The Princess Diaries I

by Meg Cabot

  Lilly goes: "Well, at least I know Boris isn’t on the rebound."

  Excuse me. Josh Richter is not on the rebound. He and Lana had been broken up for sixteen whole hours before he asked me out.

  Lilly goes: "Plus Boris doesn’t do drugs."

  I swear, for someone so smart, Lilly sure does go for the whole rumor and innuendo thing in a major way. I asked her if she’d ever seen Josh do drugs, and she looked at me all sarcastically.

  But really, if you think about it, there isn’t any proof Josh does drugs. He definitely hangs out with people who do drugs, but hey, Tina Hakim Baba hangs out with a princess, and that doesn’t make her one.

  Lilly didn’t like that argument, though. She went: "You’re overrationalizing. Whenever you overrationalize, Mia, I know you’re worried."

  I am not worried. I am going to the biggest dance of the fall semester with the cutest, most sensitive boy in school, and nothing anyone can do or say will make me feel bad about that.

  Except that it does kind of make me feel weird, seeing Lana looking so sad and Josh looking like he doesn’t care at all. Today at lunch, he and his entourage sat with Tina and me, and Lana and her entourage sat back with the other cheerleaders. It was just so strange. Plus neither Josh nor any of his friends talked to me or to Tina. They just talked to each other. Which didn’t bother Tina any, but it kind of bothered me. Especially since Lana kept trying so hard not to look over at our table.

  Tina didn’t say anything bad about Josh when I told her the news. She just got very excited and said tonight, when I spend the night, we can try on different outfits and experiment with our hair to see what will look best for tomorrow night. Well, I have no hair to experiment with, but we can experiment with her hair. Actually, Tina’s almost more excited than I am. She is a much more supportive friend than Lilly, who went, all sarcastically, when she heard: "Where’s he taking you to dinner? The Harley-Davidson Cafe?"

  I said, "No," very sarcastically. "Tavern on the Green."

  Lilly went, "Oh, how imaginative."

  I suppose superartsy Boris is taking her somewhere in the Village.

  Then Michael, who had been pretty quiet (for him) all through class, looked at Lars and went, "You’re going, too, right?"

  And Lars went, "Oh, yes." And the two of them looked at each other in that infuriating way guys look at each other sometimes, like they have this secret. You know in sixth grade, when they made all of us girls go into this other room and watch a video about getting our periods and stuff? I bet while we were gone, the boys were watching a video about how to look at each other in that infuriating way.

  Or maybe a cartoon or something.

  But now that I think of it, Josh is kind of dissing Lana. I mean, he probably shouldn’t have asked out another girl so soon after breaking up with her—at least, not to something he was going to go to with her. Know what I mean? I kind of feel bad about the whole thing.

  But not bad enough not to go.

  FROM NOW ON I WILL

  1. Be nicer to everyone, even Lana Weinberger.

  2. Never ever bite my fingernails, even the fake ones.

  3. Write faithfully in this journal every day.

  4. Stop watching old Baywatch reruns and use my time wisely, like to study Algebra, or maybe improve the environment, or something.

  Friday Night

  Abbreviated lesson with Grandmère today because of my spending the night at Tina’s. Grandmère had pretty much gotten over my yelling at her yesterday about the press. She was totally into helping me figure out what I’m going to wear tomorrow night, just like I knew she would. She got on the phone with Chanel and set up an appointment for tomorrow to pick something out. It will have to be a rush job, and will cost a fortune, but she says she doesn’t care. It will be my first formal event as a representative of Genovia, and I have to "sparkle" (her word, not mine).

  I pointed out to her that it was a school dance, not an inauguration ball or anything, and that it wasn’t even a prom, just a stupid dance to celebrate the diversity of the various racial and cultural groups that attend Albert Einstein High School. But Grandmère went ape anyway, and kept on worrying there wouldn’t be time to dye shoes to match my gown.

  There’s a lot of stuff about being a girl I never realized. Like having your shoes match your gown. I didn’t know that was so important.

  But Tina Hakim Baba sure knows. You should see her room. She must have every women’s magazine ever printed. They are in order on shelves all around her room, which, by the way, is huge and pink, much like the rest of her apartment, which takes up the entire top floor of her building. You hit PH on the elevator buttons, and the elevator opens in the Hakim Babas’ marble foyer, which really does have a fountain, only you’re not supposed to throw pennies in it, I found out.

  And then there’s just room after room after room. They have a maid, a cook, a nanny, and a driver, all of whom live in. So you can imagine how many rooms there are, on top of the fact that Tina has three little sisters and a baby brother, and all of them have their own rooms, too.

  Tina’s room has its own 37-inch TV with a Sony PlayStation. I can see now that I have been living a life of monastic simplicity compared to Tina.

  Some people have all the luck.

  Anyway, Tina is a lot different at home than she is at school. At home, she’s totally bubbly and outgoing. Her parents are pretty nice, too. Mr. Hakim Baba is really funny. He had a heart attack last year and isn’t allowed to eat practically anything but vegetables and rice. He has to lose twenty more pounds. He kept pinching my arm and going, "How do you stay so skinny?" I told him about my strict vegetarianism, and he went, "Oh," and shuddered really hard. The Hakim Babas’ cook has orders to prepare only vegetarian meals, which was good for me. We had couscous and vegetable goulash. It was all quite delicious.

  Mrs. Hakim Baba is beautiful, but in a different way than my mom. Mrs. Hakim Baba is British and very blond. I think she’s pretty bored, living here in America and not having a job and all. Mrs. Hakim Baba used to be a model, but she quit when she got married. Now she doesn’t get to meet all the interesting people she used to meet when she was modeling. She once stayed in the same hotel as Prince Charles and Princess Diana. She says they slept in separate bedrooms. And that was on their honeymoon!

  No wonder things didn’t work out between them.

  Mrs. Hakim Baba is as tall as me, which makes her about five inches taller than Mr. Hakim Baba. But I don’t think Mr. Hakim Baba minds.

  Tina’s little sisters and brother are really cute. After we messed around with the fashion magazines, looking up hairstyles, we tried some of them out on Tina’s sisters. They looked pretty funny. Then we put butterfly clips in Tina’s little brother’s hair and gave him a French manicure like mine, and he got very excited and changed into his Batman suit and ran around the apartment, screaming. I thought it was cute, but Mr. and Mrs. Hakim Baba didn’t think so. They made the nanny put little Bobby Hakim Baba to bed right after dinner.

  Then Tina showed me her dress for tomorrow. It’s a Nicole Miller. It’s so pretty, like sea foam. Tina Hakim Baba looks much more like a princess than I ever could.

  Then it was time for Lilly Tells It Like It Is, which comes on on Friday nights at nine. This was the episode dedicated to exposing the unjust racism at Ho’s Deli. It was filmed before Lilly called off the boycott due to lack of interest. It was a very hard-hitting piece of television news journalism, and I can say that without bragging, since I wasn’t involved in its creation. If Lilly Tells It Like It Is ever went network, I bet it would be as highly rated as 60 Minutes.

  At the end, Lilly came on and did a segment she must have shot the night before, with a tripod in her bedroom. She sat on her bed and said that racism is a powerful force of evil that all of us must work to combat. She said that even though paying five cents more for a bag of gingko biloba rings might not seem like much to some of us, victims of real racism, like the Armenians and the Rwandans an
d the Ugandans and the Bosnians, would recognize that that five cents was only the first step on the road to genocide. Lilly went on to say that because of her daring stand against the Hos there was a little bit more justice on the side of right today.

  I don’t know about that, but I did sort of start to miss her when she waggled her feet, in their furry bear claw slippers, into the camera as a tribute to Norman. Tina is a fun friend and everything, but I’ve known Lilly since kindergarten. It’s kind of hard to forget that.

  We stayed up really late reading Tina’s teenage love novels. I swear, there wasn’t a single one where the boy broke up with a snotty girl and started going out with the heroine right away. Usually he waited a tactful amount of time, like a summer or at least a weekend, before asking her out. The only ones with a guy who started going out with the heroine right away turned out to be ones where the guy was just using the girl to get revenge or something.

  But then Tina said even though she loves reading those books, she never takes them as a guide to real life. Because how many times in real life does anybody ever get amnesia? And when do cute young European terrorists ever take anybody hostage in the girls’ locker room? And if they did, wouldn’t it be on the day when you’re wearing your worst underwear, the kind with the holes and loose elastic, and a bra that doesn’t match, and not a pink silk camisole and tap pants, like the heroine of that particular book?

  She has a point.

  Tina’s turning out the light now, because she’s tired. I’m glad. It’s been a long day.

  Saturday, October 18

  When I got home, the first thing I did was check to make sure Josh hadn’t called to cancel.

  He hadn’t.

  Mr. Gianini was there, though (of course). This time he had pants on, thank God. When he heard me ask my mom if a boy named Josh had called, he was all, "You don’t mean Josh Richter, do you?"

  I got kind of mad, because he sounded . . . I don’t know. Shocked or something.

  I said, "Yes, I mean Josh Richter. He and I are going to the Cultural Diversity Dance tonight."

  Mr. Gianini raised his eyebrows. "What about that Weinberger girl?"

  It kind of sucks to have a parent who’s dating a teacher in your school. I went, "They broke up."

  My mom was watching us pretty closely, which is unusual for her, since most of the time she’s in her own world. She went, "Who’s Josh Richter?"

  And I went, "Only the cutest, most sensitive boy in school."

  Mr. Gianini snorted and said, "Well, most popular, anyway."

  To which my mom replied, with a lot of surprise, "And he asked Mia to the dance?"

  Needless to say, this was not very flattering. When your own mother knows it’s weird for the cutest, most popular boy in school to ask you to the dance, you know you’re in trouble.

  "Yes," I said, all defensively.

  "I don’t like this," Mr. Gianini said. And when my mom asked him why, he said, "Because I know Josh Richter."

  My mom went, "Uh oh. I don’t like the sound of that," and before I could say anything in Josh’s defense, Mr. Gianini went, "That boy is going one hundred miles per hour," which doesn’t even make any sense.

  At least it didn’t until my mom pointed out that since I’m only going five miles per hour (FIVE!) she was going to have to consult my father "about this."

  Hello? Consult him about what? What am I, a car with a faulty fan belt? What’s this five-miles-per-hour stuff?

  "He’s fast, Mia," Mr. Gianini translated.

  Fast? FAST? What is this, the fifties? Josh Richter is a rebel without a cause all of a sudden?

  My mom went, as she was dialing my dad’s phone number over at the Plaza, "You’re just a freshman. You shouldn’t be going out with seniors anyway."

  How unfair is THAT? I finally get a date, and all of a sudden my parents turn into Mike and Carol Brady? I mean, come on!

  So I was standing there, listening to my mom and dad over the speakerphone go on about how they both think I’m too young to date and that I SHOULDN’T date, since this has been a very confusing time for me, what with finding out I’m a princess and all. They were planning out the rest of my life for me (no dating until I’m eighteen, all-girls dorm when I get to college, etc.) when the buzzer to the loft went off, and Mr. G went to answer it. When he asked who it was, this all-too-familiar voice went, "This is Clarisse Marie Grimaldi Renaldo. Who is this?"

  Across the room, my mom nearly dropped the phone. It was Grandmère. Grandmère had come to the loft!

  I never in my life thought I’d be grateful to Grandmère for something. I never thought I’d be glad to see her. But when she showed up at the loft to take me shopping for my dress, I could have kissed her—on both cheeks, even—I really could have. Because when I met her at the door, I was like, "Grandmère, they won’t let me go!"

  I forgot Grandmère had never even been to the loft before. I forgot Mr. Gianini was there. All I could think about was the fact that my parents were trying to low-ball me about Josh. Grandmère would take care of it, I knew.

  And boy, did she ever.

  Grandmère came bursting in, giving Mr. Gianini a very dirty look—"This is he?" she stopped long enough to ask, and when I said yes, she made this sniffing sound and walked right by him—and heard Dad on the speakerphone. She shouted, "Give me that phone," at my mother, who looked like a kid who’d just gotten caught jumping a turnstile by the Transit Authority.

  "Mother?" my dad’s voice shouted over the speakerphone. You could tell he was in almost as much shock as Mom. "Is that you? What are you doing there?"

  For someone who claims to have no use for modern technology, Grandmère sure knew how to work that speakerphone. She took Dad right off it, snatched the receiver out of my mother’s hand, and went, "Listen here, Phillipe," into it. "Your daughter is going to the dance with her beau. I traveled fifty-seven blocks by limo to take her shopping for a new dress, and if you think I’m not going to watch her dance in it, then you can just—"

  Then my grandmother used some pretty strong language. Only since she said it all in French, only my dad and I understood. My mom and Mr. Gianini just stood there. My mom looked mad. Mr. G looked nervous.

  After my grandmother had finished telling my dad just where he could get off, she slammed the phone down, then looked around the loft. Let’s just say Grandmère has never been one for hiding her feelings, so I wasn’t too surprised when the next thing she said was, "This is where the princess of Genovia is being brought up? In this . . . warehouse?"

  Well, if she had lit a firecracker under my mom, she couldn’t have made her madder.

  "Now look here, Clarisse," my mother said, stomping around in her Birkenstocks. "Don’t you dare try to tell me how to raise my child! Phillipe and I have already decided she isn’t going out with this boy. You can’t just come in here and—"

  "Amelia," my grandmother said, "go and get your coat."

  I went. When I got back, my mom’s face was really red, and Mr. Gianini was looking at the floor. But neither of them said anything as Grandmère and I left the loft.

  Once we were outside, I was so excited I could hardly stand it. "Grandmère!" I yelled. "What’d you say to them? What’d you say to convince them to let me go?"

  But Grandmère just laughed in this scary way and said, "I have my ways."

  Boy, did I ever not hate her then.

  More Saturday

  Well, I’m sitting here in my new dress, my new shoes, my new nails, and my new panty hose, with my newly waxed legs and underarms, my newly touched-up hair, my professionally made-up face, and it’s seven o’clock, and there’s no sign of Josh, and I’m wondering if maybe this whole thing was a joke, like in the movie Carrie, which is too scary for me to watch but Michael Moscovitz rented it once, and then he told Lilly and me what it was about: This homely girl gets asked to a dance by the most popular boy in school just so he and his popular friends can pour pig blood on her. Only he doesn’t know Carrie ha
s psychic powers, and at the end of the night she kills everyone in the whole town, including Steven Spielberg’s first wife and the mom from Eight Is Enough.

  The problem is, of course, I don’t have psychic powers, so if it turns out that Josh and his friends pour pig blood on me I won’t be able to kill them all. I mean, unless I call in the Genovian national guard or something. But that would be difficult, since Genovia doesn’t have an air force or navy, so how would the guards get here? They’d have to fly commercially, and it costs A LOT to buy tickets at the last minute. I doubt my dad would approve such an exorbitant expenditure of government funds—especially for what he’d be bound to consider a frivolous reason.

  But if Josh Richter stands me up, I can assure you, I will not have a frivolous reaction. I got my LEGS waxed for him. Okay? And if you think that doesn’t hurt, think about having your UNDERARMS waxed, which I also had done for him. Okay? That waxing stuff HURTS. I practically started to cry, it hurt so bad. So don’t be telling ME we can’t call out the Genovian national guard if I get stood up.

  I know my dad thinks Josh has stood me up. He’s sitting at the kitchen table right now, pretending to read TV Guide. But I see him sneaking peeks at his watch all the time. Mom, too. Only she never wears a watch, so she keeps sneaking peeks at the blinking-eye cat clock on the wall.

  Lars is here, too. He isn’t checking the clock, though. He keeps checking his ammunition clip to make sure he has enough bullets. I suppose my dad told him to shoot Josh if he makes a move on me.

  Oh, yes. My dad said I can go out with Josh, but only if Lars goes, too. This is no big thing since I always expected Lars would go, anyway. But I pretended to be all mad about it so my dad wouldn’t think I was getting off too easy. I mean, HE’s in BIG trouble with Grandmère. She told me while I was being fitted for my dress that my dad has always had a problem with commitment and that the reason he doesn’t want me to go out with Josh is that he can’t stand to see me dumped the way my dad has dumped countless models all over the world.