Princesses, Inc.

by Mari Mancusi

  She looked hurt, and I immediately felt bad. After all, I had been the one to invite her to contribute to the story in the first place. And she’d done a great job, too.

  That said, I didn’t like the idea that now something I had once done for fun was starting to feel like more homework, complete with unreasonable deadlines.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I know I’m behind. I promise I’ll write the next chapter tonight. And I’ll upload it right away so you won’t have to wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Madison asked, thankfully showing up with her mountainous tray of food before Sarah could open her mouth to argue further. She plopped down beside me. “ ’Cause I really don’t want to wait to hear how it went yesterday at the Mitchells’. Did they love your dress? Did the little girl think you were a real princess? Did she like your magic show?”

  “Wait, wait! I want to hear too!” Kalani cried, rushing to her seat, late as per usual. “Tell us everything!”

  I looked around the table at my friends. Their eager faces. “Well,” I said. “There were some good things—and some not-so-good things. But mostly good in the end.”

  They listened without interrupting as I proceeded to give them the play-by-play for the afternoon from beginning to end. When I finished, they were all wide-eyed.

  “Seriously?” Kalani cried. “They locked you in a closet?”

  “And you had to babysit four kids for the price of one?” Madison added.

  “Who was this cute pirate boy again?” demanded Sarah, even though I hadn’t even remotely implied he was cute.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes, not exactly, and his name’s Brody,” I said, answering them all at once. Then I went on to explain my little babysitter blackmail scheme and the fact that Bella’s father had given me a 100 percent tip. All of which I would deposit into our Comicpalooza savings account.

  “That is awesome,” Madison declared. “I cannot believe they thought they could just take advantage of you like that. You totally deserved that extra money.”

  “Yeah, and now the kids they were babysitting are going to go home and ask for us next time instead!” Kalani crowed. “Those girls, like, literally gave us their customer base.”

  “Hold on. I still want to know more about this Brody guy,” Sarah broke in, waving her hands in my direction. The girl could be like a pit bull with a bone when it came to boy talk.

  I sighed, knowing there was no way I was going to be allowed to leave the lunchroom until I gave her the scoop on my new friend. And so I went through the story, explaining how I’d first met him while hanging up the flyers and how he’d gone and recommended us to the Mitchells, giving us our first job. I ended by telling them how he’d overheard my desperate pirate talk from next door and had decided to come to my aid.

  “Wow,” said Madison when I had finished. “That’s awesome.”

  “He’s like your knight in shining armor,” declared Kalani.

  “This would be great for the next chapter of our story!” Sarah exclaimed. “A brave, valiant hero—saving his favorite damsel in distress! But, of course,” she added, perhaps unnecessarily, “in this case the hero would be Collin Prince. And I’d be the one in distress.” She mock-swooned, and Madison rolled her eyes.

  “For the record, I wasn’t that distressed,” I protested. But then—because who was I kidding?—I allowed myself a small dreamy smile. “Though I have to admit, he did have pretty great timing. And the whole treasure thing was a brilliant idea. The kids totally freaked.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement. “Too bad you can’t use him every time,” Madison remarked. “Sounds like the two of you made a good team.”

  I nodded slowly. “You know, maybe we should consider something like that. . . .”

  “Having cute boys rescue us?” Sarah asked eagerly. “Absolutely. Where do I sign up?”

  I laughed. “I meant the teamwork thing,” I clarified. “After all, if I’ve learned anything from this whole adventure, it’s that it’s tough to babysit solo. Especially when wearing a fancy dress.” I snorted, remembering. “But if there were two of us at every job, we’d always have each other as backup if things started going bad. Or even if they didn’t, it would give us a lot more opportunities to put on a show like Brody and I did. Like, we’re kind of boring by ourselves,” I said. “But together . . . we could be amazing.”

  “Yeah. But who’s going to pay for two babysitters?” asked Madison.

  “No one,” I assured her. “We’ll still charge the same. It’ll be like another bonus of hiring us over the others in the neighborhood. Two babysitters for the price of one.”

  “Which means only half the money,” Kalani protested.

  “At first, maybe. But we’ll be able to do a better job. And more moms will want to hire us. Which will lead to more money in the end.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’d probably be a lot more fun, too. We did start this company together, after all.”

  “Well, I think it’s a great idea,” Sarah declared. “I was kind of dreading doing it by myself anyway, to be honest. I’ve never really been around a lot of kids. . . .” She paused, then added, “Maybe you could ask Brody to join us from time to time too. I mean, not officially or anything. My parents would flip out if they knew I was alone in some house with a boy. But he could be, like, behind the scenes. Planting treasure, making maps, staging fight scenes—whatever.”

  “I don’t know,” I hedged. “He did ask if he could join. I just thought you guys wouldn’t want to share the profits a fifth way.”

  Madison waved me off. “Like you said, the better we perform, the more profit we’ll get. And if this Brody guy can help, well, then let’s get him on board.”

  “If you’re sure,” I said, giving in. Because, of course I wanted Brody to join us. I just didn’t want them to think I was choosing a boy over my besties. But if it was their idea, who was I to complain?

  It was then that I remembered the whole Comicpalooza thing. Brody thought I was going for the writing contest. If my friends started talking about Collin Prince in front of him . . .

  I swallowed hard. “Okay, I’ll ask him,” I said. “On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When he’s around, we don’t talk about Collin Prince.”

  My friends exchanged looks. “Why not?” Kalani demanded.

  I could feel my face flush. “It’s just . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “I do!” Sarah crowed. She turned to Madison and Kalani, giving them a conspiratorial look. “She likes Brody.”

  Oh man. Now I was positive I was bright purple. “That’s not why!” I protested.

  My friends giggled. “Mm-hm,” Madison said. “Sure it isn’t.”

  “He’s just a friend!”

  “For now,” Kalani teased. “But once you start babysitting with him . . .”

  “Seriously. One more word and I will strangle all of you at once.”

  Sarah laughed. “Don’t worry!” she cooed. “We won’t say a word about Collin to Brody.” She winked at me. “As long as I get that next chapter, that is . . .”

  14

  BRODY, OF COURSE, WAS HAPPY to have the opportunity to join us, and we spent the next day’s lunch period creating scripts to go along with our potential new gigs. Pirates and princesses were definitely more fun when mixed together, and we wrote some scenarios where the princesses were the good guys and some where they were evil—and where the pirates were forced to defend the kids against the cruel monarchy.

  There was only one thing that Madison insisted be in every script. That the princesses could never be wimpy. They could never sit around, waiting in a tower. Or fall asleep and need some random dude with a crown to wake them up with a “true-love kiss.”

  We princesses saved ourselves, y’all.

  When I retrieved my phone from my locker that afternoon, I found three messages waiting for me, from parents around the neighborhood who had heard about my adventures with Bella. One was ac
tually Izzy’s mother, who told me her “too cool for school” six-year-old who normally hated babysitters had come home gushing about pirate adventures—and could I come by on Saturday for a couple of hours while she ran errands?

  Score! I grinned to myself. Izzy’s regular babysitter was going to be so mad when she realized she’d been replaced. But hey—that was her fault, right? After all, Izzy wouldn’t even know my awesome babysitting skills existed if her babysitter hadn’t dumped her on me in the first place.

  Thursday night I finally had a chance to sit down at my computer and created a new Google calendar and shared it with my friends. Then I marked the three jobs and, after some thought, paired everyone up. I would take Izzy on Saturday—with a little help from Brody behind the scenes. Madison and Kalani could take the Jacksons’ three-year-old twin girls Wednesday after school. Which left the third job—a Friday night assignment for a five-year-old boy who was obsessed with Captain Hook. That had Madison’s name written all over it, and I could be the assist.

  When I finished, I leaned back in my seat, looking over the calendar. I was no math ninja like Madison, but I could practically see the money adding up on the screen all the same. Three hours, four hours, two hours. Thirty, seventy, ninety dollars. And that was all in one week. If we kept this schedule up, we’d have no problem getting the money raised in time for Comicpalooza.

  Feeling pretty good about things, I opened up Microsoft Word and pulled up my Collin Prince story. I’d managed to write half a chapter over the weekend, but Sarah had burned through that in like three seconds this morning and had demanded the rest—stat. Feeling bad that I’d been such a lazy writer, I’d decided to finish up the chapter for her before getting back to my homework.

  Okay, fine, starting my homework. Turned out, making the calendar had taken a little longer than I’d thought. Now it was almost eight o’clock and I hadn’t even cracked a book. But, I told myself, this was just a one-time thing, and now that the calendar was made, it would just need to be updated. So no big deal. Unlike the never-ending flow of homework my teachers seemed to feel the need to dish out every night. Bleh.

  I swear, sometimes homework felt like a really bad video game—the kind with endless repeating quests. You worked your butt off to unlock the next level, defeat the bad boss, turn that quest in, and then—bam! You got another one, just like it. Sure, you got “experience points” (or, in this case, “grades”), but there had to be a better way, right?

  That was one reason I liked writing so much. Stories had a beginning, middle, and end. No matter where you were in the process, you knew where you stood. How far you had to go. And when you did finish, you got this total sense of accomplishment, writing “the end.”

  Of course, at the moment I was very far from the end.

  I shook my head, trying to focus. I typed a sentence. I stared at the screen. Then I typed another sentence. And stared at the screen again. Then I read over the two sentences and deleted the first—which wasn’t very good. Ugh.

  Feeling suddenly depressed, I scrolled up to the top of the document. To the very first chapter I’d written at the beginning of the school year. At the time I’d been so excited to share this story with my friends. But now, reading it over, it sounded so stupid. How did I ever think this was any good? What would Brody think if he read this? His dad was a real author, after all.

  Sighing, I switched over to my other story. The one I’d started working on for the competition. I read it over—it wasn’t long—and when I got to the end, I tried typing a new sentence.

  But the words refused to come. And I found myself staring at a blank page again. One thing about the Collin Prince story—I had no problem coming up with what happened next. After all, my friends were very clear as to how they wanted things to go.

  But for this story . . . I needed to do better. Serious fiction, after all, was supposed to say something important. That was what my English teacher always said, anyway. That there was always a serious message, written between the lines.

  All I saw between my lines, however, was white space.

  Endless, nonspeaking, white space.

  I slumped in my chair, scrubbing my face with my hands. It didn’t help that I was so tired. Which wasn’t good. I had to work on the Collin Prince story or Sarah would kill me. And I had to keep working on the Comicpalooza story or I’d have nothing to show Brody. And then, of course, there was my homework. But I didn’t even want to think about that yet.

  Suddenly there was a knock on my door. My stepmother poked her head in.

  “How’s the homework going?” she asked.

  “Um, great!” I lied, quickly closing my browser window. “Just about done, actually.”

  “Good girl,” she said. Then she held out her phone. “Your father wanted to FaceTime, but he didn’t want to disturb you if you were in the middle of something.”

  I leaped from my seat, eager for the distraction. “Thanks!” I said, grabbing the phone from her, then giving her a meaningful look. Thankfully, she got the hint and exited the room, closing the door behind her. Once she was gone, I climbed onto my bed and pulled my knees up to my chest, resting the phone on top of them.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, smiling into the camera.

  He smiled back at me. “Hey, princess,” he said, his voice a little crackly. The Wi-Fi in his apartment in China was always a bit sketchy, to say the least. “How’s everything going over there?”

  I stole a glance over at my computer and the two unfinished stories mocking me next to an unopened history book.

  “Great!” I chirped. “Really great!”

  My dad gave me a suspicious look. I knew it was tough for him to be stationed over in China for months on end, leaving me to live with my stepfamily. At times I wasn’t sure what made him feel guiltier, leaving me stuck with my stepmom or leaving my stepmom stuck with me.

  “And you’ve been behaving yourself? Not giving your stepmother any more grief about that comic book convention?”

  “No, Dad.” Ugh. I still couldn’t believe she went and told him about that.

  “She felt really bad having to say no,” he continued, as if I had demanded some explanation. “But you know money is tight right now, right, sweetheart? There’s really not a lot of room in the budget for trips this year.”

  I balled my hands into fists, off-camera so he couldn’t see. “I know, Dad,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s fine. I was disappointed for, like, a second. She really didn’t need to mention it.”

  “Honey, she’s just worried about you,” my father responded, as I knew he would. Always taking her side, even though I was the one who was blood-related. He gave me a sympathetic look. “My baby girl,” he said. “You know I would give you the entire world, wrapped in ribbon, if only I could.”

  I felt a lump form in my throat, despite my best efforts. It was something he used to say to me when I was little. Dad’s life savings were pretty much drained in his attempt to save Mom’s life with an experimental treatment that wasn’t covered by insurance. (And didn’t work in the end.)

  “I know, Dad,” I said, swallowing down the lump best I could. “And really, it’s okay. I swear. My friends and I . . . well, we found a way to make some money on our own. To pay for the trip ourselves.”

  His face brightened. “That’s wonderful, sweetheart.” A mischievous smile flashed across his mouth. “I assume whatever it is, it’s legal?”

  I laughed. “It’s babysitting, Dad!” I told him. “Princess babysitting.”

  “You’re babysitting princesses? Well, la-dee-dah!”

  “No. We’re princess babysitters.” I quickly explained the whole idea. When I had finished, he gave a low whistle.

  “My little entrepreneur,” he said. “You’re going to be running the whole world someday, the rate you’re going.”

  “Eh.” I waved him off. “Running the world sounds pretty stressful. I’ll settle with being a New York Times bestselling author, thank you very muc
h.”

  He laughed. “That’s my Hailey. Keeping her dreams small!” He paused, then added, “So does this mean you’re writing again?”

  I squirmed a little at this. When I was growing up, my dad had always loved to hear my stories, which may have been partially why I loved writing so much. In fact, before I even knew how to write, I would tell him stories and he’d type them into the computer, then print them out so I could draw the pictures. Once I was older, we’d write them together, taking turns at each chapter. We once created a story that was almost a hundred pages long, about elves and princesses and fiery monsters that wanted to eat them. (The last part being Dad’s contribution.)

  But the last few stories I’d sent him had gone unread; he’d been too busy at work. And eventually I’d stopped sending them altogether, not wanting him to feel bad about not having the time. I guess he must have assumed I’d stopped writing entirely.

  “I’m trying to enter a short-story competition,” I told him. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to go to Comicpalooza in the first place.” I quickly explained the contest and the writing-camp scholarship.

  When I finished, I realized Dad had a worried look on his face.

  “What?” I asked a little uncomfortably.

  “So you’ve got school, homework, babysitting, and a brand-new writing project,” he listed, shaking his head. “That’s a lot to have on your plate, sweetheart. Are you sure you’re going to have time for all of that? I don’t want you to overextend yourself and fall behind. School and homework still need to take first priority, you know.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice as indignant as I could make it, all while I forced my eyes not to drift back to the unopened history book on my desk. “Don’t worry, Dad,” I promised. “It’s all under control; you’ll see.”

  He nodded slowly. I could tell he really wanted to believe me. Or, perhaps more accurately, he didn’t have time not to believe me.

  A moment later he confirmed my suspicions by glancing at his watch. The time difference between China and Texas was more than twelve hours—meaning while it was nighttime here, it was tomorrow morning there.