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“Grandmère, what are you doing, casting me in your musical?” I demanded. “You know I don’t want to be in it. I didn’t fill out the audition form, remember?”
“Is that all?” Grandmère seemed disappointed. “I thought you were only supposed to use your mobile in cases of emergency. I hardly think this constitutes an emergency, Amelia.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” I informed her. “This IS an emergency. An emergency crisis in our relationship—yours and mine.”
Grandmère seemed to find this statement totally hilarious.
“Amelia,” she said. “What is the one thing you have been complaining about most since the day you discovered you were, in reality, a princess?”
I had to think about this one.
“Having a bodyguard follow me around?” I asked, in a whisper, so Lars wouldn’t overhear and get his feelings hurt.
“What else?”
“Not being able to go anywhere without the paparazzi stalking me?”
“Think again.”
“The fact I have to spend my summers attending meetings of Parliament instead of going to camp like my friends?”
“Princess lessons, Amelia,” Grandmère says, into the phone. “You loathe and despise them. Well, guess what?”
“What?”
“Princess lessons are canceled for the duration of rehearsals for Braid! What do you think of that?”
You could almost hear the smug satisfaction in her voice. She totally thought she’d pulled one over on me.
Little did she know that my loyalty to my friends is stronger than my hatred for princess lessons!
“Nice try,” I informed her. “But I’d rather have to learn to say ‘Please pass the butter’ in fifty thousand languages than see Lilly not get the part she deserves.”
“Lilly is unhappy with the part she received?” Grandmère asked.
“Yes! She’s the best actress of all of us, she should have had the lead! But you gave her the stupid part of Alboin’s mistress, and she only has, like, two lines!”
“There are no small parts in the theater, Amelia,” Grandmère said. “Only small actors.”
WHAT? I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Whatever, Grandmère,” I said. “If you don’t want your show to suck, you should have cast Lilly in the lead. She—”
“Did I mention,” Grandmère interr
upted, “how much I enjoyed meeting your friend Amber Cheeseman?”
My blood literally ran cold, and I froze in front of the G & T room, my phone clutched to my face.
“Wh-what?”
“I wonder what Amber would say,” Grandmère went on, “if I happened to mention to her how you’d squandered the money for her commencement ceremony on recycling bins.”
I was too shocked to speak. I just stood there, while Boris tried to edge past me with his violin case, going, “Um, excuse me, Mia.”
“Grandmère,” I said, barely able to speak because my throat had gone so dry. “You wouldn’t.”
Her reply rocked me to my very core:
