Princess' Diaries

My mom hadn’t gone to her studio, which she does every Saturday without fail. She was sitting there waiting for me to come home, reading old copies of the subscription she got me toSeventeen magazine before she realized I was too flat-chested to ever be asked out on a date, so all the information provided in that particular periodical was worthless to me.

Then there was my dad, who was sitting in the exact same spot as he’d been when I’d left the day before, only this time he was reading theSunday Times, even though it was Saturday, and Mom and I have this rule that you can’t start reading the Sunday sections until Sunday. To my surprise, he wasn’t wearing a suit. Today he had on a sweater—cashmere, no doubt given to him by one of his many girlfriends—and corduroy pants.

When I walked in, he folded the paper all carefully, put it down, and gave me this long, intent look, like Captain Picard right before he starts going on to Ryker about the Prime Directive. Then he goes, "We need to talk."

I immediately started in about how it wasn’t like I hadn’t told them where I was, and how I just needed a little time away to think about things, and how I’d been really careful and hadn’t taken the subway or anything, and my dad just went, "I know."

Just like that. "I know."He completely gave in without a fight.

My dad.

I looked at my mom to see if she’d noticed that he’d lost his mind. And then she did the craziest thing. She put the magazine down and came over and hugged me and said, "We’re so sorry, baby."

Hello?These are myparents? Did the body snatchers come while I was gone and replace my parents with pod people? Because that was the only way I could think of that my parents would be so reasonable.

Then my dad goes, "We understand the stress that this has brought you, Mia, and we want you to know that we’ll do everything in our power to try to make this transition as smooth for you as possible."

Then my dad asked me if I knew what a compromise was, and I said yes, of course, I’m not in like the third grade anymore, so he pulled out this piece of paper, and on it we all drafted what my mom calls the Thermopolis-Renaldo Compromise. It goes like this: