Party Princess (The Princess Diaries 7)

Although if you think about it, acting is one of the few professions in which you can make a ton of money while having no actual intelligence or talent whatsoever, as many a star has shown us.

So in that way, you can see why it would be such an appealing career option to so many people.

Grandmère decided to actually run this as if it were a real audition. She had her maid hand out applications to

everyone who walked through the door. We were supposed to fill them out, then stand for a Polaroid taken by Grandmère’s chauffeur, then hand the Polaroid and our application to a tiny, extremely ancient man with huge glasses and an ascot, who was sitting behind a long table set Jennifer-Lopez-in-her-Flashdance-re-creation-video-for-“I’m Glad”-style in the middle of the room. Grandmère sat next to him, with her toy poodle Rommel shivering—in spite of his purple suede bomber jacket—on her lap.

I went up to her, waving my form and the Number One Noodle Son bag in which I had stowed her birthday gift earlier that day and dragged with me to school.

“I’m not filling this out,” I informed her, slapping the form down on the table. “Here’s your present. Happy birthday.”

Grandmère took the bag from me—inside it were the padded satin hangers I had special-ordered from Chanel for her (Whatever. Dad was the one who’d suggested—and paid for—them.), and said, “Thank you. Please be seated, Amelia, dear.”

I knew the “dear” was entirely for the benefit of the guy sitting next to her—whoever he was—not for me.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I said to her. “I mean…is this really how you want to spend your birthday?”

Grandmère just waved me away. “When you’re my age, Amelia,” she said, “age becomes meaningless.”

Oh, whatever. She’s in her SIXTIES, not her nineties. Instead of satin hangers, I should have gotten her one of those shirts I saw downtown that say DRAMA QUEEN inside the Dairy Queen logo.

Lilly flagged me down, so I sat with her and Tina and everybody. Right away Lilly was all, “So what’s the deal here, POG? I’m reporting on this for The Atom, so make it good.”

Lilly always gets the best assignments for the school paper. I have totally sunk to special features—i.e. occasional stories on the school band concert or the library’s most recent acquisitions—since I am too busy with presidential and princess stuff to make a regular deadline.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ll find out when you find out.”

“Off the record,” Lilly said. “Come on. Who’s the little dude with the glasses?”

Before she could ask me anything else, though, Grandmère stood up—dumping poor Rommel from her lap to the ballroom floor, where he slid around a bit before finding his footing on the slippery parquet—and said in a deceptively kind voice (deceptive because, of course, Grandmère isn’t kind), as the room fell silent, “Welcome. For those of you who don’t know me, I am Clarisse, Dowager Princess of Genovia. I am very delighted to see so many of you here today for what will prove, I am certain, to be an important and historic moment in the history of Albert Einstein High School, as well as the theatrical world. But before I say more about that, allow me to introduce, without further ado, the much celebrated, world-famous theatrical director, Señor Eduardo Fuentes.”

Señor Eduardo! No! It can’t be!

And yet…it was! It was the famous director who had asked Grandmère, all those years before, to come to New York with him and star in an original Broadway production!

He had to have been in his thirties back then. He’s gotta be about a HUNDRED now. He’s so old, he looks like a cross between Larry King and a raisin.

Señor Eduardo struggled to rise from his chair, but he was so rickety and frail that he only managed to get about a quarter of the way up before Grandmère pushed him down again impatiently, then went on with her speech. I could practically hear his fragile bones snap under her grip.

“Señor Eduardo has directed countless plays and musicals on numerous prestigious stages worldwide, including Broadway and London’s West End,” Grandmère informed us. “You should all feel extremely honored at the prospect of working with such an accomplished and revered professional.”

“Tank you,” Señor Eduardo managed to get in, waving his hands around and blinking in the bright lights from the ballroom ceiling. “I tank you very, very much. It geeves me great pleasure to look out across so many youthful faces, shining with excitement and—”

But Grandmère wasn’t letting anyone, not even a centenarian world-famous director, steal her show.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she cut him off, “you are, as I said, about to audition for an original work that has never been performed before. If you are cast in this piece, you will, in essence, become a part of history. I am especially pleased about welcoming you here today because the piece you are about to read from was written almost entirely by”—she lowered her false eyelashes modestly—“me.”

“Oh, this is good,” Lilly said, eagerly jotting stuff down in her reporter’s notebook. “Are you getting this, POG?”

Oh, I was getting it all right. Grandmère wrote a PLAY? A play she means for us to put on to raise money for AEHS’s senior graduation?

I am so, so dead.

“This piece,” Grandmère was going on, holding up a sheaf of papers—the script, apparently—“is a work of complete originality and, I am not embarrassed to say, genius. Braid! is, essentially, a classic love story, about a couple who must overcome extraordinary odds in order to be together. What makes Braid! all the more compelling is that it is based on historical fact. Everything that happens in this piece ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE. Yes! Braid! is the story of an extraordinary young woman who, though she spent most of her life as a simple commoner, was one day thrust into a role of leadership. Yes, she was asked to assume the throne of a little country you all might have heard of, Genovia. This brave young woman’s name? Why, none other than the great—”

No. Oh my God, no. For the love of God, no. Grandmère’s written a play about me. About MY LIFE. I AM GOING TO DIE. I AM GOING TO—

“—Rosagunde.”