Party Princess by Meg Cabot Page A

like taking a little jog down memory lane, and had decided to drag me along with her.
    I wondered if she’d even notice if I started text messaging Michael. He’d just be getting out of his Stochastic Analysis and Optimization class.
    “I had the starring role, of course,” Grandmère was going on, lost in reverie. “The ingenue, Yum-Yum. People said I was the finest Yum-Yum they had ever seen, but I’m sure they were only trying to flatter me. Still, with my twenty-inch waist, I did look absurdly fetching in a kimono.”
     
     
     
    Text message: STUCK W/GM
     
     
     
    “No one was more surprised than I was when it turned out there was a Broadway director in the audience—Señor Eduardo Fuentes, one of the most influential stage directors of his day—and he approached me after opening night with an offer to star in the show he was directing in New York. I never even considered it, of course—”
     
     
     
    Text message: I MISS U
     
     
     
    “—since I knew I was destined for much greater things than a career in the theater. I wanted to be a surgeon, or perhaps a fashion designer, like Coco Chanel.”
     
     
     
    Text message: I LUV U
     
     
     
    “He was devastated, of course. I wouldn’t be surprisedif it turned out he was a little bit in love with me. I did look smart in that kimono. But, of course, my parents never would have approved. And if I HAD gone to New York with him, I’d never have met your grandfather.”
     
     
     
    Text message: GET ME OUT OF HERE
     
     
     
    “You should have heard my rendition of ‘Three Little Maids’:
    ‘Three little maids from school are we—’”
     
     
     
    Text message: OMG SHE IS SINGING SEND HELP NOW
     
     
     
    “‘Pert as a schoolgirl well can be—’”
     
     
     
    Fortunately Grandmère broke off at that point in a coughing fit. “Oh dear! Yes. I was quite the sensation that year, let me tell you.”
     
     
     
    Text message: THIS IS WORSE THAN WHAT AC WILL DO 2 ME WHEN SHE FINDS OUT ABOUT THE $
     
     
     
    “Amelia, what are you doing with that mobile phone?”
    “Nothing,” I said, quickly pressing SEND .
    Grandmère’s face still had a dewy look from her stroll down memory lane.
    “Amelia. I have an idea.”
    Oh no.
    See, there are two people in my acquaintance from whom you never want to hear the words “I have an idea.”
    Lilly is one.
    Grandmère is the other.
    “Would you look at that?” I pointed at the clock. “Six o’clock already. Well, I better get going, I’m sure you have dinner plans with some shah or something. Isn’t it your birthday tomorrow? You must have some pre-birthday reflection to do….”
    “Sit back down, Amelia,” Grandmère said in her scariest voice.
    I sat.
    “I think,” Grandmère said, “that you should put on a show.”
    At least, that’s what I could have sworn she said.
    But that couldn’t be correct. Because no one in her right mind would say something like that.
    Wait. Did I just write “in her right mind”?
    “A show?” I knew Grandmère had recently cut back on her smoking. She hadn’t quit or anything. But her doctor told her if she didn’t cut back, she’d be on an oxygen tank by the time she’s seventy.
    So Grandmère had started limiting her cigarettes to after meals only. This is on account of her not being able to find an oxygen tank that goes with any of her designer outfits.
    I decided that maybe the nicotine patch she was wearing had backfired or something, sending pure, unadulterated carbon monoxide into her bloodstream.
    Because that was the only explanation I could think offor why she might possibly consider it a good idea for Albert Einstein High School to put on a show.
    “Grandmère,” I said. “Maybe you should peel off your patch. Slowly. And I’ll just call your doctor—”
    “Don’t be ridiculous, Amelia,” she said, sniffing at the suggestion that she might be suffering from any sort of brain aneurysm or stroke, either of which, at her age, are