Royals (Royals #1)(5)

Ellie says it’s “flighty,” but I think it’s fun, and before she can get going on that train of thought, I change the subject back to her, where it always ends up anyway. “I didn’t know y’all were coming.”

Mom is sitting in her wingback chair, so I flop in Dad’s recliner, and Ellie frowns a little.

My sister has always been one step away from having mice make dresses for her, but ever since she met Alexander, her Disney Princessness has been dialed up to eleven. While we both got Mom’s light hair, El’s was always shinier, more golden. Right now, it falls in soft waves to her shoulders, held back with a pair of sunglasses that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. She’s wearing jeans, as is Alexander, but even those look fancy on them, probably because they’ve paired them with expensive leather loafers. Alexander is wearing a white button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and El has on some kind of drapey navy blouse with little white polka dots all over it.

Basically, they look like they belong on a yacht, while I am wearing a T-shirt that says, “EVE WAS FRAMED.”

“It was a surprise!” Ellie says brightly, and Alexander flashes me and Mom a smile.

This is the unsettling thing about Ellie and Alexander. They spend so much of their life being public people that sometimes they act that way in private, too, so it can make you feel like they’re holding the world’s smallest press conference in the living room.

“And a lovely one, too,” my dad says, coming into the room. He’s wearing a pair of khaki shorts that started their life as pants, a few stray strings hanging down to his bony knees. El’s forehead creases a bit as she looks over his graying hair, which is pulled back into a ponytail, and the paint that’s splattered all over his Pink Floyd T-shirt. Dad fancies himself an artist these days, although he’s not very good at it. But he gave up music ages ago, and as Mom points out, it’s good for him to have something that keeps him busy.

And for all that Ellie is clearly not impressed with Dad’s appearance, he’s kind of the reason she even met Alexander in the first place.

Here, let me give you the Star Magazine treatment.

“10 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT ELLIE WINTERS (OR, MORE ACCURATELY, HER FAMILY!)”

1) Ellie’s dad, Liam, was famous for eleven months in 1992! According to Liam, that’s the worst amount of time for a person to have fame—not long enough for anyone to remember you, but just long enough to ruin your life.

2) Liam was in a band called Velvet! It was every bit as embarrassing as the name implies, and full of more gelled hair and skinny suits than his daughter Daisy would like to talk about.

3) Velvet had exactly ONE HIT SONG, “Harbor Me,” and while that title sounds pretty sweet, “harbor” is being used in a metaphorical sense, and the video was banned in seven countries. The less we say about it, the better.

4) Their second song only went to #22 (“Staying the Night,” less gross than “Harbor Me” but with way too many references to sheets and skin for anyone’s comfort), and the third never even cracked the top 100 (“Daisy Chain,” surprisingly not offensive, but also not listenable).

5) By that point, Liam had a flat in London he couldn’t afford, a fancy car he’d crashed twice, and a pretty significant drug problem. It was all very Behind the Music!

6) He moved back to his hometown, a tiny village in the Midlands, where he started working at his father’s garden supply shop, only to meet a lovely journalist by the name of Bess Murdock, who was working for some hip London newspaper and came all the way out to little Glockenshire-on-the-Vale to interview Liam for a “Whatever Happened To?” piece.

7) Surprising absolutely no one who has seen a romantic comedy, the two fell in love and moved to Florida for a fresh start. Luckily for Liam, “Harbor Me”—or an instrumental version of it at least—got picked up for a car commercial, and since Liam was the sole songwriter on that track (a fact that fills his family with equal parts pride and mortification!) he became, as they say, “well off!”

8) It was this stroke of luck that allowed the Winterses to send their oldest daughter, Eleanor, off to the UK for university, and it was there that the blond girl with the shiny hair and teeth met the heir to the Scottish throne!

9) Ellie—as she’s known to friends and family—and Prince Alexander have been dating for nearly two years now, making her the most famous person in her family, which is saying something since her dad was on the cover of NME, and her mom once made out with someone in Oasis!

10) Ellie’s younger sister, Daisy, works at a grocery store and just got a killer dye job, clearly making her the real baller of the Winters family.

There. Now you’re caught up.

“Are you staying long?” I ask. The last time they were here together was Christmas, and it had kind of been a disaster. Alexander had needed to sleep on our pullout sofa, which must have been a step down from whatever dynasty-making bed he had back in Scotland (even though he’d spent the entire time insisting that he was fine, and that the sofa bed was “surprisingly comfortable” and “such an interesting innovation”), and then my dad had given Ellie a plastic tiara as a joke, which embarrassed her so much that she spent most of that evening in her room.

Mom had been flustered about everything from setting the table to whether Alexander would be offended if we ordered pizza—our Christmas Eve tradition—and then more or less bullied Alexander’s bodyguards into coming in to drink eggnog with us on Christmas Day, which made everyone so uncomfortable that in the end, we all sat there in total silence, Malcolm and David in their black suits, El and Alexander dressed like they were going to church, and me, Mom, and Dad all in our pajamas, Dad with a stray bit of tinsel tucked into his ponytail.