Monday, November 23
11:15 A.M.
Royal Genovian Academy Still in World Languages

I should have known when Madame Alain said she had an important announcement that it wasn’t going to be good news.

I don’t know why I thought it was going to be something nice, like that we were all going to get to go home early because the new baby princesses of Genovia had been born (except that I had already made my dad promise that if Mia went into labor while I was in school, I’d get pulled out of class immediately and brought to the hospital so that I could be one of the first people to meet the babies, and they would imprint upon me like baby ducks and then follow me everywhere).

But no. The announcement was nothing like that.

Instead it was:

“Your Royal Majesties, Highnesses, Graces, lords, ladies, and gentlemen, I’m sorry to inform you that I have only received twenty-seven permission slips for this week’s trip to the Royal School Winter Games in Stockerdörfl,” Madame Alain said after some of the hissing, screeching, and feedback had died down over the intercom.

The Royal Genovian Academy is a very fancy school, with extremely high tuition fees (except for the two hundred or so refugee children who had recently been admitted—they are allowed to attend tuition-free), but it’s also housed in a building that was constructed before sound systems (or electricity) were invented, so it has a lot of technical problems.

“As you know, unless I receive at least another thirty permission slips from those of you who signed up for the trip last week, the Royal Genovian Academy’s participation in this year’s Royal School Winter Games will be canceled due to lack of interest.”

Of course as soon as he heard the name of his hometown mentioned, Prince Gunther Lapsburg von Stuben of Stockerdörfl stood up and gave a fist pump, causing a few of the younger girls in the language lab to squeal. (Prince Gunther is considered extremely good-looking, for a seventh grader.)

This annoyed my cousin Lady Luisa, who flashed the girls a dirty look. She and Prince Gunther have been going out since June, even though all “going out” means in the seventh grade at the Royal Genovian Academy is holding hands. Anything more than that would be a violation of the school’s “honor code.” If they get caught, the head of the school, Madame Alain, will probably expel them, and they’ll have no choice but to attend The Royal Academy in Switzerland, or worse—to Luisa, anyway—Genovian public school.

Luisa grabbed Prince Gunther by the arm and tugged him back into his seat. He looked confused, not knowing—as usual—what he’d done to offend her.

“It’s canceled,” Luisa hissed into Prince Gunther’s ear. “She just said our trip to the Games is going to be canceled. Why are you so excited?”

Prince Gunther looked as hurt as if someone had punched him in the gut. “Canceled? No!”

Luisa rolled her eyes. Except for the fact that the Games meant getting out of class for a few days, no one at the Royal Genovian Academy cared very much about them … no one except for Prince Gunther.

“I know how much of a blow this might be to some of you,” Madame Alain went on over the intercom, almost as if she’d seen Prince Gunther’s look of sadness. “I am extremely disappointed that so many of our royals seem to be lacking in the kind of pride for our school that I have come to expect from students at the Royal Genovian Academy.

“But it is not simply that we don’t have enough permission slips. This illness that so many of you are referring to as La Grippe—when it is, in fact, merely a little cold—has struck down many of our finest athletes. Princess Charlotte on our cross-country ski team. The Contessa Gerante on the girls’ hockey team. Even Lady Marguerite is apparently too ill to work a camera and take photos for the school yearbook, which I find somewhat hard to believe. But there it is.”

I raised my eyebrows at this. Lady Marguerite is another one of my cousins. I knew she hadn’t been feeling well, but I also knew how much she’d been looking forward to going on this school trip. (She’d wanted to get out of a test we were having in Algebra on Friday.)

She must have actually been feeling sick.

La Grippe is a particularly nasty flu that has been going around our school as well as up and down the Mediterranean coast. It is pronounced La Greep but sounds even nastier when someone like Grandmère or Madame Alain says it, because they both roll their r’s and pronounce the letter i like ee, so it comes out sounding like La Grrreeeeeeep.

Yuck!

Half the student population of the Royal Genovian Academy seems to have come down with La Grippe, and so has the faculty.

It’s gotten so bad, it’s started affecting other things at school besides field trips to the Alps:

“In addition,” Madame Alain went on, “because my administrative assistant, Monsieur Gerard, was too ill to come to work last week, we were unable to make your seating assignments for lunch today. Therefore, you may sit wherever you like. Thank you, and remember: Manners matter!”

Though the walls at the RGA are nearly three feet thick, I could hear cheering from the high school classrooms all the way down to the kindergarten (and that was across the courtyard, in another building). Normally, seating for lunch at the Royal Genovian Academy is assigned (like at a wedding), so that we don’t form into “friend groups.”

Madame Alain hates friend groups. She thinks an important part of our training to be “leaders of tomorrow” is developing the ability to make polite conversation with anyone—from the lowliest sixth grader to the tallest senior—and she does that by assigning seats and forcing us to eat lunch with different people every day.

But today we were going to be able to sit anywhere we wanted.

While I felt sorry for Madame Alain’s administrative assistant, this was definitely an unexpected benefit of La Grippe.

So I guess the news wasn’t all bad … at least, not to me. Some people, however, were pretty upset by it.

“Madame Chi,” Prince Gunther cried, leaping to his feet. “If replacements can be found for those suffering with La Grippe, could we not still go to Stockerdörfl on Wednesday?”

Madame Chi, sitting at the front of the language lab, looked as if she might have been coming down with La Grippe herself. Rubbing her temples with her fingers, she sighed so heavily that a curl that had escaped from the tight bun in which she always wore her hair fluttered up into the air.

“Well, Your Highness, I don’t know … it’s terribly late. But I suppose you could always ask.”

Prince Gunther spun around to face our class.

“Come on, everyone!” he cried. “I know you can do better than this! Show some school pride! Get your permission slips to your parents and get them signed. We have to go to the Games. And we have to win! We have to beat TRAIS!”

TRAIS stands for The Royal Academy in Switzerland, against whom the Royal Genovian Academy competes every year at the Royal School Winter Games, a kind of Olympics for all the royal schools in Europe. (The Royal Academy in Switzerland swept most of the medals last year. I understand that they even won the spirit contest, showing better sportsmanship than the RGA by wearing matching tracksuits and chanting, “Go team, go, TRAIS, TRAIS, TRAIS!” at each event. This would be unthinkable to any student at the RGA.)

This year the Games are taking place in Prince Gunther’s Austrian village of Stockerdörfl, just a short—well, okay, fourteen-hour—train ride from Genovia. Prince Gunther’s parents, Prince Hans and Princess Anna-Katerina Lapsburg von Stuben, are going to hand out the medals at the closing ceremonies.

So I guess I can see why Prince Gunther is so excited. If the Games were being hosted in Genovia, with my family handing out medals, I might have been more enthusiastic.

But despite Prince Gunther’s impassioned speech about beating TRAIS, everyone (except me) whipped out their cell phones and began pressing buttons … not to ask their parents to sign and send over their permission slips, but to text one another about where to sit for lunch.

I think Madame Alain is right: the RGA really does have zero school spirit.

And I’m afraid that might include me. I’ve carefully refrained from mentioning anything about the Games to my dad, stepmom, Grandmère, or Mia. Why would I want to go to some dumb royal kids’ competition when my sister is due to have royal twins at ANY MOMENT? Especially since newborns can’t really see all that well (according to my sister’s birthing books). They become accustomed to those closest to them during those all-important first few days in their life by the sound of their voices.

No way am I leaving Genovia and missing out on that.