Page 11 of Royals
Maddy shifts her weight from one foot to the other, moving a little closer. “And are you gonna move there? To Scotland?”
Hannah shakes her head at that, eyes wide. “I mean, you’re basically going to be a princess, right?”
Sighing, I take a sip of my tea before saying, “I’m not really allowed to talk about it.” Then I drop my voice to a whisper and add, “For security reasons.”
Maddy and Hannah both widen their eyes, stepping back a little, and Isabel grins at me before schooling her face into a serious expression and adding, “Yeah, she had to sign papers and shit. If she talks about any of it, she’ll get in trouble. I mean,bigtrouble.”
“Isa!” I say sharply, and then glance around, like people might be watching us. “You know what happens if they hear us!”
I give Isabel my best solemn look, then draw my finger across my throat. Isabel swallows hard, looking properly scared.
“Jesus,” Hannah breathes, and Maddy looks at me with her jaw hanging open.
“Just... don’t ask me about it, okay?” I say, and both Hannah and Maddy nod so hard I’m surprised their necks don’t snap.
They go back to their table, whispering again and genuinely looking a little pale.
“We’re evil,” Isabel says, rattling the ice in her cup, and I shrug.
“Proactive.”
Going back to my test, I let Isabel go back to her gossip surfing, thinking I might grab some kind of fried seafood onmy way home this afternoon. High-stress days require high calories, so...
“Oh holy god!” Isabel yelps, and my head shoots up. For a second, I think maybe she saw a bug or, even worse, a snake—Isabel is deathly afraid of all things slithery—but then I see her eyes still glued to the screen, her face going kind of gray underneath her tan, and I know it’s much worse.
EXCLUSIVE: “DAISY WINTERS DUMPED ME FOR A ROYAL UPGRADE!”
Seems like Eleanor Winters is not the only member of her family with royal ambitions. According to our exclusive interview with Michael Dorset, Daisy’s most recent boyfriend, now that Daisy’s sister, Eleanor, is notjustPrince Alexander’s girlfriend, but his fiancée, Daisy has seen her own prospects skyrocket.
“Daisy has always been a really chill girl,” Michael tells us. “You know, laid-back, never gave a [expletive deleted] what other people thought of her. But she’s been different since Eleanor started dating Prince Alexander. And once they were engaged? She wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
When asked if he thought Daisy would be setting her sights on Alexander’s brother, Prince Sebastian, Mr. Dorset shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s obvious everything with her sister has gone to her head.”
Mr. Dorset then played for us a sample of a song he’d written for Daisy Winters, a song, he claims, that left the soon-to-be-royal-adjacent high schooler unmoved.
I KNEW IT!!
Ahem, Gentle Readers, was I NOT just wondering wheeeeerrrrre the heck Eleanor-Not-Ellie’s family was? And did you not DELIVER, my angels?? YOU DID! SO! So we knew our Miss Eleanor comes from $$$. Maybe not the same kind of F You Money she’s about to marry into, but still. Her dad was a rock star—albeit suuuuuper briefly—andher mom writes those mystery books where people get killed in small towns in really cutesy ways. You know, “Oh no, the local pastry chef was stabbed with a cake server!” THAT kind of thing. But we KNEW that stuff, so the BIG FIND is that our Eleanor-Not-Ellie has a HOT YOUNGER SISTER. Don’t they all? Attaching a pic someone sent me below, and ommmmggggg, the hair!! Don’t you KNOW Miss Eleanor is NOT HERE FOR THAT? I swear I used to have a Little Mermaid doll with hair that color. ANYWAY, her name is Daisy (and her dad once had a song called “Daisy Chain,” which adds a nice touch of ICK to everything), she’s in high school (this is why we haven’t heard much about her before now, according to my “sources”—Alexander’s scary family wanted her left alone because she’s not eighteen, which seems kind of dumb based on how many Celebrity Rug Rats I’ve seen in tabloids, but whatevs). TMZ has an exclusive interview with her wastrel of an ex, who is saying she dumped him because, like her sister, she has PRINCELY AMBITIONS. She works at a GROCERY STORE of all things, aaaaaand I’m giving you a link to her Facebook because hey, not like we don’t already know I’m going to hell, so let’s add RIBBONS TO THE HANDBASKET, SHALL WE? It’s pretty boring, NGL, but come on. She HAS to be the slutty one, right?
(“I KNEW IT!!,” fromCrown Town)
Chapter 6
“Can I just state for the record that being called ‘the slutty one’ when I had exactly one boyfriend for less than a year isdeeplyunfair?”
Even through the computer screen, I can feel El tighten her shoulders as she shoots a glare toward the tiny camera. “Daisy, this is not funny.”
We’re all in the dining room, me, Mom, and Dad, crowded around my laptop. Ellie is in Edinburgh in the flat she shares with another girl who works at her publishing company, and since it’s about 2 a.m. there, she’s speaking in a whisper for the most part throughout our emergency family Skype session. She’s still dressed from work, too, which, weirdly, makes me feel kind of sorry for her. “Jammies by 5 p.m. or die” is practically my motto.
So maybe that’s why I keep my own voice soft when I reply, “Trust me, I know it’s not, El.I’mthe one who had to delete her Facebook. Which, by the way, was so totally not boring. I had all those pictures from last year’s trip to Colonial Williamsburg!”
“I feel the lack of a book of faces is truly the least of our concerns at the moment,” Dad says. He’s sitting next to me, drinking cranberry juice out of a wineglass.
Mom is currently indulging in a cigarette. She quit about ten years ago but still gets three smokes a year to be used in either celebration or crisis.
There is no doubt what kind of cigarette this is.
“It’s just one blog post,” Mom says, stubbing out her cigarette in the lumpy clay ashtray I made for her two years ago when I went through a pottery phase. It’s supposed to be shaped like a hand, but it looks a lot more like a claw if I’m being honest. The fact that I painted it green doesn’t help. “It isn’t as though this is in the papers, or on the telly. Who reads those blogs anyway?”
