Well, okay, not really. I mean, I don’t think anyone is holding her for ransom. Because if they were, we’d probably have heard from them already, begging us to please take her off their hands. I truly pity anyone who would try to kidnap Grandmère. First of all, they would probably choke to death from all the secondhand smoke. And if that didn’t finish them off, all the criticizing of their kidnapping technique would make them WISH they were dead.

“I have never seen such slipshod handling of an automatic weapon! What’s wrong with you? Do you take no pride in your work? A monkey would make a better kidnapper than you!”

Except that I’m pretty sure she hasn’t been kidnapped. According to her maid, Dr. Steve came to fetch her after breakfast this morning, and the two of them have been gone all day.

But there’ve been periodic spottings: They were seen on the Today Show, being interviewed by Katie Couric about Dr. Steve’s prediction that Prince Charles will give up the throne in order to be allowed to marry Camilla Parker Bowles. And then later they showed up on Maury, where Dr. Steve correctly guessed that the real father of a girl named Tiffany’s baby was not her husband, Roy, but her husband’s son from a previous marriage, Jimmy. Dr. Steve then correctly guessed that Roy would punch Jimmy, which he promptly did.

I wonder if I should call my dad. I mean, this is just not normal. Not the incestuous nature of Tiffany’s love life, but the whole Grandmère thing. Grandmère NEVER misses a princess lesson, if she can help it. What other joys does she have in life, besides torturing me for two or three hours? Except for smoking and swilling Sidecars, of course? Oh, and shopping?

On the other hand, if I call Dad, he’ll just find some way to pry Grandmère away from Dr. Steve, and I’ll have princess lessons again. What am I, crazy? I don’t want to spend any more afternoons learning diplomatic protocol than I have to.

But I kind of don’t want to just sit back and let Grandmère make a giant fool of herself over a guy. Especially a guy who might turn out to be a Svengali-David Koresh-Fundamentalist-Mormon-Rasputin type. Remember what happened to the Romanov girls! And Grandmère doesn’t wear diamonds on her corsets like they did, so the bullets won’t exactly bounce off and ricochet around the room before finally nailing her in the forehead, like they did Anastasia.

Wow, this is, like, a real problem. I really have to think about it. Am I going to be unselfish and rat Grandmère out for her own good? Or selfish and just let her crash and burn?

Hmmmmm…

Thursday, February 13, the loft

So I just asked Mom what she would do if a “friend” was making a really bad mistake—would she mind her own business, or tell her what she thought?

And Mom was like, “Mia, is Lilly doing drugs? What kind of drugs? Tell me now. You know, two girls down at NYU died last weekend from doing ecstasy—”