Meg Cabot - Forever Princess

Until the bright rays of the afternoon sun caught on the diamond in the ring J.P. had given me, which I forgot to take off. Anyway, the resulting reflection sent an explosion of little rainbows all over Michael’s face, making him blink.

I was mortified, and said, “I’m sorry,” and slipped the ring off and put it in my bag.

“That’s some rock,” Michael said, with a teasing smile. “So are you guys, like, engaged now?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s just a friendship ring.” Mia Thermopolis’s Big Fat Lie Number Eleven.

“I see,” Michael said. “Friendships have gotten a lot more…expensive than when I was at AEHS.”

Ouch.

But then Michael changed the subject. “And where’s J.P. going to college next year?”

“Well,” I said carefully. “Sean Penn’s optioned this play J.P. wrote, so he’s thinking about heading out to Hollywood next year, and doing college later.”

Michael looked very interested to hear that. “Really? So you guys would be doing the long-distance thing.”

“Well,” I said. “I don’t know. We’re talking about me going with him….”

“To Hollywood?” Michael sounded totally incredulous. Then he apologized. “Sorry. You just…I mean, you’ve just never struck me as the Hollywood type. Not that you aren’t glamorous enough now. Because you totally are.”

“Thanks,” I said, completely embarrassed. Fortunately the waiter had brought our salads by then, so I was able to distract myself by saying no, thank you, to ground pepper.

“But I know what you mean,” I went on, when the waiter went away. “I’m not really sure what I’d do all day in Hollywood. J.P. said I could write. But…I always thought if I put off college for a year, it would be to go out in one of those little boats that put themselves between the whaling ships and the humpbacks, or something. Not hang around on Melrose. You know?”

“Somehow I don’t see your parents giving the seal of approval to either of those plans,” Michael said.

“And then there’s that,” I said, with a sigh. “I have some things I need to figure out. And not a whole lot of time left to do it. The parental units want a decision on where I’m going by the election.”

“You’ll do the right thing,” Michael said confidently. “You always do.”

I just stared at him. “How can you even say that? I so do not.”

“Yes, you do,” he said. “In the end.”

“Michael, I screw everything up,” I said, laying down my fork. “You, more than anyone, should know that. I completely ruined our relationship.”

“No, you didn’t,” he said, looking shocked. “I did.”

“No,I did,” I said. I couldn’t believe we were finally saying these things…these things I’d been thinking for so long, and saying to other people—my friends, Dr. Knutz—but never to the one person to whom they really mattered…Michael. The person to whom I ought to have said them, ages ago. “I never should have made such a big deal over the Judith thing—”

“And I ought to have told you about it from the beginning,” Michael interrupted.

“Even so,” I said. “I acted like a complete and utter psycho—”

“No, Mia, you didn’t—”

“Oh my God,” I said, holding up my hand to stop him with a laugh. “Can we please not try to rewrite history? I did. You were right to break up with me. Things were getting too intense. We both needed a breather.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Abreather . You weren’t supposed to go and get engaged to someone else in the meantime.”

For a second after he said it, I couldn’t inhale. I felt as if all the oxygen in the room had been sucked out of it, or something. I just stared at him, not sure I’d heard him correctly. Had he really said…was it possible he’d really…?

Then he laughed, and, as the waiter came back to pick up his empty salad plate (I’d barely touched mine), said, “Just kidding. Look, I knew it was a risk. I couldn’t have expected you were going to wait around for me forever. You can get engaged—or, what is it? Right, friendship-ringed—to whomever you want. I’m just glad you’re happy.”

Wait. What was happening?

I didn’t know what to do or say. Grandmère had prepared me for tons of situations—from dealing with thieving maids to escaping from embassies during coups d’etat.

But honestly, nothing could have prepared me for this.

Was my ex-boyfriend really intimating that he wanted to get back together?

Or was I reading too much into things? (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

Fortunately just then our main courses came, and Michael steered the conversation back to normal ground like nothing had happened. Maybe nothinghad happened. Suddenly we were talking about whether or not Joss Whedon will ever make aBuffy the Vampire Slayer feature film and how much Karen Allen rocks and Boris’s concert and Michael’s company and Dad’s campaign. For two people with relatively nothing in common (because, let’s face it, he’s a robotic-surgical-arm designer. I’m a romance writer…and a princess. I love musicals and he hates them. Oh, and we have totally dissimilar DNA) we have never, ever run out of things to say to each other.

Which is completely weird.

Then, without my knowing quite how, we got to Lilly.

“Has your dad seen the commercial she made for him?” Michael asked.

“Oh,” I said, smiling. “Yes! It was wonderful. I couldn’t believe it. Was that…did you have something to do with that?”

“Well,” Michael said, smiling too. “She wanted to do it. But…I might have encouraged her a little. I can’t believe you two still aren’t friends again, after all this time.”

“We aren’tnot friends,” I said, remembering what Lilly had told me about how he’d said she had to be nice to me. “We just…I don’t know what happened, really. She never would tell me.”

“She’d never tell me, either,” Michael said. “You really have no idea?”

I flashed back to an image of Lilly’s face as we sat in G&T that day she told me J.P. had broken up with her. I’d always wondered if that had been it. Could this whole thing have been over a boy? Is that what I was being sodense about?

But that would be so stupid. Lilly wasn’t the type of person to let something as dumb as a boy get in the way of a friendship. Not with her best friend.

“I really,” I said, “have no idea.”

The dessert menus came, and Michael insisted on ordering one of each dessert, so we could try them all (because this was a celebration), while he told me stories about the cultural differences in Japan—how one takeout restaurant delivered meals in actual china bowls that he’d place outside his door when he was finished eating, and the restaurant would come back to pick them up, which takes recycling to another level—and some of the embarrassments he’d suffered because of them (karaoke ballad singing, which his Japanese coworkers had taken very seriously, high among them).

And as he talked, it became clear that he and Micromini Midori? Not a couple. He mentioned her boyfriend, who is apparently a karaoke champion in Tsukuba, several times.

Then I started giggling in a different way when, after all the desserts came, I noticed two girls in a boat in the center of the lake, arguing fiercely with each other, and rowing in circles, not getting anywhere. Lana’s plan of spying on me completely and utterly failed.

It was later, after the check came—and Michael paid, even though I said I wanted to takehim out, to thank him for the donation to the hospital—that thingsreally started to fall apart.

Well, maybe they’d been falling apart all afternoon—steadily crumbling—and I just hadn’t been paying attention. Things have a tendency to do that in my life, I’ve noticed. It was when we were standing outside the Boathouse, and Michael asked what I had to do for the rest of the day, and I admitted that—for once—I had nothing to do (until my therapy appointment, but I didn’t mention that. I’ll tell him about therapy someday. But not today), that everything disintegrated like one of the madeleines we’d been nibbling on.