Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

  He loves Texas—he believes in Texas. But he doesn’t know if Texas still loves him.

  He’s paced all the way to the opposite side of the room from her, and she watches him and cocks her head to one side.

  “So … you’re afraid of wearing anything too flashy for your first post-coming-out trip home, on account of Texans’ delicate hetero sensibilities?”

  “Basically.”

  She’s looking at him now more like he’s a very complex problem set. “Have you looked at our polling on you in Texas? Since September?”

  Alex swallows.

  “No. I, uh.” He scrubs his face with one hand. “The thought, like … stresses me out? Like, I keep meaning to go look at the numbers, and then I just. Shut down.”

  Nora’s face softens, but she doesn’t move closer yet, giving him space. “Alex. You could have asked me. They’re … not bad.”

  He bites his lip. “They’re not?”

  “Alex, our base in Texas hasn’t shifted on you since September, at all. If anything, they like you more. And a lot of the undecideds are pissed Richards came after a Texas kid. You’re really fine.”

  Oh.

  Alex exhales a shaky breath, running one hand through his hair. He starts to pace back, away from the door, which he realizes he’s gravitated near as some fight-or-flight reflex.

  “Okay.”

  He sits down heavily on the bed.

  Nora sits gingerly next to him, and when he looks at her, she’s got that sharpness to her eyes like she does when she’s practically reading his mind.

  “Look. You know I’m not good at the whole, like, tactful emotional communication thing, but, uh, June’s not here, so. I’m gonna. Fuckin’. Give it a go.” She presses on. “I don’t think this is just about Texas. You were recently fucking traumatized in a big way, and now you’re scared of doing or saying the kind of stuff you actually like and want to because you don’t want to draw any more attention to yourself.”

  Alex almost wants to laugh.

  Nora is like Henry sometimes, in that she can cut right down to the truth of things, but Henry deals in heart and Nora deals in facts. It takes her razor’s edge, sometimes, to get him to pull his head out of his ass.

  “Uh, well, yeah. That’s. Probably part of it,” he agrees. “I know I need to start rehabilitating my image if I want any chance in politics, but part of me is like … really? Right now? Why? It’s weird. My whole life, I was hanging on to this imaginary future person I was gonna be. Like, the plan—graduation, campaigns, staffer, Congress. That was it. Straight into the game. I was gonna be the person who could do that … who wanted that. And now here I am, and the person I’ve become is … not that person.”

  Nora nudges their shoulders together. “But do you like him?”

  Alex thinks; he’s different, for sure, maybe a little darker. More neurotic, but more honest. Sharper head, wilder heart. Someone who doesn’t always want to be married to work, but who has more reasons to fight than ever.

  “Yeah,” he says finally. Firmly. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Cool,” she says, and he looks over to see her grinning at him. “So do I. You’re Alex. In all this stupid shit, that’s all you ever needed to be.” She grabs his face in both hands and squishes it, and he groans but doesn’t push her off. “So, like. You want to throw out some contingency plans? You want me to run some projections?”

  “Actually, uh,” Alex says, slightly muffled from how Nora’s still squishing his face between her hands. “Did I tell you that I kind of … snuck off and took the LSAT this summer?”

  “Oh! Oh … law school,” she says, as simply as she said dick you down all those months ago, the simple answer to where he’s been unknowingly headed all along. She releases his face, shoving his shoulders instead, instantly excited. “That’s it, Alex. Wait—yes! I’m about to start applying for my master’s; we can do it together!”

  “Yeah?” he says. “You think I can hack it?”

  “Alex. Yes. Alex.” She’s on her knees on the bed now, bouncing up and down. “Alex, this is genius. Okay—listen. You go to law school, I go to grad school, June becomes a speechwriter-slash-author Rebecca Traister–Roxane Gay voice of a generation, I become the data scientist who saves the world, and you—”

  “—become a badass civil rights attorney with an illustrious Captain America-esque career of curb-stomping discriminatory laws and fighting for the disenfranchised—”

  “—and you and Henry become the world’s favorite geopolitical power couple—”

  “—and by the time I’m Rafael Luna’s age—”

  “—people are going to be begging you to run for Senate,” she finishes, breathless. “Yeah. So, like, a lot slower than planned. But.”

  “Yeah,” Alex says, swallowing. “It sounds good.”

  And there it is. He’s been teetering on the edge of letting go of this specific dream for months now, terrified of it, but the relief is startling, a mountain off his back.

  He blinks in the face of it, thinks of June’s words, and has to laugh. “Fire under my ass for no good goddamn reason.”

  Nora pulls a face. She recognizes the June-ism. “You are … passionate, to a fault. If June were here, she would say taking your time is going to help you figure out how best to use that. But I’m here, so, I’m gonna say: You are great at hustling, and at policy, and at leading and rallying people. You are so fucking smart that most people want to punch you. Those are all skills that will only improve over time. So, like, you are gonna crush it.”

  She jumps to her feet and ducks into his closet, and he can hear hangers sliding around. “Most importantly,” she goes on, “you have become an icon of something, which is, like, a very big deal.”

  She emerges with a hanger in her hand: a jacket he’s never worn out before, one she convinced him to buy online for an obscene price the night they got drunk and watched The West Wing in a hotel in New York and let the tabloids think they were screwing. It’s fucking Gucci, a midnight-blue bomber jacket with red, white, and blue stripes at the waistband and cuffs.

  “I know it’s a lot, but”—she slaps the jacket against his chest—“you give people hope. So, get back out there and be Alex.”

  He takes the jacket from her and tries it on, checks his reflection in the mirror. It’s perfect.

  The moment is split with a half scream from the hallway outside of his bedroom, and he and Nora both run to the door.

  It’s June, tumbling into Alex’s bedroom with her phone in one hand, jumping up and down, her hair bouncing on her shoulders. She’s clearly come straight from one of her runs to the newsstand because her other arm is laden with tabloids, but she dumps them unceremoniously on the floor.

  “I got the book deal!” she shrieks, waving her phone in their faces. “I was checking my email and—the memoir—I got the fucking deal!”

  Alex and Nora both scream too, and they haul her into a six-armed hug, whooping and laughing and stomping on one another’s feet and not caring. They all end up kicking off their shoes and jumping on the bed, and Nora FaceTimes Bea, who finds Henry and Pez in one of Henry’s rooms, and they all celebrate together. It feels complete, the gang, as Cash once called them. They’ve earned their own media nickname in the wake of everything: The Super Six. Alex doesn’t mind it.

  Hours later, Nora and June fall asleep against Alex’s headboard, June’s head in Nora’s lap and Nora’s fingers in her hair, and Alex sneaks off to the en suite to brush his teeth. He nearly slips on something on the way back, and when he looks down, he has to do a double take. It’s an issue of HELLO! US from June’s abandoned stack of magazines, and the image dominating the cover is one of the shots from his and Henry’s portrait session.

  He bends down to pick it up. It’s not one of the posed shots—it’s one he didn’t even realize had been taken, one he definitely didn’t think would be released. He should have given the photographer more credit. He managed to capture the moment right when Henry cra
cked a joke, a candid, genuine photo, completely caught up in each other, Henry’s arm around him and his own hand reaching up to grasp for Henry’s on his shoulder.

  The way Henry’s looking at him in the picture is so affectionate, so openly loving, that seeing it from a third person’s perspective almost makes Alex want to look away, like he’s staring into the sun. He called Henry the North Star once. That wasn’t bright enough.

  He thinks again about Brooklyn, about Henry’s youth shelter there. His mom knows someone at NYU Law, right?

  He brushes his teeth and climbs into bed. Tomorrow they find out, win or lose. A year ago—six months ago—it would have meant no sleep tonight. But he’s a new kind of icon now, someone who laughs on even footing with his royal boyfriend on the cover of a magazine, someone willing to accept the years stretching ahead of him, to give himself time. He’s trying new things.

  He props a pillow up on June’s knees, stretches his feet out over Nora’s legs, and goes to sleep.

  * * *

  Alex tugs his bottom lip between his teeth. Scuffs the heel of his boot against the linoleum floor. Looks down at his ballot.

  PRESIDENT and VICE PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES

  Vote for One

  He picks up the stylus chained to the machine, his heart behind his molars, and selects: CLAREMONT, ELLEN and HOLLERAN, MICHAEL.

  The machine chirps its approval, and to its gently humming mechanisms, he could be anybody. One of millions, a single tally mark, worth no more or less than any of the others. Just pressing a button.

  * * *

  It’s a risk, doing election night in their hometown. There’s no rule, technically, saying that the sitting president can’t host their rally in DC, but it is customary to do it at home. Still, though.

  2016 was bittersweet. Austin is blue, deep blue, and Ellen won Travis County by 76 percent, but no amount of fireworks and champagne corks in the streets changed the fact that they lost the state they stood in to make the victory speech. Still, the Lometa Longshot wanted to come home again.

  There’s been progress in the past year: a few court victories Alex has kept track of in his trusty binder, registration drives for young voters, the Houston rally, the shifting polls. Alex needed a distraction after the whole tabloid nightmare, so he threw himself into an after-hours committee with a bunch of the campaign’s Texas organizers, Skyping in to figure out logistics of a massive election day shuttle service throughout Texas. It’s 2020, and Texas is a battleground state for the first time in years.

  His last election night was on the wide-open stretch of Zilker Park, against the backdrop of the Austin skyline. He remembers everything.

  He was eighteen years old in his first custom-made suit, corralled into a hotel around the corner with his family to watch the results while the crowd swelled outside, running with his arms open down the hallway when they called 270. He remembers it felt like his moment, because it was his mom and his family, but also realizing it was, in a way, not his moment at all, when he turned around and saw Zahra’s mascara running down her face.

  He stood next to the stage set into the hillside of Zilker and looked into eyes upon eyes upon eyes of women who were old enough to have marched on Congress for the VRA in ’65 and girls young enough never to have known a president who was a white man. All of them looking at their first Madam President. And he turned and looked at June at his right side and Nora at his left, and he distinctly remembers pushing them out onto the stage ahead of him, giving them a full thirty seconds of soaking it in before following them into the spotlight.

  The soles of his boots hit brown grass behind the Palmer Events Center like he’s coming down from a much greater altitude than the back seat of a limo.

  “It’s early,” Nora is saying, thumbing through her phone as she climbs out behind him in a plunging black jumpsuit and killer heels. “Like, really early for these exit polls, but I’m pretty sure we have Illinois.”

  “Cool, that was projected,” Alex says. “We’re on target so far.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Nora tells him. “I don’t like how Pennsylvania looks.”

  “Hey,” June says. Her own dress is carefully selected, off-the-rack J. Crew, white lace, girl-next-door. Her hair is braided down one shoulder. “Can’t we, like, have one drink before y’all start doing this? I heard there are mojitos.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Nora says, but she’s still staring down at her phone, brow furrowed.

  HRH Prince Dickhead

  Nov 3, 2020, 6:37 PM

  HRH Prince Dickhead

  Pilot says we’re having visibility problems? May have to reroute and land elsewhere.

  HRH Prince Dickhead

  Landing in Dallas? Is that far?? I’ve no bloody clue about American geography.

  HRH Prince Dickhead

  Shaan has informed me this is, in fact, far. Landing soon. Will try to take off again once the weather clears.

  HRH Prince Dickhead

  I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. How are things on your end?

  things are shit

  please get your ass here asap i’m stressing tf out

  Oliver Westbrook @BillsBillsBills

  Any GOPers still backing Richards after his actions toward a member of the First Family—and, now, this week’s rumors of sexual predation—are going to have to reckon with their Protestant God tomorrow morning.

  7:32 PM · 3 Nov 2020

  538 politics @538politics

  Our projections had Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all at a 70% or higher chance of going blue, but latest returns have them too close to call. Yeah, we’re confused too.

  8:04 PM · 3 Nov 2020

  The New York Times @nytimes

  #Election2020 latest: a bruising round of calls for Pres. Claremont brings the electoral tally up to 178 for Sen. Richards. Claremont lags behind at 113.

  9:15 PM · 3 Nov 2020

  * * *

  They’ve partitioned off the smaller exhibit hall for VIPs only—campaign staff, friends and family, congresspeople. On the other side of the event center is the crowd of supporters with their signs, their CLAREMONT 2020 and HISTORY, HUH? T-shirts, overflowing under the architectural canopies and into the surrounding hills. It’s supposed to be a party.

  Alex has been trying not to stress. He knows how presidential elections go. When he was a kid, this was his Super Bowl. He used to sit in front of the living room TV and color each state in with red and blue magic markers as the night went on, allowed to stay up hours past his bedtime for one blessed night at age ten to watch Obama beat McCain. He watches his dad’s jaw in profile now, trying to remember the triumph in the set of it that night.

  There was a magic, then. Now, it’s personal.

  And they’re losing.

  The sight of Leo coming in through a side door isn’t entirely unexpected, and June rises from her chair and meets them both in a quiet corner of the room on the same instinct. He’s holding his phone in one hand.

  “Your mother wants to talk to you,” Leo says, and Alex automatically reaches out until Leo holds out a hand to stop him. “No, sorry, Alex, not you. June.”

  June blinks. “Oh.” She steps forward, pushes her hair away from her ear. “Mom?”

  “June,” says the sound of their mother’s voice over the little speaker. On the other end, she’s in one of the arena’s meeting rooms, a makeshift office with her core team. “Baby. I need you to, uh. I need you to come in here.”

  “Okay, Mom,” she says, her voice measured and calm. “What’s going on?”

  “I just. I need you to help me rewrite this speech for, uh.” There’s a considerable pause. “Well. Just in case of concession.”

  June’s face goes utterly blank for a second, and suddenly, vividly furious.

  “No,” she says, and she grabs Leo by the forearm so she can talk directly into the speaker. “No, I’m not gonna do that, because you’re not gonna lose. Do you hear me? You’re not losing. We’re
gonna fucking do this for four more years, all of us. I am not writing you a goddamn concession speech, ever.”

  There’s another pause across the line, and Alex can picture their mother in her little makeshift Situation Room upstairs, glasses on, high heels still in the suitcase, staring at the screens, hoping and trying and praying. President Mom.

  “Okay,” she says evenly. “Okay. Alex. Do you think you could get up and say something for the crowd?”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure, Mom,” he says. He clears his throat, and it comes out as strong as hers the second time. “Of course.”

  A third pause, then. “God, I love you both so much.”

  Leo leaves, and he’s quickly replaced by Zahra, whose sleek red dress and ever-present coffee thermos are the biggest comfort Alex has seen all night. Her ring flashes at him, and he thinks of Shaan and wishes desperately Henry was here already.

  “Fix your face,” she says, straightening his collar as she shepherds him and June through to the main exhibit hall and into the back of the stage area. “Big smiles, high energy, confidence.”

  He turns helplessly to June. “What do I say?”

  “Little bit, ain’t no time for me to write you anything,” she tells him. “You’re a leader. Go lead. You got this.”

  Oh God.

  Confidence. He looks down at the cuffs of his jacket again, the red, white, and blue. Be Alex, Nora said when she handed it to him. Be Alex.

  Alex is—two words that told a few million kids across America they weren’t alone. A letterman jacket in APUSH. Secret loose panels in White House windows. Ruining something because you wanted it too badly and still getting back up and trying again. Not a prince. Something bigger, maybe.

  “Zahra,” he asks. “Did they call Texas yet?”

  “No,” she says. “Still too close.”