this wrong and give lunch the credit it deserves.”

“We'd like to discuss it with you tomorrow,” the first guy said. “Perhaps over lunch?”

“That's it!” I shouted. “Get out of here!”

“What?” the three of them said, shocked.

“Mr. President!” Lane yelled, trying to stop me from saying anything else. Secret Service Agent Doe peeked in the door to see what was going on.

“Get these people out of here!” I hollered. “You and your organization are a bunch of losers who have too much time on your hands!”

“So this is how you treat your contributors,” the lady said angrily, pointing her finger at me. “Well, we got you elected, Moon, and we can ruin you, too!”

“Get a life, lady!” I shouted as Agent Doe grabbed her.

“Hey, we never got our picture taken with the president!” one of the men complained as the guards dragged him away.

“Beat it!” I screamed.

“Moon! You can't kick your supporters out of the Oval Office!” Lane complained after the whole fuss was over.

“They're morons,” I said. “Where did idiots like that get five million dollars anyway?”

“By skipping a lot of breakfasts and dinners, I guess,” Lane said. “But Moon, you've got to understand how politics works. When somebody does a politician a favor, they expect a favor in return. Would it really hurt anybody if you named lunch the most important meal of the day?”

“I guess not,” I said wearily.

At the end of the day, I could barely keep my eyes open. I hadn't set foot outside all day. I hadn't seen my parents. I thought about taking a swim in the White House pool or playing some video games in the game room. But I was so tired, I just collapsed on my bed and was asleep in minutes.

When I woke up the next morning, I opened the
Washington Post
to see this big headline:

 

MOON THROWS TANTRUM!

VISITORS CLAIM PREZ WENT

BERSERK IN OVAL OFFICE!

 

And this smaller one:

 

Lunch Named

Most Important

Meal of the Day

Having a Secret Service agent watch your every move is creepy.

Everywhere I turned, Agent Doe was there. When I woke up in the morning, he was outside my bedroom door, waiting for me. When I went to sleep at night, he was there. He never seemed to sleep or eat. He was always hanging around, twenty feet away from me, watching me but pretending not to.

The weird thing is, after a while, I got used to it. I stopped noticing him lurking in the shadows. He became like a piece of furniture. A piece of furniture that carried a gun and just happened to move wherever I moved, like one magnet being pulled along by another magnet.

Chief of Staff Lane Brainard told me to take up jogging, but the president can't just go outside alone. Agent Doe had to go with me. I thought he was going to complain, but he didn't. At more than 300 pounds, he knew he could use the exercise.

We jogged early in the morning, before the streets were filled with people. Leaving from the White House, we could usually make it to the Lincoln Memorial and back in less than an hour. We must have been a sight, this enormous bald-headed black man jogging with a skinny thirteen-year-old white boy. Trailing behind us was always a car with Secret Service agents inside holding the football.

Each morning, Agent Doe led me on a different route. He said that if we went the same way every day, it would be easier for somebody to try to harm me. It seemed ridiculous, but when it came to security, Agent Doe was my boss.

As we jogged, little by little he told me about himself. He was from California. He'd never met his father, he said. His mom couldn't afford to send him to college, so he put himself through school by working as a bouncer in a bar. A bouncer is a big guy who breaks up fights and kicks out people who get rowdy.

He didn't like that job, so he joined the Army. He fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his bravery was noticed by one of the generals. Soon Doe was with the Secret Service.

I guess they figured he was so big that if some nut ever tried to shoot the president, Agent Doe would make the perfect human shield. Still, he said he'd always had a weight problem. Several times he had received warnings about it from the head of the Secret Service.

He didn't have any brothers or sisters, and he never got married. When I asked him why not, he said he was “married to his job.”

From the start, I had been bugging Agent Doe about teaching me some martial arts. I had taken a few tae kwon do classes when I was younger and learned a few moves, but he was an expert.

“Did you ever hurt anybody really badly?” I asked as we jogged past the Washington Monument early one morning.

“Yes,” he puffed. “But only in self-defense, Mr. President.”

“What happened?”

“It was in the bar, sir,” he said. “Some guy got drunk and was bothering people. I asked him politely to leave. He wouldn't. So I asked him again, a little less politely. He smashed a bottle against the bar and came at me with it. I had to subdue him.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, I know a few tricks, sir.”

“Will you teach them to me?” I asked.

“I don't know about that, sir,” he huffed. “They're very dangerous.”

“Please?” I begged.

“As long as I'm around, sir, you don't need to bother yourself with that stuff.”

I kept after Agent Doe, begging and pleading him to show me his martial arts techniques. I threatened to have him thrown into the White House pool again. I just about used my executive power to force him to spill the beans.

I wore him down, I guess. Finally, he agreed to teach me the secret of how to disable a man in three seconds.

After a morning jog, we went up to the roof of the White House, where there was plenty of room for hand-to-hand combat and nobody around to disturb us.

“Can I hit you really hard?” I asked before we got started.

“Go ahead, sir,” Agent Doe said. “But you don't have to use all your strength to immobilize a man.”

I took a little running start and gave him my best shot, a reverse knife-hand strike right below the chest. I wasn't expecting to knock him down or anything, but I thought I might be able to rock him back a little.

Nothing doing. It was like hitting a refrigerator.

“Owww!” I yelled, shaking my hand.

“Mr. President, are you okay?” Agent Doe rushed to comfort me.

“I'll be fine,” I grimaced.

“If you get hurt, I'm in big trouble, sir.”

“Don't worry about it,” I assured him.

“You're just a little guy, sir, so you shouldn't go running and charging at big guys like me,” he explained. “Let me show you something that might work better — the Secret Ninja Death Touch.”

“Yeah!” I agreed excitedly. “The Secret Ninja Death Touch. That sounds cool. How do I do it?”

“The Secret Ninja Death Touch is a part of
Dim Mak
. Death-point striking, it's called,” Agent Doe explained. “It's the deadliest system of self-defense ever created. You should only use it in life-or-death situations. There are only a few
Dim Mak
masters in the world.”

“Where did you learn it?”

“From a guy I met in Iraq. He learned it from a sergeant who fought in Vietnam. And
he
learned it from a South Vietnamese
Dim Mak
master.”

“What do I do?”

“The idea is that you can totally immobilize an opponent by applying intense pressure to his most vulnerable areas. There are forty-three major target areas on the human body. They are neurological shutdown points. If you interrupt and manipulate your attacker's nervous and circulatory systems, those systems shut down almost instantly.”

“Awesome!”

“In the first second he feels pain,” Agent Doe explained. “In the second, numbness sets in. And in the third, he becomes unconscious.”

“What happens in the fourth second?” I asked.

“Death,” he said simply. “That's why it's called the Secret Ninja Death Touch.”

“And you don't even have to hit the guy?”

“Correct, sir. Go ahead, grab me from behind.”

I went behind Agent Doe's back and wrapped my arm around his huge neck.

“Okay, you got me good and tight, right, sir?” he asked.

“Right.”

“I can't escape, right?”

“Right.”

At that point, Agent Doe reached behind him and placed his thumb on a part of my body. I can't tell you what part because I know that if I did, some of you lunatics reading this would go and try it on your friends. You're going to have to take my word for this. He touched me with his thumb and put pressure on that part of my body.

I didn't feel anything at first, but after about a second I felt a little numb.

“See? You're helpless, aren't you?”

“Yeah,” I grunted.

“If I wanted to totally immobilize you I would increase the pressure,” Agent Doe explained. “In a few seconds you would pass out. But I won't do that, of course, because …”

That was the last thing I remember before I passed out.