Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

  A bubble of hysterical laughter emerges from his throat.

  His bedroom door flies open, and Zahra slams on the light, a steely expression of rage barely concealing the sheer terror on her face. Alex’s brain flashes to the panic button behind his headboard and wonders if the Secret Service will be able to find him before he bleeds out.

  “You’re on communications lockdown,” she says, and instead of punching him, she snatches his phone out of his hand and shoves it down the front of her blouse, which has been buttoned wrong in her rush. She doesn’t even blink at his state of half-nakedness, just dumps an armload of newspapers onto his bedspread.

  QUEEN HENRY! twenty copies of the Daily Mail proclaim in gigantic letters. INSIDE THE PRINCE’S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES!

  The cover is splashed with a blown-up photo of what is undeniably himself and Henry kissing in the back seat of the car behind the cafe, apparently shot with a long-range lens through the windshield. Tinted windows, but he forgot about the fucking windshield.

  Two smaller photos are inset on the bottom of the page: one of the shots of them on the Beekman’s elevator and a photo of them side by side at Wimbledon, him whispering something in Henry’s ear while Henry smiles a soft, private smile.

  Fucking shitting hell. He is so fucked. Henry is so fucked. And, Jesus Christ, his mother’s campaign is fucked, and his political career is fucked, and his ears are ringing, and he’s going to throw up.

  “Fuck,” Alex says again. “I need my phone. I have to call Henry—”

  “No, you do fucking not,” Zahra says. “We don’t know yet how the emails got out, so it’s radio silence until we find the leak.”

  “The—what? Is Henry okay?” God, Henry. All he can think about is Henry’s big blue eyes looking terrified, Henry’s breathing coming shallow and quick, locked in his bedroom in Kensington Palace and desperately alone, and his jaw locks up, something burning in the back of his throat.

  “The president is sitting down right now with as many members of the Office of Communications as we could drag out of bed at three in the morning,” Zahra tells him, ignoring his question. Her phone is buzzing nonstop in her hand. “It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration. For God’s sake, put some clothes on.”

  Zahra disappears into Alex’s closet, and he flips the newspaper open to the story, his heart pounding. There are even more photos inside. He glances over the copy, but there’s too much to even begin to process.

  On the second page, he sees them: printed and annotated excerpts of their emails. One is labeled: PRINCE HENRY: SECRET POET? It begins with a line he’s read about a thousand times by now.

  Should I tell you that when we’re apart, your body comes back to me in dreams …

  “Fuck!” he says a third time, spiking the newspaper at the floor. That one was his. It feels obscene to see it there. “How the fuck did they get these?”

  “Yep,” Zahra agrees. “You dirty did it.” She throws a white button-down and a pair of jeans at him, and he pitches himself out of bed. Zahra gamely holds out an arm for him to steady himself while he pulls his pants up, and despite it all, he’s struck with overwhelming gratitude for her.

  “Listen, I need to talk to Henry as soon as possible. I can’t even imagine— God, I need to talk to him.”

  “Get some shoes, we’re running,” Zahra tells him. “Priority one is damage control, not feelings.”

  He grabs a pair of sneakers, and they take off while he’s still pulling them on, running west. His brain is struggling to keep up, running through about five thousand possible ways this could go, imagining himself ten years down the road being frozen out of Congress, plummeting approval ratings, Henry’s name scratched off the line of succession, his mother losing reelection on a swing state’s disapproval of him. He’s so screwed, and he can’t even decide who to be the angriest with, himself or the Mail or the monarchy or the whole stupid country.

  He nearly crashes into Zahra’s back as she skids to a stop in front of a door.

  He pushes the door open, and the whole room goes silent.

  His mother stares at him from the head of the table and says flatly, “Out.”

  At first he thinks she’s talking to him, but she cuts her eyes down to the people around the table with her.

  “Was I not clear? Everyone, out, now,” she says. “I need to talk to my son.”

  THIRTEEN

  “Sit down,” his mother tells him, and Alex feels dread coil deep in his stomach. He has no clue what to expect—knowing your parent as the person who raised you isn’t the same as being able to guess their moves as a world leader.

  He sits, and the silence hovers over them, his mother’s hands folded in a considering pose against her lips. She looks exhausted.

  “Are you okay?” she says finally. When he looks up in surprise, there’s no anger in her eyes.

  The president stands on the edge of a career-ending scandal, measures her breaths evenly, and waits for her son to answer.

  Oh.

  It hits him with sudden clarity that he hasn’t at all stopped to consider his own feelings. There simply hasn’t been the time. When he reaches for an emotion to name, he finds he can’t pin one down, and something shudders inside him and shuts down completely.

  He doesn’t often wish away his position in life, but in this moment, he does. He wants to be having this conversation in a different life, just his mother sitting across from him at the dinner table, asking him how he feels about his nice, respectable boyfriend, if he’s doing okay with figuring his identity out. Not like this, in a West Wing briefing room, his dirty emails spread out between them on the table.

  “I’m…” he begins. To his horror, he hears something shake in his voice, which he quickly swallows down. “I don’t know. This isn’t how I wanted to tell people. I thought we’d get a chance to do this right.”

  Something softens and resolves in her face, and he suspects he’s answered a question for her beyond the one she asked.

  She reaches over and covers one of his hands with her own.

  “You listen to me,” she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. “I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.”

  Alex is silent.

  But the debates, he thinks. But the general.

  Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She’ll handle it.

  “So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?”

  And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s known all along.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I do.”

  Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis County.

  “Then, fuck it.”

  The Washington Post

  As details emerge about Alex Claremont-Diaz’s affair with Prince Henry, White House goes silent

  * * *

  September 27, 2020

  “Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess,” First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz writes in one of the many emails to Prince Henry published by the Daily Mail this morning. “And you too.”

  It seems the answer to that question may have come sooner than any anticipated with the sudden exposure of the First Son’s romantic relationship with Prince Henry, an arrangement with major repercussions for two of the world’s most powerful nations, less than two months before the United States casts its vote on President Claremont’s second term.
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br />   As security experts within the FBI and the Claremont administration scramble to find the sources that provided the British tabloid with evidence of the affair, the usually high-profile First Family has shuttered, with no official statement from the First Son.

  “The First Family has always and continues to keep their personal lives separate from the political and diplomatic dealings of the presidency,” White House Press Secretary Davis Sutherland said in a brief prepared statement this morning. “They ask for patience and understanding from the American people as they handle this very private matter.”

  The Daily Mail’s report this morning revealed that First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz has been involved romantically and sexually with Prince Henry since at least February of this year, according to emails and photographs obtained by the paper.

  The full email transcripts have been uploaded to WikiLeaks under the moniker “The Waterloo Letters,” seemingly named for a reference to the Waterloo Vase in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in one email composed by Prince Henry. The correspondence continues regularly up to Sunday night and appears to have been lifted from a private email server used by residents of the White House.

  “Setting aside the ramifications for President Claremont’s ability to be impartial on issues of both international relations and traditional family values,” Republican presidential candidate Senator Jeffrey Richards said at a press conference earlier today, “I’m extremely concerned about this private email server. What kind of information was being disseminated on this server?”

  Richards added that he believes the American voters have a right to know everything else for which President Claremont’s server may have been used.

  Sources close to the Claremont administration insist the private server is similar to the one set up during President George W. Bush’s administration and used only for communication within the White House about day-to-day operations and personal correspondence for the First Family and core White House personnel.

  First rounds of examination of “The Waterloo Letters” by experts have yet to reveal any evidence of classified information or otherwise compromising content outside of the nature of the First Son’s relationship with Prince Henry.

  * * *

  For five endless, unbearable hours, Alex is shuffled from room to room in the West Wing, meeting with what seems to be every strategist, press staffer, and crisis manager his mother’s administration has to offer.

  The only moment he recalls with any clarity is pulling his mother into an alcove to say, “I told Raf.”

  She stares at him. “You told Rafael Luna that you’re bisexual?”

  “I told Rafael Luna about Henry,” he says flatly. “Two days ago.”

  She doesn’t ask why, just sighs grimly, and they both hover over the implication before she says, “No. No, those pictures were taken before that. It couldn’t have been him.”

  He runs through pro and con lists, models of different outcomes, fucking charts and graphs and more data than he has ever wanted to see about his own relationship and its ramifications for the world around him. This is the damage you cause, Alex, it all seems to say, right there in hard facts and figures. This is who you hurt.

  He hates himself, but he doesn’t regret anything, and maybe that makes him a bad person and a worse politician, but he doesn’t regret Henry.

  For five endless, unbearable hours, he’s not allowed to even try to contact Henry. The press sec drafts a statement. It looks like any other memo.

  For five hours, he doesn’t shower or change his clothes or laugh or smile or cry. It’s eight in the morning when he’s finally released and told to stay in the Residence and stand by for further instructions.

  He’s handed his phone, at last, but there’s no answer when he calls Henry, and no response when he texts. Nothing at all.

  Amy walks him through the colonnade and up the stairs, saying nothing, and when they reach the hallway between the East and West Bedrooms, he sees them.

  June, her hair in a haphazard knot on the top of her head and in a pink bathrobe, her eyes red-rimmed. His mom, in a sharp, no-nonsense black dress and pointed heels, jaw set. Leo, barefoot in his pajamas. And his dad, a leather duffel still hanging off one shoulder, looking harried and exhausted.

  They all turn to look at him, and Alex feels a wave of something so much bigger than himself sweep over him, like when he was a child standing bowlegged in the Gulf of Mexico, riptide sucking at his feet. A sound escapes his throat uninvited, something that he barely even recognizes, and June has him first, then the rest of them, arms and arms and hands and hands, pulling him close and touching his face and moving him until he’s on the floor, the goddamn terrible hideous antique rug that he hates, sitting on the floor and staring at the rug and the threads of the rug and hearing the Gulf rushing in his ears and thinking distantly that he’s having a panic attack, and that’s why he can’t breathe, but he’s just staring at the rug and he’s having a panic attack and knowing why his lungs won’t work doesn’t make them work again.

  He’s faintly aware of being shifted into his room, to his bed, which is still covered in the godforsaken fucking newspapers, and someone guides him onto it, and he sits down and tries very, very hard to make a list in his head.

  One.

  One.

  One.

  * * *

  He sleeps in fits and starts, wakes up sweating, wakes up shivering. He dreams in short, fractured scenes that swell and fade erratically. He dreams of himself at war, in a muddy trench, love letter soaking red in his chest pocket. He dreams of a house in Travis County, doors locked, unwilling to let him in again. He dreams of a crown.

  He dreams once, briefly, of the lake house, an orange beacon under the moon. He sees himself there, standing in water up to his neck. He sees Henry, sitting naked on the pier. He sees June and Nora, hands clasped together, and Pez on the grass between them, and Bea, digging pink fingertips into the wet soil.

  In the trees next to them, he hears the snap, snap, snap of branches.

  “Look,” Henry says, pointing up at the stars.

  And Alex tries to say, Don’t you hear it? Tries to say, Something’s coming. He opens his mouth: a spill of fireflies, and nothing.

  When he opens his eyes, June is sitting up against the pillows next to him, bitten nails pressed against her bottom lip, still in her bathrobe and keeping watch. She reaches down and squeezes his hand. He squeezes back.

  * * *

  Between dreams he catches the sound of muffled voices in the hallway.

  “Nothing,” Zahra’s voice is saying. “Not a thing. Nobody is taking our calls.”

  “How can they not be taking our calls? I’m the goddamn president.”

  “Permission to do a thing, ma’am, slightly outside diplomatic protocol.”

  * * *

  A comment: The First Family Has Been Lying To Us, The American People!!1 WHAT ELSE Are They Lying About??!?!

  A tweet: I KNEW IT I KNEW ALEX WAS GAY I TOLD YOU BITCHES

  A comment: My 12 y/o daughter has been crying all day. She’s dreamt of marrying Prince Henry since she was a little girl. She is heartbroken.

  A comment: Are we really supposed to believe that no federal funds were used to cover this up?

  A tweet: lmaoooo wait look at page 22 of the emails alex is such a hoe

  A tweet: OMFG DID YOU SEE somebody who went to uni with Henry posted some photos of him at a party and he is just like Profoundly Gay in them i’m screaming

  A tweet: READ—My column with @WSJ on what the #WaterlooLetters say about the inner workings of the Claremont White House.

  More comments. Slurs. Lies.

  June takes his phone away and shoves it under a couch cushion. He doesn’t bother protesting. Henry’s not going to call.

  * * *

  At one in the afternoon, for the second time in twelve hours, Zahra bursts through his bedroom door.

  “Pack a bag,” she says. “We’re going to London.”
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br />   * * *

  June helps him stuff a backpack with jeans and a pair of shoes and a broken-in copy of Prisoner of Azkaban, and he stumbles into a clean shirt and out of his room. Zahra is waiting in the hall with her own bag and a freshly pressed suit of Alex’s, a sensible navy one that she has apparently decided is appropriate for meeting the queen.

  She’s told him very little, except that Buckingham Palace has shut down communication channels in and out, and they’re just going to show up and demand a meeting. She seems confident Shaan will agree to it and willing to physically overpower him if not.

  The feeling rolling around in his gut is bizarre. His mom has signed off on them going public with the truth, which is incredible, but there’s no reason to expect that from the crown. He could get marching orders to deny everything. He thinks he might grab Henry and run if it comes down to that.

  He’s almost completely sure Henry wouldn’t go along with pretending it was all fake. He trusts Henry, and he believes in him.

  But they were also supposed to have more time.

  There’s a secluded side entrance of the Residence that Alex can sneak out of without being seen, and June and his parents meet him there.

  “I know this is scary,” his mom says, “but you can handle it.”

  “Give ’em hell,” his dad adds.

  June hugs him, and he shoves on his sunglasses and a hat and jogs out the door and toward whatever way this is all going to end.

  Cash and Amy are waiting on the plane. Alex wonders briefly if they volunteered for the assignment, but he’s trying to get his emotions back under control, and that’s not going to help. He bumps his fist against Cash’s as he passes, and Amy nods up from the denim jacket she’s needling yellow flowers into.

  It’s all happened so quickly that now, knees curled up to his chin as they leave the ground, is the first time Alex is able to actually think about everything.