This was apparently the right move, since Lana continued, “You just show up—looking fantastic, of course. Then you grab a beer. If the music’s any good, you dance. If there’s a hot guy, you hook up. That’s it.”

I thought about this. “I don’t like beer,” I said.

But Lana just ignored me. “And you wear something sexy.” Her gaze flicked from my combat boots up to the top of my head, and she added, “Although for you, that might be a challenge.”

Then she sauntered off.

It can’t be that simple. Partying, I mean. You just go, drink, dance, and, um, hook up? This information does not help me at all. What do you do if they’re playing fast music? Are you supposed to dance fast? I look like I’m having a seizure when I dance fast.

And what are you supposed to do with this alleged beer while you’re dancing? Do you put it down on, like, a coffee table or something? Or do you hold it while you dance? If you’re dancing fast, won’t it spill?

And don’t you have to introduce yourself to everyone in the room? Grandmère insists that at parties I make sure I greet every guest personally, shaking their hand and inquiring after their health. Lana didn’t say anything about that.

Or about the most important thing of all: What are you supposed to do about your bodyguard?

God. This partying thing is going to be even harder than I thought.

Thursday, March 4, Geometry

Something horrible just occurred to me. I mean, something even more horrible than the usual things that occur to me, like that Rocky might be suffering from childhood disintegrative disorder, or that the mole on my right hip is growing and could turn into a two-hundred-pound tumor like the one that grew on that lady I saw on that documentary on the Discovery Health Channel called 200 Pound Tumor.

And that’s that Lana might be self-actualized.

Seriously. I mean, that shakedown in the stairwell just now—that was almost a beautiful thing. It was CLASSIC.

And okay, she did it in a totally underhanded and manipulative way. But she got exactly what she set out to get.

She CAN’T be self-actualized. I mean, it totally wouldn’t be fair if she were.

But you can’t deny that she knows how to get what she wants out of life. Whereas I am just floundering around, lying to everyone all the time, and definitely NOT getting what I want.

I don’t know. I mean, sure, she’s pure unadulterated evil.

But it’s something to think about.

Alternate exterior angles—A pair of angles on the outer sides of two lines cut by a transversal, but on opposite sides of the transversal.

Thursday, March 4, Earth Science

Just now Kenny asked me if I would recopy our viscosity lab handout. He got Alfredo sauce all over it while filling in the blanks last night during dinner.

I guess it’s a small price to pay for not actually having to know what viscosity is.

HOMEWORK

PE: WASH GYM SHORTS!!!

U.S. Economics: Questions at end of Chapter 8

English: Pages 133–154, O Pioneers

French: Rewrite histoire

G&T: Cut black velvet knee-length skirt to micromini for party. FIND BERET!!!!

Geometry: Chapter 17, problems on pages 224–230 Earth Science: Who cares? Kenny will do it.

Thursday, March 4, the Grand Ballroom, the Plaza

A lot of people showed up for the Braid! auditions. I mean, a LOT.

Which is weird when you consider that none of the Drama Club people can even audition for Braid! because they’re too busy rehearsing for Hair.

Which means that all of the people who showed up today were theater neophytes (which means “beginner or novice,” according to Lilly), like Lilly and Tina and Boris and Ling Su and Perin (but not Shameeka, since she’s only allowed that one extracurricular per semester).

But Kenny was there, with some of his wonder-geek pals. And Amber Cheeseman, her school uniform sleeves rolled up to show off her apelike forearms.

Even The Guy Who Hates It When They Put Corn in the Chili showed up.

Wow. I really had no idea there were so many aspiring thespians at AEHS.

Although if you think about it, acting is one of the few professions in which you can make a ton of money while having no actual intelligence or talent whatsoever, as many a star has shown us.

So in that way, you can see why it would be such an appealing career option to so many people.

Grandmère decided to actually run this as if it were a real audition. She had her maid hand out applications to everyone who walked through the door. We were supposed to fill them out, then stand for a Polaroid taken by Grandmère’s chauffeur, then hand the Polaroid and our application to a tiny, extremely ancient man with huge glasses and an ascot, who was sitting behind a long table set Jennifer-Lopez-in-her-Flashdance-re-creation-video-for-“I’m Glad”-style in the middle of the room. Grandmère sat next to him, with her toy poodle Rommel shivering—in spite of his purple suede bomber jacket—on her lap.

I went up to her, waving my form and the Number One Noodle Son bag in which I had stowed her birthday gift earlier that day and dragged with me to school.

“I’m not filling this out,” I informed her, slapping the form down on the table. “Here’s your present. Happy birthday.”

Grandmère took the bag from me—inside it were the padded satin hangers I had special-ordered from Chanel for her (Whatever. Dad was the one who’d suggested—and paid for—them.), and said, “Thank you. Please be seated, Amelia, dear.”

I knew the “dear” was entirely for the benefit of the guy sitting next to her—whoever he was—not for me.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” I said to her. “I mean…is this really how you want to spend your birthday?”

Grandmère just waved me away. “When you’re my age, Amelia,” she said, “age becomes meaningless.”

Oh, whatever. She’s in her SIXTIES, not her nineties. Instead of satin hangers, I should have gotten her one of those shirts I saw downtown that say DRAMA QUEEN inside the Dairy Queen logo.

Lilly flagged me down, so I sat with her and Tina and everybody. Right away Lilly was all, “So what’s the deal here, POG? I’m reporting on this for The Atom, so make it good.”

Lilly always gets the best assignments for the school paper. I have totally sunk to special features—i.e. occasional stories on the school band concert or the library’s most recent acquisitions—since I am too busy with presidential and princess stuff to make a regular deadline.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’ll find out when you find out.”

“Off the record,” Lilly said. “Come on. Who’s the little dude with the glasses?”

Before she could ask me anything else, though, Grandmère stood up—dumping poor Rommel from her lap to the ballroom floor, where he slid around a bit before finding his footing on the slippery parquet—and said in a deceptively kind voice (deceptive because, of course, Grandmère isn’t kind), as the room fell silent, “Welcome. For those of you who don’t know me, I am Clarisse, Dowager Princess of Genovia. I am very delighted to see so many of you here today for what will prove, I am certain, to be an important and historic moment in the history of Albert Einstein High School, as well as the theatrical world. But before I say more about that, allow me to introduce, without further ado, the much celebrated, world-famous theatrical director, Señor Eduardo Fuentes.”

Señor Eduardo! No! It can’t be!

And yet…it was! It was the famous director who had asked Grandmère, all those years before, to come to New York with him and star in an original Broadway production!

He had to have been in his thirties back then. He’s gotta be about a HUNDRED now. He’s so old, he looks like a cross between Larry King and a raisin.

Señor Eduardo struggled to rise from his chair, but he was so rickety and frail that he only managed to get about a quarter of the way up before Grandmère pushed him down again impatiently, then went on with her speech. I could practically hear his fragile bones snap under her grip.

“Señor Eduardo has directed countless plays and musicals on numerous prestigious stages worldwide, including Broadway and London’s West End,” Grandmère informed us. “You should all feel extremely honored at the prospect of working with such an accomplished and revered professional.”

“Tank you,” Señor Eduardo managed to get in, waving his hands around and blinking in the bright lights from the ballroom ceiling. “I tank you very, very much. It geeves me great pleasure to look out across so many youthful faces, shining with excitement and—”

But Grandmère wasn’t letting anyone, not even a centenarian world-famous director, steal her show.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she cut him off, “you are, as I said, about to audition for an original work that has never been performed before. If you are cast in this piece, you will, in essence, become a part of history. I am especially pleased about welcoming you here today because the piece you are about to read from was written almost entirely by”—she lowered her false eyelashes modestly—“me.”

“Oh, this is good,” Lilly said, eagerly jotting stuff down in her reporter’s notebook. “Are you getting this, POG?”

Oh, I was getting it all right. Grandmère wrote a PLAY? A play she means for us to put on to raise money for AEHS’s senior graduation?

I am so, so dead.

“This piece,” Grandmère was going on, holding up a sheaf of papers—the script, apparently—“is a work of complete originality and, I am not embarrassed to say, genius. Braid! is, essentially, a classic love story, about a couple who must overcome extraordinary odds in order to be together. What makes Braid! all the more compelling is that it is based on historical fact. Everything that happens in this piece ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE. Yes! Braid! is the story of an extraordinary young woman who, though she spent most of her life as a simple commoner, was one day thrust into a role of leadership. Yes, she was asked to assume the throne of a little country you all might have heard of, Genovia. This brave young woman’s name? Why, none other than the great—”