“Puh-lease ,” she said. “This’ll get them back for slamming the front door at five every single morning when they go to pick up the Times .”
It was a long time after that that I finally heard some footsteps, and then Michael going to Lilly, “Thanks.” Then Michael picked up the phone and went, kind of curiously, since Lilly hadn’t told him who it was, “Hello?”
Just hearing his voice made me forget all about how it was after three in the morning and I was miserable and hating my life. Suddenly it was like it was two in the afternoon and I was lying on one of the beaches I was working so hard to protect from erosion and pollution by tourists, with the warm sun pouring down on me and someone offering me an ice-cold Orangina from a silver tray. That’s how Michael’s voice made me feel.
“Michael,” I said. “It’s me.”
“Mia,” he said, sounding genuinely happy to hear from me. I don’t think it was my imagination, either. He really did sound pleased, and not like he was getting ready to dump me for Kate Bosworth at all. “How are you?”
“I’m okay,” I said. Then, to get it out as soon as possible, I went, “Listen, Michael, I can’t believe I missed your birthday. I suck. I can’t believe how much I suck. I am the most horrible person who ever walked the face of the planet.”
Then Michael did a miraculous thing. He laughed. Laughed! Like missing his birthday was nothing!
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “I know you’re busy over there. And there’s that time-zone thing, and all. So. How’s it going? Has your grandmother let you off for that parking-meter thing, or is she still on your case about it?”
I practically melted right there in the middle of my big, fancy royal bed, with the phone clutched to my ear and everything. I couldn’t believe he was being so nice to me, after the terrible thing I had done. It wasn’t like twenty days had gone by at all. It was like we were still standing in front of my stoop, with the snow coming down and looking so white against Michael’s dark hair and Lars getting mad in the vestibule because we wouldn’t stop kissing and he was cold and wanted to go inside already.
I couldn’t believe I had ever thought Michael might fall in love with some Floridian girl with multicolored eyes and a surfboard. I mean, I still wasn’t exactly sure he was in love with me, or anything. But I was pretty sure he liked me.
And right there, at three in the morning, sitting by myself in my royal bedchamber in the Palais de Genovia, that was enough.
So then I asked him about his birthday, and he told me how they’d gone to Red Lobster and Lilly’d had an allergic reaction to her shrimp cocktail and they’d had to cut the meal short to go to Promptcare because she’d swollen up like Violet in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory , and now she has to carry a syringe filled with adrenaline around with her in case she accidentally ingests shellfish ever again, and how Michael’s parents got him a new laptop for when he goes to college and how when he gets back to New York he is thinking about starting a band since he is having trouble finding sponsors for his webzineCrackhead on account of how he did that groundbreaking exposé on how much Windows sucks and how he only uses Linux now.
Apparently a lot of Crackhead ’s former subscribers are frightened of the wrath of Bill Gates and his minions.
I was so happy to be listening to Michael’s voice that I didn’t even notice what time it was or how sleepy I was getting until he went, “Hey, isn’t it, like, four in the morning there?” which by that point it was. Only I didn’t care because I was so happy just to be talking to him.
“Yes,” I said dreamily.
“Well, you’d better get to bed,” Michael said. “Unless you get to sleep in. But I bet you have stuff to do tomorrow, right?”
“Oh,” I said, still all lost in rhapsody, which is what the sound of Michael’s voice sends me into. “Just a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the hospital. And then lunch with the Genovian Historical Society. And then a tour of the Genovian zoo. And then dinner with the minister of culture and his wife.”
“Oh, my God,” Michael said, sounding alarmed. “Do you have to do that kind of stuff every day?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, wishing I was there with him, so that I could gaze into his adorably brown eyes while hearing his adorably deep voice, and thus know whether or not he loved me, since this was, according to Tina, the only way you could tell with boys.
“Mia,” he said, with some urgency. “You’d better get some sleep. You have another huge day ahead of you.”
“Okay,” I said happily.
“I mean it, Mia,” he said. He can be so authoritative sometimes, just like the Beast in Beauty and the Beast , my favorite movie of all time. Or the way Patrick Swayze bosses Baby around in Dirty Dancing. So, so exciting. “Hang up the phone and go to bed.”
“You hang up first,” I said.
Sadly, he got less bossy after this. Instead, he started talking in this voice I had only ever heard him use once before, and that was on the stoop in front of my mom’s apartment building the night of the Nondenominational Winter Dance, when we did all that kissing.
Which was actually even more exhilarating than when he was bossing me around, to be truthful.
“No,” he said. “You hang up first.”
“No,” I said, thrilled to pieces. “You.”
“No,” he said. “You.”
“Both of you hang up,” Lilly said, very rudely, over the extension. “I have to call Boris before his nightly Benadryl kicks in.”
So we both said good-bye very hastily and hung up.