The Princess Diaries (15 page)

Or did I? Maybe nobody has a right to tell anybody to shut up. Maybe this is how wars get started, because someone tells someone else to shut up, and then no one will apologize.

If this keeps up, who am I going to eat lunch with tomorrow?

Monday, October 13, Algebra

When Lars pulled up in front of Lilly’s building to pick her up for school, her doorman said she’d already left. Talk about holding a grudge.

This is the longest fight we’ve ever had.

When I walked into school, the first thing somebody did was shove a petition in my face.

Boycott Ho’s Deli!
Sign below and take a stand against racism!

I said I wouldn’t sign it, and Boris, who was the person holding it, told me I was ungrateful, and that in the country he came from voices raised in protest had been crushed for years by the government, and that I should feel lucky I lived in a place where I could sign a petition and not live in fear that the secret police would come after me.

I told Boris that in America we don’t tuck our sweaters into our pants.

One thing you have to say for Lilly: She acts fast. The whole school is plastered with Boycott Ho’s Deli posters.

The other thing you have to say about Lilly: When she’s mad, she stays mad. She is totally not speaking to me.

I wish Mr. G would get off my case. Who
cares
about integers, anyway?

Operations on Real Numbers: negatives or opposites—numbers on opposite sides of the zero but the same distance from zero on the number line are called negatives or opposites

What to Do During Algebra

O what to do during Algebra!

The possibilities are limitless:

There’s drawing, and yawning,

and portable chess.

There’s dozing, and dreaming,

and feeling confused.

There’s humming, and strumming,

and looking bemused.

You can stare at the clock.

You can hum a little song.

I’ve tried just about everything

to pass the time along.

BUT NOTHING WORKS!!!!!

Later on Monday, French

So even if Lilly and I weren’t in a fight, I wouldn’t have been able to sit with her at lunch today. She’s become the queen of the cause célèbre. All these people were clustered around the table where she and I and Shameeka and Ling Su normally eat our dumplings from Big Wong.
Boris Pelkowski
was sitting where I usually sit.

Lilly must be in heaven. She’s always wanted to be worshiped by a musical genius.

So I was standing there like a total idiot with my stupid tray of stupid salad, which was the only vegetarian entree today, since they ran out of cans of Sterno for the bean and grain bar, and I was like, Who am
I
going to sit by? There are only about ten tables in our caf, since we have rotating lunch shifts: There’s the table where I sit with Lilly, and then the jock table, the cheerleader table, the rich kid table, the hip-hop table, the druggie table, the drama freak table, the National Honor Society table, the foreign exchange students table, and the table where Tina Hakim Baba sits every day with her bodyguard.

I couldn’t sit with the jocks or the cheerleaders, because I’m not either. I couldn’t sit at the rich kids’ table because I don’t have a cell phone or a broker. I’m not into hip-hopping or drugs, I didn’t get a part in the latest play, and with my F in Algebra the chance of my getting into the National Honor Society is like nil, and I can’t understand anything the foreign exchange students say since there are no French ones.

I looked at Tina Hakim Baba. She had a salad in front of her, just like me. Only Tina eats salad because she has a weight problem, not because she’s a vegetarian. She was reading a romance novel. It had a photograph on the front of a teenage boy with his arms around a teenage girl. The teenage girl had long blond hair and pretty big breasts for someone with such thin thighs. She looked exactly the way I know my grandmother wants me to look.

I walked over and put my tray down in front of Tina Hakim Baba’s.

"Can I sit here?" I asked.

Tina looked up from her book. She had an expression of total shock on her face. She looked at me, and then she looked at her bodyguard. He was a tall, dark-skinned man in a black suit. He had on sunglasses even though we were inside. I think Lars could probably have taken him, if it had come down to a fight between the two of them.

When Tina looked at her bodyguard, he looked at me—at least I think he did; it was hard to tell with those sunglasses—and nodded.

Tina smiled really big at me. "Please," she said, laying down her book. "Sit with me."

I sat down. I felt kind of bad, seeing Tina smile like that. Like maybe I should have asked to sit down with her before. But I used to think she was such a freak because she rode to school in a limo and had a bodyguard.

I don’t think she’s as much of a freak now.

Tina and I ate our salads and talked about how much school food sucks. She told me about her diet. Her mother put her on it. She wants to lose twenty pounds by the Cultural Diversity Dance. But the Cultural Diversity Dance is this Saturday, so I don’t know how that’s going to work out for her. I asked Tina if she had a date for the Cultural Diversity Dance or something, and she got all giggly and said yes she did. She’s going with a guy from Trinity, which is another private school in Manhattan. The guy’s name is Dave Farouq El-Abar.

Hello? It isn’t fair. Even Tina Hakim Baba, whose father doesn’t allow her to walk two blocks to school, has been asked out by someone.

Well, she’s got breasts, so I guess that’s why.

Tina is pretty nice. When she got up to go to the jet line to get another diet soda—the bodyguard went with her; God, if Lars ever started shadowing me like that, I’d kill myself—I read the back of her book. The book was called
I Think My Name Is Amanda,
and it was about a girl who woke up from a coma and couldn’t remember who she was. This really cute boy comes to visit her in the hospital and tells her that her name is Amanda and that he’s her boyfriend. She spends the rest of the book trying to figure out whether or not he’s lying.

I am so sure! If some cute boy wants to tell you that he’s your boyfriend, why wouldn’t you just
let
him? Some girls don’t know when they’ve got it made.

While I was reading the back of the book, this shadow fell over it, and I looked up and there was Lana Weinberger. It must have been a game day, because she had on her cheerleader uniform, a green-and-white pleated miniskirt and a tight white sweater with a giant
A
across the front of it. I think she stuffs her pom-poms down her bra when she isn’t using them. Otherwise, I don’t see how her chest could stick out so much.

"Nice hair, Amelia," she said in her snotty voice. "Who are you supposed to be? Tank Girl?"

I looked past her. Josh Richter was standing there with some of his dumb jock friends. They weren’t paying any attention to me and Lana. They were talking about a party they’d been to over the weekend. They were all "wrecked" from having consumed too much beer.

I wonder if their coach knows.

"What do you call this color, anyway?" Lana wanted to know. She touched the top of my head. "Pus yellow?"

Tina Hakim Baba and her bodyguard came back while Lana was standing there tormenting me. In addition to her diet soda, Tina had purchased a Nutty Royale ice cream cone, which she gave to me. I thought this was very nice of her, considering the fact that I’d hardly ever spoken to her before.

But Lana didn’t see the niceness of this gesture. Instead she asked, all innocently, "Oh, Tina, did you buy that ice cream for Amelia here? Did your daddy give you an extra hundred dollars today so you could buy yourself a new friend?"

Tina’s dark eyes filled up with hurt. The bodyguard saw this and opened his mouth.

Then a strange thing happened. I was sitting there, looking at the tears welling up in Tina Hakim Baba’s eyes, and then the next thing I knew, I’d taken my Nutty Royale and thrust it with all my might at the front of Lana’s sweater.

Lana looked down at the vanilla ice cream, hard chocolate shell, and peanuts that were sticking to her chest. Josh Richter and the other jocks stopped talking and looked at Lana’s chest, too. The noise level in the cafeteria plummeted to the quietest I’ve heard it.
Everyone
was looking at the ice cream cone sticking to Lana’s chest. It was so quiet I could hear Boris breathing through the wires of his bionater.

Then Lana started to scream.

"You—you—" I guess she couldn’t think of a word bad enough to call me. "You—you . . .  Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve done to my sweater!"

I stood up and grabbed my tray. "Come on, Tina," I said. "Let’s go somewhere a little bit quieter."

Tina, her big brown eyes on the sugar cone sticking out of the middle of the
A
on Lana’s chest, picked up her tray and followed me. The bodyguard followed Tina. I could swear he was laughing.

As Tina and I walked past the table where Lilly and I usually sat, I saw Lilly staring at me with her mouth open. She had obviously seen the whole thing.

Well, I guess she’s going to have change her diagnosis: I am
not
unassertive. Not when I don’t want to be.

I’m not sure, but as Tina and her bodyguard and I left, I thought I heard some applause coming from the geek table.

I think self-actualization might be right around the corner.

Later on Monday

Oh my God. I am in so much trouble. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before!

I am sitting in the principal’s office!

That’s right. I got sent to the principal’s office for stabbing Lana Weinberger with a Nutty Royale!

I should have known she’d tell on me. She is such a big whiner.

I’m kind of scared. I’ve never disobeyed a student rule before. I’ve always been a really good kid. When the student worker came to our G & T class with the pink hall pass, I never thought for a minute it might be for me. I was sitting there with Michael Moscovitz. He was showing me that the way I subtract is all wrong. He says my main problem is that I don’t write my numbers neat enough when borrowing. Also that I don’t keep track of my notes, and scribble them in whatever notebook I happen to have handy. He says I should keep all my Algebra notes in one notebook.

Also, he says I seem to have trouble concentrating.

But the reason I couldn’t concentrate was that I had never sat so close to a boy before! I mean, I realize it was only Michael Moscovitz, and that I see him all the time, and he’d never like me anyway because I’m a freshman and he’s a senior, and I’m his little sister’s best friend and all—at least, I used to be.

But he’s still a boy, a
cute
boy, even if he
is
Lilly’s brother. It was really hard to pay attention to subtraction when I could smell this really nice clean boy smell coming from him. Plus every once in a while he would put his hand over mine and take my pencil away and go, "No, like
this,
Mia."

Of course, I was also having trouble concentrating because I kept feeling like Lilly was looking at us. She wasn’t, of course. Now that she’s fighting the evil forces of racism in our neighborhood, she doesn’t have time for the little people like me. She was sitting at this big table with all of her supporters, plotting their next move in the Ho Offensive. She even let Boris come out of the supply closet to help.

May I point out that he was all over her? How she can stand having his spindly little violin-stroking arm around the back of her chair, I can’t imagine. And he
still
hasn’t untucked his sweater.

So I really shouldn’t have worried that anybody was going to notice me and Michael. I mean, he certainly didn’t have his arm around the back of
my
chair. Although once, under the table, his knee touched my knee. I nearly died at the niceness of it all.

Then that stupid hall pass arrived with
my
name on it.

I wonder if I’m going to get expelled. Maybe if I get expelled I could go to a different school, where nobody knows that my hair used to be a different color and that these fingernails aren’t really real. That might be kind of nice.

FROM NOW ON I WILL

1. Think before I act.

2. Try to be gracious, no matter how much I am provoked to behave otherwise.

3. Tell the truth, except when doing so would hurt someone’s feelings.

4. Stay as far away as possible from Lana Weinberger.

Uh-oh. Principal Gupta is ready to see me now.

Monday Night