The Princess Diaries (The Princess Diaries 1)

I’m dead.

That’s it.

Now I know what everyone was looking at outside. I know why they were whispering and giggling. I know why those girls ran out of the bathroom. I know why Josh Richter talked to me.

My picture is on the cover of the Post.

That’s right. The New York Post. Read by millions of New Yorkers daily.

Oh, yeah. I’m dead.

It’s a pretty good picture of me, actually. I guess somebody took it as I was leaving the Plaza Sunday night, after dinner with Grandmère and my dad. I’m going down the steps just outside the revolving door. I’m sort of smiling, only not at the camera. I don’t remember anybody taking my picture, but I guess somebody did.

Superimposed over the photo are the words Princess Amelia, and then in smaller letters New York’s Very Own Royal.

Great. Just great.

Mr. Gianini was the one who figured it out. He said he was walking to catch the subway to work and he saw it on the newsstand. He called my mother. My mom was taking a shower, though, and didn’t hear the phone. Mr. G left a message. But my mom never checks the machine in the morning, because everyone who knows her knows she is not a morning person, so nobody ever calls before noon. When Mr. G called again, she had already left for her studio, where she never answers the phone, because she wears a Walkman when she paints, so she can listen to Howard Stern.

So then Mr. G had no choice but to call my dad at the Plaza, which was pretty nervy of him, if you think about it. According to Mr. G, my dad blew a gasket. He told Mr. G that until he could get there, I should be sent to the principal’s office, where I would be “safe.”

My dad has obviously never met Principal Gupta.

Actually, I shouldn’t say that. She hasn’t been so bad. She showed me the paper and said, kind of sarcastically, but in a nice way, “You might have shared this with me, Mia, when I asked you the other day if everything was all right at home.”

I blushed. “Well,” I said, “I didn’t think anybody would believe me.”

“It is,” Principal Gupta said, “a bit unbelievable.”

That’s what the story on page 2 of the Post said, too. FAIRY TALE COMES TRUE FOR ONE LUCKY NEW YORK KID was how the reporter, one Ms. Carol Fernandez, put it. Like I had won the lottery, or something. Like I should be happy about it.

Ms. Carol Fernandez went on at length about my mom, “the raven-haired avant-garde painter Helen Thermopolis,” and about my dad, “the handsome Prince Phillipe of Genovia,” who’d “successfully battled his way back from a bout of testicular cancer.” Oh, thanks, Carol Fernandez, for letting all of New York know my dad’s only got one you-know-what.

Then she went on to describe me as “the statuesque beauty who is the product of Helen and Phillipe’s tempestuous whirlwind college romance.”

HELLO??? CAROL FERNANDEZ, ARE YOU ON CRACK????

I am NOT a statuesque beauty. Yeah, I’m TALL. I’m way TALL. But I am no beauty. I want what Carol Fernandez has been smoking, if she thinks I’M beautiful.

No wonder everybody was laughing at me. This is SO embarrassing. I mean, really.

Oh, here comes my dad. Boy, does he look mad. . . .

More Wednesday, English

It isn’t fair.

This is totally, completely unfair.

I mean, anybody else’s dad would have let them come home. Anybody else’s dad, if his kid’s picture was on the front of the Post, would say, “Maybe you should skip school for a few days until things calm down.”

Anybody else’s dad would have been like, “Maybe you should change schools. How do you feel about Iowa? Would you like to go to school in Iowa?”

But oh, no. Not my dad. Because he’s a prince. And he says members of the royal family of Genovia do not “go home” when there is a crisis. No, they stay where they are and slug it out.

Slug it out. I think my dad has something in common with Carol Fernandez: They’re BOTH on crack.

Then my dad reminded me that it’s not like I’m not getting paid for this. Right! One hundred lousy bucks! One hundred lousy bucks a day to be publicly ridiculed and humiliated.