Party Princess (The Princess Diaries 7)

Earth Science: d/c (Kenny will tell me)

Monday, March 8, limo on the way home from the Plaza

I can’t believe it.

Really. It’s too much. After all that—

Okay. I have to get a grip. MUST. GET. A. GRIP.

It started out innocently enough. We were all lying there on the ballroom floor, exhausted from our final run-through.

Then somebody—I think it was Tina—went, “Um, Your Highness? My parents want to know where they can buy tickets to this show, so they can be sure to see it.”

“All of your parents’ names have already been put on the guest list,” Grandmère said, from where she sat, enjoying a post-rehearsal cigarette (apparently, she’s allowing herself to smoke after run-throughs, as well as after meals), “for Wednesday.”

“Wednesday?” Tina asked, a funny inflection in her voice.

“That is correct,” Grandmère said, exhaling a plume of blue smoke. Señor Eduardo coughed a little in his sleep as some of it drifted his way.

“But isn’t this Wednesday the night of the Aide de Ferme benefit?” someone else—I think it was Boris—asked.

“That is correct,” Grandmère said, again.

And that’s when it finally sunk in.

Lilly was the first one up.

“WHAT?” she cried. “You’re going to make us do this play in front of all the people coming to your PARTY?”

“It’s a musical,” Grandmère replied darkly. “Not a play.”

“You said, when I asked you last week, that we’d be putting Braid! on a week from that day!” Lilly shouted. “And that was Thursday!”

Grandmère puffed on her cigarette. “Oh, dear,” she said, not sounding in the least concerned. “I was off by one day, wasn’t I?”

“I am not,” Boris said, drawing himself up to his full height, “going to be strangled by some girl’s hair in front of Joshua Bell.”

“And I am not,” Lilly declared, “going to play someone’s mistress in front of Benazir Bhutto—no matter how long she supported the Taliban!”

“I don’t want to play a maid in front of celebrities,” Tina said meekly.

Grandmère very calmly stubbed her cigarette out on an empty plate someone had left on top of the piano. I saw Phil eyeing the smoking butt nervously from where he sat at the keyboard. Obviously, he is as nervous about contracting lung cancer from secondhand smoke as I am.

“So this,” Grandmère said, her Gitane-roughened voice projecting very loudly across the empty ballroom, “is the thanks I get, for taking your dull, avera

ge little lives, and injecting them with glamour and art.”

“Um,” Boris said. “My life already has art in it. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Your Royal Highness, but I’m a concert violinist, and I—”

“I tried,” Grandmère’s voice rang out, as she ignored him, “to do something to enrich your humdrum days of scholastic slavery. I tried to give you something meaningful, something you could look forward to. And this is how you repay me. By whining that you don’t want to share what we’ve worked so hard to create together with others. What kind of ACTORS are you????”

Everyone blinked at her. Because, of course, none of us considered himself an actor of any kind.

“Were you not,” Grandmère demanded, “put on this earth with a God-given obligation to share your talent with others? Would you dare to presume to DEFY God’s plan for you by DENYING the world the right to see you perform your art? Is THAT what you’re trying to tell me? That you want to DEFY God?”

Only Lilly was brave enough to answer.

“Um,” she said. “Your Highness, I don’t believe I am defying God—if She does, in fact, exist—by saying that I don’t care to make an ass out of myself in front of a bunch of world leaders and movie stars.”