They’re not! Well, I mean…not really.

I told you—I can wait.

I know! And it’s sweet of you. Really sweet!

I’m too sweet, aren’t I? Too much of a nice guy? Girls never fall for the nice guys.

No! You’re not nice. You’re scary, remember? At least according to your therapist….

Hey, that’s right. And didn’t your doctor tell you to do something every day that scares you?

Um. Yes….

Then you should go out with me Friday night.

I can’t! I have a thing.

Mia. I thought we were going to be honest with each other.

Do you see my nostrils flaring? Seriously, I have to give a speech at this Domina Rei gala.

Fine. I’ll be your escort.

You can’t. It’s women only.

Right.

I’m serious. Believe me, I wish I weren’t.

Okay. Saturday, then.

I can’t! I really have to study. Do you have any idea how tenuously I’m hanging on to my B-plus average right now?

Fine. But sooner or later, I’m taking you out. And you’re going to forget all about Michael. I promise.

J.P., you have no idea how much I hope that’s true.

Thursday, September 23, 8 p.m., limo on the way to the Four Seasons

Okay. It’s really hard to write this because my hands are shaking so hard.

But I need to get it all down. Because something happened.

Something big.

Bigger than a nitrostarch explosion. Bigger than Lilly hating me and maybe possibly being the founder of ihatemiathermopolis.com. Bigger than J.P. turning out to love me. Bigger than Michael turning out NOT to love me (anymore). Bigger than me having to start therapy. Bigger than my mom marrying my Algebra teacher and having his baby, or me turning out to be a princess, or Michael even loving me in the first place.

Bigger than anything that’s happened to me ever.

Okay. This is what happened:

It started out like a normal enough evening. I mean, I worked with Mr. G on my homework (I will never pass either Chemistry or Precalculus without daily tutoring—that much is clear), had dinner, and finally decided, you know, that Lana’s right: I need to make a new start. I need a do-over. Seriously. It’s time to go out with the old—old boyfriends, old best friends, old clothes that don’t fit me anymore, and old décor—and in with the new.

So I was rearranging my bedroom furniture (whatever. I was done with my homework, and I DON’T HAVE A TV ANYMORE. What ELSE was I supposed to do? Look up mean things about myself on the Internet? There is now a comment section on ihatemiathermopolis.com where someone from South Dakota just posted “I hate Mia Thermopolis, too! She is so shallow and self-absorbed! I once sent her an e-mail care of the Genovian palace and she never wrote back!”) when I accidentally knocked over Princess Amelie’s portrait.

And the back fell off. You know, the wood part that was over the back of the frame?

And I totally freaked out, because, you know, that portrait is probably priceless or whatever, like everything else at the palace.

So I scrambled over to pick it up.

And this paper fell out.

Not a paper, really. Some parchment. Like the kind they used to write on, back in the 1600s.

And it was covered all over in this scrawly seventeenth-century French that was really hard to read. It took me forever to decipher what it said. I mean, I could see that at the bottom it was signed by Princess Amelie—my Princess Amelie. And that right next to her signature was the Genovian royal seal. And that next to that were the signatures of two witnesses, whose names were not familiar to me.

It took me a minute to figure out that they had to be the signatures of the two witnesses she had found to sign off on her executive order.

That’s when I realized what I was looking at. That thing Amelie had signed—the thing her uncle had gotten so mad at her for, and burned all the copies of…except one, that she’d hidden somewhere close to her heart.

At first I’d thought she’d meant LITERALLY next to her heart, and that whatever it was, it must have been burned to a crisp along with her body in the royal funereal pyre after Amelie’s death.

But then I realized she hadn’t been literal at all. She’d meant next to her PORTRAIT’s heart…which, in fact, is from where the parchment had fallen—from between the portrait and its backing. Where she’d hidden it to keep her uncle from finding it…and where the Genovian parliament was supposed to look for it, after Amelie’s diary and the portrait were returned to them from the abbey to which she’d sent them for safekeeping.

Except, of course, no one ever did. Read the diary, I mean (beyond translating it, apparently). Or found the parchment.

Until me.

So then, of course, I wondered what this thing could say. You know, if it had made her uncle so mad, he’d tried to burn all the copies, and she’d gone to so much trouble to hide the last one.

And even though at first it was kind of hard to figure out what, exactly, the document was talking about, by the time I’d finished translating all the words I didn’t know with the help of an online medieval French dictionary (thank you, nerds), I had a pretty good idea why Uncle Francesco had been so mad.

And also why Amelie had hidden it. And left clues in her journal as to where it could be found.

Because it was possibly the most inflammatory document I have ever read. Hotter, even, than Kenny’s nitrostarch synthesis experiment.

For a second, I could only stare down at it in total and complete astonishment.