Except someone had moved her blue school cardigan from the chair next to mine and made himself comfortable while his servants—er, agents—got his lunch.
“Your Highness,” I said a little awkwardly. “How, um, nice of you to join us.” Even though you weren’t invited.
Then I gave myself a mental smack. I was the only person he knew here. Of course he’d want to sit with me. Us.
“It is my pleasure.” I hoped we wouldn’t have to watch our mouths and use our forks to eat our fries.
“Hello,” Mac said on his other side as she slid into the seat marked with her cardigan.
“Lady Lindsay,” the prince said solemnly.
“Oh, please.” She picked up a fry with her fingers, dipped it in ranch dressing, and waved it back and forth like a shaking head. “Don’t call me that. My name is Mac.” Then she popped the fry in her mouth.
Okay. If she could, then I could. “So how about it, Your Highness? First-name basis here?”
His smile could light ships into harbor, it was so perfectly white. “Of course. You both must call me Rashid.”
One of the agents set his plate in front of him and spread a napkin on his knee. I waited until he stepped back to stand against the wall behind us. “Will your bodyguards get bent out of shape about it?”
“It is not for them to say.” He glanced at Mac’s plate, and she pushed the dish of ranch dressing closer to him. He picked up a fry with his fingers and, instead of taking the invitation, he dipped it into my ketchup instead. Uh, okay. Maybe he didn’t know what the bottles on the condiment bar were for. “My father would prefer that no one forget the proprieties, but my father is on the other side of the world.” He paused. “This is very good. What is the white mixture you are eating?”
“A lovely American thing called ranch dressing. But you should try your chips with salt and vinegar when they have hamburgers on Fridays,” Mac suggested. “You’ll never go back.”
The agent was back at his elbow, speaking a language I didn’t know. Rashid answered him in the same language, only a lot briefer. Deliberately, he dipped another fry in my ketchup.
“My bodyguard objects to my sharing a dish with you,” he informed me.
“I’ve got no known diseases, if that’s what he’s worried about.”
“It’s not that. It’s an intimacy usually reserved for couples.” He smiled into my eyes and I swallowed a half-chewed chunk of halibut sideways, choked, then grabbed my soda and gulped.
“Is that all it takes?” The guy with the shoulders from the rowing team dipped a fry in Gillian’s ketchup and grinned at her, which made Jeremy flush and glare at him from under knitted brows.
“Not happening, Tate, my man,” Brett said. “You need to do more than that to get Gillian’s attention.”
“Yeah, like have half a brain,” Jeremy muttered. Fortunately, I don’t think Tate heard him.
“You’re some piano player,” Tate told her. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“Thanks.” Calmly, she pushed her ketchup toward Jeremy, dipped one of her own fries, and offered it to him. Jeremy took it and, I swear, fell another fathom deep in love with her.
Brett grinned at his friend, who sat back with a shrug. Clearly he could take a hint without getting bent about it. Meanwhile, that left me with a prince cleaning up my ketchup. “You keep that up and it’ll all be gone.”
He turned and signaled to one of the bodyguards.
“Oh, please.” I got up. “I’ll get my own.”
“No, no. It is his duty to—”
“You’re kidding, right?”
I walked over to the condiment bar and filled a bigger ramekin. An agent materialized beside me as if I’d rubbed a lamp. “Miss. Please allow me.”
“This isn’t for him. It’s for me.”
“Please.”
I surrendered the ketchup and rolled my eyes in Lissa’s direction while she tried to keep a straight face and failed.
Great. And here I was, narrowly avoiding a tug-of-war over who was going to present His Highness with a dish of ketchup. I suddenly felt as if we were six again, fighting over who was going to get the last fig in the dish or who would ride in the front of the car to the village to get ice cream.
The fact that I could remember that distant holiday at all amazed me. I hadn’t thought about it in years.
What I wanted was to be sitting next to a certain someone the way Gillian and Carly were, leaning on him if I wanted, maybe even feeling his arm slip around me. I’d share Danyel’s dish any day.
Instead, I got another ramekin off the stack and filled it. With ranch dressing.
“Will you not share with me?” the prince asked when I came back with it.
“No. I changed my mind.”
He looked completely crushed. “But I got this for you.”
I put the dish down next to my plate and sat. “Dude. One, your bodyguard got it, and two, if I share it with you, you’ll just hog it all again and leave me none. Now get over it and let me eat my lunch.”
And wouldn’t you know it, just as I said those last words, everyone in the vicinity decided to stop talking. My voice, cranky as the attention-seeking little kid I’d once been, practically echoed.
I wanted to drop through the floor.
At the table by the window, Vanessa Talbot got up and strolled over to us. “Your Highness, my friends and I would be honored if you’d share your lunch with us.” She glanced at me out of the corner of her mascaraed eye and scooped up his plate and the ramekin of ketchup as though she’d been waiting tables half her life. “I love fish and chips, don’t you? Come on with me.”
His spine stiff with the offense I’d dished him, Rashid got up and followed her and his lunch to the other table, where Callum, DeLayne, Dani, and Emily made a big pro-duction out of making him comfortable and hanging on his every royal word.
Fine. Marvy. Exactly what I’d wanted in the first place.
I eyed the fries cooling on my plate.
And pushed them away.
* * *
To:[email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date:September 28, 2009
Re:Hi
Lissa gave me your e-mail so I hope you don’t mind me invading your inbox. Funny to think that just a week ago we were hanging out on the beach. Hope school’s going OK. Also that you don’t mind me joining your prayer circle by video. I felt like we were all connected and I wanted some way to keep feeling that. I’ll give Lissa the YouSendIt link for the next one.
So…I’m curious. You hang with believers and go to church and prayer circle, but from what I can tell, you’re not a believer yet? Yet is a pretty hopeful word though:)
I haven’t forgotten what you said on the beach. You know, when I was leaving. I was so surprised that I didn’t have an answer, even though you deserved one. It takes me a while to think things through. Drives Kaz nuts sometimes.
So, bottom line, I’ve been thinking about you. Maybe we can get to know each other this way, or I can call you. However you want to play it, I know one thing. I’ll be praying for you.
Your friend (I hope),
Danyel
* * *
Chapter 6
I’D BEEN MEAN to the prince. We’d been friends once. We weren’t now. So throw me in the dungeon.
I was still in a mood on Wednesday as I left core class (U.S. History, which is the catch-all where they put me because I’d designed my own curriculum) and headed to second-period math. Maybe my blues had as much to do with him as with spending the previous evening reading Danyel’s e-mail and watching his new prayer video over and over again with the sound turned down so Carly and Mac wouldn’t hear, and then seeing Rashid crossing the quad this morning after breakfast with DeLayne Geary, who just happened to be going to the library at the same time.
Like she ever went to the library for anything but the latest issue of Vogue.
What was I going to have to do
to get Danyel’s attention and make him think of me as more than just “your friend, Danyel”? Date a prince?
Oh, ha-ha. That Shani, what a joker.
And then, what do you know, Rashid himself walked into the math classroom and took the seat across the aisle from me. One of his bodyguards took up his stance outside the door, feet planted and hands clasped loosely in front. The other stood against the rear wall of the classroom. I’m sure this was totally creeping out the faculty, but Mr. Jackson, the math teacher, ignored both of them and got down to business.
When he assigned us some statistics problems to work on after the lecture, I made the mistake of glancing to my left. Rashid smiled, as if he’d been sitting there watching me and waiting for me to look.
“I apologize if I offended you,” he whispered. “As we were eating together yesterday.”
“We were not together.” I glanced toward the front, but Mr. Jackson was busy helping someone. “And you didn’t offend me. I—I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
“I accept your apology.” He sounded so pleased, I almost wished I hadn’t. “Please do me the honor of joining me today.”
“I, um—” What was the protocol for turning down royalty, anyway? How come they didn’t teach us that in etiquette? “I usually just eat with my friends. You’re welcome to join us, if you want.”
“Miss Hanna, is there something you want to share with the class?” Mr. Jackson materialized in front of me, his school tie lying limply down his shirt, as if it had given up all hope of style years ago.
“No, sir,” I said.
“Then kindly stop the chatter and get on with your work.”
“Mr. Jackson, it was my fault,” Rashid said. “I asked her a question and she was obliged to answer.”
Jackson looked flummoxed. Because everyone knows that if a prince talks to you, you are obliged to answer. You can’t just ignore him. I mean, wars have broken out over that kind of thing.
“Right,” he said after a moment. “Please remember that I do the talking in my classroom, Your Highness. I’d appreciate it if you’d confine your remarks to solutions to these problems.”
“Yes, sir,” we both mumbled.
I glanced at Rashid, and his eyes practically danced with suppressed laughter. An answering smile quivered on my mouth before I controlled myself and looked down at my textbook. He didn’t have to come to my rescue. And he didn’t have to think Jackson’s pompousness was funny.
What was funny was a guy like him having a sense of humor. How could you have perfect grammar and the ability to laugh at things at the same time? I didn’t need another reason to like the guy. And I really didn’t want to remember that sparkle in his eyes.
No. Uh-uh. My heart belonged to Danyel.
DGeary Help me? I need some info.
CAragon This is a surprise.
DGeary Why surprise? All Brett’s friends are friends. Cool?
CAragon I hope it’s not math-related. Calculus. Blech.
DGeary Man-related.
CAragon Sorry, wrong number.
DGeary Ha. What’s with Shani and the prince?
CAragon ??
DGeary Emily sent me a text second period. She thinks something’s going on.
CAragon She’s overthinking.
DGeary Emily has a hard time getting to think, never mind overthink. No, huh?
CAragon I have inside info. Definitely no.
DGeary Good.
CAragon Why?
DGeary Thanks. Gotta go.
AT LUNCH, RASHID took me up on my offer and staked out our tables. He’d even had the bodyguards—let’s call them the BGs for short, okay?—push them together. Within minutes, the rowing team showed up and mobbed it, then Carly and Brett, and finally, my girls.
Somebody must have taken the prince aside and given him the dish on high school social skills. Or maybe he was a quick study. Anyway, there was no hogging of ketchup or sly remarks about couples. Instead, the guy acted like a normal person—or as normal as you can be when your net worth has nine zeros.
Carly leaned over under the cover of a series of good-natured insults about international soccer teams. “There’s weirdness afoot.”
“What else is new?”
“DeLayne Geary IM’d me to find out if you and Rashid had a thing.”
I don’t know which was more surprising: DeLayne speaking voluntarily outside her caste, or her asking nosy questions about me. I don’t think we’ve said more than six words to each other since we parted ways in freshman year.
“What’d you tell her?”
“I said I had the inside scoop. Definitely no.” She gave me the kind of look that sees into your brain. “I hope that was right.”
“Of course it was right. Are you kidding me?”
She leaned back. “Just checking.”
I grabbed her arm before she got out of whisper space. “I’m serious. There is no thing. You know how I feel about—about someone else.” I stopped as Tate leaned between us to set down a plate piled high with enough triple chocolate cake to put us all into orbit for the afternoon.
Not quite enough to go around, however, when half your table is jocks. A minute later, Lissa reached for the empty plate. Rashid stopped her. “Allow me.”
He took it to the dessert bar and loaded it up again. But instead of giving it to Lissa so she could start it around to everyone who’d missed out, he held it out to me.
“Please.”
“Uh. Thanks.” This guy really was a quick study. Not to mention good at improv—he’d gone from being served by the BGs to serving random girls in twenty-four hours flat.
Lissa pounced on the next piece of cake, and within seconds the rest of it was gone. “Thanks, Rashid.” He looked pleased, a little smile curving his mouth. I guess when it’s the first time you’ve ever served someone, you’d want to know they appreciated it.
A glance at the clock told me I had just enough time to scoot upstairs and grab my philosophy books and the music I’d chosen for Individual Voice this afternoon. “See you later,” I told Lissa. “What’s going on after school? Anything interesting?”
“Nothing. Call me and we’ll figure something out.”
Philosophy is really math disguised as critical thinking and logic, and it’s a lot harder than you’d think. But my other choices in that time slot were O-Chem and six different flavors of algebra, so I took what I could get.
Voice was a different thing. I know I’m not going to be the next Mahalia Jackson—and by the end of two lessons, my instructor did, too. But I didn’t care. If Carly could take design modules just because she loves them, then I could take voice and chorus for the same reason. Besides, a person deserves a little fun when she’s a senior. We’ve earned it.
I let myself into our room, feeling pretty happy about the work I’d done on my scales and a first run-through of the gospel piece I’d chosen. I found Carly already there, changing out of her uniform.
“Hey.” I couldn’t wait to get out of mine, too. Say what you will about the hypo-allergenic fabric our plaid pleated skirts are made of, they’re still…plaid pleated skirts.
“There you are.” She laced up her sneakers. “I wanted to talk to you before Mac gets back.”
I was slowly getting used to our room’s new look. I’d pushed my bed back against the wall, and Mac and Carly had formed an L-shape with theirs. Mac didn’t have a desk, but since she never used one anyway, it didn’t matter. I hadn’t found her in here doing homework once. Maybe she went to the library. Maybe she didn’t do it. None of my nevermind.
“What’s up?” I pulled on a glittery butterfly T-shirt—it had no slogans, so technically I could wear it outside class—and my comfiest black Theory jeans. “Lissa said she’d be up for something later. I vote for retail therapy.”
“I wasn’t thinking about tonight. What are you doing Friday night?”
That was easy. “Big bunches of nothing. Why?”
“Oh, good.” She sat cross-
legged on her bed, facing me. “What do you think about going out with me and Brett?”
“Uh.” How to put this nicely? “You guys need a chaperone or what? Because that’s so not the image I want going around.”
“No, no.” She laughed. “Are you kidding? I meant as a double. The four of us.”
“The fourth being…?” Hope sparked inside. Was Danyel coming up for the weekend? Why hadn’t Lissa said anything?
“The prince, silly. Unless you have some other local guy you haven’t told me about?”
I stared at her, my brain all wound up on the thought of Danyel while it tried to process the unexpected reality of Rashid. “What?”
“You and the prince. Me and Brett. On a double,” she said slowly, as though she were reading a primer to a first grader. “We were thinking dinner at TouTou’s.”
My brain and my mouth finally synced up. “If you think I’m asking the prince out to dinner, you’ve got another think coming.”
“You don’t have to ask him. He already asked us. And now I’m asking you.”
“Wait a minute. I’m his date and I’m the last to know?” I didn’t know whether to be insulted or not. “How come you get to be the messenger?”
“Farrouk explained it all to me.”
“And Farrouk would be…”
“His Secret Service guy. The one who sleeps across his threshold at night.”
“He does not.”
“Yeah, he does. He’s got one of those army cots and they move it every morning. The other guy’s name is Bashir. He sleeps next door. They switch off every week.”
I so didn’t need to know this. “How do you know so much about the royal sleeping arrangements?”
“Because I asked them. They’re really nice guys. And I had to talk to somebody while the prince was asking Brett if we could double. Then Brett asked me—I said yes, what a no-brainer—and I’m to ask you.”
Who Made You a Princess? Page 5
