Royally Crushed (23 page)

“Definitely. I’ll call you.”

He sounds completely sincere, but I still wonder how many teenage angst movies I’ve seen where someone says, “I’ll call you.” It has to be a couple dozen. And in every single case, the guy never calls. It’s code for something else, something not good.

I’m not sure, but I might’ve just been dumped.

The
Washington Post
.

I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS!

I cannot even THINK about it. The picture Jules sent was apparently taken by the guy from
Majesty
, judging from the angle. It’s not the same photo they ran in the paper here. And thankfully, the
Washington Post
is not calling me corrupt. I did a Google search on the article, and it’s completely different than what was in the Schwerinborg paper. They just have three paragraphs saying that the prince of “tiny Schwerinborg” (and they also show it on the map, because of course no one in the States knows where Schwerinborg is except the twelve of us who actually got it correct on the Geography exam) might be dating an American, and that we were seen sneaking into an empty restroom together.

It does mention that the press in Europe is speculating that Georg and I might have been doing drugs, but that the palace adamantly denies it. And the
Post
article states flat out that there’s no evidence, in their words, that “either of these two teens, both of whom are honor roll students with spotless records, were dabbling in drugs.”

They actually write about it like it’s cool—the American-dates-European-prince-and-is-hounded-by-their-press angle, I suppose.

What’s really pissing me off, though, isn’t the newspapers, either here or in the States. It’s not Jules’s threat to put her boots to my butt, or Natalie (jokingly, I hope)
telling me I must be smoking crack. It’s the whole Georg thing.

Because, as I told Jules, and as the
Post
so eloquently states, it might have been a thing.

As in past tense.

As in, over before it began.

As in I am a complete and total idiot to have thought it meant a
thing
.

When I hung up after talking to Georg, I had a solid two hours to sit alone in my room and ignore the phone’s constant ringing before I got distracted by e-mail (since, for once, I thought it’d be wise for me to listen to Dad and not answer the phone, even if every time it rang I was hoping it’d be Georg).

But the whole ignoring-the-phone thing was made much easier by a simple realization that hit me a few minutes after I hung up.

Georg said
I think it’d be best if we cool it for a while
. Not his parents. Not the press office.

I.

To use his own word,
definitely
, he’s definitely not calling me again. This much I’ve figured out.

No wonder I’ve never had a boyfriend before. I clearly can’t keep one for even a week. And come on—if it was him trying to reach me on the phone when it kept ringing and
ringing, and if he really wanted to talk to me, then he’d try e-mailing or texting me, too. But so far, nada on that front. Just all my buds from Virginia wanting a piece of me when I’m already as beaten down as I can get.

There’s a light knock at my bedroom door. “Valerie?”

“Come on in, Dad.” I’m so numb, I don’t bother to move, even though I know I look completely lame. I’ve got one arm slung over my forehead, and I’m sprawled like one of those women who faints in Western movies after some guy dressed in black with really bad whiskey breath shoots the sheriff.

Except in my case, instead of having a totally hot cowboy crouching next to me, trying to loosen my corset so I can breathe, I’m just in jeans and an old sweater on my unmade bed, and I’m covered in Geometry homework.

As if on cue, my dad says, “I thought you finished your Geometry last night.”

“I’m so freaking pathetic, I’m working ahead so I don’t have to think about stuff.”

My dad walks to the edge of my bed and shakes my foot, which he loves to do whenever I’m vegging out. “Don’t use ‘freaking,’ Valerie. It sounds coarse.”

I move my arm far enough off my face to look at him. He’s clearly back to his old self. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad for me.

“You have a package from your mother.”

I push myself to a semi-sitting position, then look at the oversized, padded manila envelope with a horrible feeling of déjà vu. She warned me there’d be another self-help book, and this must be it. Dad can tell, too, because he’s holding the thing toward me as if it’s rat poison.

Kinda makes me wonder if he sort of blames Mom’s giant collection of self-help books for her coming out of the closet. We both know that’s not the case, obviously, but sometimes it sure feels that way. And there are days I think he wants to blame somebody, or something, for blindsiding him with the whole lesbian thing after nearly twenty years of marriage.

As bad as Mom’s decision makes me feel, I know he has it much, much worse.

I pull the string tab on the side of the package, then look at Dad and hold up the book.

It’s about cheese. No kidding. About who moved cheese. My mother is clearly getting back at me for making fun of her self-help book about moving cheese, because this is apparently the teen version. Gag.

I flip it over and look at the back cover. It’s supposed to help me deal with change in my life. I don’t think moving cheese around and having your brand-spankin’-new relationship (if that’s what it was) dissected by the Associated Press are equivalent, but whatever.

At least, given the cheese angle, it might be more entertaining than the book she sent last week. That book tried to convince me that my problems were small stuff.

Hah.

I’m thinking no self-help book author ever had a mother come out of the closet and move in with a vegan. Or ever found herself forced to choose between living with her gay mom (and the vegan girlfriend) or moving to Schwerinborg, but that’s just a wild guess on my part.

“Write your mother a nice e-mail to thank her,” Dad says, though he looks like he’s just thankful the book didn’t come to him.

“I will,” I grumble as I stuff the book back into the envelope.

“And while you’re at it, you can tell her you’ll be coming home next week for Winter Break.”

PS—Is Christie gone or something? She hasn’t e-mailed. Also, she was supposed to call but never did.

Spin control.

This is how my dad explains the fact that I am now on a plane, taxiing (is that really a verb?) toward the Jetway at Dulles International Airport.

Apparently, after his conference with Prince Manfred and Princess Claudia, Dad worried that things might get out of hand in the press. (I immediately asked if they could possibly get any worse, and Dad assured me they could. He even offered several hypothetical examples that convince me his protocol-wired brain is actually quite warped.)

So for the week of Winter Break, they—they being my dad, Georg’s parents, and all the suits in public relations at the palace—thought it would be a grand idea for me to get outta town and let the P.R. office deal with the press. Frankly, I’d rather stay in Schwerinborg to avoid 1) Jules’s ass-kicking; 2) dealing with Mom; and 3) making things even worse with Georg.

When I complained to Dad about not being consulted,
he told me that I’m fifteen and should get over it already, though he said it in a more formal, dad-ish way that made it hard for me to argue against.

My dad explained that the P.R. guys would accidentally but on purpose leak a story about how I would spend my vacation in the United States with family (making me sound very goody-goody and non-junkie-like), while Georg and some of the other guys from his year eleven class go skiing in Zermatt. Of course they would also accidentally but on purpose mention that Georg would be stopping to visit kids in hospitals on the way to and from Switzerland. All that nicey-nice prince stuff.

This is evidently what media types refer to as spin control: attempting to change or control the direction that a particular story will take in the press.

So after the week from hell at school—where Steffi gave me these
I’m so so sorry
(fake) looks, Ulrike walked around with a horrible guilty expression plastered to her perfect face, Maya simply avoided me, and my dad drove me to school so the reporters would have to leave me alone—Prince Manfred had his limousine take me from the palace to the Freital airport. Dad gave me a hundred bucks just in case, then sent me off. And now here I am, back in the States, in what must be the world’s ugliest airport.

Controlling spin.

According to my father, the hope is that the press will believe that: 1) Georg and I are not together (which might actually be true, depending on what “cool it” means); and/or 2) whether we’re together or not, we are good little kids and not the type to use drugs.

Although if anything will drive me to smoke weed, I decide it has to be the sight just past airport security. Yeegads.

Mom brought Gabrielle.

I kind of figured she would, but seeing them together makes me want to hork up the airplane food. Don’t they realize I’m suffering enough already?

“Val-er-eeeee!” My mom is jumping up and down and waving to make sure I recognize her in the crowd, as if her image hasn’t been burned on my brain from birth.

I wave back, hoping it’ll shut her up, even though I’m disappointed to see that she obviously still thinks her buzz cut is a good idea. She looks freshly shorn. I’d really been hoping she’d grow her hair back out. No woman my mother’s age—let alone a woman named Barbara—should wear her hair that short. Does she not own a mirror? Has she not seen a recent copy of
Glamour
or
Vogue
—or, geez, even
Good Housekeeping
?