Chapter
Eight
Teenage
Gold Diggers
There
were two shocks in store for Shiloh and Paige the next day in the cafeteria. Firstly,
we, The Princesses, formally asked them to join their group. Melody was leaving
anyway but her father’s departure had been delayed. Our head Princess wanted to
continue the tradition of making our group exclusive but not ‘mean,’ and Melody
liked Shiloh (and thought she might make leader one day) and Shiloh wouldn’t
join without Paige – so that’s how it all came about. Though Paige told no one
she was part of our circle. She sat with Shiloh at lunch and Shiloh took
Melody’s place when she left, which would have been fine, until Mackenzie
started to show her true colors.
Anyway,
I blogged, doesn’t exclusivity make us mean
by association?
Shiloh was a bit confused. Paige saw all
things clearly. I heard them talking in the locker rooms.
“This group are snobbish and elitist. I
want out,” Paige said.
“I want to stay in,” Shiloh replied,
asserting herself for once.
Paige didn’t want to hurt her sister but
I’m sure she knew we only let her in because we wanted Shiloh to join. Shiloh meant
everything to Paige. As well as being a sister, she was her best friend, so
that made Paige one of us even if we hadn’t formally voted her in.
As I skipped along to art class, there
were pictures of the legendary Princess founders – Teegan, Tory, Brooke and
Freya who had hoped to one day be real Princesses themselves – in the honor
cabinet. It was kind of sad. There were
so few possibilities to become an American Princess in their era.
So, after a girlhood of being totally mean,
the founding princesses had to settle into suburbia. They were now moms and had
become surprisingly nice. They hadn’t married real princes (of course) but they
had married rich and as far as power went, they had to settle for running the Parents of the Poshest Bel Air Schools committee.
I strolled through to my drama class. I
wanted to arrive early to practice my audition piece for this new TV show my
agent had been bugging me about.
If you read my sister’s best friend’s
memoir (Pride & Princesses)
you’ll know I’ve been auditioning since I was three. Well, actually, I got a TV
commercial and the money I made is in trust and enough to pay my way through
college, thanks to my sister and her best friend, Phoebe. It’s only recently
that my interest in auditioning has returned. My manager Thom has gone from
tiny office in a backstreet to being attached to the largest acting agency in a
fancy part of LA. He leaves messages all the time for me but I only return them
sometimes. It’s important he knows I’m not desperate for work.
As I worked away on my audition piece in
the empty theatre waiting for class to start, emoting at the top of my voice, Mackenzie
began to temporarily lose her mind in another part of the school. She’d
surveyed the cafeteria and was contemplating the social structure of the place.
Mackenzie concluded, now that Melody was out and Shiloh was in, that her week
long grip on power was tenuous.
“They will NOT upstage me with some povvie
princess whose fashion sense is at least a season out of date!” Shiloh ranted
to the bathroom mirror. Unfortunately the mirror did not reply.
*note to reader: “povvie” = a derogatory
word used by Mackenzie to describe her financially challenged rivals. I don’t
endorse the use of this word. It derives from ‘poverty’ which is in direct
opposition to the affluence of the Bingley and Donovan families.
