Party Princess (17 page)

J.P. blinked.

“I know,” he said. “That was a joke. I mean, after she freaked out about the meat in the vegetarian lasagna that
one time, the whole SCHOOL knows she’s a vegetarian.”

“Oh, yeah?” Boris said. “Well, you’re one to talk, Mr. Guy Who Hates It When They—”

I had to slap my hand over Boris’s mouth before he could finish.

“Good night, J.P.,” I said. “See you tomorrow!” Then, after he’d left the room, I let Boris go, and had to wipe my hand on a napkin.

“God, Boris,” I said. “Drool much?”

“I have a problem with oversecretion of saliva,” he informed me.

“NOW you tell me.”

“Wow, Mia,” Lilly said, as we were on our way out. “Way to overreact. What is wrong with you, anyway? Do you
like
that J.P. guy or something?”

“No,” I said, offended. Geez, I mean, I’ve only been dating her brother for a year and a half. She should KNOW by now who I like. “But you guys could at least be nice to him.”

“Mia just feels guilty,” Boris observed, “because she killed him off in her short story.”

“No, I don’t,” I snapped.

But as usual, I was fully lying. I
do
feel guilty about killing J.P. in my story.

And I hereby swear I will never kill another character based on a real person in my fiction again.

Except when I write my book about Grandmère, of course.

Friday, March 5, 10 p.m., the Moscovitzes’ living room

Okay, these movies Michael is making me watch? They are so depressing! Dystopic science fiction just isn’t my thing. I mean, even the WORD “dystopic” bums me out. Because dystopia is the OPPOSITE of utopia, which means an idyllic or totally peaceful society. Like the utopian society they tried to build in New Harmony, Indiana, where my mom made me go one time when we were trying to get away from Mamaw and Papaw during a visit to Versailles (the one in Indiana).

In New Harmony, everyone got together and planned this, like, perfect city with all these pretty buildings and pretty streets and pretty schools and stuff. I know it sounds repulsive. But it’s not. New Harmony is actually cool.

A dystopic society, on the other hand, is NOT cool. There are no pretty buildings or streets or schools. It’s a lot like the Lower East Side used to be before all the rich dot-com geniuses moved down there and they opened all those tapas bars and three-thousand-dollar-a-month-maintenance-fee condos, actually. You know, one of those places where everything is pretty much gas stations and strip clubs, with the occasional crack dealer on the corner thrown in for good measure.

Which is the kind of society heroes in pretty much all the dystopic sci-fi movies we’ve seen tonight have lived.

Omega Man
? Dystopic society brought on by mass plague that killed most of the population and left everybody (except Charlton Heston) a zombie.

Logan’s Run
? Utopian society that turns out to be dystopic when it is revealed that in order to feed the population with the limited resources left to them after a nuclear holocaust, the government is forced to disintegrate its citizens on their thirtieth birthdays.

2001: A Space Odyssey
is up next, but I seriously don’t think I can take it anymore.

The only thing making any of this bearable is that I get to snuggle up next to Michael on the couch.

And that we get to make out during the slow parts.

And that during the scary parts, I get to bury my head against his chest and he wraps his arms around me all tight and I get to smell his neck.

And while this would be more than satisfying under normal circumstances, there is the small fact that whenever things start getting REALLY passionate between Michael and me—like, heated enough for him to actually press pause on the remote—we can hear Lilly down the hall screaming, “A curse upon you, Alboin, for being the scurrilous dog I always knew you to be!”

Can I just say it’s very hard to get swept away in the arms of your one true love when you can hear someone yelling, “You would take this common Genovian wench to wed when you could have me, Alboin? Fie!”

Which may be why Michael just went to the kitchen to get us some more popcorn. It looks like
2001: A Space Odyssey
may be our only hope for drowning out Lilly’s not-so-dulcet tones as she and Lars rehearse her lines.

Although—seeing as how I’m making this new effort to stop lying so much—I should probably admit that it’s not
just Lilly’s strident rehearsing that’s keeping me from being able to give Michael my full attention, make out–wise. The truth is, this party thing is weighing down on me like that banana snake Britney wore at the VMAs that one time.

It’s killing me inside. It really is. I mean, I made the dip—French onion, you know, from the Knorr’s packet—and everything, to make him think I’m looking forward to tomorrow night and everything.

But I’m so not.

At least I have a plan, though. Thanks to Lana. About what I’m going to do during the party. I mean, the dancing thing. And I have an outfit. Well, sort of. I think I might have cut my skirt a little TOO short.

Although to Lana, there’s probably no such thing.

Oooooh, Michael’s back, with more popcorn. Kissing time!

Saturday, March 6, midnight

Close call: When I got home from the Moscovitzes’ this evening, my mom was waiting up for me (well, not exactly waiting up for ME. She was watching that three-part
Extreme Surgery
on Discovery Health about the guy with the enormous facial birthmark that even eight surgeries couldn’t totally get rid of. And he couldn’t even put a mask on that side of his face like the
Phantom of the Opera
guy, because his birthmark was all bumpy and stuck out too far for any mask to fit over. And Christine would just be all,
Um, I can totally see your scars even with your mask, dude
. Plus he probably didn’t have an underground grotto to take her to anyway. But whatever).

Even though I tried to sneak in all quietly, Mom caught me, and we had to have the conversation I’d really been hoping to avoid:

Then I had to go into my room and breathe into a paper bag because I thought I might be hyperventilating.

Saturday, March 6, 2 p.m., the Grand Ballroom, the Plaza

Okay, so acting may be a little harder than I thought it was. I mean, that thing I wrote a while back, about how the reason so many people want to be actors is because it’s really easy and you get paid a lot—

That might be true. But it turns out it’s not that easy. There’s a whole lot of stuff you have to remember.

Like blocking. That’s, like, where you move on the stage as you’re saying your lines. I always thought actors just got to make this up as they went along.

But it turns out the director tells them exactly where to move, and even on which word in which line to do it. And how fast. And in which direction.

At least, if that director is Grandmère.

Not that she’s the director, of course. Or so she keeps assuring us. Señor Eduardo, propped up in a corner with a blanket covering him to his chin, is REALLY directing this play. I mean, musical.

But since he can barely stay awake long enough to say, “And… scene!” Grandmère has generously come forward to take over.

I’m not saying this wasn’t her plan all along. But she sure isn’t admitting it if it was.

Anyway, in addition to all of our lines, we also have to remember our blocking.

Blocking isn’t choreography, though. Choreography is the dancing you do while you’re singing the songs.

For this, Grandmère hired a professional choreographer.
Her name is Feather. Feather is apparently very famous for choreographing several hit Broadway shows. She also must be pretty hard up for cash if she’d agree to choreograph a snoozer like
Braid!
But whatever.

Feather is nothing like the choreographers I’ve seen in dancing movies like
Honey
or
Center Stage
. She doesn’t wear any makeup, says her leotard was made from hemp, and she keeps asking us to find our centers and focus on our chi.

When Feather says things like this, Grandmère looks annoyed. But I know she doesn’t want to yell at Feather since she’d be hard-pressed to find a new choreographer at such short notice if Feather quits in a fit of pique, as dancers are apparently prone to do.

But Feather isn’t as bad as the vocal coach, Madame Puissant, who normally works with opera singers at the Met and who made us all stand there and do vocal exercises, or
vocalastics
, as she called it, which involved singing the words
Me, May, Ma, Mo, Moooo-oooo-oooo-ooo
over and over again in ever-ascending pitches until we could “feel the tingle in the bridge of our nose.”

Madame Puissant clearly doesn’t care about the state of our chis because she noticed Lilly wasn’t wearing any fingernail polish and almost sent her home because “a diva never goes anywhere with bare nails.”

I noticed Grandmère seems to approve VERY highly of Madame Puissant. At least, she doesn’t interrupt her at all, the way she does Feather.

As if all of this were not enough, there was also costume measurements to endure and, in my case anyway, wig fittings as well. Because, of course, the character of
Rosagunde has to have this enormously long braid, since that is, after all, the title of the play.

I mean, musical.

I’m just saying, everyone was worried about getting their LINES memorized in time, but it turns out there is WAY more involved in putting on a play—I mean, musical—than just memorizing your lines. You have to know your blocking and choreography as well, not to mention all the songs and how not to trip over your braid, which, since we don’t have a braid yet, in my case means not tripping over one of those velvet ropes they used to drape outside the Palm Court to keep people from storming it before it opened for afternoon tea, and which Grandmère has wrapped around my head.

I guess it isn’t any wonder I have a little headache. Although it’s not any worse than the ones I get every time they cram me into a tiara.

Right now J.P. and I have a little break because Feather is going over the choreography for the chorus of the song
Genovia!,
which everyone but he and I sing. It turns out that Kenny, in addition to not being able to sing or act, can’t dance either, so it is taking a really long time.

That’s okay, though, because I’m using the time to plot tonight’s Party Strategy and talk to J.P., who really turns out to know a LOT about the theater. That’s on account of his father being a famous producer. J.P. has been hanging around the stage since he was a little kid, and he’s met tons of celebrities because of it.

“John Travolta, Antonio Banderas, Bruce Willis, Renée Zellweger, Julia Roberts… pretty much everybody there is to meet,” is how J.P. replied, when I asked
him who all he meant by celebrities.

Wow. I bet Tina would change places with J.P. in a New York minute, even if it meant, you know. Becoming a boy.

I asked J.P. if there was any celebrity he HADN’T met, that he wanted to, and he said just one: David Mamet, the famous playwright.

“You know,” he said, “
Glengarry Glen Ross. Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Oleanna.
”

“Oh, sure,” I said, like I knew what he was talking about.

I told him that was still pretty impressive—I mean, that he’d met almost everybody else in Hollywood.