Princess in Pink Read online

THE DOWAGER PRINCESS: A ROYAL SNORE

  I can’t believe this is happening. Like my life isn’t bad enough. Like I don’t have enough problems. Now my psychotic grandmother has moved in with me?

  I could hardly believe it when I opened the loft door and saw her standing there, her driver right behind her with about fifty million Louis Vuitton bags. I just stared at her for a full minute, until finally Grandmère went, “Well, Amelia? Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  And then, before I even had a chance to, she just barged right by me, complaining the whole way about how we don’t have an elevator and did we have any idea what a walk up three flights of stairs can do to a woman her age? (I noticed that she didn’t mention what it can do to a chauffeur who has been forced to carry all of her luggage up the same aforementioned three flights of stairs.)

  Then she started walking around the loft like she always does when she comes over, picking up things and looking at them with a disapproving expression on her face before putting them down again, like Mom’s Cinco de Mayo skeleton collection, and Mr. G’s NCAA Final Four drink holders.

  Meanwhile, my mom and Mr. G, having heard all the commotion, came out of their room and then froze—both of them—in horror as they took in the sight before them. I have to admit, it did look a bit scary… especially since by then Rommel had worked his way free from Grandmère’s purse and was staggering around the floor on his spindly Bambi legs, sniffing things so carefully, you would have thought he expected them to explode in his face at any given moment (which, when he gets around to sniffing Fat Louie, might actually happen).

  “Um, Clarisse,” my mother (brave woman!) said. “Would you mind telling us what you’re doing here? With, er, what appears to be your entire wardrobe in tow?”

  “I cannot stay at that hotel a moment longer,” Grandmère said, putting down Mr. G’s lava lamp and not even glancing at my mother, whose pregnancy—“at her advanced age,” Grandmère likes to say, even though Mom is actually younger than many recently pregnant starlets—she considers an embarrassment of grand proportions. “No one works there anymore! The place is completely chaotic. You cannot get a soul to bring up a morsel of room service, and forget about getting someone to run your bath. And so I’ve come here.”

  She blinked at us less than fondly. “To the bosom of my family. In times of need, I believe it is traditional for relatives to take one another in.”

  My mom totally wasn’t falling for Grandmère’s poor-little-me act.

  “Clarisse,” she said, folding her arms over her chest (which is quite a feat, considering how big her boobs have gotten—I can only hope that if I ever get pregnant, my own knockers will swell to such bootylicious proportions). “There is a hotel worker strike. No one is exactly lobbing SCUD missiles at the Plaza. I think you’ve lost your perspective a little bit….”

  Just then the phone rang. I, of course, thinking it was Michael, dove for it. But alas, it was not Michael. It was my father.

  “Mia,” he said, sounding a trifle panicked. “Is your grandmother there?”

  “Why, yes, Dad,” I said. “She is. Would you care to speak with her?”

  “Oh God.” My dad groaned. “No. Let me talk to your mother.”

  My dad was totally in for it, and did he ever know it. I handed the phone to my mom, who took it with the long-suffering expression she always wears in Grandmère’s presence. Just as she was putting the phone to her ear, Grandmère said to her chauffeur, “That will be all, Gaston. You can put the bags down in Amelia’s room, then leave.”

  “Stay where you are, Gaston,” my mom said, just as I yelled, “MY room? Why MY room?”

  Grandmère looked at me all acidly and went, “Because in times of hardship, young lady, it is traditional for the youngest member of the family to sacrifice her comfort for the eldest.”

  I never heard of this cockamamie tradition before. What was it, like the ten-course Genovian wedding supper, or something?

  “Phillipe,” my mom was growling into the phone. “What is going on here?”

  Meanwhile, Mr. G was trying to make the best out of a bad situation. He asked Grandmère if he could get her some form of refreshment.

  “Sidecar, please,” Grandmère said, not even looking at him, but at the magnetic alphabet Algebra problems on the refrigerator door. “Easy on the ice.”

  “Phillipe!” my mother was saying, in tones of mounting urgency, into the phone.

  But it didn’t do any good. There was nothing my father could do. He and the staff—Lars, Hans, Gaston, et al.—were okay to rough it at the Plaza under the new, roomservice–free conditions. But Grandmère just couldn’t take it. She had apparently tried to ring for her nightly chamomile tea and biscotti, and when she’d found out there was no one to bring it to her, she’d gone completely mental and stuck her foot through the glass mail chute (endangering the poor postman’s fingers when he comes to collect the mail at the bottom of the chute tomorrow).

  “But Phillipe,” my mom kept wailing. “Why here?”

  But there was nowhere else for Grandmère to go. Things were just as bad, if not worse, at all the other hotels in the city. Grandmère had finally decided to pack up and abandon ship… figuring, no doubt, that as she had a granddaughter fifty blocks away—why not take advantage of the free labor?

  So for the moment, anyway, we’re stuck with her. I even had to give her my bed, because she categorically refused to sleep on the futon couch. She and Rommel are in my room—my safe haven, my sanctuary, my fortress of solitude, my meditation chamber, my Zen palace—where she has already unplugged my computer because she didn’t like my Princess Leia screensaver “staring” at her. Poor Fat Louie is so confused, he actually hissed at the toilet, because he had to express his disapproval of the whole situation somehow. Now he has hidden himself away in the hall closet— the same closet where, if you think about it, all of this started—amid the vacuum cleaner parts and all the three-dollar umbrellas we’ve left there over the years.

  It was an extremely frightening sight when Grandmère came out of my bathroom with her hair all in curlers and her night cream on. She looked like something out of the Jedi Council scene in Attack of the Clones. I was about to ask her where she’d parked her landspeeder. Except that Mom told me I have to be nice to her, “at least until I can think of some way to get rid of her, Mia.”

  Thank God Michael finally did show up with my homework. We could not exchange tender greetings, however, because Grandmère was sitting at the kitchen table, watching us like a hawk the whole time. I never even got to smell his neck!

  And now I am lying here on this lumpy futon, listening to my grandmother’s deep, rhythmic snoring from the other room, and all I can think is that this strike better be over soon.

  Because it is bad enough living with a neurotic cat, a drum-playing Algebra teacher, and a woman in her last trimester of pregnancy. Throw in a dowager princess of Genovia, and I’m sorry: Book me a room on the twenty-first floor of Bellevue, because it’s the funny farm for me.

  Friday, May 9, Homeroom

  I decided to go to school today because:

  It’s Senior Skip Day, so most of the people who’d like to see me dead aren’t here to throw things at me, and

  It’s better than staying at home.

  I mean it. It is bad in 1005 Thompson Street, Apt. 4A. This morning when Grandmère woke up, the first thing she did was demand that I bring her some hot water with lemon and honey in a glass. I was like, “Um, no way,” which did not go over real well, let me tell you. I thought Grandmère was going to hit me.

  Instead, she threw my Fiesta Giles action figure—the one of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s watcher, Giles, in a sombrero—against the wall! I tried to explain to her that he is a collector’s item and worth nearly twice what I paid for him, but she was fully unappreciative of my lecture. She just went, “Get me a hot water with lemon and honey!”

  So I got her her stinking hot water with lemon and honey, and she drank
it down, and then, I kid you not, she spent about a half hour in my bathroom. I have no idea what she was doing in there, but it nearly drove Fat Louie and me insane… me because I needed to get in there to get my toothbrush, and Fat Louie because that’s where his litter box is.

  But whatever, I finally got in and brushed my teeth, and then I was like, “See ya,” and Mr. G and I fully raced for the door.

  Not fast enough, though, because my mom caught us before we could get safely out of the loft, and hissed at us in this very scary voice, “I will get you both for leaving me alone with her all day today. I don’t know how, and I don’t know when. But when you least expect it… expect it.”

  Whoa, Mom. Have some more Pedialyte.

  Anyway, things here at school have calmed down a lot since yesterday. Maybe because the seniors aren’t here. Well, all except for Michael. He’s here. Because, he says, he doesn’t believe in skipping just because Josh Richter says to. Also because Principal Gupta is giving ten demerits to every student with an unexcused absence for the day, and if you get demerits, the school librarian won’t give you a discount at the end-of-year used-book sale, and Michael has had his eye on the school’s collected works of Isaac Asimov for some time now.

  But really I think he’s here for the same reason I am: to escape his current home situation. That’s because, he told me in the limo on the way up to school, his parents finally found out about how Lilly’s been skipping school and holding press conferences without their permission. The Drs. Moscovitz supposedly went full-on Reverend and Mrs. Camden, and are making Lilly stay home with them today so they can have a nice long talk about her obvious disestablishmentarianism and the way she treated Boris. Michael was like, “I was so outta there,” for which who can blame him?

  But things are definitely looking up, because when we stopped by Ho’s this morning before school to buy breakfast (egg sandwich for Michael; Ring Dings for me) he fully grabbed me while Lars was in the refrigerated section buying his morning can of Red Bull and started kissing me, and I got to smell his neck, which instantly soothed my Grandmèrefrazzled nerves and convinced me that somehow, some way, everything is going to be all right.

  Maybe.

  Friday, May 9, Algebra

  Oh, my God, I can barely write, my hands are shaking so badly. I cannot believe what just happened…. Cannot believe it because it is so GOOD. How is this possible? Good things NEVER happen to me. Well, except for Michael.

  But this…

  It is almost too good to be believed.

  What happened was, I came into the Algebra classroom all unsuspectingly, not expecting a thing. I sat down in my seat and started taking out last night’s homework—which Mr. G fully helped me finish—when all of a sudden, my cell phone rang.

  Thinking my mom was going into labor—or had passed out in the ice cream section of the Grand Union again—I hurried to answer it.

  But it wasn’t my mother. It was Grandmère.

  “Mia,” she said. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ve taken care of the problem.”

  I swear I didn’t know what she was talking about. Not at first, anyway. I was like, “What problem?” I thought maybe she was talking about our neighbor Verl and his noise complaints against us. I thought maybe she’d had him executed, or something.

  Well, it’s possible, knowing Grandmère.

  Which is why her next words were such a total shock.

  “Your prom,” she said. “I spoke to someone. And I’ve found a place where you can have it, strike or no strike. It’s all settled.”

  I just sat there for a minute, holding the phone to my ear, barely able to register what I’d just heard.

  “Wait,” I said. “What?”

  “For God’s sake,” Grandmère said all testily. “Must I repeat myself? I found a place for you to have your little prom.”

  And then she told me where.

  I hung up in a daze. I couldn’t believe it. I swear I couldn’t believe it.

  Grandmère had done it.

  Oh, not fessed up to her role in causing one of the most expensive strikes in the history of New York City. Nothing like that.

  No. This was more important.

  She’d saved the prom. Grandmère had saved the Albert Einstein High School senior prom.

  I looked at Lana sitting in front of me, resolutely not glancing in my direction, due to the fact that I was the one who’d caused the prom to be canceled.

  And that’s when it hit me. Grandmère had saved the prom for AEHS. But I could still save the prom for me.

  I poked Lana in the shoulder and went, “Did you hear?”

  Lana turned to stare at me in a very mean way. “Hear what, freak?” she demanded.

  “My grandmother found an alternative space to hold the prom,” I said.

  And I told her where.

  Lana just stared at me in total shock. Really. She was so stunned, she couldn’t talk. I’d stunned Lana into silence. Not like that time I’d stabbed her with a Nutty Royale, either. That time, she’d had a LOT to say.

  This time? Nothing.

  “But there’s just one condition,” I went on.

  And then I told her the condition.

  Which, of course, Grandmère hadn’t brought up. The condition, I mean. No, the condition was a little princess-of-Genovia maneuvering all my own.

  But I learned from a master.

  “So,” I said, in conclusion, in an almost friendly way, as if Lana and I were buddies, and not sworn mortal enemies, like Alyssa Milano and the Source of All Evil. “Take it, or leave it.”

  Lana didn’t hesitate. Not even a second. She went, “Okay.”

  Just like that. “Okay.”

  And suddenly, it was like I was Molly Ringwald. I’m not kidding, either.

  I cannot explain, not even to myself, why I did what I did next. I just did it. It was like for a moment I was possessed by the spirit of some other girl, a girl who actually gets along with people like Lana. I reached out, grabbed Lana’s head, pulled it toward me, and gave her a great big kiss, smack in the middle of her eyebrows.

  “Ew, gross,” Lana said, backing away fast. “What is wrong with you, freak?”

  But I didn’t care that Lana had called me a freak. Twice. Because my heart was singing like those little birds who fly around Snow White’s head when she’s hanging out by the wishing well. I went, “Stay right here,” and jumped out of my seat….

  Much to the surprise of Mr. G, who had just come into the room, his Starbucks’ Grande in hand.

  “Mia,” he said bewilderedly as I darted past him. “Where are you going? The second bell just rang.”

  “Be back in a minute, Mr. G,” I called over my shoulder, as I raced down the hall to the room where Michael has AP English.

  I didn’t have to worry about making a fool out of myself in front of Michael’s peers or anything, since none of Michael’s peers were around, it being Senior Skip Day and all. I marched into his classroom—the first time I had ever done such a thing: Usually, of course, Michael visited me in MY classroom—and went, “Excuse me, Mrs. Weinstein,” to his English teacher, “but may I have a word with Michael?”

  Mrs. Weinstein—who you could tell had been anticipating a light work day, since she’d come armed with the latest Cosmo—looked up from the Bedside Astrologer and went, “Whatever, Mia.”

  So I bounded over to an extremely surprised Michael and, slipping into the desk in front of his, said, “Michael, remember how you said that you’d only go to the prom if the guys in your band went, too?”

  Michael couldn’t seem to fathom the fact that I was actually in his classroom for a change.

  “What are you doing here?” he wanted to know. “Does Mr. G know you’re here? You’re going to get into trouble again….”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Just tell me. Did you mean it when you said you’d go to the prom if the guys from your band went, too?”

  “I guess so,” Michael said. “But, Mia
, the prom got canceled, remember?”

  “What if I told you,” I said, all casually, like I was talking about the weather, “that the prom was back on, and that they need a band, and that the band the prom committee has chosen is YOURS?”

  Michael just stared. “I’d say… get out of town.”

  “I am totally serious,” I informed him. “And I will not get out of town. Oh, Michael, please say yes, I want to go to the prom so badly—”

  Michael looked surprised. “You do? But the prom is so… lame.”

  “I know it’s lame,” I said, not without some feeling. “I know it is, Michael. But that does not alter the fact that I have been dreaming of going to the prom for my entire life, practically. And I really believe that I could achieve total self-actualization if you and I went to the prom together tomorrow night….”

  Michael still looked like he couldn’t quite believe any of it: that his band was actually being booked for a real gig; that that gig was the school prom; and that his girlfriend had just confessed that her way up the Jungian tree of self-actualization might be speeded along if he agreed to take her to said prom with him.

  “Uh,” Michael said. “Well, okay. I guess so. If you feel that strongly about it.”

  I was so overcome with emotion, that I reached out and grabbed Michael’s head, just as I had grabbed Lana’s. And just as I had done with Lana, I dragged Michael’s head toward me and planted a great big kiss on him… only not between his eyebrows, like with Lana, but right square on the lips.

  Michael seemed very, very surprised by this—especially, you know, that I’d done it right in front of Mrs. Weinstein. Which is probably why he turned red all the way to his hairline after I finished kissing him, and went, “Mia,” in a sort of strangled voice.

  But I didn’t care if I’d embarrassed him. Because I was too happy. I went, “See ya, Mrs. Weinstein,” to Michael’s stunned-looking English teacher and skipped out of there, feeling just like Molly when Andrew McCarthy came up to her at the prom and confessed his love to her, even though she was wearing that hideous dress.

  And now I am sitting here—having told Lana that Skinner Box would definitely be performing at the prom—trembling with excitement over my own good fortune.