by Meg Cabot
I will not make an appointment with Rolanda. I am on my way to see you (even though we’re stuck in traffic right now). So you had better have an explanation ready. Why would you do something so horrible as announce my engagement to the press before we had a chance to tell Michael’s parents in person?
Oh, it’s you. Amelia, something terrible has happened. Please come see me at once.
Something terrible is ABOUT to happen. To you.
Amelia, I am speaking of something of national urgency. I dare not write it here. We could be being spied upon, you know.
Let me get this straight. You sent out a press release that I’m getting married to distract everyone from some OTHER story that you’re afraid is about to break? Who are you now, President Snow from “The Hunger Games”?
Amelia, don’t be flippant.
Sometimes I think Rommel may not be the only one in the family with dementia.
CHAPTER 24
5:20 p.m., Monday, May 4
Grandmère’s Condo, The Plaza Hotel
Rate the Royals Rating: 1
Well, that was . . . I don’t even have words to describe what that was.
But I have to write it all down because it’s the only way I’m ever going to make sense of it, let alone figure out what I’m going to do about it.
It started normally enough—normally enough for my family, anyway—when I walked in and Grandmère didn’t want to talk about it (of course).
All she wanted to do was order us “tea” from room service. She said she couldn’t bear the thought of telling me the “heinous news” on an empty stomach, and of course she’d sent away her assistant, Rolanda, because what we needed to discuss was “so private.”
Except not so private that certain other people don’t know all about it. Only of course I didn’t find that out until later.
“So let’s be honest, Grandmère,” I said, sitting down on one of her overstuffed pink satin-covered Louis Quatorze armchairs (her new decorator has told her that “everything old is new again,” which is another way of saying, “I need a hundred-thousand-dollar commission, so let’s redecorate”).
“There is no heinous news, am I right? You’re simply upset that I caught you using my marriage proposal as a propaganda tool to boost Dad’s image since he got arrested. Or is it that I’m marrying Michael, and not the heir to some wealthy European family? Well, I’m sorry, but you’re just going to have to get used to the idea of the next prince consort of Genovia being a Jewish computer genius who looks incredibly good in board shorts.”
“Don’t be a fool, Amelia,” Grandmère said. She was trying to keep Rommel from humping an incredibly ugly antique milking bench for which I happened to know she’d paid sixteen thousand euros. “Why would I want you to marry anyone other than Michael? He saved our lives that summer he fixed the hi-fi at the palace and I was able to cast my vote for my darling Rudolpho on Genovia Can Dance.”
I rolled my eyes. “You mean when he fixed the Wi-Fi.”
“Whatever it’s called. Now get up and help me with this dog.”
I thought she meant Rommel, so I got up to help her place him back in his basket (eighteenth-century French egg-gathering, one thousand euros). But she said, “Not that dog! He’s fine. The other one. Get the other one!”
Yes, Grandmère now owns another dog (although this isn’t the national emergency. I wish).
And while it is very adorable—for now, anyway, the dog still has all its hair—really, people who can’t take proper care of their current pet shouldn’t go out and buy a second one.
“Why?” I demanded, lifting the tiny white powder puff I found digging for a stray cocktail onion under the $40,000 white satin-covered couch. “Why did you get another dog?”
“She’s top of the line,” Grandmère said. “The breeder assured me that any puppies she has with Rommel will be of the highest quality, intelligence, and beauty. And you’re the one who said I needed to solve Rommel’s little . . . problem.”
I was horrified. “By getting him fixed, not by buying him a wife! And look, he’s not even interested in her.” Rommel was humping his thousand-euro French egg-gathering basket.
“Oh, that’s because she isn’t in heat yet,” Grandmère said matter-of-factly.
“But he’ll hump my leg, regardless of whether or not I’m in the mood. Grandmère, this is worse than The Bride of Frankenstein, because instead of building Rommel a girlfriend out of corpses, which he’d have been fine with since he can’t tell inanimate objects from animated ones, you actually went out and bought him a living girlfriend.”
“Stop worrying about the dog, she’s perfectly happy. Show me the ring.”
I put Grandmère’s sweet, innocent new dog down in the kitchen with a bowl of food and another of water, then closed the door to keep her safe from Rommel’s advances (should he choose ever to make any) and went back to show my grandmother the ring Michael had given me.
“As you can see,” I said, “your spies got it wrong. It’s not a sapphire.”
“Good Lord!” she cried. Of course, while I’d been out of the room she’d put on her jeweler’s loupe to examine the stone. “This must be seven carats at least. I didn’t know robot builders made so much money. I have renewed respect for the boy.”
I snatched my hand away from her. “Michael isn’t a boy, he’s a man. And I’ve told you repeatedly he doesn’t build robots, he designs robotic surgical arms and now prostheses. And it’s a lab-grown diamond.”
She immediately dropped my hand. “It’s fake? I take back everything I said about respecting him.”
“Lab-grown diamonds aren’t fake like cubic zirconia, Grandmère. They’re actual diamonds, they’re just grown in a laboratory instead of in a mine, so there’s no human-rights or environmental impact in harvesting them.”
Grandmère sighed like I’d just told her that Michael and I were moving to one of those adult gated communities where no one wears any clothes at the public tennis courts because they want to “express their true selves.”
“I don’t suppose this day could get any worse,” she said.
“For me,” I said. “I was hoping to spend this day personally sharing news of my engagement with all my loved ones, and now I’m having to explain to them why they’ve heard about it via text message or gossip news sites. So why don’t we talk about this matter of ‘national urgency’ that you keep saying made it necessary for you to put out a press release that I’m getting married this July, which, by the way, I’m not. And if this national matter is so urgent, why isn’t Dad here?”
She regarded me unblinkingly through her tattooed-on eyeliner. “Because the news I have to impart to you, Amelia, is about your father.”
For the second time in seventy-two hours, my heart stopped. The one person I hadn’t spoken to (or heard from) all day was Dad.
“Grandmère!” I grabbed her veiny, many-ringed hand. “What happened? Was it his heart? Was it a protester? Where have they taken him? Can I see him?”
“Pull yourself together!” I think Grandmère would have slapped me if I hadn’t already been holding her hand (and there hadn’t been a cocktail in her other one). “Your father is fine. This is no time for hysterics. Have a drink, like a normal person.”
In Grandmère’s day, people didn’t take antidepressants or go see therapists when they were distressed about something. They had some sense slapped into them, or they had a drink “like a normal person.”
I have to admit, this does save a lot of time, unless of course you happen to be an alcoholic, or what’s bothering you is that family members are always slapping you, which nowadays is called “abuse.”
Fortunately by that time “tea” had arrived, so finger sandwiches and “tea” had been spread out over the antique marble coffee table (7,500 euros). Grandmère was already armed with her traditional sidecar, so I made myself a vodka tonic because frankly I didn’t think I could take whatever was coming sober.
“If Dad’
s not dead, what is it, then?” I asked, after taking a few fortifying gulps. “He didn’t get arrested again, did he?”
“No, but that’s how I discovered all of this in the first place.” Grandmère sat down and bit into an egg-salad sandwich on white bread with the crusts cut off. “While I was searching through your father’s desk, looking for his checking-account number to post his bail after he was incarcerated.”
“Wait. You paid Dad’s bail with money from his own account?”
“Of course. It was his foolishness that landed him in jail. Why would I use my own money to bail him out?”
This was cold, even for Grandmère. “Wow,” I said. “Remind me not to call you to pay the ransom if I ever get kidnapped.”
“Oh, please,” Grandmère said. “That’s why we pay ransom insurance.”
“Well,” I said. The egg-salad sandwich looked good, so I took one, too, even though my stomach was churning with anxiety. “Whatever you found can’t be that bad. He got arrested weeks ago, and you’re only calling it a matter of ‘national urgency’ now?”
“I assigned a member of the RGG to look into it and he just got back to me with a full report on the gravity of the matter this morning.”
“Oh, well, the RGG! And what could the Royal Genovian Guard possibly have found in Dad’s personal effects that was so shocking it justifies forcing me to have a wedding I haven’t agreed to?”
Grandmère cleared her throat very dramatically and said the last thing I ever expected:
“Amelia, you have a sister.”
Fortunately I’d swallowed before she made this pronouncement, or I’d have choked. “I’m sorry, what?”
“You heard me. You are not your father’s only enfant naturel”—which means “love child” in French. “He has another.”
Stupidly all I could think about at that moment was the scene in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back when Obi-Wan sighs that Luke is their last hope and Yoda says, “No. There is another.”
Of course you have to wait for a whole other movie to find out that “the other” is Princess Leia, who happens to be Luke’s secret twin.
“Wait a minute.” I wasn’t aware that I had allowed my sandwich to dangle from my fingers until I felt Rommel’s sharp teeth nip them as he stole it. “Ow!” I cried. Then I said, “That’s not possible, Grandmère. If I had a sister, Dad would have told me. Besides, you know perfectly well Dad can’t have any more children because the chemo he had for his testicular cancer rendered him infertile. That’s why I’m the heir to the throne—”
“Of course,” Grandmère interrupted, rolling her eyes. “And when he told you that pretty little story twelve years ago, he had just received that devastating news from his doctors. But as we all know, doctors aren’t always correct. You will recall the time I was told to avoid smoking and alcohol because it was believed I had a stomach tumor. But it turned out only to be acid reflux. I took a few Tums and I was fine.”
“Grandmère,” I said, still stunned. “That is not the same thing.”
“Well,” she said. “Be that as it may, you have a sister. She was probably conceived right around the time your father delivered that quaint little speech to you. But as it happened, he still had a few active swimmers left in the old pipeline.”
“Eww!” I did some swift math in my head, which wasn’t easy, not only because math has never been my strong suit but also because Grandmère’s verbal imagery had completely grossed me out. “Wait . . . so you’re saying I have a twelve-year-old little sister?”
“Yes, that is precisely what I’m saying.”
“How do you know this?” I asked suspiciously. “What exactly did you find in Dad’s desk to prove this? It wasn’t another one of those e-mails, was it?”
My grandmother is one of the many people who feels compelled to help out whatever down-on-his-luck Nigerian prince (because one royal should help out another royal) comes her way, and she actually believed the one about a close relative needing cash wired to them immediately because they’d been robbed and were stranded in Mexico. Worse, she believed I was the person who’d been robbed. Someone managed to find my private e-mail address and use it to scam my grandmother out of $30,000 (which thankfully she could afford) before anyone on the palace staff could find out what she was doing and stop her (not that anyone would have been able to. Once Grandmère gets an idea in her head, there’s no talking her out of it).
Grandmère was livid when she found out I was safely in class at Sarah Lawrence and nowhere near Mexico, and that there was a complete stranger running around Mexico $30,000 richer.
The worst decision we ever made was allowing my grandmother to have access to the Internet (although she adores commenting anonymously. She is the worst troll ever. No one on Jezebel.com or Reddit knows that the Dowager Princess of Genovia is the person making all the mean comments about how the fat children just need to use more self-control and they’ll lose weight).
“You know what you saw was probably just another kind of scam, right?” I asked her. “People contact me all the time saying they’re my long-lost relative—which, especially with all these genealogy websites, could even be true. Six degrees of separation, and all that. We’re all cousins, basically. But I would never send those people any money, or give any credence at all to their crazy claims. Dad wouldn’t either.”
“Unfortunately, Amelia, this isn’t a scam,” Grandmère said haughtily. “I can assure you that this person does, in fact, exist, and is, in fact, your sister. Otherwise, I highly doubt your father would have been making child-support payments to her—monthly—for the past twelve years. I saw them in his private bank-account book.”
My mind reeled. “Grandmère, that—that can’t be true. The payments must have been for something else.”
“Not according to what José says in his report.”
“José?” I was pouring myself another drink, this time with shaky fingers. “José as in José de la Rive, the director of the Royal Genovian Guard, Lars’s boss?”
“Well, naturally, Amelia. Despite what you might think of me, I wasn’t simply going to assume that what I saw in your father’s bankbook was true, not after Mexico . . . and not without sending someone to check on it. And José is, of course, the very best, and quite experienced in this kind of thing. He used to work for Interpol. The terrorism unit.” She got a faraway look in her eyes that I recognized. It was the same one she’d worn around the time of the James Franco affair. “José is surprisingly gentlemanly for a man skilled in the use of torture.”
This was getting worse and worse.
“Oh, Grandmère,” I said. “Please tell me you didn’t send José to waterboard this little girl’s family!”
“Of course not, Amelia,” she said in disgust. “What do you take me for? I sent José to Cranbrook, New Jersey, to collect DNA from the child for a paternity test.”
“New Jersey? Why New Jersey?”
“Because that’s where your father’s been sending the monthly support payments for nearly twelve years now, Amelia. Are you dense? I thought it would be nice to know he’s not been doing so unnecessarily—”
“New Jersey?” I shouted. “Are you telling me that I’ve had a half sister living across the river since I was fourteen years old, and no one ever told me?”
“Us, Amelia,” Grandmère said, looking annoyed. “Your father never told us. And must you shout so? It’s hardly regal. And that is precisely what I asked José to find out, which he did. He said he’s shocked that no one—such as your insufferable cousin Ivan, or that blackguard Brian Fitzpatrick—had discovered it sooner. Your father has been making the payments in his own name from an account here at Chase Manhattan Bank. The fool!”
I couldn’t believe it. Not the part about Dad having had a secret love—he’s a prince, after all, who’d never married after my mom refused his proposal in college, choosing instead to “wander the globe in search of a woman who might be able to provide the balm to sooth
e his wounded heart,” as Tina liked to put it (although really he’d simply had dozens of short-lived relationships with supermodels, actresses, television news journalists, and the occasional high school English teacher).
It was the part about my having a little sister that I couldn’t believe . . . and the fact that my father had never told me about it. Not telling Grandmère I could understand. Though underneath her flamboyant exterior, she has a warm (well, warmish) heart. How else has she tolerated her horrible dog all these years?
But there is no doubt that she disapproves of nearly everything her only child (my father) does.
This is most likely why he’d fallen for the one woman in the world he couldn’t have—my mother, his own mother’s exact opposite (in complete defiance of Dr. Moscovitz’s theory about him).
But I’d always thought my father and I were close.
Now I realized I knew nothing about him at all.
This stings a little. Actually, a lot.
I leaped to my feet. “Well, what are we waiting for?” I said to my grandmother. “Have your driver bring the car around, and let’s go meet her.”
“Certainly not, Amelia,” my grandmother said. “According to Lazarres-Reynolds, that’s the worst possible thing we could do. We can’t risk exposing this story to the media, especially after all the trouble we went to today in order to provide the perfect distraction for them, in the form of your wedding.”
“What are you talking about? Who on earth is Lazarres-Reynolds?”
“The crisis management firm I hired to handle this affair, of course. Why do you think I announced your engagement this morning?”
I sank back down onto the couch, stunned. “I thought you did that to distract the press from Dad’s arrest.”
“Well, of course I did, Amelia. Have you seen his most recent numbers in the polls for prime minister? He’s five points behind your cousin Ivan—who just today announced that, if elected, he’ll make genetically modified fruit illegal and deny all humanitarian entry visas into Genovia. But if news of this latest debacle of your father’s gets out—well, he’ll be crushed in the election. Crushed.”
