The Princess Diaries (The Princess Diaries 1)

I could still hear the reporters yelling outside, and inside the cafeteria I could hear the thump, thump, thump of the sound system as it ground out some hip-hop, a tribute to our Latino student population, and these thoughts are moving really sluggishly through my head, these thoughts that are saying:

He set you up.

He only asked you out so he could get his picture in the paper.

He’s the one who notified the press that you’d be here tonight.

He probably only broke up with Lana just so he could tell his friends he’s dating a girl worth three hundred million dollars. He never even noticed you until your picture was on the cover of the Post. Lilly was right: That day in Bigelows, he WAS only suffering from a synaptic breakdown when he smiled at you. He probably thinks his chances of getting into Harvard or whatever are way enhanced by the fact that he’s the princess of Genovia’s boyfriend.

And like a big idiot, I fell for it.

Great. Just great.

Lilly says I’m not assertive enough. Her parents say I have a tendency to internalize everything and fear confrontation.

My mom says the same thing. That’s why she gave me this book, in the hopes that what I won’t tell her, I’ll at least get out into the open somehow.

If it hadn’t turned out that I’m a princess, maybe I might still be all that stuff. You know, unassertive, fearful of confrontation, an internalizer. I probably wouldn’t have done what I did next.

Which was turn to Josh and ask, “Why did you do that?”

He was busy patting himself down, trying to find the dance tickets to hand to the sophomores who were manning the ticket table. “Do what?”

“Kiss me like that, in front of everybody.”

He found the tickets in his wallet. “I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t you hear them? They were yelling at me to kiss you. So I did. Why?”

“Because I didn’t appreciate it.”

“You didn’t appreciate it?” Josh looked confused. “You mean you didn’t like it?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s exactly what I mean. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. Because I know you didn’t kiss me because you like me. You just kissed me because I’m the princess of Genovia.”

Josh looked at me like he thought I was crazy.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “I like you. I like you a lot.”

I said, “You can’t like me a lot. You don’t even know me. That’s why I thought you asked me out. So you could get to know me better. But you haven’t tried to get to know me at all. You just wanted to get your picture on Extra.”

He laughed at that, but I noticed he didn’t look me in the eye when he said, “What do you mean, I don’t even know you? Of course I know you.”

“No, you don’t. Because if you did, you wouldn’t have ordered me a steak for dinner.”

I heard a murmur go around through all of my friends. I guess they recognized the seriousness of Josh’s mistake, even if he didn’t. He heard them, too, so when he replied, he was talking to them, too. “So I ordered the girl a steak,” he said, with his arms open in a so-sue-me sort of way. “That’s a crime? It was filet mignon, for God’s sake.”

Lilly said, in her meanest voice, “She’s a vegetarian, you sociopath.”

This information didn’t seem to bother Josh very much. He just shrugged and went, “Oops, my bad.”

Then he turned to me and said, “Ready to slide?”

But I had no intention of sliding with Josh. I had no intention of doing anything with Josh, ever again. I couldn’t believe, after what I’d just said to him, he thought I’d still want to. The guy really was a sociopath. How could I ever have thought he’d seen into my soul? How???

Disgusted, I did the only thing a girl can be expected to do under those circumstances:

I turned my back on him and walked out.

Only, since of course I couldn’t go back outside—not if I didn’t want Teen People to get a nice close-up of me crying—my only recourse was to walk out into the girls’ room.