The Princess and the Absolutely Not a Princess

by Emma Wunsch

  11

  DAY FOUR AT MOUNTAIN RIVER VALLEY ELEMENTARY

  On the fourth day at Mountain River Valley, Maude brought in four hard-boiled eggs, her orange handkerchief, a rusty harmonica, a set of yellow false teeth, a snakeskin, and a miniature ship in a bottle.

  Miranda brought in her doily, two pink candles, the tissues in the diamond box, and a small bottle of nail polish called “pinktastically pink.”

  12

  FRIDAY AT MOUNTAIN RIVER VALLEY ELEMENTARY

  On the fifth day of school, Maude put a piece of blue cheese, eight pencils, the rusty harmonica, the orange handkerchief, the false teeth, and the snakeskin on her desk. There was so much stuff, the desk was barely visible, but then she reached into her green canvas bag and took out six hard-boiled eggs! She lined them up in a crooked row.

  Next to her, Miranda reached into her fancy leather bag and set up, in neat rows, three candles, the doily, a small oval mirror, four bottles of nail polish, and a shiny ruby pen, because she still couldn’t find a pencil anywhere in the castle.

  It was the pen that brought everything to an end.

  It was so shiny and sparkly that everyone in 3B, even Miss Kinde, kept looking at it.

  “That is a lovely pen, Miranda,” Miss Kinde said right before giving out yet another practice Mandatory National Reading and Writing and Math Exam. “But very distracting.”

  “Hard-boiled eggs are distracting, too,” Miranda whispered, because she wasn’t used to talking in class.

  “Excuse me?” Miss Kinde said.

  The princess felt too shy to repeat what she had said, but Hillary Greenlight-Miller, who had amazing hearing, yelled, “She said, ‘Hard-boiled eggs are distracting, too,’ Miss Kinde!”

  In one second, thirty eyes were on Maude.

  Maude scrunched her face. There’s nothing wrong with hard-boiled eggs, she told herself. There was no rule against them!

  “Maude?” Miss Kinde walked over to Maude’s desk. “Why do you have six hard-boiled eggs on your desk?”

  “They’re from my amazing chickens,” Maude said, trying to sound proud. “I collect their eggs every morning. After I sing to them. There’s no rule in the Official Rules of Mountain River Valley Elementary about hard-boiled eggs!”

  Miss Kinde looked at Maude and her eggs, then at Miranda, then back at Maude’s eggs. Finally, she said, “No, there’s no rule against having hard-boiled eggs in school, but since lunch isn’t for several hours, please put your eggs in your lunch bag.”

  “Maude always eats gross food,” Hillary Greenlight-Miller announced.

  “School lunches are grosser,” Maude said to Hillary Greenlight-Miller.

  Miranda couldn’t help but nod as she watched Maude and Hillary stick their tongues out at each other. School lunches looked absolutely disgusting. It was all she could do to choke down a few bites of her own lunch, since the cafeteria smelled almost as bad as the gym and was as loud as the music room.

  “Girls,” Miss Kinde said, “there’ll be no more discussion of lunch. Maude, put your eggs away.”

  “Do I have to? It’s not in the Official—”

  “It’s a class rule,” Miss Kinde said quickly. “Put the harmonica away, too. And the snakeskin, the cheese, and false teeth. You don’t want distractions while taking the practice Mandatory National Reading and Writing and Math Exam.”

  “I’m not distracted,” Maude grumbled, putting her things back in her bag. “I always get the highest score on the practice Mandatory National Reading and Writing and Math Exam.” She looked right at Hillary Greenlight-Miller, who stuck her tongue back out.

  Princess Miranda sneezed and took one of the tissues out of the diamond box.

  Maude pointed to the princess. “How come she gets to have stuff on her desk? Because she’s a princess?”

  It felt strange to hear Maude call her a princess, Miranda thought. Until that moment she wasn’t sure Maude actually knew she was royal. Who would offer a princess a dirty handkerchief, dull pencils, or hard-boiled eggs?

  Miss Kinde looked at all the things that were lined up on Miranda’s desk. Then she cleared her throat. “Class,” she said, “starting today, all personal items will be kept in your backpacks.”

  “Maude doesn’t have a backpack,” Hillary Greenlight-Miller said. “Just her ugly green sack.”

  “Hey!” Maude scowled at Hillary. “That bag belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather. With only eighteen cents and a one-eyed cat named Onion the Great, he explored the world on a unicycle!”

  “Ewww,” Hillary said. “One-eyed cats are the worst.”

  Maude scowled at Hillary. “My cat, Onion the Great Number Eleven, is lovely! But not as lovely as Rudolph Valentino, my dog.”

  “Animals belong in zoos,” Hillary Greenlight-Miller said, straightening her glasses.

  Maude gasped.

  “Girls!” Miss Kinde said sharply. “Please, we must start the practice exam.”

  I don’t have a backpack either, Miranda thought as she put her wonderful pen and candles and tissues in her fancy leather bag.

  As Miss Kinde handed out the green paper with all the ovals, Maude glared at Miranda. “This is your fault,” she said.

  “What did I do?” Miranda whispered. “Miss Kinde made a new rule.”

  Maude looked at the princess. It was that sparkly pen that had caused her eggs and snakeskin and harmonica to be banned. It wasn’t fair, she thought. Why should Miranda and her stupid pen have so much power?

  13

  BREAKFAST WITH KD AND QM

  On Monday morning, the princess was miserable and tired. She’d spent the weekend trying to forget Mountain River Valley Elementary by re-arranging a bunch of toys she didn’t play with anymore and painting her toenails a dozen different times. But now it was the beginning of the week all over again, and she couldn’t stop yawning as she ate her breakfast.

  QM leaned across the long table and said, “Why Miranda, your birthday is just two weeks away!”

  KD sat upright. “My mashed potatoes! How did we not remember?”

  “Miranda has been busy.” QM sounded pleased.

  Miranda swallowed. Her birthday was in two weeks? She couldn’t believe it! All the time she was wasting in school when she could have been party planning! Miranda always threw fantastic birthday parties and, until now, she’d always planned them weeks in advance. School was really getting in the way of all the things she liked to do.

  “We’ll pull out all the stops,” KD said, “since this year’s party will be different.”

  Princess Miranda looked at her dad. Her birthday parties were always incredible. Last year’s party included a rocket launch, hot-air balloon rides, and a famous mariachi band. One year, there was a dolphin show. Every year, at the end of the party, fireworks spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MIRANDA! in bright pink explosions. Why would this year be different?

  “This year,” KD boomed, “Three B will be here!”

  Miranda stared at her father.

  “Why bother with the royal children of our royal friends when you have your very own classmates?” KD smiled at his excellent idea. Because Miranda didn’t have any friends her age, the guests at her birthday parties had always been the children of the royal people QM and KD knew. Miranda never knew the tiny earls or teenage dukes at her parties, but she didn’t care. She just liked the planning part anyway.

  “What a lovely way to meet Three B!” QM said.

  “No,” the princess said.

  Her parents stared at her, which reminded her of all the staring the kids in 3B would be doing in school later that morning. “I can’t invite Three B to my party,” she told them.

  “Why not?” KD asked.

  Miranda looked up at the diamond chandelier above her. It was the perfect chandelier for the room, and she had chosen it because she was good at things like that. She understood how lights and tables should look in a room this big. Her parents didn’t understand things like that and they
wouldn’t understand anything about 3B—certainly not how, just after Miss Kinde had said the new rule about how all home things had to be left in bags, the boy two seats in front of her, Fletcher, had asked for a pencil. He was talking to Maude, but since he was staring at Miranda, she accidentally handed him the ruby pen from her bag. Fletcher said something about pens on practice exams breaking rule number forty-two, which made her realize that the pen wasn’t even supposed to be out of her bag! In a panic, she’d grabbed it, only to watch Maude hand Fletcher one of her sticky pencils.

  Later, at recess, which was noisier than PE and lunch and music combined, Agatha had said she liked Miranda’s sweater.

  The princess had nodded.

  “I love it!” Agatha had said, stepping closer to touch it. “Did you get it at Tops and Tees?”

  Miranda shook her head.

  “Pants and Pullovers?” Agatha asked.

  Miranda had never heard of Tops and Tees or Pants and Pullovers, but she guessed they were clothing stores. She shook her head, hoping Agatha would go back to chasing Donut around the playground, but Agatha had stayed put.

  “Where did you get it? I’d love one!”

  Miranda didn’t know how to tell Agatha about Yoshi von Mutter, the world-famous fashion designer, and his assistant tailor Starbella Loon. Four times a year, Yoshi and Starbella came to the castle to outfit the royal family for the upcoming season. For nearly a week, Miranda and Yoshi pored over magazines and swaths of the fanciest French fabrics. Yoshi would stay up every night cutting and trimming and measuring and sticking all kinds of pins in all kinds of places. At the end of the week, the royal family had exquisite one-of-a-kind wardrobes, and Yoshi and Starbella would jet off to their next royal family.

  How could Miranda describe all this to Agatha? “I don’t know . . .” she’d finally said. “It was in one of my closets.”

  Agatha had given her a weird look and walked away.

  “Your class would love to come to your birthday party,” QM said, jolting Miranda back to the breakfast table.

  “No, they wouldn’t,” Miranda whispered.

  “Of course they would.” KD chuckled. “We’ll borrow a lion! A white lion! Won’t that be something?”

  “I don’t think they’d like it,” Miranda said. “I don’t think Three B will want to come to my party.”

  KD and QM laughed. “It’s your birthday party!” KD said. “At our castle! What could they possibly not like?”

  Me, Miranda thought. They could not like me.

  14

  THE INVITATIONS

  But in the same way they’d decided that she was going to school, QM and KD decided that Miranda would take the dusted-with-gold invitations with her on her eighth day at Mountain River Valley Elementary.

  When Miranda got to school early for her extra-extra Mandatory National Reading and Writing and Math Exam practice, Miss Kinde handed her a test and told her to get started while she went to make copies. Because the other students didn’t need extra-extra practice, Miranda was alone.

  Instead of starting her practice exam, Miranda took the invitations out of her bag, took a deep breath, and began putting them on desks. One invitation for Agatha and another for Agnes. She put an invitation on Donut’s desk, then one on Norbert’s, and another one on Norris’s. She went to the next row and put one on Fletcher’s desk and, pausing for a minute, one on Hillary Greenlight-Miller’s. She kept going until she got to Maude’s desk, which was empty except for a sticky spot in the middle, three pencils, and her You Journal. Miranda thought it still smelled like hard-boiled eggs.

  She held her nose and lowered the invitation just as a breeze came through the open window. The breeze opened Maude’s You Journal to the very first page, and the princess couldn’t believe what she saw. Maude was drawing! Not writing! Drawing! Miranda saw the picture of a dreadful dog and a smiling Miss Kinde and the hard-boiled eggs.

  And then she saw the pictures of her!

  There was an enormous crown on top of her head! She’d never wear a crown to school. She didn’t even like wearing them at royal events. They were heavy and made her head itch. Miranda turned the page and saw another drawing of her wearing shoes that looked like forks! Miranda turned the page and saw the worst drawing of all: She was holding her ruby pen and saying,

  Miranda shut her eyes tightly and took a deep breath. Then she opened her eyes to make sure she was still alone. And then Princess Miranda shoved Maude’s invitation back into her bag, sat down, and began her practice exam.

  15

  WHEN MISS KINDE CAME BACK IN

  Miss Kinde noticed the invitations as soon as she walked back into 3B. Since rule number eighty-seven in the Official Rules of Mountain River Valley Elementary stated that invitations had to be given to everyone in the class, Miss Kinde scanned the room to make certain there was a gold envelope on every desk. She saw envelopes on Agatha’s, Norbert’s, Fletcher’s, and Felix’s desks. Hillary Greenlight-Miller had one, too. And Agnes and Donut and Desdemona. But just as Miss Kinde was about to check Maude’s desk, Miranda sneezed seven times in a row.

  Miss Kinde looked up. “Do you need a tissue?”

  Miranda shook her head and pulled out a tissue from the diamond box in her bag. As she took it, her hand grazed the last birthday invitation. Miranda looked at Maude’s desk and then at her teacher. But Miss Kinde was frantically stapling practice exams, so Miranda blew her nose and reread question three.

  16

  WHEN 3B CAME IN

  When 3B trooped in, they were heartbroken to see another practice exam, but delighted to see the shiny gold envelopes on their desks. Moving the exams aside, 3B ripped open their invitations:

  As her classmates whispered and giggled and smiled big smiles at the princess, Maude, who had almost been late, moved her practice exam to the side to see if her envelope was under it. It wasn’t. Maude looked under her desk, but nothing was on the floor. She scowled but didn’t say anything. Instead, she opened her You Journal and began to write.

  She’s probably drawing another mean picture of me, the princess thought, so it’s only fair that I didn’t invite her.

  17

  WHAT MAUDE WROTE IN HER YOU JOURNAL

  18

  SUPER RARE IS SUPER COOL

  3B couldn’t stop chatting about the princess’s party. No one in 3B had been to a party that lasted till the next day! In a castle!

  “Is there really going to be a white lion?” Norbert asked the princess as 3B made their way to the cafeteria. “White lions are super rare.”

  “It’s being flown in,” the princess said, trying not to smell the day’s lunch. “From . . . Belgrade.” She was pretty sure that was what KD had said.

  “Cool,” Norbert said. “Super cool!”

  It is cool, Miranda thought.

  During lunch, Agatha and Agnes walked over to the princess.

  “Will there really be a fashion show?” Agatha asked.

  The princess nodded and tried not to look at their school lunches.

  “With fancy clothes?” Agnes looked interested.

  Miranda nodded again and tried not to notice Maude slowly nibbling her hard-boiled egg.

  As soon as Agnes and Agatha went back to their seats, Donut slid over to the princess. “There’ll be doughnuts? At your party?” he asked, then licked his lips.

  Miranda didn’t remember anything about doughnuts.

  “It said doughnuts on the invitation,” Donut said.

  “Oh.” The princess yawned. “There’ll be doughnuts then. Plus cakes, cookies, pies, an ice cream bar, and candy.” Miranda yawned again. School made her so very tired. And her head always ached.

  “I just care about the doughnuts.” Donut drooled onto the gloppy gray food on his tray. “I really love doughnuts.”

  “Okay,” Miranda said, accidently looking at Maude, who was now reading a book called Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Cold.

  At the end of the eighth day of school, like all
the other days, Miranda was still exhausted, confused, and headachy. But one thing had changed. While the students in 3B were still staring at her, all of them (except one) were now smiling at her, too.

  19

  PICTURES ON THE WALL

  After the dismissal bell rang on the eighth day of school, Maude walked home, ignored her happily clucking chickens, dragged herself up the twenty-seven stairs, and flung herself onto her bed, where she stared at the ceiling. A group of famous revolutionaries that she’d drawn stared back.

  “Did any of you famous revolutionaries ever not get invited to a party?” she asked.

  Because they were pictures of people who had died long ago, they didn’t answer.

  Maude turned onto her side and looked at a framed photograph of a woman holding a baby.

  “I miss you, Mom,” she said. “If you were alive, I might tell you how I didn’t get an invitation to the stupid princess’s party. Everyone else got one. Even my archenemy Hillary Greenlight-Miller.” Maude touched the picture with her index finger. “I could file an official complaint with Principal Fish. The princess totally broke rule eighty-seven. But . . . I don’t want to tell the principal.” She picked up a stuffed ladybug. “If I tell Miss Kinde, she’ll just feel sorry for me. That’s not what I want.”

  What do you want? Maude imagined her mother asking.

  She closed her eyes and imagined Principal Fish booming that rule 9,999 was that royalty would no longer be allowed at school. No, Maude thought. That would never be a rule. She opened her eyes.

  Did you learn anything today? Maude imagined her dad asking.

  Well, I learned that it feels awful to not get invited to something even if you don’t want to go. I learned that all it takes for my classmates to be friends with someone rude is an invitation to pet a white lion. It isn’t fair. The princess should learn something, too.