The Royal We

by Heather Cocks

  “I don’t know what that means, but I think I want to try it,” Gaz said. “Are you sure you have to go home at the end of the week?”

  “I probably should stay,” she twinkled. “I haven’t even met Nick yet!”

  Nick’s absence was the only failure of her trip, it seemed, and as her departure neared, Lacey fixated on it. And while I understood her disappointment, I caught myself feeling a little defensive of him: Nick was my friend, not an animal at the zoo who was refusing to come out of his cave. It’s the first time I ever empathized with Lady Bollocks.

  Near the end of Lacey’s stay was our birthday, the fifth of November, which coincides with Guy Fawkes Day—so named for the mustachioed ex-soldier who, in the early seventeenth century, got busted guarding explosives that were supposed to blow up Parliament. Much of England observes it with fireworks and bonfires, commemorating the big bang that wasn’t. But when Gaz had found out Lacey and I like celebrating our birthday with a costume party, because we’re so close to Halloween, he—as Pembroke’s social chair—had a brainwave.

  “Fawkesoween!” he’d proclaimed. “Two parties for the price of one.”

  Lacey and I got ready for the party in my room, just like we had our entire lives. (On prom night, she’d spent an hour on my hair, leaving her only five minutes for her own, and voted for me for prom queen; she won unanimously but for that one vote.) Gossiping with her while we primped, and snacked on British cheeses and crackers I’d bought as a surprise, felt like old times. Like home. If I had looked out my window to see our parents’ backyard instead of the quad, I would not have blinked.

  “Do you think Nick will finally show up?” Lacey asked. “I didn’t fly all this way just to walk past his closed bedroom door.”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “No one’s heard from him.”

  “I find it very suspicious that you two are in here all night watching Devour and nothing has ever happened,” Lacey said. “Are you holding out on me? Or are you not interested? Do I get to be interested?”

  “He’s got a girlfriend!” I said, though to my own ears I said it a little too fast and a little too protectively. “Actually, she kind of looks like you.”

  “So does that Ceres chick,” Lacey said blithely. “Although I only saw her twice before she dropped out to go work for that party planner. I can’t believe she thought Cornell was in Manhattan.” She gazed out the window as church bells rang peacefully in the distance. “I sort of sympathize with her, though. It’ll suck going back to Ithaca. It’s so alive here.”

  “I told you to apply with me.”

  “I couldn’t, you know that. Med school beckons,” Lacey said, although she sounded less convinced of that here in my room, staring out at the light dusting of snow that had turned the quad into something from the pages of those old boarding-school stories we read by flashlight. She shook her head quickly, and then came over and threw her arms around me from behind.

  “I miss you,” she said, her voice tight. “I keep worrying that you’re going to forget me now that you have this whole other life.”

  This was an impossibility; even the suggestion made me sad. As she squeezed me, I had a vivid flashback to our first year at Cornell, at the café in Balch Hall. I’d spied her on my way in and shuffled over to say hi, still sweaty and disheveled from morning practice with the intramural flag football team, only to discover Lacey was being figuratively wined and dined by some power players at a sorority. I wasn’t much interested in pledging, myself—which was convenient given that none of them were particularly interested in me, either—but as usual, Lacey went after whatever looked the most prestigious on her resume, and she’d made sure her reputation preceded her.

  “This table is full,” one of the girls had said, giving me an extremely hairy eyeball. “Consider taking your sweat elsewhere.”

  I had been prepared to leave quietly, but Lacey grabbed my arm and stood, calmly picking up the rest of her toast. “Maybe you should consider not being such a bitch,” she’d said, to their obvious shock. “I’ll let you bus my tray. Bex and I have better places to be.”

  She never did end up joining a sorority. “How could I find any better sisters than the one I already have?” she’d said, with a hug much like the one she was giving me right there in my room at Pembroke.

  I rubbed her forearm affectionately. “I could never forget you,” I promised. “It’s in our genetic contract.”

  She sniffled. “That better be true.”

  “It is,” I said. “And you’re here now, and my friends love you, and there’s a party full of guys down there who’d like a crack at the blond twin.”

  Lacey grinned. “In that case, I’d better do my hair,” she said. “No, wait. I need to fix yours first. You’re a danger to yourself with a curling iron.”

  In an hour, Lacey had transformed my head of fine hair into springy, innocent curls, and straightened her own plentiful waves. We were reusing a costume we’d worn last Halloween to great acclaim: I would be an angelic Little White Lie, and she—winking at being the better-behaved twin in real life—would be a Dirty Little Secret. This involved snug-fitting white (for me) and black (for her) V-neck T-shirts—Lacey is all about Just Enough Cleavage, although she has more of it than I do, and so the V on mine fell almost low enough to be indecent—and silver Sharpies tied to our belt loops, so that people could jot down on our bodies their various anonymous fibs and close-held truths. In other words, we would look good, Lacey’s main requirement, while everyone else did the real work.

  The music was pulsing when we headed into the lovely old Hogwarts-style Dining Hall, with its high ceilings and wood panels and dramatic candelabra. It was well chosen because of the decent-size double staircase leading down from the door, meaning all guests got to Make an Entrance and be ogled from the throng below them. As soon as we hit the top of those stairs, half the room turned, and Lacey broke into a confident smile.

  “I have missed that since high school,” she said.

  “Write that on your shirt,” I teased her.

  “Is he here?” she asked as we made our way down the steps and toward the bar, where Gaz had set up several punch bowls full of potent-looking mixed drinks, steaming with dry ice.

  “It’s dark. I can’t tell yet,” I said, feeling a twinge at the tenor of her eagerness. “I’ll introduce you if he is, I promise.”

  Gaz had triumphed. All the Fawkes dummies had eerie jack-o’-lantern heads, and were suspended from the wood-beamed ceiling in various grisly positions. The lighting was flickering and spooky, but ripe for romantic shenanigans, and the drinking and dancing were in full swing. Clive met us at the bar in a costume that was split down the middle: half of the pipe, mustache, and hat that make up the classic Sherlock Holmes, and half a set of glasses, a thinner waxed mustache, and slicked-down hair that screamed Watson.

  “The Sexy Sherlock I’d envisioned had other plans,” he said, gesturing at me, “so I decided to do a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing and go as both of them.”

  “That must have taken you forever,” I said, impressed. “It’s really good.”

  Clive beamed. “If I may,” he said, turning to Lacey, “there is a gentleman chemistry major who, when you came in, expressed an interest in seeing if the two of you have any.”

  He gestured to an extremely good-looking blond who shot Lacey a seraphic smile.

  “Damn,” she murmured appreciatively. “I haven’t scored this fast in a long time.”

  “Well, you’re a busy woman,” I said. “But you’re on vacation now.”

  A grin spread across Lacey’s face. “And it’s my birthday,” she said.

  Just before Clive led her to her prey, he shot me an endearing smile, and I felt a rush of gratitude toward him for caring so much that my sister had a good time. With Nick gone and our TV nights on hold, I’d slipped right back into my old habits with Clive, but I knew it looked like—and, honestly, felt like—I was just killing time until Nick returned. I could hear
Cilla’s voice in my head from that afternoon, and stubbornly muted her as quickly as I could. Clive was more than lovely. He was smart and cute and available and interested, and maybe I should try to look at him the way I’d noticed him looking at me.

  And yet, the first person I scanned for was Nick. Instead, I got India Bolingbroke—dressed, in grand Halloween tradition, as Sexy Person of Vaguely Hawaiian Origin As an Excuse to Wear a Coconut Bra—who was herself surveying the room with a deflated air; apparently she didn’t know Nick’s whereabouts any better than I did. I saw Joss in one corner dressed as Karl Lagerfeld, sprayed silver hair in a frizzy ponytail. Lady Bollocks, perched on one of the deep windowsills, sported what looked a fortune’s worth of Marie Antoinette garb and had brought three boys dressed as peasants, to whom she was feeding cake (which made me wonder if Bea had very well-hidden fun depths). Cilla had done herself up as Ginger Spice, in a Union Jack dress, and she appeared to be berating a large, lumpy burrito with a head. As I inched closer, I recognized Gaz, stuffed into a flesh-colored nylon body stocking. He’d paired it with a long, red wig and the world’s most garish pair of massive, hollow plastic breasts. They looked like Jell-O molds with nipples. My gaze, against every ounce of my judgment, drifted between them to the large sparkling heart-shaped bauble resting unluckily there.

  “Oh my God,” I said, starting to giggle uncontrollably. “You’re Kate Winslet. From the scene in Titanic where he paints her naked.”

  “Right you are,” he said. “See, Cilla? People get it.”

  “But it’s not accurate,” she hissed, pointing to the tufts of black, curly hair glued to Gaz’s crotch. “The Heart of the Ocean was not green and she did not have pubic hair in that scene.”

  “Well, we never saw for certain,” Gaz offered. “Anyway, it’s for modesty. The bloody stocking stretches too thin—I had to put something there or you’d see all my bits.”

  “I can’t believe that your objection to this is on authenticity grounds,” I said to Cilla, stealing a sip of her dramatically steaming glass of pitch-black punch.

  Cilla uncapped my Sharpie and wrote Gaz is a genius on my shirt.

  “There. The first enormous lie of the night,” she said.

  Gaz tacked onto the end of her sentence: at pretending he is not dynamite in the sack.

  “Much better,” he said.

  It took me fifteen minutes to find Clive and Lacey, and then another fifteen to get a drink (so I got three, for maximum efficiency). The more the cocktails flowed, the less little and white the lies scribbled on my shirt became—someone wrote Bea is SO NICE on my breast—and the sweatier and looser our dancing was: me, Clive, Lacey, Damian the Incredibly Hot Chemistry Student, and whoever else happened to be in our radius, including a guy dressed as Captain Hook whom I’d noticed staring at me with increasingly sexy intensity. I was wrestling with whether to strike up a conversation when the pirate beat me to it, putting his lips right to my ear.

  “Yer makeup’s runnin’ down your face, innit,” he yelled.

  I ran a finger across my cheek and it came away dark from rivulets of sweaty mascara. I had to laugh. This was exactly what I deserved for breaking a promise about Clive that I’d barely even made to myself.

  I waved at Lacey. “Be right back,” I shouted, mopping at my face.

  But as I headed out to the nearest bathroom, I caught sight of a familiar figure turning tail and sprinting up the main stairs, and like a magnet to metal I shot toward it.

  “Hey,” I called out, but Nick was already most of the way upstairs. I followed him straight to his own open door, which I caught before he could close it behind himself.

  “Welcome back,” I said.

  He jumped. “I almost didn’t recognize you without your ponytail,” he said. I could swear his eyes flickered to my cleavage and then immediately away. “What’s that costume?”

  “I’m a Little White Lie,” I said, catching my reflection in his mirror and wiping again at my cheeks. “Feel free to add one. I suggest, ‘I have every intention of going into this party.’”

  “I am going,” Nick said, but it was thin.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “You’re hiding.”

  Nick turned away and stretched, his shirt riding up slightly and revealing an appealing side-ab muscle.

  “You’ve seen the papers. My head’s been a bit scrambled,” he said. “I thought getting torched with you lot would make me feel right again, but I’m not quite sure I’m ready yet.”

  I imagined India having a drunken Where have you been?!? hissy on the dance floor. I wouldn’t want to deal with that in front of two hundred people, either, especially after a half-baked paternity crisis. Nick just looked so downtrodden; I felt suddenly, fiercely protective.

  “Come on,” I heard myself say. “We’re getting you out of here.”

  “But I just got here,” Nick said.

  I put my hands on my hips. “Right now, ‘here’ is alone in your bedroom,” I said. “Tell me something. When did you last have any fun?”

  “You’ve been out with me—I’m terribly fun.”

  “Sure, you are fun, but that’s not what I asked.”

  “I do have a good time,” Nick insisted. He sat down on the bed and tugged on his hair. “I just sometimes get tired of it being contractually obligated. Being a prince involves a lot of luxuries, but getting to be in a bad mood is not one of them.” His face was downcast, but then he shook himself. “Ugh. Poor little royal boy. I’m sorry I even said that. I should be smacked.”

  I closed his door. “Listen, I don’t know if you’re aware of this,” I said. “But you are allowed to have feelings, even if you did spring from the loins of Norman vanquishers or whatever.”

  “Can’t we just stay in and watch Devour?” he said hopefully. “Wasn’t that chap with the bad wig going to suck the acid out of Carrie’s scar?”

  “Nice try,” I said. “But you need actual social fun. And you’re right that it’s not going to happen at this party. Everyone down there’s either going to suck up to you or freak out on you.”

  “Or just stare at me to see if I’m about to crack,” Nick said glumly. He looked resigned, then determined. “Right, as you’re clearly the delinquent here, where do we go?”

  I grinned. “Anywhere. People here might recognize you, but who’s going to tell the people milling around out there?” I gestured expansively at the window. “If we can find you a mask, they’ll just think you’re some deranged guy who’s a week late with his costume.”

  He considered this. “I think we’re going to look back at this one day and agree that it was a bad decision.”

  “Even better,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter Seven

  Nick still claims I stole the wheelbarrow by announcing, “No fence is bigger than I am,” before hurtling over one and then running out two seconds later screaming, “Your chariot, my lord.” But I swear that the wheelbarrow found us, proffering itself in the middle of a random driveway, practically begging us to let it cradle the Royal Carcass.

  “Are we there yet?” Nick asked, lolling his head to the side.

  “We have moved about twenty feet since you last asked me that,” I said, heaving the wheelbarrow with great effort.

  “Your problem,” Nick slurred, taking a swig out of his Guinness can, “is that you need to learn the metric system. It will make you whole. Are we there yet?”

  His volume was loud, but Nick didn’t care. That was at least two parts due to the booze, but I also write it off to something we still affectionately call the Oxford Bubble. Prince Richard had struck a deal with the press to steer clear of Nick while he was at school, in exchange for occasional official sit-downs with him—a level of access previously denied them. Miraculously, the media honored this deal. And somehow both the townspeople and most of our fellow students were protective enough that they kept their mouths shut about Nick’s specific comings and goings. Even if they were woken up by the sounds of s
omeone who looked like him being dragged off in a neighbor’s wheelbarrow.

  It was going to be a long walk with that infernal thing, capping an even longer night. We’d snuck out to the nearest Boots and found, amid the cosmetics and snacks, a junk aisle with Halloween masks on clearance. While Nick hid around the corner—I had lied that I was going to shoplift, just to make him feel rebellious—I picked out a rubbery Darth Vader helmet and a Batman mask that would go all the way down over Nick’s shoulders.

  “Ultimate Evil, or a hero who never speaks above a whisper?” I asked him.

  “Ultimate Evil is obviously you,” he said, grabbing the Batman mask, which mashed his nose into a baby snout and made him sound congested. “It smells weird in here.”

  “Stop stalling.”

  On the way to Boots, we’d passed a billboard covered in posters advertising various events around town. Nick closed his eyes and I spun him around, and then he ripped a flyer off the wall at random, which is why we ended up at a dive bar named The Hedge Maze, where some regulars were duking it out in a profoundly impassioned and unironic karaoke contest.

  I sidled up to the bar and waved at the portly, buzz-cut man pulling pints, whose neck was wider than his head.

  “Is there a fee to enter?” I asked.

  “Five quid,” the guy said, looking skeptically at both of us. “But I don’t trust a man if I can’t see ’is face. Might ’ave a gun up in there or summat.”

  “His only weapon is his talent,” I said. “He’s just got terrible stage fright.”

  “’e’s in a bloody mask,” the guy said. “S’not Halloween. What kind o’ prat does that?”

  “Listen, sir,” I said, plonking a ten-pound note on the bar. “My friend Steve here is having a rough year. His, um, brother threw acid on his face and it has scarred him for life.”

  “Blimey,” the man said. “Poor Steve.”

  I nodded serenely. “The acid burned his throat. They said Steve would never sing again.”

  “Yes, and he might never,” hissed Nick.

  “He will,” I said. “Steve will sing.”