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I guess I shouldn’t have been so shocked. Grandmère can be pretty self-absorbed, when she wants to
be.
“Grandmère, a man lost his job because of you,” I cried. “You’ve got to do something! He could starve.”
Grandmère looked at the ceiling. “Good heavens, Amelia.
I already got you an orphan. Are you saying you want to adopt a busboy as well?”
“No. But, Grandmère, it wasn’t Jangbu’s fault that he spilled soup on you. It was an accident. But it was caused by your dog.”
Grandmère shielded Rommel’s ears.
“Not so loud,” she said. “He’s very sensitive. The vet said—”
“I don’t care what the vet said,” I yelled. “Grandmère, you’ve got to do something! My friends are down at the restaurant picketing it right now!”
Just to be dramatic, I switched on the television and turned it to New York One. I didn’t really expect there to be anything on it about Lilly’s protest. Just maybe something about how there was a traffic snarl in the area, due to rubber-neckers peering at the spectacle Lilly was making of herself.
So you can imagine I was pretty surprised when a reporter started describing the “extraordinary scene outside Les Hautes Manger, the trendy four-star eatery on Fifty-seventh Street,” and they showed Lilly marching around with a big sign that said LES HAUTES MANGER MGMT UNFAIR. The biggest surprise wasn’t the large number of Albert Einstein High School students Lilly had managed to talk into joining her. I mean, I expected to see Boris there, and it wasn’t exactly astonishing to see that the AEHS Socialist Club was there as well, since they will show up at any protest they can find.
No, the big shocker was that there were a large number of men I’d never seen before marching right alongside Lilly and the other AEHS students.
The reporter soon explained why.
“Busboys from all over the city have gathered here in front of Les Hautes Manger to show their solidarity with Jangbu Panasa, the employee who was dismissed from Les Hautes Manger last night after an incident involving the dowager princess of Genovia.”
In spite of all of this, however, Grandmère remained completely unmoved. She just looked at the screen and clacked her tongue.
“Blue,” she said, “isn’t Lilly’s best color, is it?”
I seriously don’t know what I am going to do with the woman. She is completely IMPOSSIBLE.
Friday, May 2, the loft
You would think in my own house I would find a little peace and quiet. But no, I come home to find my mom and Mr. G in a raging fight. Usually their fights are about the fact that Mom wants a home birth with a midwife and Mr. G wants a hospital birth with the staff of the Mayo Clinic in attendance.
But this time it was because my mom wants to name the baby Simone if it’s a girl, after Simone de Beauvoir, and Sartre if it’s a boy, after—well, some guy named Sartre, I guess.
But Mr. G wants to name the baby Rose if it’s a girl, after his grandma, and Rocky if it’s a boy, after… well, apparently after Sylvester Stallone. Which, you know, having seen the movie Rocky, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since Rocky was very nice and all….
But my mom says over her dead body will her son—if she has a son—be named after a practically illiterate prize-fighter.
Still, if you ask me, Rocky is better than the last boy’s name they came up with: Granger. Thank God I went and looked up Granger in the baby-name book I bought them. Because once I let them know that Granger means “farmer” in Middle French, they totally cooled on it. Who names their baby “Farmer”?
Amelia doesn’t mean anything in French. It is said to be derivative of Emily, or Emmeline, which means “industrious” in Old German. The name Michael, which is old Hebrew, means “He who is like the Lord.” So you see that together, we make a very nice pair, being industrious and lordlike.
But the fight didn’t end with the whole Sartre-versus-Rocky thing. Oh no. My mom wants to go to BJ’s Wholesale Club in Jersey City tomorrow to buy the supplies for my party, but Mr. G is afraid that terrorists might set off a bomb in the Holland Tunnel, trapping them in there like Sylvester Stallone in the movie Daylight, and then Mom might go into labor prematurely and have the baby with the water from the Hudson River gushing all around.
Mr. G just wants to go to Paper House on Broadway to buy Queen Amidala birthday plates and cups.
Hello, I hope they know I am fifteen years—not months— old, and that I can perfectly understand everything that they are saying.
Whatever. I put on my headphones and turned on my computer in the hope of finding some solace from all the raised voices, but no such luck. Lilly could only have just gotten home from her protest thingie, but she’s already managed to send around a mass e-mail to everyone in school:
Fr: WOMYNRULE
ATTENTION ALL STUDENTS OF
