Page 23 of The Dandelion Princess
“Max,” I finish.
Her lips twist in silent apology.
“Don’t feel guilty for being happy,” I say, putting my hands on her cheeks and forcing her face to the screen. “I’m glad when any of us escapes the spreadsheets.”
Mama’s spreadsheets have been a sword hanging over my head since before I could toddle. The story goes that because Mama found her match in a marriage carefully arranged by her parents, her children will benefit from her guidance to findtheirs, thus avoiding a host of calamities that have befallen other royal houses in modern Europe. (Here, Mama’s story digresses to go over specific examples of infidelity, treason, and best-selling tell-alls.) Her spreadsheets, they say, are filled with the names and net worth of the only people in Europe worth marrying, and they go on for pages.
Instead of selecting matches from this list, my sisters have chosen an officer, an immigrant, and the heir to a hostile kingdom. All the pressure of upholding tradition and supporting the Crown lands at my feet and Noah’s. I have to break free while it’s still possible.
Clara taps the cat bus again. “I’d very much like you to close your eyes and visualize trying to pee in this. Let’s veto all costumes in the form of a vehicle.”
“Bummer. My backup plan was going as a white box truck with dramatic brake failure. What about this one?” I point to a drama that features a girl wearing a massive red scarf that swallows half her head.
Clara looks heavenward. “I am begging you, with tears in my eyes, to choose something hot. You haven’t dated in so long. Please give me a crumb that says you want to.”
I catch my bottom lip between my teeth. Marc is everywhere and Clara is right. “There’s this drama about an ancient Seongan king and the mermaid who lives in his fish pond, but—”
“Mermaid? Perfect.”
Clara does not care to hear a comprehensive exposition of the characters and plot, instead navigating to a high-end shopping website. Eventually, she lands on a vintage Schiaparelli number on the back of a willowy model. If you squint, there’s something fishy about it.
Reason raps her knuckles on the desk. “I am too short and I have enjoyed too many laminated pastries to make that work. Can you imagine how many fashion historians would releaseunhinged video essays if I tried to squeeze into that? We’ve only got a week and I have to be realistic.”
“Realism is for people with a mortgage,” Clara counters. “I’m not going to entertain a negative attitude from the same girl who wanted to whip a whole cat bus together with a glue gun and piano wire.”
My eyes gleam. “When it falls apart on the dance floor, it’s going to be hilarious.”
She shakes her head and puts her finger under my nose. “No. No. We’re not going to play this game where you make yourself into a joke just to avoid people seeing there’s something you really want and can’t have.”
Her incisive appraisal lands like a stab in the back. “I don’t—” But I do, so I shut up.
“Caroline will source any fabric you need,” Clara continues.
“Caroline? You meanVrouwTiele?”
She nods. “We’ll do the mermaid.”
“I can’t be a mermaid,” I protest.
“Give me one good reason.”
I would pay serious money if she let this drop. Going through puberty on a global stage teaches you to play the cards you’re dealt, and I’ve got a lot of amazing cards. I’m cute. I’m playful. I’m clever and approachable. But it has never occurred to anyone in our nation of 5.8 million citizens to describe me as sexy.
“Here are two good reasons,” I say, waving my hand over my considerable cleavage. “Look at all this business. My clamshell bra is going to look like it was cultivated downstream from a nuclear power plant.”
Clara’s laugh comes through her nose. “Now you have to do it. Marc would die.”
There he is again. When other girls practiced writingVrouw[frothy first name] [surname of Global Shipping Dynasty] intheir composition notebooks, I was scratching out the Chinese characters of his Seongan name, Jun Hao—handsome, vast—and telling the other girls it meant ‘peach tree fate’ or ‘hot soup’.
“Marc?” I whisper.
“What Marc?” Clara echos, searching images of mermaid costumes.
“You Marc-ed first,” I say. “Why is he going to die?”
She makes a few keystrokes. “Oh. He really likes your…business.”
Time slows like a spaceship failing the jump into light speed.Wooooooom.
