Besides, you know what they’d say.

Sure,nice people—like Tina—would say that I’m lucky.

Like luck had anything to do with it! Unless you count the “luck” where my mom ran into my dad at that off-campus party where they met, instantly hated each other, which of course led inevitably to sexual tension and then tol’amour , and one broken condom later, to me.

And—despite Principal Gupta’s insistence—I’m not convinced hard work had very much to do with me getting in everywhere, either.

Okay…I did do really well in the writing and critical reading sections of my SATs. And my college app essays were good, too. (I’m not going to lie aboutthat , at least not in my own journal. I worked my butt off on those.)

I’ll admit, when your extracurriculars are,Single-handedly brought democracy to a country that otherwise had never known it before , andWrote a four-hundred-page novel for my senior project , it does look slightly impressive.

But I can be truthful tomyself : All those colleges I applied to? They only let me in because I’m a princess.

And it’s not that I’m not grateful. I know every single one of those schools will give me a wonderful, unique educational opportunity.

It’s just…it would have been nice for justone of those places to have accepted me for…well, forme , and not the tiara. If only I could have applied under my pen name—Daphne Delacroix—to know for sure.

Whatever. I’ve got bigger things to worry about right now.

Well, not bigger than where I’m going to spend the next four—or more, if I goof off and don’t declare a major right away like Mom did—years of my life.

But there’s the whole thing with Dad. What if he doesn’t win the election? The election that wouldn’t even be happening if it weren’t for me telling the truth.

And Grandmère is so upset about the fact that René, of all people, is running against Dad—plus all the rumors that have been going around ever since I made Princess Amelie’s declaration public, like that our family was purposefully hiding Amelie’s declaration all along, so that the Renaldos could stay in power—that Dad has had to banish her to Manhattan and have her plan this stupid birthday party for me just to distract her so she’ll quit driving him insane with her constant barrage of, “But does this mean we’ll have to move out of the palace?”