Princess in Training (The Princess Diaries 6)

I walked in on utter chaos at the Thompson Street loft again. Since Mom and Mr. G are going to Indiana this weekend, Mom had to move Ladies’ Poker Night from Saturday to tonight. So, all of the feminist artists from Mom’s poker group were sitting around the kitchen table eating moo goo gai pan when I walked in.

They were being really loud, too. So loud that when I called Fat Louie, he didn’t come. I shook his bag of low-fat Iams and everything. Nothing. I actually thought for a minute that Fat Louie had run away—like he’d gotten out somehow in all the confusion of the feminists coming in. Because you know, he hasn’t been all that happy about sharing the loft with a new baby. In fact, we’ve had to chase him out of Rocky’s crib more than a few times, since he seems to think it’s a bed we put there just for him, since it IS kind of Fat Louie–sized.

And I’ll admit, I DO spend a lot of time with Rocky. Time I used to spend giving Fat Louie his kitty massages and all.

But I’m TRYING to be a good mother—a baby-licker to BOTH my brother AND my cat.

I finally found him hiding under my bed…but just his head, because he’s so fat, the rest of him wouldn’t fit, so his kitty butt was kind of sticking out in the air.

I didn’t blame him for hiding, really. Mom’s friends can be scary.

Mr. G agrees, apparently. He was hiding, too, it turned out, in the bedroom he and Mom share, trying to watch a baseball game with Rocky. He looked up all startled when I came in to give Rocky a kiss hello.

“Are they gone yet?” he wanted to know, his eyes looking kind of wild behind his glasses.

“Um,” I said. “They haven’t even started playing.”

“Damn.” Mr. G looked down at his son, who wasn’t crying for once. He is usually fine if there is a television on. “I mean, darn.”

I felt a spurt of sympathy for Mr. G. I mean, it is not easy being married to my mom. Aside from the whole crazy painter thing, there’s the fact that she seems to be physically incapable of paying a bill on time, or even of FINDING the bill when she finally does remember to pay it. Mr. G transferred everything to online banking, but it doesn’t help, on account of all the checks my mom gets sent for her art sales end up wadded up somewhere weird, like in the bottom of her gas mask container.

I swear, between my inability to divide fractions and her inability to assume any sort of adult responsibility—aside from attending political rallies and breast-feeding—it’s a wonder Mr. G doesn’t divorce us.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked Mr. G. “Some spare ribs? Shrimp with garlic sauce?”

“No, Mia,” Mr. G said, wearing a look of long suffering that I recognized only too well. “But thanks, anyway. We’ll be fine.”

I left the menfolk to themselves and went into the kitchen to scrounge some food up for myself before sneaking off to my bedroom to do all my homework. Fortunately, none of my mom’s friends paid any attention to me, because they were too busy complaining about how male musical artists like Eminem are responsible for turning a generation of young men into misogynists.

Really, I could not stand idly by and allow that kind of talk in my own home. Maybe it was the aftereffects of my powerful speech-giving experience in the empty conference room at the Plaza, but I put my plate of moo shu vegetable down and told my mom’s friends that their argument against Eminem was specious (I don’t even know what this word means, but I’ve heard Michael and Lilly use it a lot) and that if they would just take a moment to listen to “Cleaning Out My Closet” (one of Rocky’s favorites, by the way), they would know that the only women Eminem hates are his mom and the hos that be trippin’ on him.

This statement, which I felt was quite reasonable, was met by utter silence by the feminist artists. Then my mom went, “Is that the door? It must be Vern from downstairs. He gets so upset these days when he thinks we’re having a party and we haven’t invited him. I’ll be right back.”

And she scurried to the door even though I hadn’t heard the buzzer ring.

Then, one of the feminists went, “So, Mia, is your defense of Eminem the kind of thing your grandmother teaches you during your princess lessons?”

And all the other feminists laughed.

But then I remembered that I actually needed some advice on the feminist front so I was all, “Hey, you guys, I mean, women, do you know if it’s true that all college boys expect their girlfriends to Do It?”

“Uh, not just college boys,” said one of the women, while the rest of them laughed uproariously.

So, it IS true. I should have known. I mean, I’d kind of been hoping that Lana was just trying to make me feel bad. But now it looked as if she might actually have been telling the truth.

“You look worried, Mia,” commented Kate, the performance artist who likes to stand up onstage and smear chicken fat on herself to make a statement about the beauty industry.

“She’s always worried,” said Gretchen, a welder who specializes in metal replicas of body parts. Particularly of the male variety. “She’s Mia, remember?”

All the feminist artists laughed uproariously at that, too.

This made me feel bad. Like my mom’s been talking about me behind my back. I mean, I talk about HER behind HER back, of course. But it’s different when your own mother has been talking about YOU.

Clearly, Lilly is not the only one who thinks I’m a baby-licker.

“You spend way too much time freaking out about things, Mia.” Becca, the neon light artist, waved her margarita glass at me knowingly. “You should stop thinking so much. I don’t remember thinking half as much as you do when I was your age.”

“Because you were already on lithium when you were her age,” Kate pointed out.