Wednesday, November 25
8:30 P.M.
La Fondue Stockerdörfl, Austria

DRAMA!

Luisa and Prince Gunther have had another one of their fights!

(Even though, according to the note Luisa gave me just yesterday, they “never fight” and are “totally and completely in love” in a way that I am too immature to understand.)

I don’t know where they found the time to have a fight between our getting off the bus, checking into our hotel rooms, and getting ready for dinner.

But that’s what Victorine was pounding on our door about.

“Luisa’s in our room crying,” Victorine said, looking upset. “She says Prince Gunther has broken her heart.”

“What?” Nadia could hardly contain her glee. She loves gossip, and also anything to do with drama. I think this is left over from her being an actress and working on the soap opera back in her home country. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Victorine said. “But I need your help. She can’t go down to dinner crying like this. People will think there’s something really wrong with her, and then they’ll stare at us and come over and ask questions like Is there anything we can do for you, little girl? But we can’t leave her alone, either, because she’s threatening to do something to herself.”

“Like what?” Nadia asked, her eyes nearly bursting out of her head.

“Like dye a purple streak in her hair.”

Nadia looked disappointed. “Is that all?”

“Really,” Princess Komiko said, “that’s not so bad.” She pointed at the purple streak in her own hair, which was a clip-on since she said her parents would kill her if she dyed her hair. “It might look good.”

“I agree,” I said. “Why can’t we let her?”

“Because she isn’t a Borette, like me,” Victorine declared. Many fans of the rock singer Boris P have multicolored streaks in their hair. “Or a royal back in her home country, like Princess Komiko. Luisa could never pull it off. She doesn’t have the confidence or the wardrobe. All of her clothes are designer.”

Victorine was right. Luisa was probably only threatening to dye her hair to get attention, not because she really wanted a purple streak.

“Whatever we do, let’s do it soon,” Victorine said. “I’m starving.”

I admired Victorine for being both compassionate and practical. Also, I was starving, too. It had been a long time since our savory and sweet snacks on the train (although I’d had four of them).

“Right,” I said. “Let’s go talk to her.”

So we all piled into Victorine and Luisa’s room, which was exactly like ours, except that it had one empty bed, where Marguerite would have slept if she hadn’t come down with La Grippe.

Luisa looked great for someone who claimed her heart was broken. She’d changed into the clothes she was going to wear for dinner—Claudio jeans and a shimmery off-the-shoulder sweater, as well as faux-fur-lined boots—and her hair and makeup were perfectly in place. She simply couldn’t seem to get up off the bed, across which she was sprawled, crying (although without any tears, I noticed, which was an impressive skill).

“H-he doesn’t understand my needs,” she sobbed as we all clustered around her and patted her on the back. “I texted that I need us to spend more time together, but he texted back that he had to stay with his parents, but that he’d see me at dinner.”

“Well,” I said, “Prince Gunther’s parents do live in Stockerdörfl. They’re hosting this whole event, and paying for a lot of it. So it sort of makes sense he’d be staying with them rather than here at the hotel.”

“But how can they be more important to him than me?” Luisa raised her not-tearstained face to ask.

This was a hard question to answer. Should a boy’s parents be more important to him than his girlfriend? I looked at Princess Komiko to see if she knew, but she only shrugged and fiddled around with the purple hooves of her unicorn backpack.

Nadia coughed. “In the soap opera that I worked on, there was a teenage boy character who had to be very kind to his father—even though he was an evil man with a weather-controlling machine—because if he wasn’t kind to him, his father’s secret assassins would have killed his girlfriend. And his mother and sisters. So maybe that’s how it is with Prince Gunther’s father.”

Luisa blinked. “Do you think that’s true?”

“Oh, yes,” Nadia said, nodding. “Probably.”

I highly doubted that Prince Gunther’s father was going to have Prince Gunther’s girlfriend killed if he didn’t spend time with the family, but was happy to agree with anything that would get Luisa moving downstairs to dinner.

“I’m sure it’s true,” I said. “So you might want to be extra supportive of Prince Gunther while we’re here.”

“Yes,” Luisa said with a sigh. “I suppose I should.”

So now we’re down in the fondue restaurant … but if this is what Luisa calls “being supportive,” I’d hate to see how she treats someone she doesn’t like.

The restaurant has a private room set up for us, with eight big tables with a grill in the middle of each, over which we’re heating the different pots for our fondue sauces.

But instead of sitting at a table with Prince Gunther, Luisa walked right by him and plopped down at a table with the Duke of Marborough and the Marquis of Tottingham!

Prince Gunther looked like he was about to cry. “Luisa hates me,” he said with the saddest sigh I’d ever heard.

“Oh, no,” I said, glancing with alarm at my friends. “Luisa doesn’t hate you. She’s just, uh, having a bad day.”

Nadia, Princess Komiko, and Victorine all assured him that Luisa didn’t hate him, as well.

But I don’t think any of us did a very good job, because Prince Gunther continued to stare into the dancing flames of our fondue fire, looking as if he wished he were anywhere else but with us.

Then something incredible happened. Prince Khalil walked into the restaurant, looked around … and headed straight for our table.

Don’t ask me why. It wasn’t as if there weren’t any seats available at the other tables, especially the ones where the cool people were sitting (there were).

“May I sit here?” he asked, indicating the empty chair beside mine.

Of course I said yes (or at least I think I did. I’m not entirely sure what came out of my mouth).

Prince Khalil sat down. I tried not to be too aware of how he smelled, which was clean and fresh. He had taken a shower (or maybe had a swim in the saltwater infinity pool) and changed from the Tupac shirt into a nice wool sweater.

I had never seen him in a sweater before. In Genovia, the weather is too warm for them. He looked very nice.

“What’s the matter with him?” Prince Khalil asked me in a low voice, nodding at Prince Gunther.

“Oh,” I said, in an equally low voice, “I think he and Lady Luisa are having a little bit of a disagreement.” I didn’t want to betray Luisa’s trust—or Prince Gunther’s—by going into too much detail.

“Oh.” Prince Khalil held his menu in front of his face and pretended to be looking at the food selections, but really he was looking at Prince Gunther—and Luisa—from behind it. “Trouble in paradise, huh?”

I couldn’t believe Prince Khalil was sitting next to me, casually gossiping, when he’d just ignored me on the bus!

Maybe he didn’t hate me after all? Or maybe he really hadn’t heard me when I’d called his name.

It was possible he hadn’t seen me take that photo after all!

“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “Maybe.”

“What’s going on?” he asked. “She’s mad but won’t tell him why?”

“Um,” I said. “Basically.”

“I hate that kind of stuff,” Prince Khalil said. “If something is on someone’s mind, they should just tell the other person what it is. Games should be saved for the ice.”

“Ha,” I said. “Or the floating tennis table.”

He grinned back at me. “Exactly.”

I couldn’t believe it! My plan—well, the plan Grandmère had suggested—was working. I was being kind to Prince Khalil, and he didn’t look sad anymore.

He didn’t know I’d secretly taken a photo of him with no shirt on and sent it to my best friend back in America as part of a bet, of course.

But that was going to stay my little secret (with Nishi).

Meanwhile, I was having fondue with him, and it was going great. He knew exactly what to order, because he’d had fondue before—well, he and Prince Gunther had. So had Victorine. And Princess Komiko, actually. And Nadia.

Basically, I was the only person at the table who’d never had fondue before.

But that was okay, because all I had to do was watch what the others did and copy them. That’s what Grandmère always said we should do when eating food with which we’re not familiar (that and, if you found that you didn’t like it, discreetly lay down your dining utensil and say that it turned out you’d had a huge lunch and weren’t that hungry after all).

I didn’t need to do that with fondue, though, because it was so good! We had the kind where you dipped pieces of bread into a big pot of warm, melty cheese, and then the chinoise kind—which was where you cooked the meat and vegetables in a pot of broth right at your table, and then shared the broth afterward as a soup—and then, for dessert afterward, the best kind of fondue of all …

Chocolate!

And even though there wasn’t cheesecake, there were strawberries and pineapple and marshmallows and banana and it was so delicious and fun to huddle around the pot of creamy warm chocolate, especially since it was so cold outside, it had started snowing. You could see the big white soft flakes coming down outside the huge picture windows, which made it especially “jolly”—to use Prince Gunther’s word—to be so snug and toasty inside.

Prince Khalil kept cracking me up, too, saying, “Oh, excuse me,” in a goofy voice every time our long forks accidentally crossed inside the pot.

I wasn’t the only one laughing, of course. Nadia and Victorine and Princess Komiko and even Prince Gunther laughed, too.

But somehow I felt as if Prince Khalil’s silly jokes were meant for me.

Ugh! Simply writing that, I realize how dumb I sound.

Don’t worry, though. It didn’t go on for very long. Because we weren’t the only ones staying at Eis Schloss who had reservations for La Fondue that night. It turned out that the British Aristocracy Training School, or BrATS, and also the French Academy of Royals (FARs) had reservations right after ours, so our chaperones for the night—Madame Alain, Monsieur Chaudhary, and Mademoiselle Justine—kept trying to hurry us along.

“Eat up, eat up, Your Highnesses,” Mademoiselle Justine kept calling out. “We must be done with our cheese course in douze minutes! Douze minutes, my lords and ladies!”

There’s nothing more annoying than being told you have twelve minutes to do something … except maybe someone going over a schedule while you’re doing something else.

But that’s what Madame Alain decided to do. Which was hand out, and then explain—in excruciating detail—the schedule for the next two days. Which is how:

A. I have so much time to be writing all this … I look like I’m taking notes. And I am … sort of!

B. I found out that as school photographer, I’m supposed to be EVERYWHERE AT ALL TIMES tomorrow. Although Madame Alain strongly encourages all of us to try to go to every event in which we are not participating, so that we can cheer for our teammates.

But I guess I shouldn’t complain, since at least I’ll get all those other photos Nishi wanted … and I won’t even have to make up an excuse to tell Prince Khalil about why I’m taking a picture of him: Taking pictures of him (and everyone else) is my job for the next couple of days!

Maybe while I’m taking photos of Prince Khalil for Nishi, I’ll take a couple for myself. You know, just to keep, and not hand in to the yearbook committee or school paper.

HA HA! JUST KIDDING. I’m not a stalker.

I don’t think.

But I did notice while we were sharing all those fondue pots together that Prince Khalil’s eyes are awfully big and soft and brown looking.

Almost as big and soft and brown-looking as Snowball’s.

Wait … is it weird to compare a boy’s eyes to your dog’s? I think it is.

I’m weird. They should change my name from Princess Olivia to Princess Weird.

Oh well. I DON’T CARE!!!