The Princess Diaries

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 Grandm่re. Grandm่re had come to the loft!

I never in my life thought I’d be grateful to Grandm่re 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, “Grandm่re, they won’t let me go!”

I forgot Grandm่re 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. Grandm่re would take care of it, I knew.

And boy, did she ever.

Grandm่re 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, Grandm่re 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 Grandm่re 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 Grandm่re and I left the loft.

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

But Grandm่re 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 has 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.