by Kirsten Boie
“Mom’s not snooty!” said Jenna. They’d had this conversation over and over in the old days. Why couldn’t Bea just drop it already?
“Well, that’s the impression she always gave,” Bea said. “All that silly etiquette business, and you never being allowed to do anything, and always having to be home by six!”
“Because she was afraid someone might kidnap me!” Jenna tried to explain for the umpteenth time. “Because I happen to be the daughter of Princess Margareta of Scandia, even though none of us knew it back then. They could have used me to blackmail the king!”
“Don’t get all defensive. I know the whole story,” said Bea. “I’m just saying, you weren’t the most exciting girl in the world, were you? But now all of a sudden you’re a princess. Like I said: Hollywood movie.”
Jenna looked down at her congealing pizza. Suddenly she wasn’t sure that she wanted anything to eat.
“So?” asked Bea. “Is it really like that? Like a movie, I mean?”
Jenna attempted a forkful of pizza. The cheese was cold and claggy. It stuck to the roof of her mouth. She should have ordered a salad instead, like Bea.
“Honestly?” she said, putting down her knife and fork. “It’s not like that at all. I mean, I’m still me, Bea. But my life has done a total one-eighty. It’s totally different.”
“Well, give me a gig as a princess and I wouldn’t complain,” said Bea. She’d almost finished her salad.
Jenna shook her head. “It’s not as nice as you think. You’re never alone, for one thing — there are always bodyguards with you. And the cameras! I’m supposed to smile and be on my best behavior all the time, polite and ‘dressed appropriately.’ Because if I’m not, you can bet it’ll be in all the papers and all over the web. Everybody’s interested in me, everybody wants to talk to me, to be photographed with me so they can pretend they know me.”
“I guess you can’t blame them,” said Bea. “Take me, for example. It’s all I talk about most of the time. ‘By the way,’ I say, ‘Princess Jenna of Scandia just happens to be my best friend.’ My cred has gone through the roof at school. Not to mention everywhere else.”
“You know I don’t mean you, Bea! Why do you think I was so desperate to come see you? Because you always were my best friend.”
“Were?”
“Still are, I hope. I know you like me for me, for who I was pre-princess, and not because you can show me off. Everyone else only seems to like me because I’m, you know … royalty.”
“Like the poor little rich girls in TV movies,” said Bea, “never sure if a guy is in love with them — or their money.”
“Something like that,” Jenna agreed. And if she really wanted to be honest with Bea, she’d tell her it was worse. No one even wanted to be friends with Jenna the princess. “And it’ll be the same if I ever fall in love with someone.” She felt herself turning red. The tabloids had already picked up on that. How sweet — a princess who blushes on cue! Nobody wanted to read things like that about themselves. Or comments about how they came across in public. “Princess Jenna, Still the Ugly Duckling.” “Princess Jenna Looking Helpless at State Reception.” After too many headlines like those, she stopped looking at the papers, but that didn’t keep the other girls at school from reading them — and then ripping out the articles and leaving them spread across her bed.
“Excuse me, Your Highness?” Bea broke into her thoughts. “Is there something — or someone — I should know?”
“What are you talking about?” Jenna asked distractedly.
“Boys!” said Bea. “You’re very quiet all of a sudden. Is there a prince for the princess?” She giggled. “‘And will they live happily ever after?’” she pronounced dramatically. “Sorry, Jenna, I couldn’t resist! But that guy who came to our place last year with you and Malena — he was kind of cute.”
“Jonas,” said Jenna, feeling herself turning a deeper shade of red. “He’s been Malena’s friend forever — since they were in kindergarten.”
“How unfortunate,” said Bea. “I thought he had hottie potential. But I guess cousins can’t go stealing each other’s boyfriends, can they?”
“No,” she acknowledged, neglecting to add, As if someone who can have Malena would want me instead.
“Anyway, you’ll probably have plenty of guys to choose from,” said Bea. “That’s how it is with royalty, isn’t it? You can have a prince, you can have a millionaire, you can have a movie star, you can even have a boring old nobody, if that’s what you want. Not like me.” She rolled her eyes up to the heavens. “I’ll probably end up with a boy who plays accordion in a klezmer band.”
“Poor you!” said Jenna, laughing. “Oh, why do I have to go back tonight?” The thought made her feel slightly sick.
“Can’t you change your schedule?” asked Bea. “Stay another day. Two or three, even.”
Jenna shook her head. “The day after tomorrow is this big summer party,” she said gloomily. “Thrown by the family of the girl I share a room with — Ylva.”
“But do you really have to go?” asked Bea. “Wouldn’t she give you a pass?”
Jenna pushed her plate away. She’d eaten almost nothing — meaning fewer calories, at least: Every cloud had a silver lining. “Ylva couldn’t care less whether I was there,” she said. “But her father’s very high up in the army — a general or something, I don’t know.”
“And that’s why you have to go?” asked Bea, puzzled. “What does the military have to do with you?”
Jenna shrugged and picked up a slice of pizza. She gave it an angry bite. “It’s because of the press,” she mumbled. She took another mouthful. “Newspapers, TV, they’re all going to be there, and it’ll be shown all over Scandia — ‘the social event of the season.’ So I have to be there. It’s called ‘making an appearance,’ which is what I have to do all the time.” She bit into the pizza again. A string of melted cheese trailed down her chin. It tasted awful. Everything was awful. She didn’t want to go back to the palace.
“Oh, Jen!” said Bea, and put her hand on Jenna’s arm as if to comfort her and to stop her from shoveling any more food into her mouth at the same time.
At that moment, Jenna heard the click! of a shutter. A man was leaning out the window of a black SUV that had stopped at the traffic light. He was taking photo after photo. On the door of the SUV was the logo of the local newspaper.
“Oh no!” Jenna cried, raising her hands to hide her face. “Not again!”
On Saturdays, school in Morgard went until noon, but then, thankfully, everyone was free for the rest of the weekend. Saturday classes were less demanding, too — just a couple of hours of art and the weekly check-in with the guidance counselors.
Jenna was awake long before the first beep of the alarm clock. She’d been tracing all the cracks in the ceiling with her eyes, and silently reciting the words of every nursery rhyme she could remember. Anything to stop herself from thinking.
When she’d flown back to Scandia the previous evening, she finally had to face the fact that her earlier life was gone forever. Even if she climbed out the window and escaped from her bodyguards, there would always be someone who would track her down or recognize her. A princess belongs to everyone, Jenna, her mother had said when she’d first complained that she couldn’t do anything or go anywhere on her own. That’s the price you pay.
“Just put a wig on!” Malena had said. “And a pair of sunglasses. A hat. All the celebs do it. No big deal.”
But Malena had been a princess all her life. She didn’t know what it was like to sit and daydream in a coffee shop, undisturbed for hours; or to be in a bad mood and bite your friend’s head off in public without all the newspapers turning it into an international crisis the next day; or even to burst into tears if you felt like it — because you could, because you belonged to yourself, not to the press and not to the crown and not to the entire country.
In the opposite bed, Ylva wriggled out from under her blankets, yawned,
then grabbed her plastic bucket of toiletries and headed out to the showers.
Jenna kept her eyes closed. She would only get up when Ylva left for breakfast in the cafeteria. She couldn’t bear the sneer on her roommate’s face when she went to the door in her nightshirt, or the snide remarks spoken softly enough to seem as if they weren’t meant to be heard: Northern blubber, bounce like rubber …
A few weeks ago, Jenna had started to starve herself so that she could at last become more like a southerner, slim and graceful. She soon gave up, though, when she realized she’d have to bleach her hair blonde as well, and wear high heels all the time to make herself seem taller.
Jenna looked across at Ylva’s bed. When she’d first come to the boarding school nearly a year ago, no one had been nicer. Ylva had even blown off her own best friend in order to share a room with her. So why hadn’t it worked out? Why was there no one in the whole school who hated her more than Ylva?
It’s because I’m not what she expected. I’m not remotely glamorous enough — not even close.
She looked at the photos on the wall above her bed, tightly packed together: Jenna with Philippa, sitting on the back of a bench with their feet on the seat, each with an ice-cream cone in her hand. She was sticking her tongue out at Philippa’s mom, who was taking the picture. Another one of her at ten years old, with the neighbors’ dog, which was almost blind and had a funny smell, but which she loved so much that, when it died, she couldn’t stop crying all day long. Another with Bea in a photo booth, having photos taken for her passport — she’d only needed one, so they’d made funny faces on the other three.
Jenna took down another photo of Bea. She was in her backyard, on the hammock in her bathing suit, drenched, laughing and raising her fist in mock anger. She was pretending to rage at Jenna for dousing her with the garden hose. Oh, Bea! thought Jenna. If only I could come back and stay with you!
The door was flung open and in came Ylva, fresh from her shower. Her long blonde hair hung in wet strands over her shoulders, leaving a trail of drops across the wooden floorboards.
“Sorry, am I disturbing you?” she said mockingly. “On an imaginary date, are we?”
Jenna looked down. It would make no difference whatever she said, and so she said nothing.
“Poor little mousey!” said Ylva. “Crying for her girlfriend.”
She put on her school blouse, the pleated skirt, and the blazer. Her hair was still dripping. When she had slammed the door shut behind her, Jenna put the photo down on the bedspread and slowly lowered her feet to the floor.
The banquet hall at Osterlin was far too big for just two people.
“Have you seen this, Peter?” cried Margareta, passing the newspaper across the table. They were sitting together at one end. There was room for at least thirty more people on each of the long sides. A page fluttered down into the basket of rolls, and one corner stuck in the jar of honey. “A whole page attacking Jenna!”
Since she’d returned to Scandia, Margareta had made it a habit to read the newspapers over breakfast, or at least skim through them and weed out the important parts. And now Peter was here with her, doing the same thing. They had so much in common. It hadn’t been easy to go back to Scandia after all those years in exile, but falling in love had made it so much better. It had been her brother who had introduced her to the wealthy lord, and they’d hit it off right away.
“Just look at this photo! When I phoned her yesterday after she’d got back to school, Jenna didn’t even mention it! Now I know why.”
“I’m afraid it’s everywhere, Greta,” said Petterson. “Look. ‘Roly-Poly Princess Goes Abroad to Pig Out.’ ‘Princess Jenna in the Land of Milk and Pizza.’ ‘Princess Jenna: A Model for Our Young People???’ With three question marks, and the same photo in all of them. It was probably the ugliest one they had.”
On every front page, six columns wide and reaching down to the middle, was the same picture: Jenna, bending low — far too low — over a plate, her hair virtually hanging into it, with a trail of cheese across her chin and her mouth gaping wide. Above it, in giant letters, the headline: “The Pizza Princess!”
“Good grief,” said Margareta, “the stupid girl! Doesn’t she realize what she’s doing to herself? To all of us?”
Peter had picked up another paper. “It’s hard for her, Greta,” he said. “I’m sometimes surprised at how little you understand her. To be suddenly thrust into a completely different world … Oh, for heaven’s sake! Wretched journalists. On the front page of the Financial Times as well? As if our country didn’t have enough problems!” He threw the paper across the table, and Margareta caught it before it landed in her coffee.
“What’s the matter with our press, Peter?” asked Margareta. “In the old days they never would have —”
Petterson’s phone began to trill out a song from a famous opera. He took it from his pocket and switched it off. “You know very well what’s the matter, Greta” was all he said.
As she made her way down the long paneled corridor to the cafeteria, Jenna could already hear the usual morning hubbub: laughter, the clatter of plates, the scraping of chairs. Friendly noises, thought Jenna, so why do they make me feel so nervous?
She tried to open the heavy door without making a sound, so that she could slip into the room unnoticed. At breakfast, you could choose your own seat, and for weeks now she’d sat behind the waist-high partition wall with its ugly pots of flowers, in the area where the younger students sat. There she would eat her breakfast, hunched up as unobtrusively as possible, among the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds.
The door snapped shut behind her. Heads turned, and faces confronted her. In the corner farthest away from the door, by a window overlooking the campus, sat her classmates.
“Jenna!” cried Paula. Her voice sounded so friendly that Jenna had to make an effort not to trust it. “There she is at last! Come and sit with us! We’ve been waiting for you!”
Quiet fell at all the other tables. There was just the occasional giggle or whisper. Jenna saw that all eyes were now on her.
What’s going on? she wondered apprehensively. It’s always bad, every morning, but now they’re all staring at me, as if they’re waiting for something. I haven’t even been here for the last few days. Nothing has happened, so why are they all staring at me?
She went around the partition wall and squeezed between the tables. If only she could find some other place to sit, not with her classmates, not with Ylva. She’d pretend she hadn’t heard Paula.
“That seat is taken!” said a thin, red-haired girl when Jenna pulled a chair out from under the table. The child looked straight at her, an insolent expression on her face. “My friend’s sitting there!”
“No room here, either!” screeched a girl at the next table. “My friend’s sitting here, too!”
“No room, no room!” came the cry from all around, as the children patted the seats of the empty chairs. “All taken, all taken!”
The cafeteria ladies in their white aprons looked up from their pots and pans at the noise. Jenna took a deep breath. The women pretended to be counting their plates, their knives and forks, and the buffet dishes. Not so long ago, those dishes had been full of eggs and bacon, hash browns and sausages, to give the girls strength for the day ahead. But now they were empty. The women weren’t going to help her.
She straightened her back and squared her shoulders. I’m Princess Jenna of Scandia, she thought. Slowly she made her way to the table where the rest of her class was sitting — it didn’t matter if they were all watching her. It was only breakfast, and it would only take a quarter of an hour, so no need to turn it into a drama. She was just being childish.
“I kept a place just for you,” said Paula with a smile, pointing to a chair beside her. “We missed you so much.”
Someone giggled.
“I hope you had a nice time in your old home country,” Rachel said in a chatty tone. Jenna could see right away that the only food o
n the table was white toast topped with thick red jam. “Stuffing yourself stupid again, Your Highness, was that it? While the rest of us were suffering here, with your friends from the north in charge of the country?” Rachel held a piece of bread with two fingers, then let it fall onto Jenna’s plate. “Two weeks and nothing but this cardboard for breakfast! In the old days, not even you northerners had to eat stuff like this! Amazing how quickly a new government can ruin the whole economy!”
Jenna stared at her. What does the new government have to do with me? she wondered. Just because I’m half-northern, that doesn’t mean …
“But at least Your Highness got a chance to carb-load for a couple of days,” said Ylva. “Afraid you might get too thin, I suppose.”
The younger girls at the nearby tables laughed out loud. Now I can’t even go and sit with them anymore, thought Jenna.
“No danger of that.” It was Linda this time. “Who cares if everyone else is starving, as long as the royal family can jet off and stuff their royal faces?”
Then a newspaper appeared on the table. How could Jenna have thought that the pizza photos would go no farther than Bea’s town? Of course the photographer was going to make the most of his scoop — how often would he get the chance to earn so much with so little? In seconds, he had uploaded his picture and it had gone online to every newspaper desk in the world, and they’d all snapped it up — she was on display from Tokyo to New York, from London to Los Angeles.
She stared at the photo. The girl she saw looked repulsive, a portrait of greed. Grease dripped down from the pizza, no doubt touched up with the help of Photoshop. And above the picture, that headline …
And now the whole country’s looking at it, thought Jenna. What happened? How did it go so wrong? They loved me at the beginning, but now they’re printing photos like this.
“Oh well, at least you got enough to eat,” said Ylva with a friendly smile. “That’s the most important thing, isn’t it? We can’t have our princess going hungry! After all, she’s so skinny, isn’t she?” Then, just like Rachel had done, she held up a piece of toast and jam by her fingertips and, with a grimace, let it drop onto Jenna’s plate.
