Princess in Waiting (The Princess Diaries 4)

Who can explain the vagaries of the human heart. Not I. Oh, my God, look, he’s moving on to vehicular safety. Could this BE more boring? Let’s make a list. You start it.

OK.

MIA THERMOPOLIS’S *NEW AND IMPROVED* LIST OF HOTTEST GUYS with commentary by Lilly Moscovitz

Michael Moscovitz (Obviously I can’t agree due to genetic link to said individual. Will concede h

e is not hideously deformed. )

Ioan Griffud from the Horatio Hornblower series (Agreed. He can shiver me timbers anytime he wants. )

The guy from Smallville (Duh—only they should have him join the school swim team because he needs to take his shirt off more per episode. )

Hayden Christensen (Again, duh. Ditto swim team. There must be one for Jedis. Even ones who have embraced the Dark Side. )

Mr. Rochester (Fictional character, but I agree he exudes certain rugged manliness. )

Patrick Swayze (Um, okay, maybe in Dirty Dancing, but have you seen him lately? The guy is older than your dad! )

Captain von Trapp from The Sound of Music (Christopher Plummer was a hottie extraordinaire. I would pit him against the Nazi horde anytime.)

Justin Baxendale (Agree. I heard an eleventh grader tried to kill herself because he looked at her. Seriously. Like, his eyes were so hypnotic, she went full-on Sylvia Plath. She is in counseling now. )

Heath Ledger (Oooh, in the rock-and-roll knight movie, totally. Not so much in Four Feathers ,though. I found his performance in that film somewhat stilted. Plus he didn’t take his shirt off enough. )

Beast from Beauty and the Beast (I think I know someone else who needs counseling. )

Tuesday, January 20, Gifted and Talented

I am so depressed.

I know I shouldn’t be. I mean, everything in my life is going so great.

Great Thing Number One: The boy I have been madly in love with my entire life, practically, loves, or at least really likes, me back, and we are going out on our first real date on Friday.

Great Thing Number Two: I know it is only the first day of the new semester, but as of yet, I am not flunking anything, including Algebra.

Great Thing Number Three: I am no longer in Genovia, the most boring place on the entire planet, with the possible exception of Algebra class, and Grandmère’s princess lessons.

Great Thing Number Four: I don’t have Kenny for my Bio partner anymore. My new partner is Shameeka. What a relief. Which I know is cowardly (feeling relieved that I don’t have to sit by Kenny anymore), but I am pretty sure Kenny thinks I am this horrible person to have led him on like that all those months, when really I liked someone else (though not the person he thought I liked). Anyway, the fact that I don’t have to deal with any hostile looks from Kenny’s direction (even though he fully has a new girlfriend, a girl from our Bio class, as a matter of fact—he didn’t waste any time) is probably really going to boost my grade in that class. Plus Shameeka is really good at science. Actually Shameeka is really good at a lot of things, on account of her being a Pisces. But like me, Shameeka has no one particular talent , which makes her my soul sister, if you think about it.

Great Thing Number Five: I have really cool friends who seem actually to want to hang around with me, and not just because I am a princess, either.

But that, see, is the problem. I have all these great things going for me, and I should be totally happy. I should be over the moon with joy.

And maybe it’s only the jet lag talking—I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open—or possibly PMS—I am sure my internal clock is way messed up from all this transcontinental flying—but I can’t shake this feeling that I am…

Well, a total reject.

I started to realize it today at lunch. I was sitting there like always with Lilly and Boris and Tina and Shameeka and Ling Su, and then Michael came and sat down with us, which of course caused this total cafeteria sensation, since usually he sits with the Computer Club, and everyone in the entire school knows it.

And I was totally embarrassed but of course proud and pleased, too, because Michael never sat at our table back when he and I were just friends, so his sitting there must mean that he is at least slightly in love with me, because it is quite a sacrifice to give up the intellectual talk at the table where he normally sits for the kinds of talks we have at my table, which are generally, like, in-depth analyses of last night’s episode of Charmed and how cute Rose McGowan’s halter top was, or whatever.

But Michael was totally a good sport about it, even though he thinks Charmed is facile. And I really did try to steer the conversation around to things a guy would like, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Milla Jovovich.

Only it turned out I didn’t even need to, because Michael is like one of those lichen moths we read about in Bio. You know, the ones that turned black when the moss they fed on got all sooty during the industrial revolution? He can totally adapt to any situation, and feel at ease. This is an amazing talent that I wish I had. Maybe if I did, I wouldn’t feel so out of place at meetings of the Genovian Olive Growers Association.

Anyway, today at the lunch table, someone brought up cloning, and everyone was talking about who would you clone if you could clone anyone, and people were saying, like, Albert Einstein so he could come back and tell us the meaning of life and stuff, or Jonas Salk so he could find a cure for cancer, and Mozart so he could finish his last requiem (whatever, that one was Boris’s, of course), or Madame Pompadour so she could give us all tips on romance (Tina) or Jane Austen so she could write scathingly about the current political climate and we could all benefit from her cutting wit (Lilly).