Princess in Pink
yelled. 'Grandmere, you've got to do something! My friends are down at the restaurant picketing it right now!'
    Just to be dramatic, I switched on the television and turned it to New York One. I didn't really expect there to be anything
    on it about Lilly's protest. Just maybe something about how there was a traffic snarl in the area, due to rubberneckers peering
    at the spectacle Lilly was making of herself.
    So you can imagine I was pretty surprised when a second later, a reporter started describing the 'extraordinary scene outside Les Hautes Manger, the trendy four-star eatery on 57th Street,' and they showed Lilly marching around with a big sign that
    said LES HAUTES MANGER MGMT UNFAIR. The biggest surprise wasn't the large number of Albert Einstein High School students Lilly had managed to talk into joining her. I mean, I expected to see Boris there, and it wasn't exactly astonishing to see that the AEHS Socialist Club was there as well, since they will show up to any protest they can find.
    No, the big shocker was that there was a large number of men I'd never seen before marching right alongside Lilly and the other AEHS students.
    The reporter soon explained why.
    'Busboys from all over the city have gathered here in front of Les Hautes Manger to show their solidarity with Jangbu Pinasa, the employee who was dismissed from Les Hautes Manger last night after an incident involving the Dowager Princess of Genovia.'
    In spite of all of this, however, Grandmere remained completely unmoved. She just looked at the screen and clacked her tongue.
    'Blue,' she said, 'isn't Lilly's best colour, is it?'
    I seriously don't know what I am going to do with the woman. She is completely IMPOSSIBLE.
    Friday, May 2, the Loft
    You would think in my own house I would find a little peace and quiet. But no, I come home to find my mom and Mr.G in a raging fight. Usually their fights are about the fact that Mom wants a home birth with a midwife and Mr G wants a hospital
    birth with the staff of the Mayo Clinic in attendance.
    But this time it was because my mom wants to name the baby Simone if it's a girl, after Simone de Beauvoir, and Sartre if it's
    a boy, after - well, some guy named Sartre, I guess.
    But Mr. G wants to name the baby Rose if it's a girl, after his grandma, and Rocky if it's a boy, after . . . well, apparently after Sylvester Stallone. Which, you know, having seen the movie Rocky, isn't necessarily a bad thing, since Rocky was very nice and all...
    But my mom says over her dead body will her son - if she has a son - be named after a practically illiterate prizefighter.
    Still, if you ask me, Rocky is better than the last name they came up with if it's a boy: Granger. Thank God I went and looked up Granger in the baby-name book I bought them. Because once I let them know that Granger means 'farmer' in Middle French, they totally cooled on it. Who names their baby Farmer?
    Amelia doesn't mean anything in French. It is said to be derivative of Emily, or Emmeline, which means 'industrious' in Old German. The name Michael, which is old Hebrew, means 'He who is like the Lord'. So you see that, together, we make a
    very nice pair, being industrious and lord-like.
    But the fight didn't end with die whole Sartre versus

    
     Rocky thing. Oh no. My mom wants to go to B.J.'s Wholesale Outlet in Jersey City tomorrow to buy the supplies for my party, but Mr. G is scared terrorists might set off a bomb in the Holland Tunnel, trapping them in there like Sylvester Stallone in the movie Daylight, and then Mom might go into labour prematurely and have the baby with the water from the Hudson River gushing all around.
    Mr. G just wants to go to Paper House on Broadway to buy Queen Amidala birthday plates and cups.
    Hello, I hope they know I am fifteen years, not months, old, and that I can perfectly understand everything that they are saying.
    Whatever. I put on my headphones and turned on my computer in the hopes of finding some solace away

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