Princess in Waiting (The Princess Diaries 4)

Lars and I pick you and Lilly up for school tomorrow?

LINUX RULZ: That’d be good. What are you doing Friday?

What am I doing Friday? Was he asking me OUT? Were Michael and I actually going to have a date? At last????

I tried to type casually so he wouldn’t know that I was so excited, I had already freaked Fat Louie out by jumping up and down in my computer chair and almost rolling over his tail.

FT LOUIE: Nothing, so far as I know. Why?

LINUX RULZ: Want to go to dinner at the Screening Room? They’re showing the first Star Wars.

OH, MY GOD!!!!!!!! HE WAS ASKING ME OUT!!!!!!!!! Dinner and a movie. At the same time, because at the Screening Room you sit at a table and eat dinner while the movie is going. And Star Wars is only my favorite movie of all time, afterDirty Dancing . Could there BE a girl luckier than me? No, I don’t think so. Bite me, Britney.

My fingers were trembling as I typed

FT LOUIE: I think that would be OK. I’ll have to check with my mom. Can I let you know tomorrow?

LINUX RULZ: OK. So see you tomorrow? Around 8:15?

FT LOUIE: Tomorrow, 8:15.

I wanted to add something like I missed you or I love you, but I don’t know, it just felt too weird, and I couldn’t do it. I mean, it’s embarrassing, telling the person you love that you love them. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Also, it didn’t seem like something Jane Eyre would do. Unless, you know, she had just discovered the man she loved had gone blind in a heroic attempt to rescue his crazy firebug wife from an inferno she’d set herself.

Asking me out to dinner and a movie didn’t really seem the same, somehow.

Then Michael wrote

LINUX RULZ : Kid, I’ve been from one side of this galaxy to the other—

which is one of my favorite lines from the first Star Wars . So then I wrote

FT LOUIE: I happen to like nice men.

—jumping ahead to The Empire Strikes Back , to which Michael replied

LINUX RULZ: I’m nice.

Which is better than saying I love you, because right after Han Solo says that, he totally kisses Princess Leia. OH, MY GOD!!! It really is like Michael is Han Solo and I’m Princess Leia, because Michael is good at fixing stuff like hyper drives, and, well, I’m a princess, and I’m very socially conscious like Leia, and everything.

Plus Michael’s dog, Pavlov, sort of looks like Chewbacca. If Chewbacca were a sheltie.

I could not imagine a more perfect date if I tried. Mom will let me go, too, because the Screening Room isn’t that far away, and it’s Michael , after all. Even Mr. Gianini likes Michael, and he doesn’t like many of the boys who go to Albert Einstein—he says they are mostly all walking bundles of testosterone.

I wonder if Princess Leia ever read Jane Eyre . But maybe Jane Eyre doesn’t exist in her galaxy.

I will never get to sleep now, I am too worked up.I am going to see him in eight hours and fifteen minutes .

And on Friday, I am going to be sitting next to him in a darkened room. All alone. With no one else around. Except all the waitresses and the other people at the movie.

The Force isso with me.

Tuesday, January 20,

first day of school after winter break, Homeroom

I barely made it out of bed this morning. In fact, the only reason I was able to drag myself out from beneath the covers—and Fat Louie, who laid on my chest purring like a weedwhacker all night long—was the prospect of seeing Michael for the first time in thirty-two days.

It is completely cruel to force a person of my tender years, when I should be getting at least nine hours of sleep a night, to travel back and forth between two such drastically different time zones, with not even a single day of rest in between. I am still completely jet-lagged, and I am sure it is going to stunt not only my physical growth, (not in the height department because I am tall enough, thank you, but in the mammary-gland division, glands being very sensitive to things like disrupted sleep cycles) but my intellectual growth as well.