The Princess Diaries (The Princess Diaries 1)

I promised, even though I don’t think I’m acting like a head case.

But when I called my mom from the pay phone in the lobby after school to ask her if it was okay if I stayed overnight at the Moscovitzes, she was all, “Um, actually, Mia, your father was really hoping that when you got home tonight we could have another talk.”

Oh, great.

I told my mom that although there was nothing I wanted to do more than have another talk, I was very concerned about Lilly, whose stalker was recently released from Bellevue again. Ever since Lilly started her cable access TV show, this guy named Norman has been calling in, asking her to take off her shoes. According to the Drs. Moscovitz, Norman is a fetishist. His fixation is feet—in particular, Lilly’s feet. He sends stuff to her care of the show, CDs and stuffed animals and things like that, and writes that there’ll be more where that came from if Lilly would just take off her shoes on air. So what Lilly does is, she takes off her shoes, all right, but then she throws

a blanket over her legs and kicks her feet around under it and goes, “Look, Norman, you freak! I took my shoes off! Thanks for the CDs, sucker!”

This angered Norman so much that he started wandering around the Village looking for Lilly. Everyone knows Lilly lives in the Village, since we filmed a very popular episode where Lilly borrowed the pricing gun from Grand Union and stood on the corner of Bleecker and La Guardia and told all the European tourists wandering around NoHo that if they wore a Grand Union price sticker on their foreheads they could get a free latte from Dean & DeLuca (a surprising amount of them believed her).

Anyway, one day a few weeks ago Norman the foot fetishist found us in the park and started chasing us around, waving twenty dollar bills and trying to get us to take off our shoes. This was very entertaining, and hardly scary at all, especially because we just ran right up to the command post on Washington Square South and Thompson Street, where the Sixth Precinct has been parking this enormous trailer so they can secretly spy on the drug dealers. We told the police that this weird guy was trying to assault us, and you should have seen it: About twenty undercover guys (even a guy I thought was an old homeless man asleep on a bench) jumped on Norman and dragged him, screaming, off to the mental ward!

I always have such a good time with Lilly.

Anyway, Lilly’s parents told her Norman just got out of Bellevue and that if she sees him she’s not to torment him anymore, because he’s just a poor obsessive-compulsive with possible schizophrenic tendencies.

Lilly’s devoting tomorrow’s show to her feet. She’s going to model every single pair of shoes she owns, but not once show her bare feet. She hopes that this will drive Norman over the edge and he’ll do something weirder than ever, like get a gun and shoot at us.

I’m not scared, though. Norman has kind of thick glasses, and I bet he couldn’t actually hit anything, even with a machine gun, which even a lunatic like Norman is allowed to buy in this country thanks to our totally unrestrictive gun laws, which Michael Moscovitz says in his webzine will ultimately result in the demise of democracy as we know it.

My mom was totally not buying this, though. She was all, “Mia, I appreciate the fact that you want to help your friend through this difficult period with her stalker, but I really think you have more pressing responsibilities here at home.”

And I was all, “What responsibilities?” thinking she was talking about the litter box, which I had totally cleaned two days ago.

And she was like, “Responsibility toward your father and me.”

I just about lost it right there. Responsibilities? Responsibilities? She’s telling me about responsibilities? When is the last time it ever occurred to her to drop off the laundry, let alone pick it up again? When is the last time she remembered to buy Q-Tips or toilet paper or milk?

And did she ever happen to think to mention, in all of my fourteen years, that I might possibly end up being the princess of Genovia someday???

She thinks she needs to tell me about my responsibilities?

HA!!!!!!

I nearly hung up on her. But Lilly was sort of standing nearby, practicing her house manager duties by switching on and off the lights in the school lobby. Since I had promised not to act like a head case, and hanging up on my mother would definitely fall into the head case category, I said in this really patient voice, “Don’t worry, Mom, I won’t forget to stop at Genovese on my way home tomorrow and pick up new vacuum cleaner bags.”

And then I hung up.

HOMEWORK

Algebra: problems 1–12, pg. 119

English: proposal

World Civ: questions at end of Chapter 4

G & T: none

French: use avoir in neg. sentence, rd. lessons one to three, pas de plus

Biology: none

Saturday, October 4,

Early, Still Lilly’s Place

Why do I always have such a good time when I spend the night at Lilly’s? I mean, it’s not like they’ve got stuff that I don’t have. In fact, my mom and I have better stuff. The Moscovitzes only get a couple of movie channels, and because I took advantage of the last Time Warner Cable bonus offer, we have all of them, Cinemax and HBO and Showtime, for the low, low rate of $19.99 per month.