Monday, November 23
1:15 P.M.
Royal Genovian Academy Lunch

Oh dear.

Right after the bell rang for lunch, as I yelled at Princess Komiko to please wait for me because I’d forgotten my backpack, then whirled around to get it, I nearly smacked right into Prince Khalil.

I’ve gotten much more graceful (in my opinion) than last year when Mademoiselle Justine, RGA’s dance instructor, despaired of me ever learning to do a proper Genovian folk dance.

But I still occasionally bump into things.

And today what I bumped into was Prince Khalil Rashid bin Zayed Faisal.

He was super nice about it, though, bending over to help me pick up all the things that had scattered out of my backpack and pretending like I hadn’t just made a total idiot out of myself.

He even asked—looking at me with the same thoughtful, sad expression he’s been wearing on his face ever since returning to school at the beginning of the new semester—“Are you all right, Princess Olivia?”

“Me?” I squeaked as I gathered up all the German flashcards I’d made for myself so I could remember my vocabulary words. “I’m fine. What about you?”

He smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him smile all semester, practically, and the look of it made my heart sing.

There was still something a bit sad in his smile, though, and that made me feel sad, too.

“I’m fine also,” he said. “You seem very excited.”

“Oh,” I said. “I am excited!”

“About the Royal School Winter Games?”

“What? No!” I made a face. “About the fact that we get to sit wherever we want at lunch today!”

His smile grew confused. “Wait … so you’re not going to the Games?”

“Oh, goodness, no,” I said. Then I noticed that his smile had disappeared altogether, and he was regarding me with a look that seemed more troubled than ever. “What I mean is…” What had I said wrong? Was Prince Khalil upset with my lack of school spirit? “I can’t. I have to stay in Genovia until my sister’s babies are born. I’ve got to be here for the birth. I’m going to be an aunt, you know.”

His dark eyebrows, which he’d furrowed when I’d said I wasn’t going to the Games, relaxed after I explained why.

“Oh,” he said. “That makes sense.”

“Does it?” I laughed a little nervously. I was still mortified from having crashed into him, but also a little freaked out that we were the only two people left in the language lab. It had been one thing to be alone with him back when we’d been friends and could talk so easily about our mutual love of iguanas.

It was quite another to be alone with him now that this strange distance had grown between us.

“I’m afraid people are going to call me a dork when they find out,” I said, climbing to my feet, my backpack secured. “But I’d rather stay home with my sister and her new babies—when she has them—than go skiing in the Alps.” I smiled at him in a fashion that was probably 100 percent dorky.

He didn’t smile back, though. In fact, he climbed to his own feet, then said, very seriously, “I don’t think there’s anything weird about wanting to stay close to your family. And I’d never think you were a dork, Olivia. In fact, just the opposite. You’ll see.…”

But instead of telling me what it was I was going to see, he turned and left. He just shouldered his own backpack, turned around, and left the language lab.

And that was it. That was the end of our conversation.

I don’t want to sound sexist or anything—my sister says making prejudicial remarks about people based on their gender is called sexism—but boys can be really weird sometimes.

(Although I guess girls can be, too.)

Now I better put my pen down, because it’s rude to write in your journal when you’re supposed to be eating lunch with someone. (I asked Princess Komiko to sit next to me, after all, and she has to be wondering what I’ve been writing about this whole time instead of talking to her over our salades Niçoises.)