Princess in Pink Read online

  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

  Well, that’s it. The strike is officially over.

  Grandmère has packed up her things and gone back to the Plaza.

  She offered to stay until Rocky comes home from the hospital, to “help” my mom and Mr. G with him until they get on some sort of schedule. Mr. G couldn’t seem to say, “Um, thanks so much for the offer, Clarisse, but no” fast enough.

  I have to say, I’m glad. Grandmère would only get in the way of my molding Rocky into the perfect boy. Like you can so tell she’ll always be saying stuff to him like, “Who’s my big boy? Who’s my gwate big widdle man?”

  Seriously. You wouldn’t think it of Grandmère, but when we finally got to see Rocky in his little incubator last night, that’s exactly the kind of stuff she was saying, except in French. It was revolting.

  I kind of know now why my dad has so many iss
ues with forming lasting relationships with women.

  Anyway, the restaurateurs finally caved to the demands of the busboys. They will now all be receiving health benefits and sick time and vacation pay. Well, all except for Jangbu, of course. He collected the money from his life story and flew back to Nepal. I guess city life didn’t really work out all that well for him. Besides, in Nepal, all that money will provide him and his family with financial stability for life—not to mention a palatial mansion. Here in New York, it would have barely bought him a walk-up studio in a bad neighborhood.

  Lilly seems to be getting over her disappointment over not having gotten to go to the prom. Tina gave her a full report—about how after Michael unceremoniously abandoned the rest of the band in order to escort me to the hospital, Boris took over lead guitar, even though he’d never played the guitar before in his life.

  But of course, being a musical genius, there is no instrument Boris can’t pick up almost instantaneously… except for maybe, like, the accordion, or something. Tina says after we left, things got a little out of hand, with Josh and some of his friends leaning over the side of the observation deck and seeing if they could hit stuff below with their spit. Mr. Wheeton caught them though, and gave them all in-school suspension. Lana supposedly started crying and told Josh he’d ruined the most special night of her life, and that this was how she was going to be forced to remember him when he went off to college next year… hawking loogies off the Empire State Building.

  Sweet.

  As for me, well, I don’t have to worry: when Michael goes off to college in the fall

  it will be just uptown, so I’ll still see him all the time, anyway. Or at least, a lot of the time, and

  the memory I’ll have of him is not hawking loogies off the Empire State Building, but of turning to my dad in the maternity waiting room and saying (after I’d asked Dad for the millionth time if, now that I had a baby brother, I could stay in New York for the whole summer and learn to get to know him, and Dad for the millionth time replied that I had signed a contract and had to stick to it), “Actually, sir,legally, minors can’t enter into contracts, and so according to New York State law, you cannot hold Mia to any document she might have signed, as she was under sixteen at the time, making it invalid.”

  WHOA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RIGHTEOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  You should have seen my dad’s face! I thought he was going to have a coronary then and there. Good thing we were already at the hospital, just in case he keeled over. George Clooney could have rushed right over with the crash cart.

  But he didn’t keel over. Instead, Dad just looked Michael very hard in the face. I am happy to report that Michael just looked right back at him. Then Dad said, all grimly, “Well…we’ll see.”

  But you could tell he knew he’d been beat. Oh, my God, it is so GREAT, going out with a genius. It really is.

  Even if he hasn’t, you know, mastered the art of strapless bra removal.

  Yet.

  So I’ve finally got my room back… and it looks like I’ll be staying in the city for at least the majority of the summer… and I have a baby brother… and I wrote my first actual story for the school paper, AND had a poem published… and I think my boyfriend and I might have gotten to second base….

  And I got to go to the prom.

  TO THE PROM!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Oh, my God. I’m self-actualized.

  Again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to Beth Ader, Jennifer Brown, Victoria Ingham, Michele Jaffe, Laura Langlie, Abigail McAden, Colleen O’Connell, June O’Neil, Lisa Russell, and especially, Benjamin Egnatz.

  About the Author

  Meg Cabot is the author of the best-selling, critically acclaimed Princess Diaries books, the first of which was made into the wildly popular Disney movie of the same name. Her other books for teens include ALL-AMERICAN GIRL, HAUNTED, NICOLA AND THE VISCOUNT, and VICTORIA AND THE ROGUE. She is still waiting for her real parents, the king and queen, to restore her to her rightful throne. She lives in New York City with her husband and a one-eyed cat named Henrietta.

  Visit Meg’s website at: www.megcabot.com

  Books by

  MEG CABOT

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME II:

  PRINCESS IN THE SPOTLIGHT

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME III:

  PRINCESS IN LOVE

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME IV:

  PRINCESS IN WAITING

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME IV AND A HALF:

  PROJECT PRINCESS

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME V:

  PRINCESS IN PINK

  PRINCESS LESSONS: A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK

  PERFECT PRINCESS: A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK

  ALL-AMERICAN GIRL

  HAUNTED: A TALE OF THE MEDIATOR

  NICOLA AND THE VISCOUNT

  VICTORIA AND THE ROGUE

  Credits

  Cover photographs © 2003 by Howard Huang

  Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Copyright

  PRINCESS IN PINK. Copyright © 2004 by Meggin Cabot. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books..

  EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780061971990

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  * Mr. Sturgess, the notes Shameeka and I were passing were fully class related, I swear. But whatever.