Disclaimer: "The Princess Diaries" belongs to The Walt Disney Company.
Michael Moscovitz sat down to eat lunch. He had only been going to this private school for a few short months now, and he did not really have any friends to speak of at this point. So he sat at the cafeteria wherever a seat appeared to be open, without any prior planning beforehand. Normally, he sat down alone, and he ate alone.
But not today.
Michael had only been eating for about a minute when someone joined him. It was a girl with brown wavy hair, eyeglasses, and a heart necklace. She seemed to be utilizing the same strategy he was in regards to finding a seat. Perhaps today would be the day he made his first friend.
So Michael was the first to speak. "Hi. I've never seen you before. What's your name?"
"I'm Mia Thermopolis," she answered. "I seem to be invisible to everyone around here."
"That sounds awful," Michael said.
"It's not. I actually enjoy being under the radar, so to speak."
Michael noticed that Mia had something unique next to her lunch. It was an irregular gray rectangle with four gold legs.
"What's that a model of?" Michael inquired.
"The Apollo 11 Lunar Module. I made it for my physics class."
A third voice entered the conversation. "You mean the cheap hollowed-out studio prop that Stanley Kubrick used to make everyone think we landed on the moon?"
Mia looked up in stunned silence. The third voice came from one of the cheerleaders.
"You don't believe that, do you, Mia?" questioned Michael.
"No."
"Well, are you going to put up with her disrespecting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin like that?"
"I can't get on her case and change her deeply entrenched beliefs." Mia looked apprehensive.
"Yes, you can. I would. No falsehood should go unchallenged."
Michael then turned to the cheerleader. "Have you personally been to the moon, and seen with your own two eyes that there were no manned lunar landings?"
"No."
"Then what makes you so sure they were faked?"
"There were no stars in any of the pictures. How do you explain that?"
"That's because they did all their spacewalks during the daytime, when the sun outshone the stars."
"Then they should have gone out and taken some pictures at night while they were on the moon."
"Maybe they should have," Mia quipped. "Then you wouldn't be bothering me right now."
"There are also pictures of rocks with the letter C on them," the cheerleader continued. "That means the rocks were studio props, just like...THIS!", proceeding to jab her finger into Mia's model, breaking off one of its legs.
"All right, that's it!" Michael snapped, retaliating by squirting his bottled water in the cheerleader's face. The cheerleader reacted by stealing someone else's food and hurling it back at Michael.
First it was just Michael and the cheerleader.
Then it was twelve people.
Then it was almost the entire student population throwing all varieties of food all which way. The only person who failed to throw any food was Mia. She just sat there smiling. Her model that she worked so hard on was ruined, but she learned that she had a true friend in Michael. (Little did she know that friendship would not only continue, but grow much, much deeper, in spite of all the changes that were about to take place in Mia's life...)
Six hours later...
Michael was explaining the prior events to his mother.
"If you had been sitting alongside me, you wouldn't be so mad. I made a valiant attempt to eradicate a conspiracy theory with insufficient supporting evidence, and I defended Mia Thermopolis when no one else would."
"And you got three weeks worth of detention!" Michael's mother scolded. "It was a stupid way to respond!"
"I wonder if Dan Goldin would agree with you," Michael responded.
The End.
Here's some trivia that inspired this one-shot.
July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on the moon.
July 20, 2012: The Princess Diaries 2-Disc Blu-Ray Combo Pack is rated PG by the Australian Classification Board. Also, "The Dark Knight Rises" is released in theaters in the United States. Guess who played Catwoman.