“No, it’s not. Is this the reason you phoned?”
“Maybe,” Alex says. “Call it historical curiosity.” Except the truth is closer to the slight drag in Henry’s voice and the half step of hesitation before he speaks that’s been there all week. “Speaking of historical curiosity, here’s a fun fact: I’m sitting in the room Nancy Reagan was in when she found out Ronald Reagan got shot.”
“Good Lord.”
“And it’s also where ol’ Tricky Dick told his family he was gonna resign.”
“I’m sorry—who or what is a Tricky Dick?”
“Nixon! Listen, you’re undoing everything this country’s crusty forefathers fought for and deflowering the darling of the republic. You at least need to know basic American history.”
“I hardly think deflowering is the word,” Henry deadpans. “These arrangements are supposed to be with virgin brides, you know. That certainly didn’t seem to be the case.”
“Uh-huh, and I’m sure you picked up all those skills from books.”
“Well, I did go to uni. It just wasn’t necessarily the reading that did it.”
Alex hums in suggestive agreement and lets the rhythm of banter fall out. He looks across the room—the windows that were once only gauzy curtains on a sleeping room for Taft’s family on hot nights, the corner now stacked with Leo’s old comic book collectibles where Eisenhower used to play cards. The stuff underneath the surface. Alex has always sought those things out.
“Hey,” he says. “You sound weird. You good?”
Henry’s breath catches and he clears his throat. “I’m fine.”
Alex doesn’t say anything, letting the silence stretch in a thin thread between them before he cuts it. “You know, this whole arrangement we have … you can tell me stuff. I tell you stuff all the time. Politics stuff and school stuff and nutso family stuff. I know I’m, like, not the paragon of normal human communication, but. You know.”
Another pause.
“I’m not … historically great at talking about things,” Henry says.
“Well, I wasn’t historically great at blowjobs, but we all gotta learn and grow, sweetheart.”
“Wasn’t?”
“Hey,” Alex huffs. “Are you trying to say I’m still not good at them?”
“No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Henry says, and Alex can hear the small smile in his voice. “It was just the first one that was … Well. It was enthusiastic, at least.”
“I don’t remember you complaining.”
“Yes, well, I’d only been fantasizing about it for ages.”
“See, there’s a thing,” Alex points out. “You just told me that. You can tell me other stuff.”
“It’s hardly the same.”
He rolls over onto his stomach, considers, and very deliberately says, “Baby.”
It’s become a thing: baby. He knows it’s become a thing. He’s slipped up and accidentally said it a few times, and each time, Henry positively melts and Alex pretends not to notice, but he’s not above playing dirty here.
There’s a slow hiss of an exhale across the line, like air escaping through a crack in a window.
“It’s, ah. It’s not the best time,” he says. “How did you put it? Nutso family stuff.”
Alex purses his lips, bites down on his cheek. There it is.
He’s wondered when Henry would finally start talking about the royal family. He makes oblique references to Philip being wound so tight as to double as an atomic clock, or to his grandmother’s disapproval, and he mentions Bea as often as Alex mentions June, but Alex knows there’s more to it than that. He couldn’t tell you when he started noticing, though, just like he doesn’t know when he started ticking off the days of Henry’s moods.
“Ah,” he says. “I see.”
“I don’t suppose you keep up with any British tabloids, do you?”
“Not if I can help it.”
Henry offers the bitterest of laughs. “Well, the Daily Mail has always had a bit of an affinity for airing our dirty laundry. They, er, they gave my sister this nickname years ago. ‘The Powder Princess.’”
A ding of recognition. “Because of the…”
“Yes, the cocaine, Alex.”
“Okay, that does sound familiar.”
Henry sighs. “Well, someone’s managed to bypass security to spray paint ‘Powder Princess’ on the side of her car.”
“Shit,” Alex says. “And she’s not taking it well?”
“Bea?” Henry laughs, a little more genuinely this time. “No, she doesn’t usually care about those things. She’s fine. More shaken up that someone got past security than anything. Gran had an entire PPO team sacked. But … I dunno.”
He trails off, and Alex can guess.
“But you care. Because you want to protect her even though you’re the little brother.”
“I … yes.”
“I know the feeling. Last summer I almost punched a guy at Lollapalooza because he tried to grab June’s ass.”
“But you didn’t?”
“June had already dumped her milkshake on him,” Alex explains. He shrugs a little, knowing Henry can’t see it. “And then Amy Tased him. The smell of burnt strawberry milkshake on a sweaty frat guy is really something.”
Henry laughs fully at that. “They never do need us, do they?”
“Nope,” Alex agrees. “So you’re upset because the rumors aren’t true.”
“Well … they are true, actually,” Henry says.
Oh, Alex thinks.
“Oh,” Alex says. He’s not sure how else to respond, reaching into his mental store of political platitudes and finding them all clinical and intolerable.
Henry, with a little trepidation, presses on. “You know, Bea has only ever wanted to play music,” he starts. “Mum and Dad played too much Joni Mitchell for her growing up, I think. She wanted guitar lessons; Gran wanted violin since it was more proper. Bea was allowed to learn both, but she went to uni for classical violin. Anyway, her last year of uni, Dad died. It happened so … quickly. He just went.”
Alex shuts his eyes. “Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Henry says, voice rough. “We all went round the bend a bit. Philip just had to be the man of the family, and I was an arsehole, and Mum didn’t leave her rooms. Bea just stopped seeing the point in anything. I was starting uni when she finished, and Philip was deployed halfway round the globe, and she was out every single night with all the posh London hipsters, sneaking out to play guitar at secret shows and doing mountains of cocaine. The papers loved it.”
“Jesus,” Alex hisses. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Henry says, steadiness rising in his voice as if he’s stuck out his chin in that stubborn way he does sometimes. Alex wishes he could see it. “In any event, the speculation and paparazzi photos and the goddamn nickname got to be too much, and Philip came home for a week, and he and Gran literally put her in a car and had her driven to rehab and called it a wellness retreat to the press.”
“Wait—sorry,” Alex says before he can stop himself. “Just. Where was your mom?”
“Mum hasn’t been involved in much since Dad died,” Henry says on an exhale, then stops short. “Sorry. That’s not fair. It’s … the grief has been total for her. It was paralyzing. It is paralyzing. She was such a spitfire. I dunno. She still listens, and she tries, and she wants us to be happy. But I don’t know if she has it in her anymore to be a part of anyone’s happiness.”
“That’s … horrible.”
A pause, heavy.
“Anyway, Bea went,” Henry goes on, “against her will, and didn’t think she had a problem at all, even though you could see her bloody ribs and she’d barely spoken to me in months, when we grew up inseparable. Checked herself out after six hours. I remember her calling me that night from a club, and I lost it. I was, what, eighteen? I drove there and she was sitting on the back steps, high as a kite, and I sat down next to her and cried and told her she wasn’t allowed to k
ill herself because Dad was gone and I was gay and I didn’t know what the hell to do, and that was how I came out to her.
“The next day, she went back, and she’s been clean ever since, and neither of us has ever told anyone about that night. Until now, I suppose. And I’m not sure why I’ve said all this, I just, I’ve never really said any of it. I mean, Pez was there for most of it, so, and I—I don’t know.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever said this many words out loud in a row in my entire life, so please feel free to put me out of my misery any time now.”
“No, no,” Alex says, stumbling over his own tongue in a rush. “I’m glad you told me. Does it feel better at all to have said it?”
Henry goes silent, and Alex wants so badly to see the shadows of expressions moving across his face, to be able to touch them with his fingertips. Alex hears a swallow across the line, and Henry says, “I suppose so. Thank you. For listening.”
“Yeah, of course,” Alex tells him. “I mean, it’s good to have times when it’s not all about me, as tedious and exhausting as it may be.”
That earns him a groan, and he bites back a smile when Henry says, “You are a wanker.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, and he takes the opportunity to ask a question he’s been wanting to ask for months. “So, um. Does anybody else know? About you?”
“Bea’s the only one in the family I’ve told, though I’m sure the rest have suspected. I was always a bit different, never quite had the stiff upper lip. I think Dad knew and never cared. But Gran sat me down the day I finished my A levels and made it abundantly clear I was not to let anyone know about any deviant desires I might be beginning to harbor that might reflect poorly upon the crown, and there were appropriate channels to maintain appearances if necessary. So.”
Alex’s stomach turns over. He pictures Henry, a teenager, back-broken with grief and told to keep it and the rest of him shut up tight.
“What the fuck. Seriously?”
“The wonders of the monarchy,” Henry says loftily.
“God.” Alex scrubs a hand across his face. “I’ve had to fake some shit for my mom, but nobody’s ever outright told me to lie about who I am.”
“I don’t think she sees it as lying. She sees it as doing what must be done.”
“Sounds like bullshit.”
Henry sighs. “Hardly any other options, are there?”
There’s a long pause, and Alex is thinking about Henry in his palace, Henry and the years behind him, how he got here. He bites his lip.
“Hey,” Alex says. “Tell me about your dad.”
Another pause.
“Sorry?”
“I mean, if you don’t—if you want to. I was just thinking I don’t know much about him except that he was James Bond. What was he like?”
Alex paces the Solarium and listens to Henry talk, stories about a man with Henry’s same sandy hair and strong, straight nose, someone Alex has met in shadows that pass through the way Henry speaks and moves and laughs. He hears about sneaking out of the palace and joyriding around the countryside, learning to sail, being propped up in director’s chairs. The man Henry remembers is both superhuman and heartbreakingly flesh and blood, a man who encompassed Henry’s entire childhood and charmed the world but was also simply a man.
The way Henry talks about him is a physical feat, drifting up in the corners with fondness but sagging in the middle under the weight. He tells Alex in a low voice how his parents met—Princess Catherine, dead set on being the first princess with a doctorate, mid-twenties and wading through Shakespeare. How she went to see Henry V at the RSC and Arthur was starring, how she pushed her way backstage and shook off her security to disappear into London with him and dance all night. How the Queen forbid it, but she married him anyway.
He tells Alex about growing up in Kensington, how Bea sang and Philip clung to his grandmother, but they were happy, buttoned up in cashmere and knee socks and whisked through foreign countries in helicopters and shiny cars. A brass telescope from his father for his seventh birthday. How he realized by the time he was four that every person in the country knew his name, and how he told his mother he didn’t know if he wanted them to, and how she knelt down and told him she’d let nothing touch him, not ever.
Alex starts talking too. Henry already hears nearly everything about Alex’s current life, but talking about how they grew up has always been some invisible line of demarcation. He talks about Travis County, making campaign posters with construction paper for fifth-grade student council, family trips to Surfside, running headlong into the waves. He talks about the big bay window in the house where he grew up, and Henry doesn’t tell him he’s crazy for all the things he used to write and hide under there.
It starts to grow dark outside, a dull and soggy evening around the Residence, and Alex makes his way down to his room and his bed. He hears about the assortment of guys from Henry’s university days, all of them enamored with the idea of sleeping with a prince, almost all of them immediately alienated by the paperwork and secrecy and, occasionally, Henry’s dark moods about the paperwork and secrecy.
“But of course, er,” Henry says, “nobody since … well, since you and I—”
“No,” Alex says, faster than he expects, “me neither. Nobody else.”
He hears words coming out of his mouth, ones he can’t believe he’s saying out loud. About Liam, about those nights, but also how he’d sneak pills out of Liam’s Adderall bottle when his grades were slipping and stay awake for two, three days at a time. About June, the unspoken knowledge that she only lives here to watch out for him, the quiet sense of guilt he carries when he can’t tear himself away. About how much some of the lies people tell about his mother hurt, the fear she’ll lose.
They talk for so long Alex has to plug his phone in to keep the battery from dying. He rolls onto his side and listens, trails the back of his hand across the pillow next to him and imagines Henry lying opposite in his own bed, two parentheses enclosing 3,700 miles. He looks at his chewed-up cuticles and imagines Henry there under his fingers, speaking into only inches of distance. He imagines the way Henry’s face would look in the bluish-gray dark. Maybe he would have a faint shadow of stubble on his jaw, waiting for a morning shave, or maybe the circles under his eyes would wash out in the low light.
Somehow, this is the same person who had Alex so convinced he didn’t care about anything, who still has the rest of the world convinced he’s a mild, unfettered Prince Charming. It’s taken months to get here: the full realization of just how wrong he was.
“I miss you,” Alex says before he can stop himself.
He instantly regrets it, but Henry says, “I miss you too.”
* * *
“Hey, wait.”
Alex rolls his chair back out of his cubicle. The woman from the after-hours cleaning crew stops, her hand on the handle of the coffeepot. “I know it looks disgusting, but would you mind leaving that? I was gonna finish it.”
She gives him a dubious look but leaves the last burnt, sludgy vestiges of coffee where they are and rolls off with her cart.
He peers down into his CLAREMONT FOR AMERICA mug and frowns at the almond milk that’s pooled in the middle. Why doesn’t this office keep normal milk around? This is why people from Texas hate Washington elites. Ruining the goddamn dairy industry.
On his desk, there are three stacks of papers. He keeps staring at them, hoping if he recites them enough times in his head, he’ll figure out how to feel like he’s doing enough.
One. The Gun File. A detailed index of every kind of insane gun Americans can own and state-by-state regulations, which he has to comb through for research on a new set of federal assault rifle policies. It’s got a giant smudge of pizza sauce on it because it makes him stress-eat.
Two. The Trans-Pacific Partnership File, which he knows he needs to work on but has barely touched because it’s mind-numbingly boring.
Three. The Texas File.
&nb
sp; He’s not supposed to have this file. It wasn’t given to him by the policy chief of staff or anyone on the campaign. It’s not even about policy. It’s also more of a binder than a file. He guesses he should call it: The Texas Binder.
The Texas Binder is his baby. He guards it jealously, stuffing it into his messenger bag to take home with him when he leaves the office and hiding it from WASPy Hunter. It contains a county map of Texas with complex voter demographic breakdowns, matched up with the populations of children of undocumented immigrants, unregistered voters who are legal residents, voting patterns over the last twenty years. He’s stuffed it with spreadsheets of data, voting records, projections he had Nora calculate for him.
Back in 2016, when his mother squeezed out a victory in the general election, the bitterest sting was losing Texas. She was the first president since Nixon to win the presidency but lose her own state of residence. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, considering Texas had been polling red, but they were all secretly holding out for the Lometa Longshot to take it in the end. She didn’t.
Alex keeps coming back to the numbers from 2016 and 2018 precinct by precinct, and he can’t shake this nagging feeling of hope. There’s something there, something shifting, he swears it.
He doesn’t mean to be ungrateful for the policy job, it’s just … not what he thought it was going to be. It’s frustrating and slow-moving. He should stay focused, give it more time, but instead, he keeps coming back to the binder.
He plucks a pencil out of WASPy Hunter’s Harvard pencil cup and starts sketching lines on the map of Texas for the millionth time, redrawing the districts old white men drew years ago to force votes their way.
Alex has this spark at the base of his spine to do the most good he can, and when he sits here in his cubicle for hours a day and fidgets under all the minutiae, he doesn’t know if he is. But if he could only figure out a way to make Texas’ vote reflect its soul … he’s nowhere near qualified to single-handedly dismantle Texas’ iron curtains of gerrymandering, but what if he—
An incessant buzzing snaps him present, and he digs out his phone from the bottom of his bag.
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