Once upon a time, there was a young prince named Alexander. He was not the handsomest prince in all the land (because obviously, Prince Justin Taylor already held that title) but he could totally kick everyone else’s collective ass at soccer, because he had a condition called Mexichondria. This meant that he believed he was a Mexican. He wasn’t a Mexican. But he totally played soccer like one.

Anyway, June 14th was Prince Alexander’s (or Alejandro, as he liked to be called on account of his Mexichondria) fifteenth birthday. But everyone forgot because it was the first Sunday of summer, and they were all preoccupied with other things like watching Queer as Folk with their mothers and singing various songs from Disney’s Aladdin.

But late at night on Prince Alejandro’s birthday, a beautiful princess from the neighboring kingdom IMed him saying, “I’m bored. Are you there? Because if you’re not, I swear, I will type and type and type until you answer me. And I will change my status message every two minutes, and all of them will describe how very much out of my happy time you are.”

Alexander did not respond.

So the beautiful Princess Emiliana sighed and continued to type. “You secretly like watching me ramble.”

Then, miraculously, Prince Alexander responded! “We should go somewhere for my birthday,” he hinted.

Princess Emiliana wrinkled her nose at the screen. Then she said out loud, “Holy fucking shit!” and checked the date at the bottom of her computer screen. June 14, 2009, it told her. “OMG!” she typed. “It’s your birthday.”

“Yes!” Alexander typed.

“See,” Emiliana replied, “If I had actually been paying attention to the date, I would have remembered. But it's summer. No one pays attention to dates in the summer. So when you said birthday, I was like, shiiiiit, what’s the date? And I looked and I was like, OMG. Yeah. That’s my story.”

“Yeah,” Alejandro responded. “Awesome.”

“I should post it on fictionpress and send you the link,” Emiliana typed. “And that will be your birthday present.”

“Cool,” Alexander typed back.

“It’ll be so epic,” Princess Emiliana decreed.

And they all lived happily ever after, except for the Evil Witch-Queen Eleanor who was doomed to watch the naked-Ethan-violin scene on repeat over and over for the rest of her immortal life.

THE END

Author’s Note: Happy birthday, Alex. Freakin’ Mexichondriac.

PS: To Ella,

I’m sorry for making your alter-ego watch Ethan playing the violin on repeat. I know how much you hate him. But it had to happen for the sake of plot.

Just kidding, there IS no plot. Haha. Had you fooled.

THE (real) END