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  Ingrid raised her hands and rolled her eyes, slumping back into the pillows again.

  "So, you ready to go back to being a princess?" Julia asked.

  I smiled and shoved my hands into the back pockets of my jeans. "You know, I think I might be able to handle it," I said. "What about you? You ready to go back to being a normal girl?"

  "Oh, Carina," Julia said, shaking her head at me with mock seriousness. "That's the one thing you just didn't understand about me. I was never a normal girl."

  She winked at me once, then turned and fluttered her fingers at Ingrid and glided out of the room, doing an extreme exaggeration of my walk.

  "Freak!" I shouted after her.

  "Princess!" she shouted back, clearly halfway down the stairs. I laughed and looked at Ingrid.

  "She's certifiable," Ingrid said, toying with the fringe on one of my pillows.

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  "You totally are in love with Markus," I said.

  "Just a little," Ingrid said with a wince.

  "You are so dead!" I shouted. I launched myself onto the bed and whacked her over the head with one of the beaded pillows.

  "Ow!" she shouted, smacking me on the back of the head with another.

  We battled and shrieked and shouted until my mother came by my room and paused in front of the door. Ingrid and I froze, totally snagged. My hair was all in front of my face and hundreds of feathers were floating around the room from an exploded pillow.

  "Girls, this is no way to conduct yourselves," my mother said sternly. My heart thumped as I waited for an extension of my grounding. Then my mom reached over and grasped the doorknob. "At least not with the door open," she said with a wicked smile.

  I grinned as the door clicked closed, and then Ingrid attacked me all over again. As we laughed and ran around the room, dodging and weaving and swinging until I was totally out of breath, I didn't feel like a princess at all. I didn't feel like a normal girl.

  I just felt like me.

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  Epilogue

  "Julia! You coming to lunch?" my roommate, Anna, asked as she grabbed her jacket and book bag. I flopped down on my bedspread and pulled out the latest People magazine from my bag.

  "Nah. I have some reading to catch up on," I said with a grin.

  Anna laughed, her huge smile lighting up the tiny, poster-covered room. "You're such a nerd," she said jokingly. "I'll see you at study group tonight."

  As soon as she was gone, I leaned back into the pillow on my narrow twin-size bed and opened the magazine to the four-page spread right near the center. I smiled when I saw Carina grinning back at me from under a Yankees baseball cap.

  princess on campus , the headline read. I flipped the page and rolled my eyes at a picture of Carina looking all studious and New York as she bent over a notebook at a classroom desk. She was wearing black-rimmed glasses that I was sure were fake and had her hair back in a bun. Her wardrobe was all J. Crew--

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  wool turtleneck and jeans. I could just imagine the truckload of clothes she'd had delivered to her dorm room at Columbia.

  I put the magazine aside and rolled over on my bed, picking up the framed picture of Carina and me that we'd taken that summer at Disneyland. We had posed on either side of Cinderella and couldn't stop giggling. We were such dorks.

  Sighing, I pulled a couple of notebooks out of my bag and forced myself to move over to the desk. When I'd applied to Cornell last year, everyone had told me the hard part was getting in, but once I was there, it would be a piece of cake. They had definitely lied. But I loved the work. I loved being there. I loved that I hadn't been forced to take out student loans to attend. My mother's hat business was booming, and she had no trouble coming up with the small part of the tuition that my scholarships didn't cover. But I wasn't letting her pay for everything. I had a work-study job at the library to pay for my living expenses.

  And I had about an hour to cram before I had to be there.

  I settled into my desk and opened up my world civ book, smiling as I flipped past a section on Vineland. I was just about to get into reading up on the Peloponnesian Wars when there was a knock on my door.

  "Perfect timing," I said under my breath.

  I got up and yanked open the door, fully expecting to find my RA, Jasper, scowling at me for not having finished the bulletin board I'd promised to decorate. Instead I was

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  staring up at a face I'd thought I would never see again. My heart stopped beating and I clasped the doorknob for support. "Markus?"

  His smile was as amazing as I remembered. Before I could rethink it, I threw my arms around his neck.

  "What're you doing here?" I asked, pulling him into my room.

  "Well, I'm checking out the school," he said. He unfolded a sheet of cream-colored paper from his pocket and handed it to me. "I got into the architecture program."

  I didn't know what to say. We'd e-mailed once in a while over the past two years, but he'd never mentioned even applying for the program. I sat down on the edge of my bed and almost fell off.

  "You're ... you're going here?" I said.

  "In the spring," Markus told me, sitting down across from me on Anna's bed. He rubbed his hands together and smiled. "Surprised?"

  "Oh, I'm surprised, all right," I said, my heart pounding out of control. "Am I ever."

  "Now, I don't want you to get all freaked out. I'm not stalking you or something. This is one of the best architecture schools in the world."

  "Yeah, I know," I said with a grin. I folded up the letter and handed it back to him. "Congratulations. How did you ... I mean ... I thought your father ..."

  The butterflies in my stomach were going crazy and I actually felt light-headed. Markus was sitting in my room!

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  His hair was shorter and he was wearing a pair of jeans and a dark sweater and he looked even more incredible than I had remembered.

  "You know how I interned at the ministry for a few months and I was so bored and miserable? Well, apparently I wasn't very good at hiding it--even my father noticed," Markus explained. "He finally told me that he didn't want to be responsible for my imminent suicide, so he let me send out applications. I didn't tell you before because I didn't want to jinx it." Markus laughed and shook his head. "I got into a bunch of places, but--"

  "You decided to come here," I said, blushing.

  "Yeah," he said, looking me in the eye.

  "And ... why was that again?" I teased.

  "Well ... like I said ... it had nothing to do with you ... ," Markus said, still grinning. He got up and sat down next to me, reaching over and taking my hand. "Unless, of course, you want it to ..."

  A tingle of warmth shot up my arm as I laced my fingers through his. "Now, Markus, you should never run your life around love," I said sternly, trying not to smile. "If there's one thing I've always believed, it's that you can't let a relationship get in the way of your dreams."

  Markus reached up with his free hand and touched my cheek, turning me to face him. "But what if you have two dreams, and they both happen to be right in the same place at the same time?"

  My heart pounded in my chest as I looked into those hopeful blue eyes. "Well, then I'd say you are a seriously lucky guy," I told him.

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  "No arguments there."

  Markus leaned in to kiss me, his fingertips never leaving my face, and just before our lips touched, we both smiled. I knew that Markus and I were the luckiest people in the world. All of our dreams had already come true, and this was only the beginning.

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  Kate Brian, The Princess & the Pauper

  (Series: # )

 

 

 

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