Royally Crushed (15 page)

Not that I can think about that right now.

I just hope Mom doesn’t find out how much he spent, though maybe she won’t care anymore. I mean, she and Dad finally agreed on a lump sum for alimony without having to deal with lawyers, and I know it’s plenty, even though he doesn’t have to give her any child support or anything.

But I am determined not to hold against her the fact she kept telling Dad (usually with Gabrielle in the room) that he could afford to pay her a hell of a lot more.

Small stuff, right?

I take a deep breath—doing my best to think only good thoughts about Mom or nothing at all, because if I let myself, I could go on all day about her stupid choice of an e-mail address, let alone the money thing—and I turn back around to face the full-length mirror that Dad was brilliant enough to have installed on the back of the door to my bathroom. The bathroom’s so tiny I have to stand in the shower to see all of me in the mirror, but it doesn’t matter.

I look amazing.

I’ve always hated my red hair. Not so much because it’s different—that’s the one thing I like about it—but because it makes me look not-quite-right in clothes and makeup.

Clothes have to stay basic—grays and blacks and other neutrals—or I could seriously blind someone. Contrary to popular belief and my mother’s shopping tendencies, jewel-tone greens and blues do
not
look good on redheads.
It makes us look like we belong on the cast of
Dynasty
or
Falcon Crest
or some other corny, over-the-top eighties TV drama. Just picture a pale actress like Nicole Kidman as a teenager in electric pink and you get the idea.
Hideous.
So I limit the colored shirts I wear to my one—
one
—red floral top that Christie bought me for Christmas last year at the Fair Oaks mall and a funky blue halter I purchased myself.

And while clothes can be a challenge, makeup is worse. The chemists at your big cosmetics companies design makeup in shades that look fantastic on your average brown-or blue-eyed, dirty-blond-to-brunette person. Those colors don’t work on someone whose face is so shockingly white that wearing reflective gear for an evening jog through the neighborhood is redundant.

But Dad outdid himself here. I mean, our shopping trip was almost like an episode of E!’s
Fashion Emergency
come to life. Only I was the emergency and he was this hunky version of the host and had all the store clerks melting.

First, he got me this killer—and I mean
killer
—dress. As in, the thing is a deep bloodred. Beyond red. I never, ever would have pulled this thing off the rack, but Dad insisted I try it on, and even though I argued with him the whole way to the dressing room, trying to explain the whole ugly-redhead-in-bright-colors concept, I took back
every word the instant I got the thing over my head and got an eyeful in the store’s three-way mirror.

It makes me look like a
goddess
.

And the thing is, the other reason I wear a lot of black is because it lets me blend in and not look like I’m trying too hard to be noticed. This dress—believe it or not—does the same thing. It’s classy and understated. And it’s
red
. Go figure!

I turn around in the shower for a final inspection. I’m being pretty harsh on myself as I look in the bathroom mirror, trying to see what I look like if I slouch, when I sit, or if I act flirty. But even if I
try
to look like a desperate girly-girl, which is pretty easy to do when you’re standing in a circa 1970s shower stall, I don’t.

In this dress, I actually look confident.

How did Dad do that?! It’s like he’s right up there with the hoity-toity hotel manager from
Pretty Woman
who knew just how to turn Julia Roberts from a total ho into Richard Gere’s dream girl.

Now that I think of it, Julia’s dress in that movie was red too. Freaky.

Anyway, the best part of the shopping trip came after the red dress, when Dad parked me at a cosmetics counter and told the ladies to go to work. He had them redo my face twice, since he didn’t like what they did on the first
or
second go-round. Then he handed the woman behind the register his plastic and gave her a limit, telling her to get me the most essential items needed to re-create the look, while he headed off to the shoe department.

I’m not kidding. Dad picked out my
shoes
.

And you wonder why, if I’d had to peg one of my parents as having gay tendencies, Dad came to mind before Mom.

He brought me these totally fun strappy things to try on—they let him, because they could see me at the makeup counter from the shoe department, plus I think the shoe department lady thought my dad was cute—and even though the shoes were kind of sexy, they weren’t so high they were uncomfortable.

It usually takes me trying on, like, ten pairs of heels to find a pair that fits and feels comfy. I’m much more the Skechers and Converse shoe type than one of those girls who wears four-inch heels, and it’s usually obvious when I actually
need
a pair of heels how unnatural they are on me. But Dad found the perfect pair on his first try. And now that I’m looking at the whole thing in the full-length mirror, I realize how awesome they look with the dress.

And that’s standing in the shower. I cannot imagine how kickin’ this is going to look once I’m in that big, fancy reception hall with chandeliers and candlelight.

I might actually look like a girl who is pretty enough to go to dinner with a prince.

When I finally walk out of the bathroom to show Dad, he’s standing in the living room wearing his tux. He doesn’t say anything. He just smiles.

You’d think I was wearing white and standing at the back of a church about to take his arm, he’s so proud of himself.

He has to leave for dinner earlier than me, since he needs to be available to Prince Manfred as soon as the British prime minister arrives at the palace, but I know he’s thrilled I got dressed an hour early, just so he could check me out before he has to leave.

All I can do is tell him thanks. And that I am glad I decided to come with him to Schwerinborg, even if I did have to leave all my friends and my entire social life a couple thousand miles away. Because I know he loves me and wants to do whatever it takes for me to be happy—even when that means making me study an extra hour for a geometry exam so I can be proud of how I’ve done.

He shakes his head and laughs, but it’s not an altogether happy laugh. I can tell he wants to give me another warning about Georg. He’s totally worried that I’m getting into more than I can handle since Georg’s not your typical guy, no matter how much I want to believe it.

Luckily, he knows I know that, and he leaves without saying anything.

I walk back to the bathroom and look in the mirror again, trying to see what Georg will see.

For the first time in my life, I
so
hope I’m going to get more than I can handle.

I can’t identify my soup, which is a light, minty green color. I also cannot identify the meat on my plate, which is some kind of fancy stuffed bird I have no idea how to eat. But I can’t even think about the food, despite the fact food generally occupies a very high spot on my priority list.

Georg’s leg is rubbing against mine under the table, and he’s totally doing it on purpose.

And what’s worse, I like it. A lot.

But what I cannot get over is that
David Anderson likes me
! For
real
. After all these years. After all this wishing and hoping and fixing my hair just so and choosing at least one class I know he’s going to be taking every quarter in the hope that he’ll
notice
me as something other than a friend. And now, apparently, he has. Or did.

That has to be what Christie wants to tell me. There can’t be another way to interpret her e-mail.

I think I am going to hurl all over the nice white table
cloth and fancy crystal goblets. My stomach is just one big friggin’ knot.

I wish, wish, wish I’d just left to meet Georg in the library when Dad left the apartment. I could’ve found plenty of things to do while I was waiting. I could’ve sketched while I waited. I could’ve stared out the window. I could’ve relaxed in front of the fire with a nice leather-bound copy of Dickens or whatever it is Prince Manfred keeps on the library shelves.

Okay, so I’m not into Dickens.

But what I should
not
have done is go online to read my e-mail and make sure Christie got my message not to call tonight, because she just gave me way more information than I can handle.

What am I going to
do
?!

How is this even possible? How can two guys like me?

And how can I not know which one I really want?

No, I know which one I want. The one who actually talks to me about me and who gets the thing with my mom.

Right?

Then I feel Georg’s fingers on my knee. I’m so surprised I bump against the table, even though he’s had his leg touching mine the whole meal. He starts making little circles with his fingers, twisting the red fabric of my dress into little swirls against my leg.

Okay, forget David.

I so want to go find a room with Georg. I mean, could he be any hotter? He’s wearing a tux, but it doesn’t look stupid on him, like on most guys when they’re going to the prom. He looks like he wears one all the time. And the best part is that the dark jacket shows off his blue eyes and his high cheekbones, making him look even more interesting and mysterious.

I glance to my left, where he’s sitting. His parents are at another table across the room, talking with the British prime minister and smiling for the press photographers—there are about a dozen or so of them crowded along the walls on that end of the room—so I don’t think anyone saw me jump. We’re stuck sitting with the losers. Okay, not really losers—I mean, they’re all fairly important people—but the press isn’t clamoring for snapshots of them like they are of Manfred and Claudia. Our table is filled with people like Prince Manfred’s private secretary, the minister of the treasury, and a couple of foreign diplomats—one of whom, Georg mentions, is Ulrike’s father—who only care about whether they’ll get a few minutes’ conversation with the P.M. after dinner, and a few random staff members like my dad. Though thankfully, he’s three people around the table from me, so he doesn’t have a good angle to see me.

The only fairly important person on this whole side of
the room is Georg’s uncle, Prince Klaus, who’s at the table behind us, with his back toward Georg’s. I guess Klaus is Manfred’s younger brother.

Could you imagine growing up in a house where the kids are named
Klaus
and
Manfred
?

Well, I’ve now been in Schwerinborg long enough to find this absolutely believable. I’ve also been here long enough to realize that the family members who aren’t in the direct line of succession—people like Georg’s uncle—and other diplomats get about a tenth of the attention someone like Georg does in the press, so they kind of run in their own little worlds. And on nights where politics is the hot topic, like tonight, the only press who show up are from the supersnooty papers and political magazines—reporters who’d rather figure out what the British P.M. tells Manfred about the environment than the fact that Georg brought a date to the dinner.

Of course, this means all of the people on our loser side of the room are talking to each other about their own little lives, and unless they get to meet the P.M., they don’t care about being here. It’s all same-old, same-old party circuit to them.

And none of them are looking at me or Georg.

I put my napkin up to my mouth and hiss, “Hey, cut it out.”

He sneaks a look at the photographers, then at his uncle. Without looking directly at me, he says, “You don’t like it?”

And he moves his fingers another inch or two higher.

Oh. My. God.

“No.” I blot an imaginary bit of food from my mouth and glance at Dad, making sure Georg follows my point. “I do. But . . .”

He smiles and takes his hand off my knee. He waits a half beat, then gets a hunk of asparagus on his fork before whispering, “Good.”

We keep quiet for the rest of the meal, but I can still feel where his fingers were on my leg, playing with my dress. Georg told me in the library, before we came in to the dinner, that he’d told his parents it was a date. However, he says that if it comes up, his parents are going to tell the reporter types that I’m the daughter of a staff member, and they thought it would be nice for Georg to have company his own age at one of these events. Period.

His parents were very cool when I met them too. They sound like they’re as laid back as Dad, once they get away from the cameras. So maybe sneaking away after dinner won’t be such a bad thing.

And then I feel Georg playing with my dress again under the table.