Princess Mia

Wednesday, September 22, East Seventy-fifth Street AEHS evacuation rendezvous

Oh my God.

Oh my God. J.P. is in love with me.

And we blew up the school.

Wednesday, September 22, Lenox Hill Hospital emergency room

To tell you the truth, I didn’t know which to write first back then.

I mean, I don’t know which is more upsetting—that it turns out J.P. has fallen in love with me, or that we all nearly died from Kenny’s experiment, in which he was trying to recreate—unbeknownst to the rest of us—a substance formerly used as filler in hand grenades during World War II, with a very high deflagration point, which means, in English, that it’s very unstable and BLOWS UP A LOT.

And we weren’t even supposed to be making it! Mr. Hipskin didn’t realize that’s what we were doing because Kenny told him we were making nitrocellulose, which is flash paper similar to what’s used in film.

Not nitrostarch, which is an EXPLOSIVE!

The emergency room nurse keeps assuring me that Kenny’s eyebrows will grow back someday.

I was much luckier. I’m here in the ER under protest—there’s nothing actually wrong with me. They just sent me here to avoid a lawsuit, I’m sure. I mean, I only had the wind knocked out of me. That’s because just before deflagration occurred, when Kenny yelled, “Everybody get down!” J.P. threw me off my stool and flattened his body over mine, so all the flaming debris landed on him and not me.

Which, I might add, was right after he’d said, “Because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time now, and every time I start to, something seems to happen to interrupt me, so I’m just going to say it now, even though this might not be the ideal moment. And I know you’re going to freak out now, because that’s what you do. So put down your pen and take a deep breath.”

This is when his blue eyes locked on to my gray ones and he said, super intently and without looking away, “Mia, I’m in love with you. I know up until now we’ve just been friends—good friends—but I want more than that. And I think you do, too.”

It was right then that Kenny yelled to get down. And that J.P. threw himself at me.

Fortunately for J.P., Lars was ON IT with the fire extinguisher—I guess to make up for not being the one to throw himself over me, which is, after all, his job, and not J.P.’s—and put out the flames that erupted on the back of J.P.’s sweater. He didn’t even get burned, because our school uniforms are made of so many unnatural fibers, most of which are flame retardant.

So no flames actually ever touched J.P.’s skin. Just his V-neck.

All of us had to flee a cloud of billowing nitrogen dioxide vapor, though. And not just in our Chem class, either. The whole school.

Good thing it wasn’t freezing outside (some kind of cold front has come down from Canada, making the city unseasonably cool for September), and none of us had our coats, or anything. Not.

One of the nurses just came in and said the whole thing was on New York One—a live shot from a helicopter of everyone standing outside Albert Einstein High shivering, with the fire trucks and ambulances all flashing their lights and everything.

Only three people were actually taken to the hospital, though: J.P., Kenny, and me.

Principal Gupta caught me just before they closed the ambulance doors. She was all, “Mia, I want to give you my sincerest assurances that I intend to get to the bottom of this matter. Mr. Showalter will not go unpunished….”

I pointed out that having no eyebrows is punishment enough, if you ask me. But Principal Gupta had already moved on to J.P.’s ambulance to repeat the same thing.

Which was smart of her because I hear J.P.’s dad is TOTALLY litigious.

It’s funny that no one has said anything about the fact that J.P. and I were Kenny’s lab partners, and we certainly never tried to stop him from blowing up the school. Except that both of us are so bad at chemistry, we didn’t know what he was trying to do.

Of course, Kenny swears that destroying the Chem lab was never his goal. He claims he only wanted to figure out how a synthesis of nitrostarch could be performed in a lab setting. Also, that he doesn’t know how it got so out of control. He says it was perfectly stable just seconds before…and then WHAMMO.

Honestly, I’m kind of glad Kenny’s experiment conflagrated. Because it kept me from having to figure out how to respond to J.P.’s totally shocking announcement that he’s in love with me.

Which, frankly, I find really hard to believe. Considering the fact that just two weeks ago, he and Lilly were totally an item.

And, okay, it wasn’t as if they didn’t have problems. I mean, Lilly was pretty upset that J.P. never said, “Me, too” to her when she told him that she loved him.

But he explained that. He explained that he never felt that way about her, and that’s why he broke up with her, because he realized it wasn’t fair to her. He did the right thing…even if she hates him for it now.

And me, too, for still being friendly with him.

But that doesn’t mean—despite Tina’s insane theory about J.P. having always been in love with me and not Lilly from the beginning—that he really was in love with me that whole time. In fact, J.P. explained—as Lars was putting out the flames on his back—that his feelings for me had been coming on gradually, and he’d only decided to mention it because he couldn’t stand seeing me so sad about Michael.

“J.P.,” I’d gasped. It was hard to talk with all the breath knocked out of me. Also, given the toxic fumes. “We’ll discuss this later, okay?”