The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  And the second of which should have been school, but this was my first trip overseas, and everything outside academia felt so much more alluring to me: the identical array of gothic arches on the Bodleian Library; the Bridge of Sighs, an ornate, arcing enclosure gracefully connecting two parts of Hertford College; the snarky gargoyles atop the spire of the town’s biggest church. They begged to be sketched, and I answered whenever I could, often in the peaceful, chilly morning hours when I could pick a spot and let the town wake up around me. Drawing has always taken me out of my own head. At Oxford, it helped me be in the moment completely, instead of wondering what Lacey was up to, or which baseball announcers were bugging Dad the most. Despite how welcoming most people had been, I missed my family. I missed knowing which way to look before crossing the street. I missed network TV and American football and the way Diet Coke tastes in the States. But with a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of me, I’m home.

  On the last morning of First Week, I got up predawn and headed across the street to Christ Church. Ostensibly I wanted to draw the glow of sunrise over the college’s meadow, all wild grass and pastured cows and squawking geese, but the Iowan in me also itched to stretch her legs, and my body demanded cardiovascular activity to offset the noble sport of drinking I’d undertaken. I started down the mud-and-gravel trail, under the canopy of tall, spiky trees whose leaves were preparing for their seasonal suicide leap, and snaked around the river—blissfully alone with my sketchbook and my thoughts, interrupted only by the occasional bark of the coxswain and the rhythmic splash of the crew team’s oars reaching me through the mist. The road led me past a quaint folly bridge arching over the Isis that would fit perfectly into a series I was doing on the curves of Oxford. I hopped off the path and scrambled around the wooded edge in search of a flat rock to sit on, so lost in trying not to fall over a tree’s root that instead I tripped over the outstretched legs of a man in a hooded sweatshirt. I let out a shrill yelp and he leapt to his feet, knocking over his light and landing in a weird defensive position.

  “Shit!” he said.

  I squinted at him. “Nick?”

  In that instant, the hood on his sweatshirt slipped to reveal his face still frozen in a comical O of surprise. He had been sitting on a plaid blanket, surrounded by papers and books, as if he were on the quad at Pembroke in the afternoon and not a clammy field at dawn. Unsure what to do, I bent to pick up one of the papers strewn about the grass, which had flipped and scattered when he jumped.

  “Are you doing a crossword?” I asked, bemused. “It’s barely even light out.”

  Nick gave a shy I’m busted shake of the head, and pushed back his hood completely. He was pink-cheeked. “Yeah, the Times cryptic,” he said.

  “Cryptic is one word for this,” I agreed.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  It occurred to me, as his breath normalized, that he might’ve thought I’d followed him.

  “I’m just on a run,” I explained, gesturing feebly to my athletic clothes and earth-splattered shins. “Well, more of an, um, art jog. I came out to sketch.” Then I froze. “Am I in someone’s crosshairs right now?”

  Nick relaxed. “You’ve not been shot yet, so that’s a good sign,” he said. “I’ll have them drop their weapons if you can answer a clue or two. It’s all tricks and wordplay and it’s impossible.” He handed me a printed sheet and pointed to one. “Like this. ‘New pay cut with Post Office work is loony.’ Gibberish.”

  “Don’t look at me. I’m still trying to figure out why your salacious secret life outside Pembroke involves word puzzles,” I said. “It’s not very scandalous.”

  “It would be if anyone ever saw how blank these are.” Nick sighed, taking back the crossword. “Freddie is brilliant at them, and he goads me about it. So I have to practice in private until I’m respectably competent. Someday I am going to finish one before he does.”

  “And this is your only way to do it in peace, because you don’t ever really get to be alone,” I said, not realizing until too late that I’d worked this out aloud.

  Nick looked surprised, but pleasantly. “The PPOs and I have a pact—they let me lose them once a week, and I pretend not to know that they followed me here anyway,” he said. “As long as I’ve no idea where they are, I mostly forget about them.”

  “Well, I should leave you to it, then,” I said. “I don’t want to step all over your one moment of privacy.”

  He dropped back down onto the blanket. “Oh, don’t go racing away on my account. I’ve got loads of coffee to share and you look like you need it.”

  “What, no morning tea?”

  “I am going to tell you something extremely dramatic that would rock the monarchy to the core,” Nick said, opening the Thermos and pouring into the lid. “I am not a fan of tea. Gran keeps insisting that I’m simply not drinking it properly. After a while I gave in and told her she was right. It is not worth it to argue with the Queen about her PG Tips.”

  “So your secret perversions are crosswords and coffee,” I said, settling in beside him and taking the steaming cup. “Truly depraved.”

  “My father would agree with you.” But that time he wasn’t smiling.

  “My dad and I once had a fight because I refuse to put ketchup on my hot dogs,” I said.

  “That’s possibly the most American sentence I’ve ever heard.”

  “I am possibly the most American person at Pembroke,” I pointed out. “But rest easy. We made up. The hole in our relationship was patched with Cracker Jack.”

  Nick’s face was blank.

  “Candied popcorn, with peanuts,” I clarified. “They sell it at baseball games. There’s always a prize inside, like a ring or something. I keep all mine—one for every game Dad and I ever went to together. I must have fifty by now.”

  I felt Dad’s absence right then. Against all odds, the Cubs had a shot at winning the division, and it was hard for us to have our traditional pregame panic attacks, thanks to the time difference and the fact that he kept accidentally hitting send on all his emails in mid-sentence.

  As if reading my mind, Nick asked, “So you two are close, then?”

  “Yeah, my dad’s the best,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest. “We like to road-trip to away games and eat the grossest snacks we can find along the way, just the two of us.”

  I picked at my shoe, swallowing a lump in my throat. Nick seemed to sense that my mood was shifting, and picked up the crossword again.

  “‘Decrepit and remote cathedral church,’ two words, five and four letters,” he read from the crossword sheet. He frowned. “It’s an anagram, I think.”

  “Do you honestly enjoy doing those, or is this just a competition?”

  “When you get one right, you feel like the most brilliant person alive, which I could do with a bit more often,” he said. “But it mostly boils down to a competition with Freddie.”

  “I know how that feels,” I said. “Lacey is really competitive, and she usually wins.”

  “I find it hard to believe that you’re the loser, landing here at Oxford,” Nick said.

  “I’m totally lucky to be here,” I said. “But she didn’t even apply. She claims pre-med does not allow for a year abroad.” It was a direct quote. “You know, when we applied to colleges, I didn’t think it made a difference where I went if what I wanted was art, so I followed her to Cornell. But after a while, that felt like her experience, not mine. Sometimes I wonder…”

  Nick let me trail off.

  “I’ve never told anyone this, actually,” I said. “But in eighth grade, Lacey cheated at algebra. Math was her one weakness, and I was pretty good at it. She spent the entire night before the test freaked out that she was going to fail, or worse, get a lower grade than I did for the first time ever. And then halfway through the test, I noticed her copying mine. Of course our grades came back identical, with all the same mistakes, but she told the teacher I’d copied her.”

  Nick’s bl
ue eyes got wide.

  “Yeah. Pretty ballsy,” I said. “But I knew she wasn’t being malicious. She just didn’t know how to handle the role reversal when she wasn’t doing better than I was.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I took the fall,” I said. “Told them I was afraid of being branded the stupid twin. They felt sorry for me, I got a month of detention, and after that, I threw a couple of tests so it’d look like I was making steady improvement.”

  “That’s very stand-up of you,” Nick said, pouring me more coffee.

  “It was also cowardly of me,” I said. “She was so grateful, she did all my chores for the month that I was grounded, and loaned me her favorite shirt, which…in Lacey currency, she might as well have given me gold bars.” I smiled at the memory. “It stresses her out when things don’t come easily, and I’ve always hated seeing her like that. But I probably didn’t need to be that laid-back. The cheating thing was the first time I volunteered myself into the sacrificial role, and now it’s almost like I’m stuck there.”

  “Is that why you came all the way to Oxford, do you think?” Nick asked.

  “I’m not sure I ever thought of it that way,” I said. “Maybe. I love being a twin, but people always want to define you in relation to each other, and I guess we slip into that trap, too.”

  “I certainly know that feeling,” Nick said, tapping his crossword wryly.

  “Not to get all philosophical on you before breakfast,” I teased.

  “Yes, I prefer my philosophy with a side of toast, but we can’t have everything.”

  A light breeze ruffled Nick’s crossword pages. He clamped a foot down on them and cocked his head contemplatively.

  “I’m sorry it’s taken this long for us to have an actual conversation,” he said.

  “It’s all good. We’re talking now. Even if it was mostly me yapping about my sister.”

  “I feel like I have to be so careful all the time,” he said. “I have a non-hilarious conversation just once, and then the next day the papers write that I’m ‘Nick the Prick,’ because I wasn’t grinning like a madman. But if I’m having too much fun, I’m a drunken lout.”

  Nick’s bitter tone, it turns out, was because both of these had already happened.

  “It gets exhausting. I forget how to be sometimes when I’m not on,” Nick continued. “That’s why I like coming out here at dawn. I have insomnia but I can’t roam the halls like some medieval ghost when my room starts to feel constricting. I have to get out.”

  “Well. You never have to be on with me. I promise,” I said, kicking out my legs and lying down on the blanket. “You can do your crosswords and drink your heathen coffee and chill. You’re not my sovereign.”

  “Yes, your ancestors saw to that.” He grinned, stretching out next to me, folding his arms under his head. Then he jerked upward.

  “Notre Dame,” he said. He felt around for the crossword and glanced at it. “Yes, ‘decrepit’ means it’s an anagram of ‘and remote,’ and you get Notre Dame, in France.”

  “I’m taking credit for that,” I said. “All this philosophizing unlocked your potential.”

  He scrawled the answer into the boxes in pen. “Nonsense. I’m just extremely clever.”

  “Not clever enough to do those in pencil,” I said, tapping a portion of the page where several answers were angrily scribbled out.

  “I have confidence in me,” he said.

  I blinked. “Is that a Sound of Music quote?”

  “Er, what? Maybe. I don’t know. Yes,” he admitted. “They show it here every year on Christmas. But we watch in secret because Gran thinks Christmas Day should be reserved for prayer and reflection. She was steaming mad one year when she caught us, but Freddie got us off the hook by arguing any movie with nuns in it counts as a religious experience.”

  I laughed. “I like him already.”

  “Everyone does,” Nick said. “You’ll meet him soon enough.”

  Our eyes met. After a beat, I nodded. It was a casual statement, couching an assumption of friendship and permanence. It was also a subtle expression of trust. Nick likes to tell me that’s the moment he knew, but he’s as revisionist as The Bexicon. He didn’t feel a lightning bolt as we sat on the cold ground passing around a Thermos, and neither did I. What I did feel was welcome. Sitting there, thousands of miles from my usual life, I’d been scooped into his.

  Chapter Four

  Nick’s serious blue eyes stared deeply into mine. “Does it hurt? Do you want to stop?”

  He was worried about my comfort, even in the heat of the moment.

  “I’m great,” I panted, desperately trying not to stare directly up the Royal Nostrils. “Just another Sunday.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” Nick said. “Your performance is extremely important to this country. No pressure.”

  I did feel pressure, but mostly in my brain. Gaz and Nick were undefeated at The Glug, and their streak rested on the newbie’s shoulders. Which were upended in a handstand position, my palms flat on a table that kept me off the ground, while Cilla and Clive held my legs.

  Nick straightened and nodded to the adjudicator, a brown-haired guy with a reedy beard and a giant stuffed lemon on his head.

  “Right, the Gazholes are set,” said the Lemonhead (which is actually the job’s official name). “And the BeatNicks are ready. Let the finals begin in three, two, one…glug!”

  A slim hose was shoved in my mouth, Nick tilted the Pimm’s vat, and I started to drink.

  The colleges at Oxford are creative and saucy in their social traditions. Worcester College used to do a Half-Naked Half Hour every Wednesday in the library. In late October, on the day British Summer Time changes to Greenwich Mean Time, Merton College holds a ceremony in which students claim to mend the space-time continuum by walking around backward in formal dress while drinking port. And legend has it that Lincoln College, physically linked to Brasenose College by a locked door, centuries ago barred entry to a Brasenose student who was fleeing a mob; as a faint apology for getting that person brutally killed, Lincoln opens the door to Brasenose for five minutes on Ascension Day during Easter week and serves any incoming students free beer…that has been lightly poisoned with ground-up ivy, because why not.

  One could argue Pembroke’s indulgence in insanity, The Glug, also constitutes attempted murder by alcohol. The legend goes that in 1878, a surprise two feet of snow began falling during Pembroke’s traditional Second Sunday Party on the quad (at the beginning, accordingly, of Second Week—celebrating being that much closer to the end of term), and The Glug was invented as a way to get hammered quickly and stay warm enough to continue the outdoor party tradition. It involves teams of five competing elimination-style to see who can guzzle the most from their upended jug of Pimm’s without breaking lip-lock with the straw, vomiting, or passing out cold—like the posh English cousin to a keg stand. Once you tap out, by choice or biology, you then have to pass The Reckoning: a full thirty seconds without falling. It is the kind of insane, irresponsible, potentially fatal activity that is catnip to college kids, and Joss—who’d thrown up three times last year—seemed glad to retire. Lady Bollocks refused to participate entirely.

  “Pimm’s is to be sipped. It’s what separates us from the hooligans,” she snapped when she caught Gaz coaching me in the hall. She’d aimed the last word at me.

  “Don’t worry about Bea,” Gaz counseled. “She is allergic to fun.”

  She also had a point. The Glug was about as regal as a root canal. Fortunately, we sailed quickly through the early rounds, and now we were in the finals.

  And really buzzed.

  I was the leadoff hitter, so to speak. Despite never getting used to the discomfiting presence of a judge staring at my mouth at close range, I glugged for a solid thirty-one seconds—the record is a superhuman one minute and four seconds—and then passed The Reckoning with ease. I had out-chugged Penelope Six-Names by twenty seconds.

 
“Suck it, BeatNicks!” I whooped, as Cilla let out a howl of glee. We then performed a triumphant chest bump that ended with me belching involuntarily as we yelped in pain. The Bexicon nailed it again: There was no more delicate paragon of womanhood at Oxford that year than I.

  “That was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Gaz announced, as Clive and Nick about fell over laughing.

  “Which part?” Cilla wheezed. “The bumping, the burping, or the mashed boobs?”

  “Yes,” Gaz replied serenely.

  Nick and I attempted a high five. I swung wildly and missed.

  “A classic case of Pimm’s Blindness,” he laughed. “So tragic in one so young.”

  “I think it’s more that some of my brain cells just exploded.”

  “Try again,” he said, raising up my arm. “If you watch the other person’s elbow at the last second, you’ll never miss.”

  We high-fived with a satisfying smack.

  “Genius!” I said. “Lacey will love that.”

  “No, sorry, it’s a state secret. Very sensitive government information,” he said.

  I felt arms wrap around me from behind. Clive lifted me up and whirled me around before setting me back on my feet.

  “Clive!” Cilla shouted as I struggled to regain my balance. “Never spin a Glugger until half an hour after The Glug.”

  “Now you’ve done it,” Gaz said. “She’ll be too Brahms’d to stand up at the trophy ceremony.”

  “Sorry,” Clive said, steadying me. “But that was ace. That record is going down today.”

  Unfortunately, Clive had barely gone up when he got penalized for breaking the lip-lock rule. Cilla and Gaz more than made up for it, though, and after the BeatNicks’ best player fell twice during The Reckoning, we’d built an impenetrable lead of more than a minute.

  “Go on, Nicky boy,” Gaz said, rubbing together his hands. “Stick it to ’em.”

  A terrified-looking guy called Terrance, lean as a toothpick and just as pointy, approached the table. He was an alternate—his older brother had partied too hard the night before—and though Nick’s turn was a formality at this point, Terrance’s team clearly expected its last Glugger to make a massive fool of himself, and the poor kid knew it. He offered Nick a wobbly handshake, and somewhere, Popeye and Twiggy doubtless took deep, meditative breaths as Nick was hoisted upside down…and drank for a pathetic seven seconds.