"Genevieve!" my stepmother called, mispronouncing it, for the fifth time.

"Coming!" I replied, slipping my bracelet over my hand and racing from my room down the stairs. "And I am not the dog from the 'Madeline' TV show. Genevieve, ma'am. Genevieve."

"Either way, your date is here, child."

"Be back by nine. Call me if he gets fresh and I'll come pick you up. I love you," I recited to my father. "I love you, too, Dad."

He pressed a kiss to my forehead. "That's my girl."

"Gen!" my date called from his car. "Don't leave me here all night."

"Bye, Dad. Good-bye, Madeline," I said, holding my hand out to her. She reluctantly shook it, and I put my jacket on, slipping out the front door and down the yard to my date's car. "Hi, Chris."

"Your mother seemed pretty put out about your leaving."

"Stepmother," I corrected, sort of reminding him. "She's my stepmother. And if it was up to her, she wouldn't let me leave my room except to eat and use the bathroom."

He opened my door for me. "After you, my lady."

I smiled at him. "Thank you, kind sir." I got in the car; he shut my door, then walked around the car and got in the driver's side. "If only my parents knew that my boyfriend was the prince."

"They'd be honored."

"Maybe then my stepmother would stop being so mean to me."

He laughed. "Gen, we've been dating a while, right?"

"Mm-hm."

"And we've been friends even longer than that, right?"

"Mm-hm."

"You're so different from all of my other friends. They always go around telling their other friends that they're friends with the prince, and then I have to end our friendship because they said something about it. But you didn't say anything. You accepted me for who I am as a person, not who I am in society."

"Well, we were friends and had been for a while before you told me you were the prince, Chris. I knew from seeing other do that that I shouldn't go tell all of my friends that I personally knew the prince. I didn't want our friendship destroyed because of a mistake I made. I'd have killed myself if I had."

"And if you'd have killed yourself, I would have followed you and killed myself."

"Chris, that's so sweet."

"Would your parents mind if you stayed the night with my parents and me tonight?"

"I have to be home by nine, Chris. My father's strict about my curfew – I come home even a second late, he bites my head off because of it."

I looked over at him to see a look of amused shock. "Not you."

I nodded. "I'm sure that if I called him about it after dinner, he'd gladly agree to it, though. Father's protective of me, and my house is my comfort zone."

"Sing 'Meadowlark' for me," he said after a second.

"Chris, I couldn't. You know what people say about my singing."

"I'm not one of 'em, Gen. I know that your entire world is music, and that's something that not many people know. I'm not one of those people, Gen. Please?"

I sighed. "You win."