“So,” Lana said, once we were all seated. “Everyone’s saying that J.P. guy saved your life. Are you two, like, going out?”

“No,” I said, feeling myself beginning to blush.

“Dude, why not?” Trisha ordered a nonfat no-whip caffè mocha and was blowing on it to cool it off. “Saving your life? That’s hot.”

“Yeah.” My cheeks felt as warm as my hot chocolate. “I just—you know. I’m just coming out of a long-term relationship, and I don’t know if I’m ready to jump back into another right now.”

“I hear you,” Lana said. “That’s how I’ve felt ever since I broke up with Josh. We’re young, you know? We have to play the field. Who needs to be tied down to one guy when you’re SIXTEEN?”

“I’d like to be tied down to Skeet Ulrich,” Trisha volunteered.

“It’s just…,” I said, ignoring the Skeet Ulrich remark. Although, you know, ditto. “I really love Michael. And the idea of being with some other guy…I don’t know. It doesn’t do anything for me.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Lana said, slurping some nonfat foam from her wooden stirrer. “After Josh and I broke up, I was like, who can ever replace Josh, you know? Because he’s, like, so tall and hot and smart and good about hanging out in the boyfriend chair while I’m shopping.”

“Totally,” Trisha said, nodding in agreement, “good about that. A lot of guys aren’t. You’d be surprised.”

“So I was really reluctant, you know, to hook up with anyone,” Lana went on, “because I just didn’t want to get hurt again. But then I thought, I need to make a new start. You know? Like a do-over. So I went to a party. And that’s where I met Blaine.”

“Blaize,” Trisha corrected her.

“Was that his name?” Lana looked far away. “Oh, yeah. Well, whatever. He was, like, my rebound guy. And after that I was totally cured.”

“You need a rebound guy,” Trisha said, pointing at me with her stirrer.

“I think it should be that J.P. guy,” Lana agreed. “I mean, he let himself get set on FIRE for you.”

“Getting set on fire is so hot,” Trisha informed me. Apparently without irony.

I nodded anyway. “I know. The thing is…on paper, J.P. is the perfect guy for me. We both love the theater and movies and come from similar backgrounds and my grandmother totally loves him and we both want to be writers—”

“And you’re both always scribbling in those notebooks,” Lana said, pointing at my Mead composition notebook with a manicured nail. “Like you’re doing now. Which isn’t weird at all, by the way.”

“Yeah,” I said, ignoring Trisha’s sarcastic snort. “And I know he’s good-looking and it was cool how he saved me and all. But it’s just…he doesn’t smell right.”

I knew they were both going to stare at me funny. And they both did. They had no idea what I was talking about.

No one does. No one gets it.

Except maybe my dad.

“Just get him a different cologne,” Trisha said.

“Yeah,” Lana said. “Josh used to wear this totally gross stuff that practically gave me a migraine, so for his birthday one year I got him some Drakkar Noir and he started wearing that instead. Problem solved.”

I had to pretend like I was thankful for this tip, and that it actually helped. Even though it totally didn’t. This, it turns out, is the problem with being friends with people in the popular crowd:

You can’t always tell them the truth about stuff, because a lot of things, they just don’t understand.

Thursday, September 23, Chemistry

Mia—you were so quiet at lunch today. Are you okay?

Yes, J.P.! Fine! Just…a little overwhelmed.

Not because of me, I hope.

No! Nothing to do with you!

You can’t tell cute guys the truth about stuff, either.

You’re lying.

No! I’m not! What would make you say that?

Your nostrils are flaring.

DANG! Can NOTHING in my life remain a secret?

Oh. Lilly told you about that?

She did. Listen, the last thing I want is for things to be weird between us.

They’re not! Well, I mean…not really.

I told you—I can wait.

I know! And it’s sweet of you. Really sweet!

I’m too sweet, aren’t I? Too much of a nice guy? Girls never fall for the nice guys.

No! You’re not nice. You’re scary, remember? At least according to your therapist….

Hey, that’s right. And didn’t your doctor tell you to do something every day that scares you?

Um. Yes….

Then you should go out with me Friday night.

I can’t! I have a thing.

Mia. I thought we were going to be honest with each other.

Do you see my nostrils flaring? Seriously, I have to give a speech at this Domina Rei gala.

Fine. I’ll be your escort.

You can’t. It’s women only.

Right.

I’m serious. Believe me, I wish I weren’t.

Okay. Saturday, then.

I can’t! I really have to study. Do you have any idea how tenuously I’m hanging on to my B-plus average right now?

Fine. But sooner or later, I’m taking you out. And you’re going to forget all about Michael. I promise.

J.P., you have no idea how much I hope that’s true.

Thursday, September 23, 8 p.m., limo on the way to the Four Seasons

Okay. It’s really hard to write this because my hands are shaking so hard.

But I need to get it all down. Because something happened.

Something big.

Bigger than a nitrostarch explosion. Bigger than Lilly hating me and maybe possibly being the founder of ihatemiathermopolis.com. Bigger than J.P. turning out to love me. Bigger than Michael turning out NOT to love me (anymore). Bigger than me having to start therapy. Bigger than my mom marrying my Algebra teacher and having his baby, or me turning out to be a princess, or Michael even loving me in the first place.

Bigger than anything that’s happened to me ever.

Okay. This is what happened:

It started out like a normal enough evening. I mean, I worked with Mr. G on my homework (I will never pass either Chemistry or Precalculus without daily tutoring—that much is clear), had dinner, and finally decided, you know, that Lana’s right: I need to make a new start. I need a do-over. Seriously. It’s time to go out with the old—old boyfriends, old best friends, old clothes that don’t fit me anymore, and old décor—and in with the new.

So I was rearranging my bedroom furniture (whatever. I was done with my homework, and I DON’T HAVE A TV ANYMORE. What ELSE was I supposed to do? Look up mean things about myself on the Internet? There is now a comment section on ihatemiathermopolis.com where someone from South Dakota just posted “I hate Mia Thermopolis, too! She is so shallow and self-absorbed! I once sent her an e-mail care of the Genovian palace and she never wrote back!”) when I accidentally knocked over Princess Amelie’s portrait.

And the back fell off. You know, the wood part that was over the back of the frame?

And I totally freaked out, because, you know, that portrait is probably priceless or whatever, like everything else at the palace.

So I scrambled over to pick it up.

And this paper fell out.

Not a paper, really. Some parchment. Like the kind they used to write on, back in the 1600s.

And it was covered all over in this scrawly seventeenth-century French that was really hard to read. It took me forever to decipher what it said. I mean, I could see that at the bottom it was signed by Princess Amelie—myPrincess Amelie. And that right next to her signature was the Genovian royal seal. And that next to that were the signatures of two witnesses, whose names were not familiar to me.

It took me a minute to figure out that they had to be the signatures of the two witnesses she had found to sign off on her executive order.

That’s when I realized what I was looking at. That thing Amelie had signed—the thing her uncle had gotten so mad at her for, and burned all the copies of…except one, that she’d hidden somewhere close to her heart.

At first I’d thought she’d meant LITERALLY next to her heart, and that whatever it was, it must have been burned to a crisp along with her body in the royal funereal pyre after Amelie’s death.

But then I realized she hadn’t been literal at all. She’d meant next to her PORTRAIT’s heart…which, in fact, is from where the parchment had fallen—from between the portrait and its backing. Where she’d hidden it to keep her uncle from finding it…and where the Genovian parliament was supposed to look for it, after Amelie’s diary and the portrait were returned to them from the abbey to which she’d sent them for safekeeping.

Except, of course, no one ever did. Read the diary, I mean (beyond translating it, apparently). Or found the parchment.

Until me.

So then, of course, I wondered what this thing could say. You know, if it had made her uncle so mad, he’d tried to burn all the copies, and she’d gone to so much trouble to hide the last one.

And even though at first it was kind of hard to figure out what, exactly, the document was talking about, by the time I’d finished translating all the words I didn’t know with the help of an online medieval French dictionary (thank you, nerds), I had a pretty good idea why Uncle Francesco had been so mad.

And also why Amelie had hidden it. And left clues in her journal as to where it could be found.

Because it was possibly the most inflammatory document I have ever read. Hotter, even, than Kenny’s nitrostarch synthesis experiment.

For a second, I could only stare down at it in total and complete astonishment.

And then I realized something…somethingamazing :

Princess Amelie Virginie Renaldo, all the way from 1669, had just totallysaved my butt !!!!!

Not just my butt, but my sanity…

…my life

…my future

…myeverything.

Really. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, and I know I do that a lot, but in this case…I’m not. I am totally and completely one-hundred-percent heart-pounding sweaty-palmed dry-mouthed serious.

So serious that for a minute, I thought I might have a heart attack on the spot.

Which is why as soon as I knew I was actually going to be okay, I called my dad and told him I was on my way uptown to see him. And Grandmère, too.

Because I have something to say to both of them.

Friday, September 24, 1 a.m., the loft

I can’t believe this. I can’t believe they’re—

This isn’t happening. It’s just NOT HAPPENING. It CAN’T be happening. Because how could my own blood relatives be so…so…sohorrible ?

I guess I could understand GRANDMÈRE’s reaction. But Dad? My OWNfather ?

It’s not like he didn’t think about what he was doing, either. He took the parchment from me and read it. He checked the seal and signature and everything. He studied it for a long time, while Grandmère sat there sputtering, “Ridiculous! A Genovian princess granting the people the right to ELECT a head of state, and declaring that the role of the Genovian sovereign is one of ceremony only? No ancestor of ours would be that stupid.”

“Amelie wasn’t being stupid, Grandmère,” I explained to her. “What she did was actually really smart. She was trying to HELP the Genovian people by sparing them from being ruled by someone she knew from personal experience was a tyrant, and who was only going to make an already bad situation, with the plague and everything, worse. It’s just bad luck that no one found the document until now.”

“It certainly is,” Dad said, still studying the parchment. “It might have spared the Genovian people a lot of hardship. The fact is, Princess Amelie made what, under the circumstances, was the best decision she could make at that time.”

“Right,” I said. “So we’ll have to get this to parliament as soon as possible. They’ll want to start nominating candidates for prime minister and figure out when they’re going to hold elections as soon as possible. And, Dad, I was going to say, I know this must come as a total blow to you, but if I know the Genovian people—and I think I do, by now—there’s only one person they’re going to want as their prime minister, and that’s you.”

“That’s kind of you to say, Mia,” Dad said.

“Well, it’s true,” I said. “And there’s nothing in the Bill of Rights as Amelie has laid them out to preclude any member of the royal family from running for prime minister if he or she wants to. So I think you should go for it. I know it’s not exactly the same thing, but I have some experience with elections thanks to the student council race last year. So if you need any help, I’ll be glad to do whatever I can.”

“What is this?” Grandmère sputtered. “Has everyone gone completely mad? Prime minister? No son of mine is going to be a prime minister! He’s a prince, need I remind you, Amelia!”