Madame President - Tara Sue Me Page 0,17
no, but Anna Fitzpatrick. It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him no, I won’t do it, when George shuts me down.
“Let me make this clear, this is the only option if you want to remain at GBNC. I should also point out that if you do decide to leave, your contract does contain a twelve-month noncompete clause. No one will hire you, you’ll be untouchable.”
The contacts I’d been shuffling through in my mind vanish. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying if you chose not to be on the Press Pool, you won’t be working on the air. Not on the national level, anyway. That local outlet you started at in Virginia might take you.”
Chapter Ten
Her
The White House
Washington DC
My first week goes by in a blur. It’s what I’ve been working toward for a long time and to finally have it almost seems surreal. I recognize I’m in a honeymoon phase and it’s not always going to be this great, but I intend to enjoy it while it lasts.
I wasn’t one of those kids who always said I wanted to be the president when I grew up. My earliest career aspiration was to be a ballerina. But even though I had marginal talent that, with a lot of practice, might ensure I was decent enough, by the eighth grade I was much too tall to consider it for a career option.
I entered high school thinking I’d become a doctor, but a boy in my freshman biology class told me his brother was in medical school and had to cut open dead people. Since our class dissected frogs soon after that discussion and I puked my guts up, I decided maybe a career in medicine wasn’t the right move.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I liked, much less what I wanted to do for a living. I went from one activity to another. Mindlessly, from ballet on Mondays and Wednesdays, to Spanish club on Thursdays. I talked with my girlfriends about cute boys and went to football games where we pretended to ignore them.
It was the summer before my senior year that Jaya moved into our neighborhood from India. She and her mother and grandmother bought a house near ours and when I found out we were the same age, I walked over to meet her. I learned very quickly that though we were the same age, our life experiences had been very different. While I had been worried about who was going to be homecoming queen, she was worried about the fifty-year old man her father planned to force her to marry.
Jaya begged her mother to do something. Fortunately, she told me, there was an American attorney, a female, working in her home city of Mumbai for the advancement of women’s rights. Jaya’s mother thankfully sided with her daughter and with the attorney’s help, Jaya, along with her mother and grandmother left India for good.
I’d heard of arranged marriages for children, and while I thought they were horrible, they were also half a world away. What could I, a tall, skinny white girl do? I realized as I got to know Jaya better over our senior year that if the attorney who’d helped her shared my opinion, Jaya would more than likely still be in India.
I set my sights on law school that day. I had all intentions of working as a human rights attorney for the life of my career.
Five years after graduating from Harvard, I was well on my way, yet, even though I found the job rewarding, it never seemed to be enough. One day, following a meeting with my supervisor during which I lamented that in placement situations, our current judicial system placed too much emphasis on biology as opposed to what was more beneficial for the child, he mentioned in passing I should run for office. Specifically, he said, for a congressional seat coming up for election in two years. I brushed him off with the typical excuses. I didn’t have the time, the money, or the connections. Not to mention, no sane person ever ran for political office. After laughing it off, I tried to dismiss the suggestion altogether.
But the more I tried to dismiss it, the more it kept coming to my mind. Eventually, I had to admit, I couldn’t reach my goals for change as an attorney. I needed to be in Washington DC.
Young and idealistic, I’d registered to vote as an Independent as neither of the two major political