First of all, it was like totally embarrassing to discuss my menstrual cycle in front of my dad’s bodyguard. I mean, Lars is kind of a Baldwin. He was concentrating really hard on driving, though, and I don’t know if he could hear us from the front seat, but it was embarrassing, just the same.

“It’s nothing,” I whispered. “Just my dad. You know.”

“Oh,” Lilly said in her normal voice. Have I mentioned that Lilly’s normal voice is really loud? “You mean the infertility thing? Is he still bummed out about that? Gawd, does he ever need to self-actualize.”

Lilly then went on to describe something she called the Jungian tree of self-actualization. She says my dad is way on the bottom branches, and he won’t be able to reach the top of the thing until he accepts himself as he is and stops obsessing over his inability to sire more offspring.

I guess that’s part of my problem. I’m way at the bottom of the self-actualization tree. Like, underneath the roots of it, practically.

But now that I’m sitting here in Algebra, things don’t seem so bad, really. I mean, I thought about it all through Homeroom, and I finally realized something:

They can’t make me be princess.

They really can’t. I mean, this is America, for crying out loud. Here, you can be anything you want to be. At least that’s what Mrs. Holland was always telling us last year, when we studied U.S. History. So, if I can be whatever I want to be, I can not be a princess. Nobody can make me be a princess, not even my dad, if I don’t want to be one.

Right?

So when I get home tonight, I’ll just tell my dad thanks, but no thanks. I’ll just be plain old Mia for now.

Geez. Mr. Gianini just called on me, and I totally had no idea what he was talking about, because of course I was writing in this book instead of paying attention. My face feels like it’s on fire. Lana is laughing her head off, of course. She is such a wanker.

What does he keep picking on me for, anyway? He should know by now that I don’t know the quadratic formula from a hole in the ground. He’s only picking on me because of my mom. He wants to make it look as if he’s treating me the same as everybody else in the class.

Well, I’m not the same as everybody else in the class.

What do I need to know Algebra for, anyway? They don’t use Algebra in Greenpeace.

And you can bet you don’t need it if you’re a princess. So however things turn out, I’m covered.

Cool.

solve x = a + aby for y

x - a = aby

Really Late on Friday,
Lilly Moscovitz’s Bedroom

Okay, so I blew off Mr. Gianini’s help session after school. I know I shouldn’t have. Believe me, Lilly let me know I shouldn’t have. I know he has these help sessions just for people like me, who are flunking. I know he does it in his own spare time and doesn’t even get paid overtime for it or anything. But if I won’t ever need Algebra in any foreseeable future career, why do I need to go?

I asked Lilly if it would be okay if I spent the night at her house tonight and she said only if I promised to stop acting like such a head case.

I promised, even though I don’t think I’m acting like a head case.

But when I called my mom from the pay phone in the lobby after school to ask her if it was okay if I stayed overnight at the Moscovitzes, she was all, “Um, actually, Mia, your father was really hoping that when you got home tonight we could have another talk.”

Oh, great.

I told my mom that although there was nothing I wanted to do more than have another talk, I was very concerned about Lilly, whose stalker was recently released from Bellevue again. Ever since Lilly started her cable access TV show, this guy named Norman has been calling in, asking her to take off her shoes. According to the Drs. Moscovitz, Norman is a fetishist. His fixation is feet—in particular, Lilly’s feet. He sends stuff to her care of the show, CDs and stuffed animals and things like that, and writes that there’ll be more where that came from if Lilly would just take off her shoes on air. So what Lilly does is, she takes off her shoes, all right, but then she throws a blanket over her legs and kicks her feet around under it and goes, “Look, Norman, you freak! I took my shoes off! Thanks for the CDs, sucker!”

This angered Norman so much that he started wandering around the Village looking for Lilly. Everyone knows Lilly lives in the Village, since we filmed a very popular episode where Lilly borrowed the pricing gun from Grand Union and stood on the corner of Bleecker and La Guardia and told all the European tourists wandering around NoHo that if they wore a Grand Union price sticker on their foreheads they could get a free latte from Dean & DeLuca (a surprising amount of them believed her).

Anyway, one day a few weeks ago Norman the foot fetishist found us in the park and started chasing us around, waving twenty dollar bills and trying to get us to take off our shoes. This was very entertaining, and hardly scary at all, especially because we just ran right up to the command post on Washington Square South and Thompson Street, where the Sixth Precinct has been parking this enormous trailer so they can secretly spy on the drug dealers. We told the police that this weird guy was trying to assault us, and you should have seen it: About twenty undercover guys (even a guy I thought was an old homeless man asleep on a bench) jumped on Norman and dragged him, screaming, off to the mental ward!

I always have such a good time with Lilly.

Anyway, Lilly’s parents told her Norman just got out of Bellevue and that if she sees him she’s not to torment him anymore, because he’s just a poor obsessive-compulsive with possible schizophrenic tendencies.