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“No,” I said. “It might be fun. No boys, right? That would be great. I mean, I’m kind of sick of boys right now.”
Grandmère shook her head. “But your friends . . . your mother . . .”
“Well,” I said, reasonably. “They could come visit.”
Then Grandmère’s face hardened. She peered at me from between the heavily mascaraed slits her eyes had become.
“Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Renaldo,” she said. “You are running away from something, aren’t you?”
I shook my head innocently. “Oh, no, Grandmère,” I said. “Really. I’d like to live in Genovia. It’d be neat.”
“NEAT?” Grandmère stood up. Her high heels went through the slots between the metal bars of the fire escape, but she didn’t notice. She pointed imperiously at my window.
“You get inside right now,” she ordered, in a voice I had never heard her use before.
I have to admit, I was so startled, I did exactly wh
at she said. I unplugged Ronnie’s electric blanket and crawled right back into my room. Then I stood there while Grandmère crawled back in, too.
“You,” she said, when she’d straightened out her skirt, “are a princess of the royal house of Renaldo. A princess,” she said, going to my closet, and rifling through it, “does not shirk her responsibilities. Nor does she run at the first sign of adversity.”
“Um, Grandmère,” I said. “What happened today was hardly the first sign of adversity, okay? What happened today was the last straw. I can’t take it anymore, Grandmère. I’m getting out.”
Grandmère pulled from my closet the dress Sebastiano had designed for me to wear to the dance. You know, the one that was supposed to make Michael forget that I am his little sister’s best friend.
“Nonsense,” Grandmère said.
That was all.
Just nonsense. Then she stood there, tapping her toes, staring at me.
“Grandmère,” I said. Maybe it was all that time I’d spent outside. Or maybe it was that I was pretty sure my mom and Mr. G and my dad were all in the next room, listening. How could they not be? There was no door, or anything, to separate my room from the living room.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I can’t go back there.”
“All the more reason,” Grandmère said, “for you to go.”
“No,” I said. “First of all, I don’t even have a date for the dance, okay? And P.S., only losers go to dances without dates.”
“You are not a loser, Amelia,” Grandmère said. “You are a princess. And princesses do not run away when things become difficult. They throw their shoulders back, and they face what disaster awaits them head on. Bravely, and without complaint.”
I said, “Hello, we are not talking about marauding visigoths, okay, Grandmère? We are talking about an entire high school that seems to think that I am in love with Boris Pelkowski.”
“Which is precisely,” Grandmère said, “why you must show them that it doesn’t matter to you what they think.”
“Why can’t I show them that it doesn’t matter by not going?”
“Because that,” Grandmère said, “is the cowardly way. And you, Mia, as you have shown amply this past week, are not a coward. Now get dressed.”
I don’t know why I did what she said. Maybe it was because somewhere deep inside, I knew that for once, Grandmère was right.
Or maybe it was because secretly, I guess I was a little curious to see what would happen.
But I think the real reason was because, for the first time in my entire life, Grandmère didn’t call me Amelia.
No. She called me Mia.
And because of my stupid sentimentalism, I am in a car right now, going back to stupid, crappy Albert Einstein High School, the dust from which I thought I’d managed to shake permanently from my feet not four hours ago.
