Princess in Pink (The Princess Diaries 5)

I can’t believe it. I really can’t. Tonight, not only did I become a woman (maybe) but I also became a big sister.

That’s right. At 12:01 A.M., Eastern Standard Time, I became the proud big sister of Rocky Thermopolis-Gianini.

He is five weeks early, so he only weighed four pounds, fifteen ounces. But Rocky, like his namesake (I guess Mom was too weak to argue for Sartre anymore. I’m glad. Sartre would have been a lousy name. The kid would have gotten beat up all the time for sure with a name like Sartre) is a fighter, and will have to spend some time in an “isolet” to “gain and grow.” Both mother and Y-chromosomed oppressor, however, are expected to be fine….

Though I don’t think the same can be said for the step-grandmother. Grandmère is slumped beside me in an exhausted heap. In fact, she appears to be half asleep, and is snoring slightly. Thank God there is no one around to hear it. Well, no one except for Mr. G, Lars, Hans, my dad, our next-door neighbor Ronnie, our downstairs neighbor Verl, Michael, Lilly, and me, I mean.

But I guess Grandmère has a right to be tired. According to my mother’s extremely grudging report, if it hadn’t been for Grandmère, little Rocky might have been born right there in the loft… and with no helpful midwife in attendance, either. And seeing as how he came out so fast, and is so early, and needed a hit of oxygen before his lungs really started going, that could have been disastrous!

But with me away at the prom, and Mr. Gianini having left the loft to go “buy some Lottery tickets down at the deli” (translation: he’d needed to get out of there for a few minutes, not being able to stand the constant bickering anymore), only Grandmère was around when Mom’s water suddenly broke (thank God in her bathroom and not on the futon couch. Or else where would I sleep tonight????).

“Not now,” Grandmère apparently heard my mother wailing from the toilet. “Oh God, not now! It’s too soon!”

Grandmère, thinking Mom was talking about the strike, and that she didn’t want it to end so soon because it meant she’d be deprived of the delightful company of the dowager princess of Genovia, of course went bustling into my mom’s room to ask which newscast she was watching….

Only to find that my mother wasn’t talking about something she’d seen on TV at all.

Grandmère said she didn’t even think about what she did next. She just ran out of the loft, screaming, “A cab! A cab! Somebody get me a cab!”

She didn’t even hear my mother’s mournful cries of, “My midwife! No! Call my midwife!”

Fortunately our next-door neighbor Ronnie was home— a rarity for her on a Saturday night, as Ronnie is quite the femme fatale. But she was just recovering from a bout of the flu and had decided to stay in for the night. She opened her door and stuck her head out and went, “Can I help you, miss?”

To which my grandmother apparently replied, “Helen’s in labor, and I need a cab! And that’s Your Royal Highness to you, mister!”

While Ronnie ran downstairs to flag down a cab, Grandmère ducked back into the apartment, grabbed my mom, and went, “Come on, Helen, we’re going.”

To which my mother supposedly replied, “But I can’t be having the baby now! It’s too soon! Make it stop, Clarisse. Make it stop.”

“I can command the Royal Genovian Air Force,” Grandmère supposedly replied. “As well as the Royal Genovian Navy. But the one thing in the world I have no control over, Helen, is your womb. Now come along.”

All of this activity was enough to wake up our downstairs neighbor Verl, of course. He came running out of his apartment thinking that the mothership was finally landing… only to find a mother of quite a different kind waddling down the stairs in front of him.

“I’ll run to the deli and get Frank,” Verl said, when he learned what was going on.

So by the time Grandmère got my mom all the way down all three flights of stairs, Ronnie had secured a cab, and Mr. G and Verl were racing up the street toward them….

They all piled into the cab (even though there is a city ordinance that there are only five people, including the driver, allowed in a cab at one time—something the cabbie apparently pointed out but to which Grandmère replied, “Do you know who I am, young man? I am the dowager princess of Genovia and the woman responsible for the current strike, and if you don’t do exactly as I say, I’ll get YOU fired, too!”) and sped off to St. Vincent’s, which is where Lars and Michael and I found them (in the maternity waiting area—minus my mom and Mr. G, of course, who were in the delivery room) a half hour after they called me, waiting tensely to hear if my mother and the baby were all right.

My dad and Hans joined us a little while later (I called him) and Lilly showed up a little after that (Tina had apparently called her from the prom, feeling bad for her, I guess, sitting around at home) and the nine of us (ten if you count the cabbie, who stuck around demanding somebody pay for the damage Ronnie’s stilettos did to his floor mats, until my dad threw a hundred-dollar bill at him and the guy grabbed it and took off) sat there watching the clock—me in my pink prom dress, and Lars and Michael in tuxes. We are definitely the best-dressed people at St. Vincent’s.

If I had any fingernails before, I certainly don’t now. It was a VERY tense two hours before the doctor finally came out and said, with a happy look on her face, “It’s a boy!”

A boy! A brother! I will admit that I was, for the teeniest second, a little disappointed. I had been hoping for a sister so hard! A sister I could share things with—like how tonight at the prom, I had maybe gotten to second base with my boyfriend. A sister I could buy those cheesy plaques for—you know, the ones that say, “God made us sisters, but life made us friends.” A sister whose Barbies I could still play with, and nobody could accuse me of being a baby, because, you know, they’d be HER Barbies, and I’d be playing with HER.

But then I thought of all the things I could do with a baby brother… you know, make him wait on line for Star Wars tickets, something no girl would ever be stupid enough to do. Throw rocks at the mean swans on the palace lawn back in Genovia. Steal his Spider-Man comic books. Mold him into a perfect boyfriend for some lucky girl of the future, like in the Liz Phair song “Whip-Smart.”

And suddenly, the idea of having a brother didn’t seem so horrible.

And then Mr. G came stumbling out of the delivery room, tears streaming down either side of his goatee, gibbering like those rhesus monkeys on the Discovery Channel about his “son,” and I knew… just knew… that it was right and good that my mom had had a boy… a boy named Rocky—after a man who, if you think about it, was really very respectful and loving of women (“ADRIAN!”). I just knew that my mom and I had somehow been divinely chosen for this. That together, Mom and I would raise the most kickass, non-sexist, non-chauvinistic, Barbie-AND-Spider-Man loving, polite, funny, athletic (but not a dumb jock), sensitive (but not whiny), second-base-getting-to, non-toilet-seat-leaver-upper that there had ever been.

In short, we would raise Rocky to be…

Michael.

Only I hereby swear, on all I hold sacred—Fat Louie, Buffy, and the good people of Genovia, in that order—that I will make sure that when Rocky is old enough to attend his senior prom, he will NOT think it is lame to do so.

Sunday, May 11, 3 p.m., the loft