To Catch a Prince Page 4

  “Alexis,” Helene reprimanded, “have you been shopping all this time?”

  Alexis’s eyes went wide as a doll’s. “Shopping? Oh, those bags. They’re nothing. It’s just that I was told to wear a British designer for my first day at work, and all I brought with me was Michael Kors and Marc Jacobs.”

  “Work?” asked Barbara, Saheed, and Helene all at once.

  Alexis stirred the soup that Basha had placed in front of her. She tried not to smile, but her face lit up despite herself. It was perfectly glowing. “I sort of got a job,” she said, still staring at her soup. “Just an internship really. With Vogue. British Vogue.”

  “With who?” Helene asked. She was amazed and a tad annoyed. She wanted to be happy for Alexis. After all, weren’t best friends always happy for each other? But tonight the attention was supposed to be focused on Helene. It had been her first day at work. She was the one who’d won the prestigious internship that brought them to London.

  “British Vogue. You know, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano.”

  “Oh!” Barbara squealed. “All my favorites. You’ll have to introduce me, or at least give me a sneak preview of the winter lines.”

  “Well, this deserves a toast,” Saheed exclaimed in his deep, imperial voice. “Basha, open the Riesling I’ve been saving and bring some sparkling water for the girls.”

  Even Nichola said, “Congratulations,” and her normally cynical eyes widened with admiration.

  “Today I sat in on the editorial meeting for the September issue. They were debating whether to do a photo spread of actors under thirty or actors over thirty. Of course, I think they should do one of the royal family, but I didn’t say anything.” She winked at Helene.

  Suddenly it all came back to Helene. The plane ride. Milk shakes. The photo of William (her William). The bet. Helene realized that her guarded feelings toward Alexis had been growing since yesterday’s plane trip when Alexis showed interest in Prince William. The two sisters were supposed to do different things. That was the unspoken rule of their friendship. Alexis had the grace and elegance; she had the ballet-dancer body and the sleek, fashionable clothes. Every guy in school mooned over her. Helene brought in the grades; she held the giant sleepovers. She was the reason the house got rolled with toilet paper by the football team. She was everyone’s friend and confidante. She was intense and creative and had nailed a summer internship. And she used to have a private little crush on Prince William that was all her own.

  Now Alexis was breaking the implicit separate-but-equal code. She was trespassing.

  Helene willed herself to find some generosity for her sister as the meal dragged on. But it was hard because Alexis was still talking about her new job. Wasn’t she supposed to be the shy one?

  Alexis explained how she landed the interview. On a whim she’d decided to walk by the offices of Vogue. She’d been standing outside awhile, just admiring the tall glass doors, when a girl ran out sobbing. Alexis offered her a tissue and asked her what was wrong. It turned out that this girl was an intern and her boss was none other than the erratic and impetuous Lady Brawn, British Vogue’s editor-in-chief. While bawling, the girl described how Lady Brawn had yelled at her that morning because her latte wasn’t foamy enough and the dry cleaning was late. She fired the poor girl on the spot. As soon as the former intern walked away sniffling, Alexis thought, What would Helene do if she were in this situation? Then, fortified, she opened the tall glass doors, smiled at the receptionist, and marched into the editor-in-chief’s office. What did she have to lose?

  “I’m Alexis Worth,” she’d said, extending her hand to a shocked Lady Brawn. “I’d like to be your new intern. Tell me what you’d like me to accomplish first.”

  And just like that, she was hired, and soon she was sitting in on her first editorial meeting.

  As Helene listened to Alexis’s recounting of her day, she thought about the hours she had spent writing and rewriting the application for her internship. She thought about the hours of studying artists and their masterpieces. She thought about how it all had culminated in her learning to make the perfect cup of English tea. And then she decided not to think anymore. She decided to be happy for her lovely sister, who had taken a job working for a monster. Helene resolved to borrow a page from Alexis’s book and make sure she did everything as perfectly as possible at her new internship. Then maybe they’d trust her to do more than make tea. Then maybe they’d send her to the Royal Ball, where Helene would meet her prince. It would all be fine. So why was she still so supremely jealous of Alexis?

  “I’m so happy for you, Alexis,” Helene said, trying to hold back her tears. Then she ran out of the room.

  Working Nine to Five

  TO A BUDDING artist in love with Prince William, nothing could sound more magical than the Royal Ball at the National Gallery. It turned out that nothing was as boring as preparation for this event, an event she wasn’t even sure she could go to. Helene spent her first week at the gallery dealing with a mountain of envelopes. First, the invitations needed to be folded. “Remember,” reprimanded stern Ms. Ming, her supervisor, “be sure to align the gold ribbons perfectly.” After six hours of such folding, Helene’s back and shoulders ached, and forgetting her vow to do everything as perfectly as Alexis, Helene found herself shoving misfolded invites into envelopes when Ms. Ming wasn’t looking.

  The next day, the envelopes needed to be labeled. “Each label must form a ninety-degree angle with the floral decoration on the envelope,” reminded Ms. Ming.

  On Thursday, Helene sealed each envelope. No licking: Helene had to dip a small sponge in a bowl of water and swipe it across the glued surface. On Friday, joy of joys, Helene was sent to the post office, where the line stretched around the block. She put on her iPod and breathed in the fresh, nonbasement air.

  At night she dreamed of stacks of envelopes, their mouths menacingly flapping open and closed. Like the rest of the staff, Helene entered and left by a side entrance, and hadn’t gone into the actual art galleries since her orientation. So it hardly felt like she was working in the art world at all. She always brought her sketch book, thinking she would stay late and sketch, but by the time Ms. Ming released her, she stumbled home on the Tube, too tired to take in the glamour of London.

  Alexis also collapsed at the end of each day, but not out of the tedium of her job. Hardly. She spent the first day shadowing the stylist on a photo shoot at Trafalgar Square. On Tuesday, she sampled lipsticks for an article called “Shades of Scarlet.” Wednesday found her calling Stella McCartney’s press agent to fact-check a story on Stella’s handbags. And on Thursday, long-legged Alexis was dolled up in a peasant dress and told to lie on her stomach in the background of a photo shoot. A real photo shoot!

  “They just needed someone in the background to make the people in the foreground stand out,” Alexis explained to Helene. But her modesty couldn’t mask the truth: Alexis’s photo would be in Vogue! Thankfully, Helene was too tired and amazed to muster up any jealousy. Besides, she told herself, she would have hated to work with all those models. She needed substance. She needed depth. Dismally, she wondered if a basement office counted as depth.

  On Saturday morning, Helene packed her sketch pad and pencils in her backpack. Relieved to be out of work clothes, she slipped on her Pumas and a green shirt that proclaimed, VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS. (When David, her best friend, pointed out that certain practices were illegal in Virginia, she’d crossed out “Lovers” with a red Magic Marker and written “Losers” over it.) She reminded herself she must find a witty postcard to send him.

  “I am going to the Tate Modern to sketch. Will you come?” she asked Alexis.

  Alexis, who was blow-drying her hair even straighter, didn’t hear. But noticing that Helene was talking to her, she nodded anyway. Since working at Vogue, she’d become even more style-conscious, if that was possible. Eschewing her three suitcases of American clothes, she now dressed head to toe in British designer
s. Lunch had become a distant, Scarsdale memory. She was even thinking about taking up smoking, but it was just too gross for her to do more than contemplate it. When the girls got outside, Helene pulled a Tube map from her backpack and sat on the sidewalk to decipher it.

  “Since this is Kensington, we’ll take the line to Waterloo Station. Then we can walk along the Thames before ending up at the Tate Modern.”

  “The Tate?” Alexis said. “Who said anything about the Tate? I thought we were going shopping!” Alexis walked in front of a suited businessman and stuck out her arm for a cab like a seasoned New Yorker.

  “But Alexis,” Helene said, joining her sister after apologizing to the businessman for their rudeness, “it’s totally easy to get to the museum on the Tube. I love riding the Tube. And the Tate! They’ve got some great exhibitions going on.”

  “Oh, Helene, you spend every day in a museum. Don’t you want to see something truly beautiful?”

  “Like what?”

  “Clothes, of course. All the lovely clothes at Harrods.”

  Just then a rounded black cab pulled up in front of them. Alexis opened the door and said, “To Harrods, please.” Helene had no choice but to shove her Tube map into her pocket and join her stepsister.

  Not that it was so bad. After all, if department stores were paintings, Harrods would be the Mona Lisa. If department stores were food, Harrods would be caviar (which was gross, because it was fish eggs, but good because it was expensive and rare).

  And, Helene reasoned, these days all famous artists dressed exquisitely. Fashion, she figured, was just a lesser art form that she would have to dabble in. And maybe Alexis would give her a few tips. As she was reminded every single time she addressed, stuffed, and sealed an invitation, the Royal Ball at the National Gallery was fast approaching.

  Bird Watching

  SUMMER VACATION IN London meant one thing to boys finishing Eton: birds. No, not the kind that fly overhead or crap on your sleeve or appear in a McNugget. But chicks, honeys, girls, birds. And what better place to spot birds than in their natural habitat, the department store?

  Eton is the most prestigious public school in England. And by public school, the Brits mean private school. Eton’s full of the best and brightest young lads—well, at least the richest plus the supersmart kids on scholarship. It offers them everything: gorgeous grounds, horses to ride, the finest teachers, pubs that serve underage. Everything, that is, except girls.

  “Mums are hot,” Laszlo said. He was reclining on a massage chair by the escalator in the Home department at Harrods. They’d already been kicked out of Junior Collections for loitering and shooed away from Lingerie after it was clear they were not, in fact, lingerie reporters for the Guardian newspaper. So the Home department was all that was left to Laszlo and Simon, recent Eton graduates. And Housewares was cluttered with mothers. Or mums.

  Simon, sitting next to Laszlo, rested his head in his palm to seriously consider that proclamation. “Mums. Well, a certain type, definitely. But not all of them as a category. I’d venture there’s a subcategory of hot mums. They’re young and they have one kid only. And … well, what does it matter? You can’t have them.”

  “Why not?” asked Laszlo incredulously, as he waved at a mother attempting to push a stroller up the escalator despite the posted warning against doing precisely that.

  “They’re married,” Simon said.

  “Oh, whatever. Besides, your mum’s not married anymore.”

  “Don’t you dare say that my mum’s hot.”

  “Fine, she’s not hot.”

  “You idiot. You can’t say that either.”

  “I’m not trying to say anything about her hotness, my dear friend. I’m trying to say that the problem with mums is not their marital status. It’s that they’re dull. Look at the blonde on the escalator. All that attention to the baby. None to me. It’s a dismal proposition. I’d rather snog a chair.” At that, Laszlo turned the massager up to ten and started an exaggerated gyration of ecstasy. “Ohhh,” he moaned, as his chair quickly pulsed from the top of his head down to his tailbone. “Ohhhh!”

  Simon and Laszlo had been housemates and fast friends for four years despite their obvious differences. Simon was quiet and rather passive when it came to girls; Laszlo was a clown. Simon’s parents were well-heeled Londoners, with some distant connection to the royal family. Laszlo was a genuine royal. That is, he was about ten times removed from the Czech monarchy. His parents had moved from the Czech Republic when Laszlo was four and found jobs cleaning flats (apartments) and fixing flats (tires). He’d attended Eton as a King’s Scholar, which is a nice way of saying a scholarship kid. Maybe because of the incongruity between his home and school, he found British stuffiness absolutely ridiculous and loved mocking it. “Uhhh, uhhh,” he sighed.

  “Look, Laszlo, could you just stop it?” Simon began. “I mean, I get the joke, ha-ha, but tone it down maybe just a bit.”

  Laszlo groaned all the more loudly.

  Simon gave up. He perched on the edge of his recliner with his legs crossed and looked toward a display of lamps, trying to give the impression of someone who just happened to be sitting next to this most unfortunate person, someone who was perhaps a bit fatigued and whose girlfriend was still shopping. He was busy picturing this fantasy girlfriend—what she looked like, what she was shopping for—when Laszlo screamed, “Yeeeowww!” Apparently the massage chair had blown some sort of circuit and was smoking something terrible. Laszlo let loose some rather terrible words as he leaped from his seat.

  The mums to which the boys had been referring now cast Laszlo and Simon dirty looks as they hurried their kids in the opposite direction. Just then, Simon saw two young women walking from the lamp display straight toward them. He cleared his throat and tried to reason with Laszlo once more: “Shh, they work here and they’re going to kick us out if you don’t stop. Then how will we meet anyone?”

  But the two people headed toward them weren’t the girls who spritzed perfume as you walked by, or the girls who giftwrapped, or the girls who offered free makeovers. One was a pretty, punky girl with blond hair accented with a bright streak of pink, who was nearly doubled over with hysterics, and the girl next to her was a gorgeous brunette carrying three olive and gold Harrods shopping bags. This girl stared fiercely at the escalators and said in that drawn-out American way, “Oh, god, what a freak. Let’s go.” She looked as mortified as Simon felt, and when she caught his eye, Simon couldn’t help it: He smiled.

  Alexis grinned back and then immediately regretted it. The boy may have been handsome in that tall, thin, pretty-boy way, but his friend was a nightmare. And she and Helene hadn’t yet visited floors four or five: stationery, pens, and leather goods. “Helene,” she whispered, “come on.” But it was too late. Pretty Boy had already stood up, apologized profusely for his friend, and held out his hand.

  “I’m Simon,” he said, in an accent that could make any American girl’s heart jump. “Lovely to meet you.” Alexis reached out her hand in return. She was always gracious to a boy with a beautiful voice. His face wasn’t offending anyone either.

  His friend, who was busily throwing towels onto the smoking chair, stopped and turned his attention to the group. “I Laszlo,” he said. “How you do? You being well? I meet you, yes?” Alexis had a flash of concern that she’d been mocking someone with a learning disability, or a language barrier, but when she zeroed in on his calm face and sparkling eyes, she knew she and her sister were being duped.

  Helene, her gullible sister, was not so perceptive.

  “I’m Helene,” she said earnestly. “Are you from Mexico?”

  “My country,” he said, “is no Mexico. I no being Mexico. My country far, far from here. Very good country. Country have beautiful women, no? Like you? You beautiful women be coming to my country and me, yes?”

  Alexis thought about all the clothes lying patiently on their hangers while this boy prattled on. It was a shame. “Extremely nice to meet you
, Laszlo,” she said sarcastically, “but we’re late.”

  “Late for what?” Helene asked.

  “Plan B,” Alexis whispered.

  “Just a sec,” Helene whispered back. This wasn’t an emergency. This was just your basic flirting. And besides, Alexis had been going on all day about what it had been like to have a makeup artist do her face for her Vogue photo shoot. It was Helene’s turn to shine.

  “Look,” Simon said, trying desperately not to stare too long at Alexis, “you’ll have to pardon Laszlo—”

  “Many beautiful women. Many, many beautiful women,” Laszlo was saying. “Your country being America, no? I hear it in your vase.”

  “That’s ‘voice,’ Laszlo. Now, really, just ignore him. He’s from the Czech Republic, you know, and his English is limited.” Simon was playing along reluctantly, out of habit, out of his perpetual passivity. He used to find it hilarious when Laszlo, who had perfectly refined manners and poise, assumed the role of pervy foreigner. But did he have to do it in front of these two particularly lovely girls?

  “Excuse, but I help needed.”

  “Well, what kind of help?” Helene asked, her sweet face furrowed with concern, as Alexis transferred all her bags to her left hand and tugged her sister toward the escalator.

  “Help to making the love,” Laszlo said, kissing the air, as if unaware of his mistake in syntax.

  Eyes wide, cheeks burning, Helene turned to her sister. “Plan B,” she said. “Now.”

  Simon punched Laszlo hard on the arm just as the girls lifted into the air—like angels, Simon thought—on the escalator. Laszlo immediately regretted his behavior; as usual, he was too late. He really, truly wanted to meet a girl, someone to talk to, to kiss. But girls intimidated him, especially pretty Americans with pink hair and so …