Third Time Lucky

I swear, I do not understand boys at all.

As if lunch wasn't bad enough, G & T isn't too great, either. No, Judith Gershner isn't here . . . but neither is Michael. The guy is AWOL. Nobody knows where he is. Lilly had to tell Mrs Hill, when she took attendance, that her brother was in the bathroom.

I wonder where he really is. Lilly says that since he started writing this new program that the Computer Club will be unveiling

at the Winter Carnival, she's hardly seen him.

Which is no real change since Michael hardly comes out of his room anyway, but still. You'd think he'd come home once in a while to study.

But I guess, seeing as how he already got into his first-choice college, his grades don't really matter any more.

Besides, like Lilly, Michael is a genius. What does he need to study for?

Unlike the rest of us slobs.

I wish they'd put the door back on the supply closet. It is extremely hard to concentrate with Boris scraping away on his violin in there. Lilly says this is just another tactic by the trustees to weaken our resistance so we will remain the mindless drones they are trying to make us, but I think it's On account of that time we all forgot to let him out and he was stuck in there until the night custodian heard his anguished pleas to be released.

Which is Lilly's fault, if you think about it. I mean, she s his girlfriend. She should really take better care of him.

Homework:

Algebra: practice test

English: term paper

World Civ.: practice test

G & T: none

French: l'exarnen pratique

Biology: practice test

Thursday, December 10, 9 p.m.

Grandmere is seriously out of control. Tonight she started quizzing me on the names and responsibilities of all of my dad's cabinet ministers. Not only do I have to know exactly what they do, but also their marital status and the names and ages of

their kids, if any. These are the kids I am supposedly going to have to hang out with while celebrating Christmas at the Palace.

I am figuring they will probably hate me as much, if not more, than Mr Gianini's niece and nephew hated me at Thanksgiving.

All of my holidays from now on are apparently going to be spent in the company of teens who hate me.

You know, I would just like to say that it is totally not my fault I am a princess. They have no right to hate me so much. I have done everything I could to maintain a normal life in spite of my royal status. I have totally turned down opportunities to be on the covers of Cosmo Girl, Teen People, Seventeen, YM and Girl's Life. I have refused invitations to go on TRL and introduce the number one video in the country, and when the mayor asked if I wanted to be the one to press the button that drops the ball in Times Square on New Year's Eve, I said no (aside from the fact I am going to be in Genovia for New Year's, I oppose the Mayor's mosquito-spraying campaign, as runoff from the pesticides used to kill the mosquitoes that may be carrying the West Nile virus has infected the local horseshoe crab population. A compound in the blood of horseshoe crabs, which nest all along the eastern seaboard, is used to test the purity of every drug and vaccine administered in the U.S. The crabs are routinely gathered, drained of a third of their blood, then re-released into the sea . . . a sea which is now killing them, as well as many other arthropods, such as lobsters, thanks to the amount of pesticide in it).

Anyway, I am just saying, all the kids who hate me should chill because I have never once sought the spotlight I have been thrust into. I've never even called my own press conference.

But I digress.

So Sebastiano was there, with Grandmere, drinking aperitifs and listening as I rattled off name after name (Grandmere has made flashcards out of the pictures of the cabinet ministers - kind of like those bubble gum cards you can get of the Backstreet Boys, only the cabinet ministers don't wear as much leather). I was kind of thinking maybe I was wrong about Sebastiano's commitment to fashion, and that maybe he was there to try and pick up some pointers for after he's thrust me into the path of

an oncoming limo or whatever.

But when Grandmere paused to take a phone call from her old friend General Pinochet, Sebastiano started asking me all these questions about clothes, in particular what clothes my friends and I like to wear. What were my feelings, he wanted to know, on velvet stretch trousers? Spandex tube-tops? Sequins?

I told him all of that sounded, you know, OK for Halloween or Jersey City, but that generally in my day-today life I prefer cotton. He looked saddened by this, so I told him that I really felt orange was going to be the next pink and that perked him right up, and he wrote a bunch of stuff down in this notebook he carries around. Kind of like I do, now that I think about it.