Can we please focus on what’s important here? Tiara-shaped squeezy things. Yay or nay?
Oh, my God. She’s handing back my paper…and it’s…
…covered in little red marks. Oh, Mia. I’m so sorry. Mia? MIA?
Friday, September 11, nurse’s office
I am lying here with a cool cloth over my forehead. Although, it is very hard to write in your journal AND keep a cool cloth on your forehead, I am finding out.
The nurse says to try to keep still and not think so much. Ha! Who does this nurse think she’s dealing with? It’s ME, Mia Thermopolis! It is impossible for me not to think so much. Thinking is all I ever do.
Fortunately, she can’t see me disobeying her orders because she went into her cubicle to fill out some forms. Hopefully, they’re forms to have me committed. I can’t debate Lana on Monday if I’m in a mental institution.
Nurse Lloyd says I’m not crazy, though. She says everybody has their breaking point, and when I walked out into the hallway after receiving another B in English, and saw my grandmother standing there in her tiara and ermine cape, handing out pens that say PROPRIÉTÉ DU PALAIS ROYAL DE GENOVIA to everyone walking by, I reached mine.
Nurse Lloyd says it’s not my fault I went mental, grabbed the box of pens out of Grandmère’s hands, and threw it at the security camera hanging outside the door to Principal Gupta’s office.
The camera’s not even broken. I mean, there are PENS all over the place.
But the camera is just fine.
I don’t know why they had to call my mom and dad.
Nurse Lloyd says I should just rest quietly until they get here. She is keeping Grandmère out at my request. Not that it’s Grandmère’s fault, really. I mean, she was just trying to help. Lilly must have called her and told her about Lana’s pom-pom-shaped squeezy things. So Grandmère felt obligated to rush over here with something she thought I could hand out.
Because who DOESN’T want a pen that says PROPRIÉTÉ DU PALAIS ROYAL DE GENOVIA on it?
Really, none of this is anyone’s fault. Except my own. I should never have handed that paper in to Ms. Martinez. What was I THINKING? How could I for ONE MINUTE have thought that she would appreciate a paper comparing Romeo and Juliet’s forbidden love with that of Britney Spears and Jason Allen Alexander? I mean, yeah, I poured my HEART and SOUL into it. I wanted the reader to feel Britney’s pain at the way she and Jason were torn apart by the media and her management and record company, so much that she had no choice but to rebound with Kevin. It’s so clear to me that these two childhood sweethearts were meant for each other….
I should have known Ms. Martinez wouldn’t share my concern for Britney. It’s quite clear she’s never REALLY listened to “Toxic.”
Oh, no.
SOMEONE’S COMING!!! MUST GET CLOTH BACK ON HEAD!!!!
Friday, September 11, nurse’s office, later
It was just my dad. I asked him how he got here so fast, and he said because he’d been on his way to the French mission to argue with them about voting Genovia out of the EU.
This just made me feel worse. Because it reminded me of how I’d let my own people down so very badly with the whole snail thing.
Dad said not to worry about it, that if anyone should be voted out of the EU it should be Monaco for letting Jacques Cousteau dump South American seaweed into the Mediterranean in the first place, and also France, for sitting on their hands about it for a decade afterward. But, as he pointed out, that’s what France is best at, after all.
I apologized to Dad for interrupting his busy day of politicking, but he just patted my hand and said everyone is entitled to a “crying jag” now and then. I asked him if that was Nurse Lloyd’s clinical diagnosis of what had happened to me, and he said, “Not exactly,” but that he’s seen a lot of crying jags in his day. But never in someone who hadn’t had more Genovian prosecco than was good for her.
It’s very embarrassing to blubber like a big baby in front of the whole school, not to mention doing it later, in front of your dad. Especially when, you know, there’s no Kleenex whatsoever around because I had used it all up already. So, I had to blow my snot into my dad’s silk show-hanky. Not that he looked like he minded too much. He’ll probably just throw it away and buy a new one, like Britney Spears does with her underwear. It’s nice to be a prince. Or a pop star.
Anyway, Dad was way concerned and kept asking me what was wrong. What’s wrong, Dad? Oh, you mean other than everything?
Of course, the only thing I could TELL him about was the Ms. Martinez thing. Because I knew if I told him about how much the whole election thing was bumming me out, he wouldn’t understand, and he’d just say something all fathery like, “Oh, Mia, don’t put yourself down. You know you’ll do great.”
And God knows I couldn’t tell him about the Michael thing. I mean, I love my dad. I don’t want to cause his head to explode.
At first my dad totally didn’t believe me. You know, that I could get a B on an English paper. I had to pull out my paper and SHOW him.
And then his eyes got all squinty—but I think mostly because he’d left his reading glasses back in the limo—and he cleared his throat a bunch of times.
Then he said some stuff about how this was what he was getting for his twenty thousand dollars a year and what kind of world was it where a little girl’s dream could get shot down like so much skeet and that if this Ms. Martinez person thinks she can get away with this, she has another think coming.