Princess in Pink (The Princess Diaries 5)

I just shook my head. “Did you see that?” I asked him. “Your sister and Jangbu?”

Michael looked toward them. “No. What?”

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to cause Michael to blow up at Lilly the way Colin Hanks did when he caught his little sister Kirsten Dunst kissing his best friend in the movie Get Over It. Because even though I have never really noticed Michael harboring protective feelings toward Lilly, I am sure that is only because she has been dating Boris all this time, and Boris is one of Michael’s friends, and a mouth breather, besides. I mean, you are not going to get too upset over your little sister going out with a mouth-breathing violinist. A hot, newly unemployed Sherpa, however… now that might be a different story.

And though you wouldn’t know it to look at him, Michael is very hot-tempered. I once saw him glare quite formidably at some construction workers who whistled at me and Lilly down on Sixth Avenue when we were coming out of Charlie Mom’s. The last thing I needed at my party was a fistfight to break out.

But Lilly managed to keep her hands off Jangbu for the next half hour, during which I attempted to put aside my depression and join in on the fun, especially when everyone started jumping around, doing the Macarena, which Michael had jokingly put in the mix he’d made.

It’s too bad there aren’t more dances, other than the Time Warp and the Macarena, that everybody knows. You know how in movies like She’s All That and Footloose, everybody starts doing the same dance at the same time? It would be so cool if that would happen sometime in, like, the cafeteria. Principal Gupta could be on the sound system, reading off the announcements, and suddenly somebody puts on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or whatever and we all start dancing on the tables.

In olden times, everybody knew the same dances… like the minuet, and stuff. Too bad things can’t be like olden times.

Except of course, I wouldn’t want to have wooden teeth or the pox.

Anyway, things were finally starting to look up, and I was actually having a pretty good time fooling around, when all of a sudden Tina was like, “Mr. G, we’re out of Coke!” and Mr. G was like, “How can that be? I bought seven flats of it at the drive-through liquor store this morning.”

But Tina insisted all the Coke was gone. I found out later she’d hidden it in the baby’s room. But whatever. At the time, Mr. G honestly thought there was no more Coke.

“Well, I’ll run down to Grand Union and buy more,” he said, putting on his coat

, and going out.

That’s when Ling Su asked my mom if she could see her slides. Ling Su, being an artist herself, knew exactly the right thing to say to my mother, a fellow artist, even though since she’s been pregnant she’s had to give up oils and work only in egg tempera.

No sooner had my mom whisked Ling Su into her bedroom to break out her slides than Tina turned off the music and announced that we would now play Seven Minutes in Heaven.

Everybody looked pretty excited about this—we certainly had never played Seven Minutes in Heaven at the last party we’d all been to, which had been at Shameeka’s house. But Mr. Taylor, Shameeka’s dad, wasn’t the type to fall for the “out of Coke” or “Can I see your slides?” thing. He is way strict. He keeps the baseball bat he once hit a homerun with in one corner of the room as a “reminder” to the boys Shameeka dates of just what, exactly, he’s capable of, should they get fresh with his daughter.

So the Seven Minutes in Heaven thing had everybody way stoked. Everybody, that is, except Michael. Michael is not a big fan of PDA, and it turns out, he is even less of a fan of being locked in a closet with his girlfriend. Not, he informed me, after Tina had gigglingly shut the closet door—closing the two of us in with Mom and Mr. G’s winter coats, the vacuum cleaner, the laundry cart, and my wheelie suitcase—that he had anything against being in a dark enclosed space with me. It was the fact that outside the door, everybody was listening that bugged him.

“Nobody’s listening,” I told him. “See? They turned the music back on.”

Which they had.

But I sort of had to agree with Michael. Seven Minutes in Heaven is a stupid game. I mean, it is one thing to make out with your boyfriend. It is quite another to do it in a closet, with everybody on the other side of the door knowing what you are doing. The ambiance is just not there.

It was dark in the closet—so dark I couldn’t even see my own hand in front of my face, let alone Michael. Plus, it smelled funny. This, I knew, was on account of the vacuum cleaner. It had been a while since anybody—namely me, since my mom never remembers and Mr. G doesn’t understand our vacuum cleaner on account of it’s being so old— had emptied the vacuum bag, and it was filled to the brim with orange cat fur and the pieces of kitty litter Fat Louie is always tracking across the floor. Since it was scented kitty litter, it smelled a little like pine. But not necessarily in a good way.

“So we really have to stay in here for seven minutes?” Michael wanted to know.

“I guess,” I said.

“What if Mr. G gets back and finds us in here?”

“He’ll probably kill you,” I said.

“Well,” Michael said. “Then I’d better give you something to remember me by.”

Then he took me in his arms and started kissing me.

I have to admit, after that, I kind of started thinking Seven Minutes in Heaven wasn’t such a bad game after all. In fact, I sort of began to like it. It was nice to be there in the dark, with Michael’s body all pressed up to mine, and his tongue in my mouth, and all. I guess because I couldn’t see anything, my sense of smell was that much stronger, or something, because I could smell Michael’s neck really well. It smelled super nice—way better than the vacuum-cleaner bag. The smell sort of made me want to jump on him. I can’t really explain it any other way. But I honestly wanted to jump on Michael.

Instead of jumping on him, which I didn’t think he’d enjoy—nor would it be socially acceptable… plus, you know, all the coats were sort of impeding our ability to move around a lot—I tore my lips from his and said—not even thinking about Tina, or Uli Derickson, or even what I was doing, but sort of lost in the heat of the moment—“So Michael, what is up with the prom? Are we going, or not?”

To which Michael replied, with a chuckle, as his lips nuzzled my own neck (though I highly doubt he was smelling it), “The prom? Are you crazy? The prom’s even stupider than this game.”

At which point, I sort of broke our embrace and took a step backward, right onto Mr. G’s hockey stick. Only I didn’t care, because, you know, I was so shocked.