Princess in Waiting (The Princess Diaries 4)

But Grandmère refused to see that my date with Michael was anywhere near as important as Contessa Trevanni’s black-and-white ball. Apparently Contessa Trevanni is a very socially prominent member of the Monaco royal family, besides being some kind of distant cousin (who isn’t?) of ours. My not attending her black-and-white ball here in the city with all the other debutantes would be a slight from which the royal house of Grimaldi might never recover.

I pointed out that my not attending Star Wars with Michael will be a slight from which my relationship with my boyfriend might never recover. But Grandmère said only that if Michael really loves me, he’ll understand when I have to cancel on him.

“And if he doesn’t,” Grandmère said, exhaling a plume of gray smoke from the Gitanes she was sucking down, “then he was never appropriate consort material to begin with.”

Which is very easy for Grandmère to say. She hasn’t been in love with Michael since the first grade. She doesn’t spend hours and hours attempting to write poems befitting his greatness. She doesn’t know what it is to love, since the only person Grandmère has ever been in love with in her entire life is herself.

Well, it’s true.

And now we are pulling up to the school. It is lunchtime. In a minute I will have to go inside and explain to Michael how I cannot make it to our first date, or it will cause an international incident from which the country over which I will one day rule may never recover.

Why couldn’t Grandmère just have sent me to boarding school in Massachusetts instead?

Wednesday, January 21, G & T

I couldn’t tell him.

I mean, how could I? Especially when he was being so nice to me during lunch. Everybody in the whole school, it seemed, knew that Grandmère had come and taken me away during homeroom. In her chinchilla cape, with those eyebrows, and Rommel at her side, how could anyone have missed her? She is as conspicuous as Cher.

Everyone was all concerned, you know, about the supposed illness in my family. Michael especially. He was all, “Is there anything I can do? Your Algebra homework, or something? I know it isn’t much, but it’s the least I could do….”

How could I tell him the truth—that my father wasn’t sick; that my grandmother had dragged me off in the middle of school to take me shopping ? Shopping for a dress to wear at a ball to which he was not invited, and which was to take place during the exact time we were supposed to be enjoying dinner and a space fantasy set in a galaxy far, far away?

I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell anyone. I just sat there at lunch being all quiet. People mistook my lack of talkat

iveness for extreme mental distress. Which it was, actually, only not for the reasons they thought. Basically all I was thinking as I sat there was I HATE MY GRANDMOTHER. I HATE MY GRANDMOTHER. I HATE MY GRANDMOTHER. I HATE MY GRANDMOTHER.

I really, really do.

As soon as lunch was over, I snuck off to one of the pay phones outside the auditorium doors and called home. I knew my mom would be there instead of at her studio because she is still working on the nursery walls. She’d gotten to the third wall, on which she was depicting a highly realistic painting of the fall of Saigon.

“Oh, Mia,” she said, when I asked her if there wasn’t something she’d possibly forgotten to mention to me. “I am so sorry. Your grandmother called during Anna Nicole . You know how I get during Anna Nicole .”

“Mom,” I said through gritted teeth. “Why did you tell her it was okay for me to go to this stupid thing? You told me I could go out with Michael that night!”

“I did?” My mom sounded bewildered. And why shouldn’t she have? She clearly did not remember the conversation she’d had with me about my date with Michael… primarily of course because she’d been dead to the world during it. Still, she didn’t need to know that. What was important was that she was made to feel as guilty as possible for the heinous crime she had committed. “Oh, honey. I am so sorry. Well, you’re just going to have to cancel with Michael. He’ll understand.”

“Mom,” I cried. “He will not! This was supposed to be our first real date! You’ve got to do something!”

“Well,” my mom said, sounding kind of wry. “I’m a little surprised to hear you’re so unhappy about it, sweetheart. You know, considering your whole thing about not wanting to chase Michael. Canceling your first date with him would definitely fall into that category.”

“Very funny, Mom,” I said. “But Jane wouldn’t cancel her first date with Mr. Rochester. She just wouldn’t call him all the time beforehand, or let him get to second base during it.”

“Oh,” my mom said.

“Look,” I said. “This is serious. You’ve got to get me out of this stupid ball!”

But all my mom said was that she’d talk to my dad about it. I knew what that meant, of course. No way was I getting out of this ball. My dad has never in his life forsaken duty for love. He is full-on Princess Margaret that way.

So now I’ve been sitting here (trying to do my Algebra homework, as usual, because I am neither gifted nor talented), knowing that at some point or another I am going to have to tell Michael our date is canceled. Only how? How am I going to do it? And what if he’s so mad, he never asks me out again?

Worse, what if he asks some other girl to see Star Wars with him? I mean, some girl who knows all the lines you’re supposed to shout at the screen during the movie. Like when Ben Kenobi goes, “Obi-Wan. Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time,” you’re supposed to shout, “How long?” and then Ben goes, “A very long time.”

There must be a million girls besides me who know about this. Michael could ask any one of them instead of me and have a perfectly wonderful time. Without me.

Lilly is bugging me to find out what’s wrong. She keeps passing me notes, because they are fumigating the teachers’ lounge, so Mrs. Hill is in here today, pretending to grade papers from her fourth-period computer class. But really she is ordering things from a Garnet Hill catalog. I saw it beneath her gradebook.

Is your dad super sick? Lilly’s latest note reads. Are you going to have to fly back to Genovia?