Forever Princess (The Princess Diaries 10)

It’s nice to be able to come home to someone who’s always happy to see you, even if it’s an almost three-year-old.

“Yeah, hi, I’m home,” I said. It’s no joke trying to walk with a toddler attached to you. “What’s for dinner?”

“It’s two-for-one pizza night at Tre Giovanni,” Mr. Gianini said, hanging up his sticks. “How can you even ask?”

“Where were you?” Rocky wanted to know.

“I had to go shopp

ing with my friends,” I said.

“But you din’t buy anything,” Rocky said, looking at my empty hands.

“I know,” I explained, heading to the kitchen drawer where we keep the silverware with him still attached to me. It’s my job to set the table. I may be a princess, but I still have chores. That’s one thing we established during family sessions with Dr. K. “That’s because we went prom dress shopping, and I’m not going to the prom, because it’s lame.”

“Since when is the prom lame?” Mr. Gianini wanted to know, wrapping a towel around his neck. Drumming can make you sweaty, as I know all too well, from the small damp person attached to my legs.

“Since she became a bitingly sarcastic, soon-to-be college girl,” Mom said, pointing at me. “Speaking of which, family meeting after dinner. Oh, hello.”

She said this last part into the phone, then gave Tre our standard order of two medium pies, one all meat for herself and Mr. G, and one all cheese, for Rocky and me. I’m back on the vegetarian bandwagon. Well, I’m really more of a flexatarian…I don’t order meat for myself except in times of extreme stress when I need a quick source of high protein, such as beef tacos (so irresistible, though I try to abstain). But when someone else serves meat to me—for instance, at last week’s meeting of the Domina Rei—I’ll eat it to be polite.

“Family meeting about what?” I demanded, when Mom hung up.

“You,” she said. “Your father’s scheduled a conference call.”

Great. There’s really nothing I look forward to more than a nice call from my dad in Genovia in the evening. That’s always a big guarantee a good time will be had by all. Not.

“What did I do now?” I wanted to know. Because, seriously, I haven’t done anything (except lie to everyone I know about…well, everything). But other than that, I’m always home by curfew, and it isn’t even because I have a bodyguard who basically ensures it, either. My boyfriend is way conscientious. J.P. doesn’t want to get on the bad side of my father (or mother or stepfather), and when we get together, he freaks if I’m not on my way home a half hour before I’m supposed to be, and so he literally hurls me into Lars’s arms every time.

So whatever Dad’s calling about—I didn’t do it.

Not this time, anyway.

I went to my room to visit Fat Louie before the pizzas came. I worry about him so much. Because let’s just say I do choose to make everyone I know furious with me, and go to a college in the U.S. instead of L’Université de Genovia, which really no one but the sons and daughters of celebrity plastic surgeons and dentists who couldn’t get in anywhere else attends. (Spencer Pratt from The Hills probably would have gone there, if he hadn’t leached his way on to his girlfriend’s ex-friend’s TV show. Lana probably would have had to go there, if I hadn’t forced her to make studying, not getting onto lastnightsparty.com, a priority her junior year.)

The thing is, none of the colleges I got into has dorms that let you bring your cat. Which means if I go there and I want to bring Fat Louie, I’ll have to live off-campus. So I won’t meet anyone, and I’ll be a bigger social leper than I would be otherwise.

But how can I leave Fat Louie behind? He’s afraid of Rocky…understandably, because Rocky adores Fat Louie and every time he sees him he runs and tries to grab him and pick him up and squeeze him, which has given Fat Louie, of course, a complex, because he doesn’t like being grabbed and squeezed.

So now Fat Louie just stays in my room (which Rocky is forbidden from entering because he messes with my Buffy the Vampire Slayer action figures) when I’m not around to protect him.

And if I go off to college, that means Fat Louie’ll just be hiding in my room for four years with no one to sleep with him and scratch him under the ears the way he likes.

That’s just wrong.

Oh, sure, Mom says that he can move into her room (which Rocky is also forbidden from entering—unsupervised, anyway—because he’s obsessed with her makeup and once ate one of her entire Lancome Au Currant Velvet lipsticks, so she had to put one of those slippy things on her doorknob, too).

But I don’t know if Fat Louie will really like sleeping with Mr. G, who snores.

My phone! It’s J.P.

Thursday, April 27, 7:30 p.m., the loft

J.P. wanted to know how prom dress shopping went. I lied to him, of course. I was like, “Great!”

Our conversation slipped into the Twilight Zone from there.

“Did you get anything?” he wanted to know.