Princesses Don't Sweat
Kaz Delaney

Prologue

New York, December 21^st

Q. What do you do if your Mom does a complete one eighty over a guy she meets in an internet chat room and the guy is like a trillion miles away in Australia and she wants you both to leave New York and go meet him? At Christmas!

1. You gross out and demand DNA testing to prove she really IS your mother. Looking for love in a chat room is so totally last year.
2. Show her the stats to prove how many internet relationships end in disaster. It’s a freak show out there!
3. Casually ask your doctor which diseases make it impossible to fly and then read up on the symptoms. Go for one with spots, coughing and delirium. Fevers are harder to fake.
4. Study up on everything Australian and present her with a list of all the things you’re positive you’re fatally allergic to down there. Make an alphabetical list with ‘Australia’ at the top. Being allergic to a whole country has to be impressive. Will she really put your life in mortal danger for a down-under fling?
5. Simply refuse to go. Ignore all the pictures of all the cute guys with the big tanned shoulders and wearing those itsy-bitsy swimsuits and little surf caps you found when you were researching and forbid yourself to dream about being rescued by one of them. Stand firm. This is your life too.
6. Compromise. Agree to go, but only under certain conditions. Like that you go Five Star all the way — and you stay right at a beach, with a balcony suite and there are binoculars in your Christmas stocking. Really high powered ones.

In my experience there is no problem in life that can’t be solved by a magazine quiz. No one should ever make a major decision without one - even if you have to make up your own. Option ‘f’ had a big tick beside it. I’d done this quiz weeks ago and when I’d passed it around my friends they all agreed with my choice. Okay — so it was an easy one mostly because all options from ‘a’ though ‘e’ had bummed out.

Totally failed.

Unlike the permanent marker which worked really well. Luckily most of the red spots (re option ‘c’) had almost worn off. I can’t believe I actually did that. Like how juvenile was that! Of course that totally described my level of desperation.

So I was going to Australia. Mom had won, she’d cut a mean deal. She was an expert on cutting deals, and she earned big bucks to prove it, so I had to be really sharp about what I wanted. The final draft went down like this:

Madeline (me): would get to lie around the beach and hotel pool in her hot new bikini, order lots of icy, fruity drinks from cute male Wait Staff, drool over all the hot life savers and practise fake drowning techniques so as to make full use of their skills. (Mom wasn’t totally with me on this one). Additionally she and Frances would get to do some fun things together to make up for all the times Frances had to work, and of course they’d make time for some side trips to major stores and burn a few calories in a heavy credit card workout. (Surely Australia had some good retail areas?) In return Madeline would, when asked, spend some time with the Internet Guy and be on her best behavior.

Frances (Mom) would spend heaps of time getting to know the Internet Guy better and decide if she really wanted to marry him, which so far she thought she did. Eeowww! She was even calling him her fiancé but that could have been because Madeline told her that at her age it was totally disgusting to call him her boyfriend. (Not that I was happy with her alternative choice.) Additionally as promised above, she would spend some quality time with Madeline — doing some cool Mom/daughter stuff.

If it all went to plan, the trip wouldn’t be a total train wreck. They’d be some salvageable moments. But, even so, I just so wished the trip would just disappear. I was really burning up about the whole deal. I’d never admit it, but I got this kind of sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I thought of mom and this guy. It was different to the other guys she’d dated. There hadn’t been many but I’d never seen her go loopy for any of those. Not like she was with Barry. That was his name. Ba-ree. I hated his name, which was totally unfair since I didn’t even know the guy.

She’d already met him so this was round two for her. After chatting online they’d met up at some business conference in Chicago last Spring. This was another reason this was scary. Mom went off guys really fast and she wasn’t going off this one. This was a bad sign. A waaay bad sign. He was all she talked about…

I felt like putting identifying names on all the photos of me around the apartment. Just in case she’d forgotten who I was. Or that I existed.

I’ve tried to work out how I feel and I think it’s just that we’d been a pretty good team for fifteen years, Mom and I. That was my whole life. Just us. And an assortment of babysitters and live-in help. Fifteen years of sharing Mom with her work. And then this Bar-ee comes along and not only is he getting Mom’s attention, he has attachments. Two kids - thirteen year old twins. That meant the tiny bit of time my Mom did have free would be divided four ways…

Four ways? And this was something I was supposed to be happy about? Hellooo???