Princess in the Spotlight (3 page)

HOMEWORK

Algebra: problems on pg. 133

English: write a brief family history

World Civ: find an example of negative stereotyping of Arabs (film, television, literature) and submit with explanatory essay

G&T: N/A

French: ecrivez une vignette parisiene

Biology: reproductive system (get answers from Kenny)

ENGLISH JOURNAL

My Family History

The ancestry of my family on my father’s side can be traced back to A.D. 568. That is the year when a Visigothic warlord named Albion, who appeared to be suffering from what today would be called an authoritarian personality disorder, killed the king of Italy and all these other people, then made himself king. And after he made himself king, he decided to marry Rosagunde, the daughter of one of the old king’s generals.

Only Rosagunde didn’t much like Albion after he made her drink wine out of her dead dad’s skull, and so she got back at him the night of their wedding by strangling him with her braids while he slept.

With Albion dead, the old king of Italy’s son took over. He was so grateful to Rosagunde that he made her princess of an area that is today known as the country of Genovia. According to the only existing records of that time, Rosagunde was a kind and thoughtful ruler. She is my great-grandmother times about sixty. She is one of the primary reasons why today Genovia has some of the best literacy, infant mortality, and employment rates in all of Europe: Rosagunde implemented a highly sophisticated (for its time) system of governmental checks and balances, and did away entirely with the death penalty.

On my mom’s side of the family, the Thermopolises were goat herders on the island of Crete until the year 1904, when Dionysius Thermopolis, my mom’s great-grandfather, couldn’t take it anymore, and ran away to America. He eventually settled in Versailles, Indiana, where he opened an appliance store. His offspring have been running the Handy Dandy Hardware store on the Versailles, Indiana, courthouse square ever since. My mom says her upbringing would have been much less oppressive, not to mention more liberal, back in Crete.

A Suggested Daily Diet for Pregnancy

• Two to four protein servings of meat, fish, poultry, cheese, tofu, eggs, or nut-grain-bean-dairy combinations

• One quart of milk (whole, skim, buttermilk) or milk equivalents (cheese, yogurt, cottage cheese)

• One or two vitamin C–rich foods: whole potato, grapefruit, orange, melon, green pepper, cabbage, strawberries, fruit, orange juice

• A yellow or orange fruit or vegetable

• Four to five slices of whole-grain bread, pancakes, tortillas, cornbread, or a serving of whole-grain cereal or pasta. Use wheat germ and brewers’ yeast to fortify other foods.

• Butter, fortified margarine, vegetable oil

• Six to eight glasses of liquid: fruit and vegetable juices, water, and herb teas. Avoid sugar-sweetened juices and colas, alcohol, and caffeine.

• For snacks: dried fruits, nuts, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, popcorn

My mom is so not going to go for this. Unless she can smother it in hoisin sauce from Number One Noodle Son, she is just not interested.

TO DO BEFORE MOM GETS HOME

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, suddenly, they did.

Grandmère called.

This is so unfair. I thought she was supposed to have gone to Baden-Baden for a little R and R. I was fully looking forward to a respite from her torture sessions—also known as princess lessons, which I am forced by my father, the despot, to attend. I mean, I could use a little vacation myself. Do they really think anyone in Genovia cares whether I know how to use a fish fork? Or if I can sit down without getting wrinkles in the back of my skirt? Or if I know how to say thank you in Swahili? Shouldn’t my future countrymen and women be more concerned with my views on the environment? And gun control? And overpopulation?

But according to Grandmère, the people of Genovia don’t care about any of that. They just want to know that I won’t embarrass them at any state dinners.

As if. Grandmère’s the one they should be worried about. I mean,
I
didn’t have eyeliner permanently tatooed onto
my
eyelids.
I
don’t dress up
my
pet in chinchilla bolero jackets.
I
was never a close personal friend of Richard Nixon.

But oh, no, it’s
me
everyone is supposedly so worried about. Like
I
might commit some huge social gaffe at my introduction to the Genovian people in December.

Right.

But whatever. It turns out she didn’t go after all, on account of the Baden-Baden baggage handlers being on strike.

I wish I knew the head of the baggage handlers’ union in Baden-Baden. If I did, I would totally offer him the one hundred dollars per day my dad has been donating in my name to Greenpeace for performing my duties as princess of Genovia, just so he and the other baggage handlers would go back to work, and get Grandmère out of my hair for a while.

Anyway, Grandmère left a very scary message on the answering machine. She says she has a “surprise” for me. I’m supposed to call her right away.

I wonder what her surprise is. Knowing Grandmère, it’s probably something totally horrible, like a coat made out of the skin of baby poodles.

Hey, I wouldn’t put it past her.

I’m going to pretend I didn’t get the message.

Just got off the phone with Grandmère. She wanted to know why I hadn’t returned her call. I told her I didn’t get the message.

Why am I such a liar? I mean, I can’t even tell the truth about the simplest things. And I’m supposed to be a princess, for crying out loud. What kind of princess goes around lying all the time?

Anyway, Grandmère says she is sending a limo to pick me up. She and my dad and I are going to have dinner in her suite at the Plaza. Grandmère says she is going to tell me all about my surprise then.

Tell me
all about it. Not
show me
. Which hopefully rules out the puppy-skin coat.

I guess it’s just as well I’m having dinner with Grandmère tonight. My mom invited Mr. Gianini over to the loft tonight so they can “talk.” She’s not very happy with me for throwing out the coffee and beer (I didn’t actually throw it away. I gave it to our neighbor Ronnie). Now my mom is stomping around complaining that she has nothing to offer Mr. G when he comes over.

I pointed out that it’s for her own good, and that if Mr. Gianini is any sort of gentleman he’ll give up beer and coffee anyway, to support her in her time of need. I know I would expect the father of my unborn child to pay me that courtesy.

That is, in the unlikely event that I were ever actually to have sex.

Some surprise
that
was.

Somebody really needs to tell Grandmère that surprises are supposed to be pleasant. There is nothing pleasant about the fact that she has managed to wrangle a prime-time interview for me with Beverly Bellerieve on
TwentyFour/Seven
.

I don’t care if it
is
the most highly rated television news show in America. I told Grandmère a million times I don’t want to have my picture taken, let alone be on TV. I mean, it’s bad enough that everyone I know is aware that I look like a walking Q-tip, what with my lack of breasts and my Yield-sign–shaped hair. I don’t need all of America finding it out.

But now Grandmère says it’s my duty as a member of the Genovian royal family. And this time she got my dad into the act. He was all, “Your grandmother’s right, Mia.”

So I get to spend next Saturday afternoon being interviewed by Beverly Bellerieve.

I told Grandmère I thought this interview thing was a really bad idea. I told her I wasn’t ready for anything this big yet. I said maybe we could start small, and have Carson Daly or somebody like that interview me.

But Grandmère didn’t go for it. I never met anybody who needed to go to Baden-Baden so badly for a little rest and relaxation. Grandmère looks about as relaxed as Fat Louie right after the vet sticks his thermometer you know where in order to take his temperature.

Of course, this might have had something to do with the fact that Grandmère shaves off her eyebrows and draws on new ones every morning. Don’t ask me why. I mean, she has perfectly good eyebrows. I’ve seen the stubble. But lately I’ve noticed those eyebrows are getting drawn on higher and higher up her forehead, which gives her this look of perpetual surprise. I think that’s because of all her plastic surgeries. If she doesn’t watch it, one of these days her eyelids are going to be up in the vicinity of her frontal lobes.

And my dad was no help at all. He was asking all these questions about Beverly Bellerieve, like was it true she was Miss America in 1991 and did Grandmère happen to know if she (Beverly) was still going out with Ted Turner, or was that over?

I swear, for a guy who only has one testicle, my dad sure spends a lot of time thinking about sex.

We argued about it all through dinner. Like were they going to shoot the interview at the hotel, or back in the loft? If they shot it at the hotel, people would be given a false impression about my lifestyle. But if they shot it at the loft, Grandmère insisted, people would be horrified by the squalor in which my mother has brought me up.

Which is totally unfair. The loft is not squalid. It just has that nice, lived-in look.

“Never-been-cleaned look, you mean,” Grandmère said, correcting me. But that isn’t true, because just the other day I Lemon Pledged the whole place.

“With that animal living there, I don’t know how you can ever get the place really clean,” Grandmère said.

But Fat Louie isn’t responsible for the mess. Dust, as everyone knows, is 95 percent human skin tissue.

The only good thing that I can see about all this is that at least the film crew isn’t going to follow me around at school and stuff. That’s one thing to be thankful for, anyway. I mean, could you imagine them filming me being tortured by Lana Weinberger during Algebra? She would so totally start flipping her cheerleading pom-poms in my face, or something, just to show the producers what a wimp I can be sometimes. People all over America would be, like, What is wrong with that girl? Why isn’t she self-actualized?

And what about G and T? In addition to there being absolutely no teacher supervision in that class, there’s the whole thing with us locking Boris Pelkowski in the supply closet so we don’t have to listen to him practice his violin. That has to be some kind of violation of Haz-mat codes.

Anyway, the whole time we were arguing about it, a part of my brain was going,
Right now, as we’re sitting here arguing over this whole interview thing, fifty-seven blocks away, my mother is breaking the news to her lover—my Algebra teacher—that she is pregnant with his child
.

What was Mr. G going to say? I wondered. If he expressed anything but joy, I was going to sic Lars on him. I really was. Lars would beat up Mr. G for me, and he probably wouldn’t charge me very much for it, either. He has three ex-wives he’s paying alimony to, so he can always use an extra ten bucks, which is all I can afford to pay a hired thug.

I really need to see about getting more of an allowance. I mean, who ever heard of a princess who only gets ten bucks a week spending money? You can’t even go to the movies on that.

Well, you can, but you can’t get popcorn.

The thing is, though, now that I’m back at the loft, I can’t tell whether I will need Lars to beat up my Algebra teacher or not. Mr. G and my mom are talking in hushed voices in her room.

I can’t hear anything going on in there, even when I press my ear to the door.

I hope Mr. G takes it well. He’s the nicest guy my mom’s ever dated, despite that F he almost gave me. I don’t think he’ll do anything stupid, like dump her, or try to sue for full custody.

Then again, he’s a man, so who knows?

It’s funny, because as I’m writing this, an instant message comes over my computer. It’s from Michael! He writes:

C
RAC
K
ING:
What was with you at school today? It was like you were off in this whole other world or something.

I write back:

F
T
L
OUIE:
I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about. Nothing is wrong with me. I’m totally fine.

I am such a liar.

C
RAC
K
ING:
Well, I got the impression that you didn’t hear a word that I said about negative slopes.

Since I found out my destiny is to rule a small European principality someday, I have been trying really hard to understand Algebra, as I know I will need it to balance the budget of Genovia, and all. So I have been attending review sessions every day after school, and during Gifted and Talented, Michael has been helping me a little, too.

It’s very hard to pay attention when Michael tutors me. This is because he smells really, really good.

How can I think about negative slopes when this guy I’ve had a major crush on since, oh, I don’t know—forever practically, is sitting there right next to me, smelling like soap and sometimes brushing my knee with his?

I reply:

F
T
L
OUIE:
I heard everything you said about negative slopes. Given slope m, +y-intercept (O,b) equation y+mx+b Slope-intercept.

C
RAC
K
ING:
WHAT???