Princess Mia (The Princess Diaries 9)

“Because you don’t want to seem like you’re sitting around at home with nothing better to do than answer e-mails from your ex-boyfriends,” she said.

Even if that’s actually true.

Although it’s not really. I feel kind of guilty not telling Tina about how I spent my day—you know, with Lana and Trisha. I don’t know why. I mean, Grandmère has pointed out a million times that it’s totally rude to tell someone about an outing on which you went but to which they were not themselves invited. So there’s no reason I SHOULD tell Tina about Lana and Trisha.

Still. It was LANA.

I—

What’s THAT? I think I just heard Tina’s doorman buzz up that there’s someone in the lobby—

Sunday, September 19, 2 a.m., Tina Hakim Baba’s bedroom

Oh. My. God.

So Tina was just finishing pouring melted butter over the low-fat microwave popcorn to make it actually taste like something when the doorman announced that Boris and “a friend” were down in the lobby.

Tina flipped out, of course, because she’s not supposed to have boys over when her parents aren’t home.

But Boris got on the intercom and said he was only dropping something off, a present for us. So, of course, Tina couldn’t resist letting them come up. Because, as she put it, “Present!!!!!”

But if you ask me the present was just an excuse so that Boris could come up and make out with Tina. Because all “the present” was was a couple of containers of Häagen-Dazs. (To be honest, they were our favorite flavors, vanilla Swiss almond and macadamia brittle. But still.)

The real surprise—at least to me—was that the “friend” turned out to be J.P.

I didn’t even know J.P. and Boris hung out that much. I mean, outside of the lunchroom.

J.P. looked shockingly…well, good as he followed Boris into Tina’s apartment. I don’t know what he’s done to himself, but he looks all tall and…guylike.

The thing is, I don’t normally notice this kind of thing about any guy except Michael. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Maybe it was just the shock of seeing J.P. in a setting outside of school, or in jeans instead of his school uniform or theater-going clothes. Maybe it’s just all the people who keep telling me how hot J.P. is, rubbing off on me.

Or maybe I’m just hot-guy-deprived, on account of not having had Michael around for so long, or something.

Still, it was weird. J.P., in addition to looking hot, looked kind of abashed, too. He shuffled in and said hi to me, while Tina was squealing over the ice cream and running to get spoons.

Tina is not the hardest person to please when it comes to presents. Case in point, she will practically faint over anything from Kay Jewelers.

“Hi,” I said back. And I don’t know why (well, I do know why: it was the hot thing), but it was weird. I guess mainly it was weird because J.P. had asked me what I was doing tonight and I’d sort of blown him off and…well, there we were together.

But also because of the hot thing.

And things got progressively weirder. Because even though at first things were cool, and we were all eating the ice cream and watching Ever After (Tina told the guys they could stay for ONE movie, but then they had to go, because if her parents found them there, they’d kill her. Well, her dad would, anyway. He’d probably kill Boris, too, and in a particularly painful way he’d learned from Tina’s bodyguard, Wahim, who’d been given the night off, along with Lars, since they’d been informed we were “in” for the evening).

But then Tina and Boris stopped paying attention to the movie and started paying attention to each other. A LOT of attention. Like, basically their tongues were in each other’s mouths. Right in front of J.P. and me! Which wasn’t TOO embarrassing (not).

After a while I couldn’t take the slurping noises anymore (even though I kept turning up the volume on the TV. But even Drew’s pseudo-British accent couldn’t drown out those two).

So finally I grabbed the melting ice cream containers and said, “Somebody should put these in the freezer before they make a mess,” and jumped up to leave the room.

Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately, I don’t know—J.P. said, “I’ll help you,” and followed me. Even though how hard is it to return two ice cream containers to the freezer? I totally could have done it by myself.

Inside the Hakim Babas’ cool, clean kitchen, with its black granite counters and Sub-Zero appliances, J.P. grabbed a root beer from the fridge, then pulled out a kitchen counter stool and slid onto it while I fought to find space in the crowded freezer for the ice cream. There were a LOT of Healthy Choice frozen dinners in there (Tina’s dad is supposed to be watching his calories and cholesterol).

“So,” J.P. said conversationally. In the background, we could hear the television from the media room, but not, thank God, the slurping noises anymore. “You missed a lot of school last week.”

“Uh,” I said, as I wrestled with what looked like a frozen beef tenderloin. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

“How are you doing now?” J.P. wanted to know. “I mean, you must have a lot of make-up work.”