She felt like screaming.

She sat for a moment on her bed. Outside the window, it was night in Switzerland. She could see the lights of boats on Lake Geneva from here, and the darkness of the mountains towering on the other side of the lake. She could even see the twinkling lights of villages high on the hillsides.

For a moment, she looked at herself in the full-length mirror across from her bed. She was pretty. She knew that. She had long brown hair and a very nice body, even if she had to say so herself. But she was eighteen years old, and she had barely even kissed a boy in her life. No boy could get through the security cordon around her.

She was bored! She was trapped! She was going to die a virgin!

She could not believe that this was her life. She couldn’t say a word without people listening in. She couldn’t go anywhere without large men following her, encircling her, protecting her.

And really, she couldn’t go anywhere at all. Everyplace she wanted to go was a security risk.

Well, she would see about that, wouldn’t she?

She got up and walked through her apartment to the bathroom that she shared with her suitemate. She crossed through the room with its heated tile floors, its rain shower and five-foot-wide vanity and mirror—it was a nice bathroom, she had to admit. Her family was old money—they didn’t believe in luxurious things—and she had never had a bathroom like this one before.

She knocked on the adjoining door.

“Come in!” a voice said.

Elizabeth opened the door and entered. Suddenly, she was in another world—the apartment of Rita Chadwick. The apartments were the same generic layout—bedroom, small kitchen, and living area—but Rita had personalized hers. She had a sense of bohemian hippie culture, and the place was hung with drapes and beads and Tibetan prayer flags. On one wall was a giant poster called “Earthrise,” showing planet Earth as it supposedly looked from the moon. On another was a life-sized poster of the rapper Eminem on stage, wearing a T-shirt and dripping sweat.

Rita wore bell-bottom jeans and a flowered shirt. She was darkly pretty, and had straight black hair tied back with a purple headwrap.

Allowing Elizabeth to have a suitemate was the one nod to normalcy that her dad, the Secret Service, and the school would give her. Even that was hardly normal. Elizabeth and Rita were suitemates and friends, but they led very different lives.