Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

  “Where are you?” June’s voice demands over the line.

  Fuck. He checks the time: 9:44. He was supposed to meet June for dinner over an hour ago.

  “Shit, June, I’m so sorry,” he says, jumping up from his desk and shoving his things into his bag. “I got caught up at work—I, I completely forgot.”

  “I sent you like a million texts,” she says. She sounds like she’s vision-boarding his funeral.

  “My phone was on silent,” he says helplessly, booking it for the elevator. “I’m seriously so sorry. I’m a complete jackass. I’m leaving now.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I got mine to go. I’ll see you at home.”

  “Bug.”

  “I’m gonna need you to not call me that right now.”

  “June—”

  The call drops.

  When he gets back to the Residence, she’s sitting on her bed, eating pasta out of a plastic container, with Parks & Recreation playing on her tablet. She pointedly ignores him when he comes to her doorway.

  He’s reminded of when they were kids—around eight and eleven years old. He recalls standing next to her at the bathroom mirror, looking at the similarities between their faces: the same round tips of their noses, the same thick, unruly brows, the same square jaw inherited from their mother. He remembers studying her expression in the reflection as they brushed their teeth, the morning of the first day of school, their dad having braided June’s hair for her because their mom was in DC and couldn’t be there.

  He recognizes the same expression on her face now: carefully tucked-away disappointment.

  “I’m sorry,” he tries again. “I honestly feel like complete and total shit. Please don’t be mad at me.”

  June keeps chewing, looking steadfastly at Leslie Knope chirping away.

  “We can do lunch tomorrow,” Alex says desperately. “I’ll pay.”

  “I don’t care about a stupid meal, Alex.”

  Alex sighs. “Then what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you not to be Mom,” June says, finally looking up at him. She closes her food container and gets up off her bed, pacing across the room.

  “Okay,” Alex says, raising both hands, “is that what’s happening right now?”

  “I—” She takes a deep breath. “No. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, you obviously meant it,” Alex says. He drops his messenger bag and steps into the room. “Why don’t you say whatever it is you need to say?”

  She turns to face him, arms folded, her spine braced against her dresser. “You really don’t see it? You never sleep, you’re always throwing yourself into something, you’re willing to let Mom use you for whatever she wants, the tabloids are always after you—”

  “June, I’ve always been this way,” he interrupts gently. “I’m gonna be a politician. You always knew that. I’m starting as soon as I graduate … in a month. This is how my life is gonna be, okay? I’m choosing it.”

  “Well, maybe it’s the wrong choice,” June says, biting her lip.

  He rocks back on his heels. “Where the hell is this coming from?”

  “Alex,” she says, “come on.”

  He doesn’t know what the hell she’s getting at. “You’ve always backed me up until now.”

  She flings one arm out emphatically enough to upset an entire potted cactus on her dresser and says, “Because until now you weren’t fucking the Prince of England!”

  That effectively snaps Alex’s mouth shut. He crosses to the sitting area in front of the fireplace, sinking down into an armchair. June watches him, cheeks bright scarlet.

  “Nora told you.”

  “What?” she says. “No. She wouldn’t do that. Although it kinda sucks you told her and not me.” She folds her arms again. “I’m sorry, I was trying to wait for you to tell me yourself, but, Jesus, Alex. How many times was I supposed to believe you were volunteering to take those international appearances we always found excuses to get out of? And, like, did you forget I’ve lived across the hall from you for almost my entire life?”

  Alex looks down at his shoes, June’s perfectly curated midcentury rug. “So you’re mad at me because of Henry?”

  June makes a strangled noise, and when he looks back up, she’s digging through the top drawer of her dresser. “Oh my God, how are you so smart and so dumb at the same time?” she says, pulling a magazine out from underneath her underwear. He’s about to tell her he’s not in the mood to look at her tabloids when she throws it at him.

  An ancient issue of J14, opened to a center page. The photograph of Henry, age thirteen.

  He glances up. “You knew?”

  “Of course I knew!” she says, flopping dramatically into the chair opposite him. “You were always leaving your greasy little fingerprints all over it! Why do you always assume you can get away with things?” She releases a long-suffering sigh. “I never really … got what he was to you, until I got it. I thought you had a crush or something, or that I could help you make a friend, but, Alex. We meet so many people. I mean, thousands and thousands of people, and a lot of them are morons, and a lot of them are incredible, unique people, but I almost never meet somebody who’s a match for you. Do you know that?” She leans forward and touches his knee, pink fingernails on his navy chinos. “You have so much in you, it’s almost impossible to match it. But he’s your match, dumbass.”

  Alex stares at her, trying to process what she’s said.

  “I feel like this is your starry-eyed romantic thing projecting onto me,” is what he decides to say, and she immediately withdraws her hand from his leg and returns to glaring at him.

  “You know Evan didn’t break up with me?” she says. “I broke up with him. I was gonna go to California with him, live in the same time zone as Dad, get a job at the fucking Sacramento Bee or something. But I gave all that up to come here, because it was the right thing to do. I did what Dad did—I went where I was most needed, because it was my responsibility.”

  “And you regret it?”

  “No,” she says. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I—I wonder. Dad wonders, sometimes. Alex, you don’t have to wonder. You don’t have to be our parents. You can keep Henry, and figure the rest out.” Now she’s looking at him evenly, steadily. “Sometimes you have a fire under your ass for no good goddamn reason. You’re gonna burn out like this.”

  Alex leans back, thumbing the stitching on the armrest of the chair.

  “So, what?” he asks. “You want me to quit politics and go become a princess? That’s not very feminist of you.”

  “That’s not how feminism works,” she says, rolling her eyes. “And that’s not what I mean. I mean … I don’t know. Have you ever considered there might be more than one path to use what you have? Or to get where you want to be to make the most difference in the world?”

  “I’m not sure I’m following.”

  “Well.” She looks down at her cuticles. “It’s like the whole Sac Bee thing—it never actually would have worked out. It was a dream I had before Mom was president. The kind of journalism I wanted to do is the kind of journalism that being a First Daughter pretty much disqualifies you from. But the world is better with her where she is, and right now I’m looking for a new dream that’s better too.” Her big brown Diaz eyes blink up at him. “So, I don’t know. Maybe there’s more than one dream for you, or more than one way to get there.”

  She gives a crooked shrug, tilting her head to look at him openly. June is often a mystery, a big ball of complex emotions and motivations, but her heart is honest and true. She’s very much what Alex holds in his memory as the sanctified idea of Southerness at its best: always generous and warm and sincere, work-strong and reliable, a light left on. She wants the best for him, plainly, in an unselfish and uncalculating way. She’s been trying to talk to him for a while, he realizes.

  He looks down at the magazine and feels the corner of his mouth tug upward. He can’t believe June kept i
t all these years.

  “He looks so different,” he says after a long minute, gazing down at the baby Henry on the page and his easy, unfledged sureness. “I mean, like, obviously. But the way he carries himself.” His fingertips brush the page in the same place they did when he was young, over the sun-gold hair, except now he knows its exact texture. It’s the first time he’s seen it since he learned where this version of Henry went. “It pisses me off sometimes, thinking about everything he’s been through. He’s a good person. He really cares, and he tries. He never deserved any of it.”

  June leans forward, looking at the picture too. “Have you ever told him that?”

  “We don’t really…” Alex coughs. “I don’t know. Talk like that?”

  June inhales deeply and makes an enormous fart noise with her mouth, shattering the serious mood, and Alex is so grateful for it that he melts onto the floor in a fit of hysterical laughter.

  “Ugh! Men!” she groans. “No emotional vocabulary. I can’t believe our ancestors survived centuries of wars and plagues and genocide just to wind up with your sorry ass.” She throws a pillow at him, and Alex scream-laughs as it hits him in the face. “You should try saying some of that stuff to him.”

  “Stop trying to Jane Austen my life!” he yells back.

  “Listen, it’s not my fault he’s a mysterious and retiring young royal and you’re the tempestuous ingénue that caught his eye, okay?”

  He laughs and tries to crawl away, even as she claws at his ankle and wallops another pillow at his head. He still feels guilty for blowing her off, but he thinks they’re okay now. He’ll do better. They fight for a spot on her big canopy bed, and she makes him spill what it’s like to be secretly hooking up with a real-life prince. And so June knows; she knows about him and she hugs him and doesn’t care. He didn’t realize how terrified he was of her knowing until the fear is gone.

  She puts Parks back on and has the kitchen send up ice cream, and Alex thinks about how she said, “You don’t have to be our parents”—she’s never mentioned their dad in the same context as their mom like that before. He’s always known part of her resents their mom for the position they occupy in the world, for not having a normal life, for taking herself away from them. But he never really realized she felt the same sense of loss he does deep down about their dad, that it’s something she dealt with and moved past. That the stuff with their mom is something she’s still going through.

  He thinks she’s wrong about him, mostly—he doesn’t necessarily believe he has to choose between politics and this thing with Henry yet, or that he’s moving too fast in his career. But … there’s the Texas Binder, and the knowledge of other states like Texas and millions of other people who need someone to fight for them, and the feeling at the base of his spine, like there’s a lot of fight in him that could be honed down to a more productive point.

  There’s law school.

  Every time he looks at the Texas Binder, he knows it’s a big fat case for him to go take the damn LSAT like he knows both his parents wish he would instead of diving headfirst into politics. He’s always, always said no. He doesn’t wait for things. Doesn’t put in the time like that, do what he’s told.

  He’s never given much thought to options other than a crow’s path ahead of him. Maybe he should.

  “Is now a good time to point out Henry’s very hot, very rich best friend is basically in love with you?” Alex says to June. “He’s like some kind of billionaire, genius, manic-pixie-dream philanthropist. I feel like you would be into that.”

  “Please shut up,” she says, and she steals the ice cream back.

  * * *

  Once June knows, their circle of “knowing” is up to a tight seven.

  Before Henry, most of his romantic entanglements as FSOTUS were one-off incidents that involved Cash or Amy confiscating phones before the act and pointing at the dotted line on the NDA on the way out—Amy with mechanical professionalism, Cash with the air of a cruise ship director. It was inevitable they be looped in.

  And there’s Shaan, the only member of the royal staff who knows Henry is gay, excluding his therapist. Shaan ultimately doesn’t care about Henry’s sexual preferences as long as they’re not getting him into trouble. He’s a consummate professional parceled in immaculately tailored Tom Ford, ruffled by absolutely nothing, whose affection for his charge shows in the way he tends to him like a favorite houseplant. Shaan knows for the same reason Amy and Cash know: absolute necessity.

  Then Nora, who still looks smug every time the subject arises. And Bea, who found out when she walked in on one of their after-dark FaceTime sessions, leaving Henry capable of nothing but flustered British stammering and thousand-yard stares for the next day and a half.

  Pez seems to have been in on the secret all along. Alex imagines he demanded an explanation when Henry literally made them flee the country under the cover of night after putting his tongue in Alex’s mouth in the Kennedy Garden.

  It’s Pez who answers when Alex FaceTimes Henry at four a.m. DC time, expecting to catch Henry over his morning tea. Henry is holidaying in one of the family’s country homes while Alex suffocates under his last week of college. He doesn’t reflect on why his migraine demands soothing images of Henry looking cozy and picturesque, sipping tea by a lush green hillside. He just hits the buttons on the phone.

  “Alexander, babes,” Pez says when he picks up. “How lovely for you to give your auntie Pezza a ring on this magnificent Sunday morning.” He’s smiling from what looks like the passenger seat of a luxury car, wearing a cartoonishly large sunhat and a striped pashmina.

  “Hi, Pez,” Alex says, grinning back. “Where are y’all?”

  “We are out for a drive, taking in the scenery of Carmarthenshire,” Pez tells him. He tilts the phone over toward the driver’s seat. “Say good morning to your strumpet, Henry.”

  “Good morning, strumpet,” Henry says, glancing away from the road to wink at the camera. He’s looking fresh-faced and relaxed, all rolled-up sleeves and soft gray linen, and Alex feels calmer knowing somewhere in Wales, Henry got a decent night’s sleep. “What’s got you up at four in the morning this time?”

  “My fucking economics final,” Alex says, rolling over onto his side to squint at the screen. “My brain isn’t working anymore.”

  “Can’t you get one of those Secret Service earpieces with Nora on the other end?”

  “I can take it for you,” Pez interjects, turning the camera back to himself. “I’m aces with money.”

  “Yes, yes, Pez, we know there’s nothing you can’t do,” says Henry’s voice off-camera. “No need to rub it in.”

  Alex laughs under his breath. From the angle Pez is holding the phone, he can see Wales rolling by though the car window, dramatic and plunging. “Hey, Henry, say the name of the house you’re staying at again.”

  Pez turns the camera to catch Henry in a half smile. “Llwynywermod.”

  “One more time.”

  “Llwynywermod.”

  Alex groans. “Jesus.”

  “I was hoping you two would start talking dirty,” Pez says. “Please, do go on.”

  “I don’t think you could keep up, Pez,” Alex tells him.

  “Oh really?” The picture returns to Pez. “What if I put my co—”

  “Pez,” comes the sound of Henry’s voice, and a hand with a signet ring on the smallest finger covers Pez’s mouth. “I beg of you. Alex, what part of ‘nothing he cannot do’ did you think was worth testing? Honestly, you are going to get us all killed.”

  “That’s the goal,” Alex says happily. “So what are y’all gonna do today?”

  Pez frees himself by licking Henry’s palm and continues talking. “Frolic naked in the hills, frighten the sheep, return to the house for the usual: tea, biscuits, casting ourselves upon the Thighmaster of love to moan about Claremont-Diaz siblings, which has become tragically one-sided since Henry took up with you. It used to be all bottles of cognac and shared malaise a
nd ‘When will they notice us’—”

  “Don’t tell him that!”

  “—and now I just ask Henry, ‘What is your secret?’ And he says, ‘I insult Alex all the time and that seems to work.’”

  “I will turn this car around.”

  “That won’t work on June,” Alex says.

  “Let me get a pen—”

  It turns out they’re spending their holiday workshopping philanthropy projects. Henry’s been telling Alex for months about their plans to go international, and now they’re talking three refugee programs around Western Europe, HIV clinics in Nairobi and Los Angeles, LGBT youth shelters in four different countries. It’s ambitious, but since Henry still staunchly covers all his own expenses with his inheritance from his father, his royal accounts are untouched. He’s determined to use them for nothing but this.

  Alex curls around his phone and his pillow as the sun comes up over DC. He’s always wanted to be a person with a legacy in this world. Henry is undoubtedly, determinedly that. It’s a little intoxicating. But it’s fine. He’s just a little sleep-deprived.

  All in all, finals come and go with much less fanfare than Alex imagined. It’s a week of cramming and presentations and the usual amount of all-nighters, and it’s over.

  The whole college thing in general went by like that. He didn’t really have the experiences everyone else has, always isolated by fame or harangued by security. He never got a stamp on his forehead on his twenty-first birthday at The Tombs, never jumped in Dalhgren Fountain. Sometimes it’s like he barely went to Georgetown, merely powered through a series of lectures that happened to be in the same geographical area.

  Anyway, he graduates, and the whole auditorium gives him a standing ovation, which is weird but kind of cool. A dozen of his classmates want to take a photo with him afterward. They all know him by name. He’s never spoken to any of them before. He smiles for their parents’ iPhones and wonders if he should have tried.

  Alex Claremont-Diaz graduates summa cum laude from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in Government, his Google alerts read when he checks them from the back seat of the limo, before he’s even taken his cap and gown off.