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NOT!!!!!!!
I have to admit, I am a little hurt. I’d thought, when he’d asked me all those questions about Michael, Sebastiano and I had kind of made a connection. But I guess not. Not if he could do something like this.
My dad has already called the Times and demanded that they remove the supplement from all the papers that haven’t been delivered yet. He has called the concierge of the Plaza and insisted on Sebastiano being listed as persona non grata, which means the cousin to the prince of Genovia won’t be allowed to set foot on hotel property.
I thought this was a little harsh, but not as harsh as what my dad wanted to do, which was call the NYPD and press charges against Sebastiano for using the likeness of a minor without the consent of her parents. Thank God Grandmère talked him out of that. She said there’d be enough publicity about this without the added humiliation of a royal arrest.
My dad is still so mad he can’t sit still. He is pacing back and forth across the suite. Rommel is watching him very nervously from Grandmère’s lap, his head moving back and forth, back and forth, his eyes following my dad as if he were watching the US Open or something.
I bet if Sebastiano were here, my dad would smash up a lot more than just his cell phone.
Saturday, December 13, 5 p.m., the loft
Well.
All I can say is, Grandmère’s really done it this time.
I’m serious. I don’t think my dad is ever going to speak to her again.
And I know I never will.
And okay, she’s an old lady and she didn’t know that what she was doing was wrong, and I should really be more understanding.
But for her to do this—for her not to even take into consideration my feelings—I frankly don’t think I will ever be able to forgive her.
What happened was, Sebastiano called right before I was getting ready to leave the hotel. He was completely perplexed about why my dad is so mad at him. He tried to come upstairs to see us, he said, but Plaza security stopped him.
When my dad, who’d answered the phone, told Sebastiano that the reason Plaza security stopped him was because he’d been PNG’d, and then explained why, Sebastiano was even more upset. He kept going, “But I had your permish! I had your permish, Phillipe!”
“My permission to use my daughter’s image to promote your tawdry rags?” My father was disgusted. “You most certainly did not!”
But Sebastiano kept insisting he had.
And little by little, it came out that he had had permission, in a way. Only not from me. And not my dad, either. Guess who, it appears, gave it to him?
Grandmère went, all indignantly, “I only did it, Phillipe, because Amelia, as you know, suffers from a terrible self-image, and needed a boost.”
But my dad was so enraged, he wouldn’t even listen to her. He just thundered, “And so to repair her self-image, you went behind her back and gave permission for her photo to be used in an advertisement for women’s clothing?”
Grandmère didn’t have much to say after that. She just stood there, going “Uhn . . . uhn . . . uhn . . .” like someone in a horror movie who’d been pinned to a wall with a machete but wasn’t quite dead yet (I always close my eyes during parts like this, so I know exactly what it sounds like).
It became clear that even if Grandmère had had a reasonable excuse for her behavior, my father wasn’t going to listen to it—or let me listen to it, either. He stalked over to me, grabbed my arm, and marched me right out of the suite.
I thought we were going to have a bonding moment, like fathers and daughters always do on TV, where he’d tell me that Grandmère was a very sick woman and that he was going to send her somewhere where she could take a nice, long rest, but instead all he said was, “Go home.”
Then he handed me over to Lars—after slamming the door to Grandmère’s suite VERY loudly behind him, before storming off in the direction of his own suite.
Jeez.
It just goes to show, even a royal family can be dysfunctional.
Couldn’t you just see us on Ricki Lake?
Ricki: Clarisse, tell us: Why did you allow Sebastiano to put your granddaughter’s photos in that Times advertising supplement?
Grandmère: That’s Your Royal Highness to you, Ms. Lake. I did it to boost her self-esteem.
I just know that when I get to school on Monday, everybody is going to be all, “Oh, look, here comes Mia, that big FAKE, with her vegetarianism and her animal-rights activism and her looks-aren’t-important-it’s-what’s-on-the-inside-that-matters-ism. But I guess it’s all right to pose for fashion photo shoots, isn’t it, Mia?”
