The Princess Diaries (7 page)

But Dad was totally rigid on the driver thing. It’s like now that I’m an official princess there’s all this concern for my welfare. Yesterday, when I was Mia Thermopolis, it was perfectly okay for me to ride the subway. Today, now that I’m Princess Amelia, forget it.

Well, whatever. It didn’t seem worth arguing over. I mean, there are way worse things I have to worry about.

Like which country am I going to be living in in the near future.

As I was leaving—my dad made Lars come up to the loft to walk me down to the car; it was totally embarrassing—I overheard my dad say to my mom, "All right, Helen. Who’s this Gianini fellow Mia was talking about?"

Oops.

ab
=
a
+
b

solve for
b

ab
-
b
=
a

b
(
a
- 1) =
a

More Friday, Algebra

Lilly could tell right away something was up.

Oh, she swallowed the whole story I fed her about Lars: "Oh, my dad’s in town, and he’s got this driver, and you know . . . "

But I couldn’t tell her about the princess thing. I mean, all I kept thinking about was how disgusted Lilly sounded during that part in her oral report when she mentioned how Christian monarchs used to consider themselves appointed agents of divine will and thus were responsible not to the people they governed but to God alone, even though my dad hardly ever even goes to church, except when Grandmère makes him.

Lilly believed me about Lars, but she was still all over me with the crying thing. She was like, "Why are your eyes so red and squinty? You’ve been crying. Why were you crying? Did something happen? What happened? Did you get another F in something?"

I just shrugged and tried to look out the passenger window at the uninspiring view of the East Village crackhouses, which we had to drive by to get to the FDR. "It’s nothing," I said. "PMS."

"It is not PMS. You had your period last week. I remember because you borrowed a pad from me after PE, and then you ate two whole packs of Yodels at lunch." Sometimes I wish Lilly’s memory weren’t so good. "So spill. Did Louie eat another sock?"

First of all, it was like totally embarrassing to discuss my menstrual cycle in front of my dad’s bodyguard. I mean, Lars is kind of a Baldwin. He was concentrating really hard on driving, though, and I don’t know if he could hear us from the front seat, but it was embarrassing, just the same.

"It’s nothing," I whispered. "Just my dad.
You know."

"Oh," Lilly said in her normal voice. Have I mentioned that Lilly’s normal voice is really loud? "You mean the infertility thing? Is he still bummed out about that? Gawd, does
he
ever need to self-actualize."

Lilly then went on to describe something she called the Jungian tree of self-actualization. She says my dad is way on the bottom branches, and he won’t be able to reach the top of the thing until he accepts himself as he is and stops obsessing over his inability to sire more offspring.

I guess that’s part of my problem. I’m way at the bottom of the self-actualization tree. Like, underneath the roots of it, practically.

But now that I’m sitting here in Algebra, things don’t seem so bad, really. I mean, I thought about it all through Homeroom, and I finally realized something:

They can’t
make
me be princess.

They really can’t. I mean, this is America, for crying out loud. Here, you can be anything you want to be. At least that’s what Mrs. Holland was always telling us last year, when we studied U.S. History. So, if I can be whatever I want to be, I can
not
be a princess. Nobody can
make
me be a princess, not even my dad, if I don’t want to be one.

Right?

So when I get home tonight, I’ll just tell my dad thanks, but no thanks. I’ll just be plain old Mia for now.

Geez. Mr. Gianini just called on me, and I totally had no idea what he was talking about, because of course I was writing in this book instead of paying attention. My face feels like it’s on fire. Lana is laughing her head off, of course. She is such a wanker.

What does he keep picking on
me
for, anyway? He should know by now that I don’t know the quadratic formula from a hole in the ground. He’s only picking on me because of my mom. He wants to make it look as if he’s treating me the same as everybody else in the class.

Well, I’m
not
the same as everybody else in the class.

What do I need to know Algebra for, anyway? They don’t use Algebra in Greenpeace.

And you can bet you don’t need it if you’re a princess. So however things turn out, I’m covered.

Cool.

solve
x
=
a
+
aby
for
y

x
-
a
=
aby

Really Late on Friday,
Lilly Moscovitz’s Bedroom

Okay, so I blew off Mr. Gianini’s help session after school. I
know
I shouldn’t have. Believe me, Lilly let me know I shouldn’t have. I know he has these help sessions just for people like me, who are flunking. I know he does it in his own spare time and doesn’t even get paid overtime for it or anything. But if I won’t ever need Algebra in any foreseeable future career, why do I need to go?

I asked Lilly if it would be okay if I spent the night at her house tonight and she said only if I promised to stop acting like such a head case.

I promised, even though I don’t think I’m acting like a head case.

But when I called my mom from the pay phone in the lobby after school to ask her if it was okay if I stayed overnight at the Moscovitzes, she was all, "Um, actually, Mia, your father was really hoping that when you got home tonight we could have another talk."

Oh, great.

I told my mom that although there was nothing I wanted to do more than have another talk, I was very concerned about Lilly, whose stalker was recently released from Bellevue again. Ever since Lilly started her cable access TV show, this guy named Norman has been calling in, asking her to take off her shoes. According to the Drs. Moscovitz, Norman is a fetishist. His fixation is feet—in particular, Lilly’s feet. He sends stuff to her care of the show, CDs and stuffed animals and things like that, and writes that there’ll be more where that came from if Lilly would just take off her shoes on air. So what Lilly does is, she takes off her shoes, all right, but then she throws a blanket over her legs and kicks her feet around under it and goes, "Look, Norman, you freak! I took my shoes off! Thanks for the CDs, sucker!"

This angered Norman so much that he started wandering around the Village looking for Lilly. Everyone knows Lilly lives in the Village, since we filmed a very popular episode where Lilly borrowed the pricing gun from Grand Union and stood on the corner of Bleecker and La Guardia and told all the European tourists wandering around NoHo that if they wore a Grand Union price sticker on their foreheads they could get a free latte from Dean & DeLuca (a surprising amount of them believed her).

Anyway, one day a few weeks ago Norman the foot fetishist found us in the park and started chasing us around, waving twenty dollar bills and trying to get us to take off our shoes. This was very entertaining, and hardly scary at all, especially because we just ran right up to the command post on Washington Square South and Thompson Street, where the Sixth Precinct has been parking this enormous trailer so they can secretly spy on the drug dealers. We told the police that this weird guy was trying to assault us, and you should have seen it: About twenty undercover guys (even a guy I thought was an old homeless man asleep on a bench) jumped on Norman and dragged him, screaming, off to the mental ward!

I always have such a good time with Lilly.

Anyway, Lilly’s parents told her Norman just got out of Bellevue and that if she sees him she’s not to torment him anymore, because he’s just a poor obsessive-compulsive with possible schizophrenic tendencies.

Lilly’s devoting tomorrow’s show to her feet. She’s going to model every single pair of shoes she owns, but not once show her bare feet. She hopes that this will drive Norman over the edge and he’ll do something weirder than ever, like get a gun and shoot at us.

I’m not scared, though. Norman has kind of thick glasses, and I bet he couldn’t actually hit anything, even with a machine gun, which even a lunatic like Norman is allowed to buy in this country thanks to our totally unrestrictive gun laws, which Michael Moscovitz says in his webzine will ultimately result in the demise of democracy as we know it.

My mom was totally not buying this, though. She was all, "Mia, I appreciate the fact that you want to help your friend through this difficult period with her stalker, but I really think you have more pressing responsibilities here at home."

And I was all, "What responsibilities?" thinking she was talking about the litter box, which I had totally cleaned two days ago.

And she was like, "Responsibility toward your father and me."

I just about lost it right there. Responsibilities?
Responsibilities? She’s
telling
me
about responsibilities? When is the last time it ever occurred to
her
to drop off the laundry, let alone pick it up again? When is the last time
she
remembered to buy Q-Tips or toilet paper or milk?

And did she ever happen to think to mention, in all of my fourteen years, that I might possibly end up being the princess of Genovia someday???

She
thinks she needs to tell
me
about my responsibilities?

HA!!!!!!

I nearly hung up on her. But Lilly was sort of standing nearby, practicing her house manager duties by switching on and off the lights in the school lobby. Since I had promised not to act like a head case, and hanging up on my mother would definitely fall into the head case category, I said in this really patient voice, "Don’t worry, Mom, I won’t forget to stop at Genovese on my way home tomorrow and pick up new vacuum cleaner bags."

And
then
I hung up.

HOMEWORK

Algebra: problems 1–12, pg. 119

English: proposal

World Civ: questions at end of Chapter 4

G & T: none

French: use
avoir
in neg. sentence, rd. lessons one to three, pas de plus

Biology: none

Saturday, October 4,
Early, Still Lilly’s Place

Why do I always have such a good time when I spend the night at Lilly’s? I mean, it’s not like they’ve got stuff that I don’t have. In fact, my mom and I have better stuff. The Moscovitzes only get a couple of movie channels, and because I took advantage of the last Time Warner Cable bonus offer, we have all of them, Cinemax
and
HBO
and
Showtime, for the low, low rate of $19.99 per month.

Plus we have way better people to spy on through our windows, like Ronnie, who used to be a Ronald but is now called Ronette, and who has a lot of big fancy parties; and that skinny German couple who wear black all the time, even in summer, and never pull down their blinds. On Fifth Avenue, where the Moscovitzes live, there’s
nobody
good to look at: Just other rich psychoanalysts and their children. Let me tell you, you don’t see anything good through
their
windows.

But it’s like every time I spend the night here, even if all Lilly and I do is hang out in the kitchen eating macaroons left over from Rosh Hashanah, I have such a great time. Maybe that’s because Maya, the Moscovitzes’ Dominican maid, never forgets to buy orange juice, and she always remembers that I don’t like the pulpy kind, and sometimes, if she knows I’m staying over, she’ll pick up a vegetable lasagna from Balducci’s, instead of a meat one, especially for me, like she did last night.