Princess in the Spotlight pd-2 Read online

  Fortunately the limo’s windows are tinted, so I don’t think anyone from school could have recognized me, but I couldn’t help feeling mortified.

  So you can understand why, after I got them all checked into the hotel and everything, and Mamaw asked me if I would take Hank to school with me in the morning, I nearly passed out.

  “Oh, you don’t want to go to school with me, Hank,” I said, quickly. “I mean, you’re on vacation. You could go do something really fun.” I tried to think of something that might seem really fun to Hank. “Like go to the Harley Davidson Cafe.”

  But Hank said, “Heck, no. I want to go to school with you, Mia. I always wanted to see what it was like at a realNew York City high school.” He lowered his voice, so Mamaw and Papaw wouldn’t hear. “I hear the girls inNew York City have all got their belly buttons pierced.”

  Hank was in for a real big disappointment if he thought he’d see any pierced navels in my school—we wear uniforms, and you aren’t even allowed to tie the ends of your shirt into a halter top, a la Britney Spears.

  But I couldn’t see a way to get out of having him accompany me for the day. Grandmère was always going on about how princesses have to be gracious. Well, I guess this is my big test.

  So I said, “Okay.” Which didn’t sound very gracious, but what else could I say?

  Then Mamaw surprised me by grabbing me and giving me a hug good-bye. I don’t know why I was so surprised. This was a very grandmotherly thing to do, of course. But I guess, seeing as how the grandmother I spend the most time with is Grandmère, I wasn’t expecting it.

  As she hugged me, Mamaw said, “Why, you aren’t anything but skin and bones, are you?” Yes, thank you, Mamaw. It is true, I am mammarily challenged. But must you shout it out in the lobby of the SoHo Grand? “And when are you going to stop shooting up so high? I swear, you’re almost taller than Hank!”

  Which was, unfortunately, true.

  Then Mamaw made Papaw give me a hug good-bye, too. Mamaw had been very soft when I hugged her. Papaw was the exact opposite, very bony. It was sort of amazing to me that these two people had managed to turn my strong-willed, independent-minded mother into such a gibbering mess. I mean, Grandmère used to lock my dad in the castle dungeon when he was a kid, and he wasn’t half as resentful toward her as my mom was toward her parents.

  On the other hand, my dad is in deep denial and suffers from classic Oedipal issues. At least according to Lilly.

  When I got home, my mom had moved from the closet to her bed, where she lay covered withVictoria ’s Secret and J. Crew catalogs. I knew she must be feeling a little better. Ordering things is one of her favorite hobbies.

  I said, “Hi, Mom.”

  She looked out from behind the Spring Bathing Suit edition. Her face was all bloated and splotchy. I was glad Mr. Gianini wasn’t around. He might have had second thoughts about marrying her if he’d gotten a good look at her just then.

  “Oh, Mia,” she said when she saw me. “Come here and let me give you a hug. Was it horrible? I’m sorry I’m such a bad mother.”

  I sat down on the bed beside her. “You aren’t a bad mother,” I said. “You’re a good mother. You just aren’t feeling well.”

  “No,” my mother said. She was sniffling, so I knew the reason she looked bloated and horrible was that she’d been crying. “I’m a terrible person. My parents came all the way fromIndiana to see me, and I sent them to a hotel.”

  I could tell my mom was having a hormonal imbalance and wasn’t herself. If she’d been herself, she wouldn’t have thought twice about sending her parents to a hotel. She has never forgiven them for

  a. not supporting her decision to have me,

  b. not approving of the way she was raising me, and

  c. voting for George Bush Sr., as well as his son.

  Hormonal imbalance or not, though, the truth is, my mother does not need this kind of stress. This should be a really happy time for her. It says in all the stuff I’ve read about pregnancy that preparing for the birth of your child should be a time of joy and celebration.

  And it would be, if Grandmère hadn’t come around and ruined it all by sticking her nose where no one wants it.

  She has got to be stopped.

  And I’m not just saying that on account of how much I really, really want to go to Rocky Horror on Friday with Michael.

  Tuesday, October 28,11 p.m.

  Another e-mail from Jo-C-rox!

  This one said:

  JOCROX:Dear Mia,

  Just a note to tell you I saw you last night on TV. You looked beautiful, as always. I know some people at school have been giving you a hard time. Don’t let them get you down. The majority of us think you rock the world.

  Your Friend

  Isn’t that the sweetest? I wrote back right away:

  FTLOUIE:Dear Friend,

  Thank you so much. PLEASE won’t you tell me who you are? I swear I won’t tell a soul!!!!!!!!!!!

  Mia

  He hasn’t written back yet, but I think my sincerity really shows, considering all the exclamation points.

  I am slowly wearing him down, I just know it.

  ENGLISH JOURNAL

  My most profound moment was

  ENGLISH JOURNAL

  Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  I believe that Mr. Emerson was talking about the fact that you are only given one life to live, and so you had better make the best of it. This idea is best illustrated by a movie I saw on the Lifetime Channel while I was sick. The movie was called Who Is Julia? In this movie, Mare Winningham portrays Julia, a woman who wakes up one day after an accident to discover that her body has been completely destroyed and her brain transplanted into someone whose body was okay but whose brain had ceased functioning. Since Julia formerly was a fashion model and now her brain is in a housewife’s body (Mare Winningham’s), she is understandably upset. She goes around banging her head against things because she is no longer blond, five foot ten, and a hundred and ten pounds.

  But finally, through Julia’s husband’s undying devotion to her—despite her iffy new looks and a brief kidnapping by the housewife’s psychotic husband, who wants her to come back home to do his laundry—Julia realizes that looking like a model isn’t as important as not being dead.

  This movie raises the inevitable question, If your body was destroyed in an accident, and they had to transplant your brain into someone else’s body, whose body would you want it to be? After considerable thought, I have decided that I would most want to be in the body of Michelle Kwan, the Olympic ice skater, since she is very pretty and has a marketable skill. And as everyone knows, it is quite stylish these days to be Asian.

  Either Michelle or Britney Spears, so I could finally have bigger breasts.

  Wednesday, October 29, English

  Well, one thing is for sure:

  Having a guy like my cousin Hank follow you around from class to class certainly keeps people’s minds off the idiot you made of yourself on TV the other night.

  Seriously. Not that the cheerleaders have forgotten all about the whole TwentyFour/Seven thing—I’m still getting the evil eye in the hallway every once in a while. But as soon as their gazes flicked over me and settled on Hank, something seemed to happen to them.

  I couldn’t figure out what it was, at first. I thought it was just that they were so stunned to see a guy in a flannel shirt and overalls in the middle ofManhattan .

  Then I slowly started realizing it was something else. I guess Hank is sort of buff, and he does have sort of nice blond hair that kind of hangs in his pretty-boy-blue eyes.

  But I think it’s something even more than that. It’s like Hank is giving off those pheromones we studied in Bio, or something.

  Only I can’t sense them, because I am related to him.

  As soon as girls notice Hank, they sidle up to me and whisper “Who is that?” while gazing longingly at Hank’s bic
eps, which are actually quite pronounced beneath all that plaid.

  Take Lana Weinberger, for instance. There she was, hanging around my locker, waiting for Josh to show up so the two of them could take part in their morning face-suckage ritual, when Hank and I appeared. Lana’s eyes—heavily circled in Bobbi Brown—widened, and she went, “Who’s your friend?” in this voice I had never heard her use before. And I’ve known her a while.

  I said, “He’s not my friend, he’s my cousin.”

  Lana said to Hank, in the same strange voice, “You can be my friend.”

  To which Hank replied, with a big smile, “Gee, thanks, ma’am.”

  And don’t think in Algebra Lana wasn’t doing everything she could to get Hank to notice her. She swished her long blond hair all over my desk. She dropped her pencil like four times. She kept crossing and recrossing her legs. Finally Mr. Gianini was like, “Miss Weinberger, do you need a bathroom pass?” That calmed her down, but only for like five minutes.

  Even Miss Molina, the school secretary, was strangely giggly when she was making out a guest pass for Hank.

  But that’s nothing compared to Lilly’s reaction as she climbed into the limo this morning, when we swung by to pick up her and Michael. She looked across the seat and her jaw dropped open and this piece of Pop Tart she’d been chewing fell right out onto the floor. I’d never seen her do anything like that before in my life. Lilly is generally very good at keeping things in her mouth.

  Hormones are very powerful things. We are helpless in their wake.

  Which would certainly explain the whole Michael thing.

  I mean, about my being so deeply besotted by him and all.

  T. Hardy—buried his heart inWessex , body inWestminster

  Um, excuse me, but gross.

  Wednesday, October 29, G & T

  I don’t believe this. I really don’t.

  Lilly and Hank are missing.

  That’s right. Missing.

  Nobody knows where they are. Boris is beside himself. He won’t stop playing Mahler. Even Mrs. Hill now agrees that shutting him into the supply closet is the best way to maintain our sanity. She let us sneak into the gymnasium and steal some exercise mats and lean them up against the supply closet door to muffle the sound.

  It isn’t working, though.

  I guess I can understand Boris’s despair. I mean, when you’re a musical genius and the girl you’ve been French-kissing on a fairly regular basis suddenly disappears with a guy like Hank, it has to be demoralizing.

  I should have seen it coming. Lilly was excessively flirty at lunch. She kept asking Hank all these questions about life back inIndiana . Like if he was the most popular boy in his school, and all. Which of course he said he was—though I personally don’t believe being the most popular boy at Versailles (which in Indiana-speak is pronounced Ver-Sales, by the way) High School is such a big accomplishment.

  Then she was all, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  Hank got bashful and said that he used to, only “Amber” had ditched him a couple weeks ago for a guy whose father owns the local Outback Steakhouse. Lilly acted all shocked, and said Amber must be suffering from a borderline personality disorder if she couldn’t see what a fully self-actualized individual Hank was.

  I was so revolted by this display, I could hardly keep my veggie burger down.

  Then Lilly started talking about all the fabulous things there are to do in the city, and how Hank really ought to take advantage of them, rather than hanging around here at school with me. She said, “For instance, there’s theTransitMuseum , which is fascinating.”

  Seriously. She actually said the TransitMuseum was fascinating. Lilly Moscovitz.

  I swear, hormones are way dangerous.

  Then she went, “And on Halloween, there’s a parade in the Village, and then we are all going to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Have you ever been to that before?”

  Hank said that no, he hadn’t.

  I should have known right then that something was up, but I didn’t. The bell rang, and Lilly said she wanted to take Hank to the auditorium to show him the part of the My Fair Lady set that she had painted herself (a street lamp). Feeling that even a momentary alleviation from Hank’s constant stream of reminders of our last visit together—“Remember that time we left our bikes in the front yard and you were all worried somebody might come in the night and steal them?”—would be a relief, I said, “Okay.”

  And that was the last any of us saw of them.

  I blame myself. Hank is apparently simply too attractive to be released amongst the general population. I ought to have recognized that. I ought to have recognized that the pull of an uneducated but completely gorgeous farm boy from Indiana would be stronger than the pull of a not-so-attractive musical genius from Russia.

  Now I have turned my best friend into a two-timer AND a class ditcher. Lilly has never skipped a class in her life. If she gets caught, she will get detention. I wonder if she’ll think sitting in the cafeteria for an hour after school with the other juvenile delinquents will be worth the fleeting moments of teenage lust she and Hank are sharing.

  Michael is no help. He isn’t worried about his sister at all. In fact, he seems to find the situation highly amusing. I have pointed out to him that for all we know, Lilly and Hank could have been kidnapped by Libyan terrorists, but he says he finds that unlikely. He thinks it more reasonable to assume that they are enjoying an afternoon showing at the Sony Imax.

  As if. Hank is totally prone to motion sickness. He told us all about it when we drove past the cable car to Roosevelt Island this morning on the way to school.

  What are Mamaw and Papaw going to say when they find out I lost their grandson?

  TOP FIVE PLACES LILLY AND HANK COULD BE

  1. Transit Museum

  2. Enjoying some corned beef at 2nd Avenue Deli

  3. Looking up Dionysius Thermopolis’s name on the wall of immigrants at Ellis Island

  4. Getting tattoos on St. Marks’ Place

  5. Making wild passionate love back in his room at the SoHo Grand

  OH, GOD!

  Wednesday, October 29, World Civ

  Still no sign of them.

  Wednesday, October 29, Bio

  Still nothing.

  HOMEWORK

  Algebra: solve problems #3, 9, 12 on pg. 147

  English: Profound Moment!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  World Civ: read Chapter 10

  G&T: please

  French: 4 sentences: une blague, la montagne, la mer, il y a du soleil

  Biology: ask Kenny

  I am so sure—who can concentrate on homework when your best friend and cousin are missing in New York City????

  Wednesday, October 29, Algebra Review

  Lars says he thinks it would be precipitous at this point to call the police. Mr. Gianini agrees with him. He says Lilly is ultimately quite sensible, and it is unrealistic to believe that she might let Hank fall into the hands of Libyan terrorists. I was, of course, only using Libyan terrorists as an example of the type of peril that might befall the two of them. There is another scenario which is much more disturbing:

  Supposing Lilly is in love with him.

  Seriously. Supposing Lilly, against all reason, has fallen madly in love with my cousin Hank, and he has fallen in love with her. Stranger things have happened. I mean, maybe Lilly is starting to realize that, yeah, Boris is a genius, but he still dresses funny and is incapable of breathing through his nose. Maybe she’s willing to sacrifice those long intellectual conversations she and Boris used to have for a boy whose only asset is what is commonly referred to as booty.

  And Hank, maybe he’s been dazzled by Lilly’s superior intellect. I mean, her IQ is easily a hundred points higher than his.

  But can’t they see that in spite of their mutual attraction, this relationship can only lead to ruin? I mean, suppose they DO IT, or something? And suppose that in spite of all those public service announcements
on MTV, they neglect to practice safe sex, like my mom and Mr. G? They’ll have to get married, and then Lilly will have to go live in Indiana in a trailer park, because that’s where all teen mothers live. And she’ll be wearing Wal-Mart housedresses and smoking Kools while Hank goes off to the rubber tire factory and makes five fifty an hour.

  Am I the only one who can see where all of this is heading? What is wrong with everyone?

  First—grouping (evaluate with grouping symbols beginning with the innermost one)

  Second—evaluate all powers

  Third—multiply and divide left to right

  Fourth—add and subtract in order left to right

  Wednesday, October 29, 7 p.m.

  It’s all right. They’re safe.

  Apparently, Hank got back to the hotel around five, and Lilly showed up at her apartment, according to Michael, a little before that.

  I would seriously like to know where they were, but all either of them will say is, “Just walking around.”

  Lilly adds, “God, could you be a little more possessive?”

  I am so sure.

  But I have bigger things to worry about. Right as I was about to step into Grandmère’s suite at the Plaza for my princess lesson today, Dad appeared, looking nervous.

  Only two things make my dad nervous. One is my mother.

  And the other is his mother.

  He said in a low voice, “Listen, Mia, about the wedding situation . . .”