“Still?”
Her smile is knowing. “Still.”
The spotlight is almost blinding when he walks out, but he knows something. Deep down in his heart. They still haven’t called Texas.
“Hey, y’all,” he says to the crowd. His hand squeezes the microphone, but it’s steady. “I’m Alex, your First Son.” The hometown crowd goes wild, and Alex grins and means it, leans into it. When he says what he says next, he intends to believe it.
“You know what’s crazy? Right now, Anderson Cooper is on CNN saying Texas is too close to call. Too close to call. Y’all may not know this about me, but I’m kind of a history nerd. So I can tell you, the last time Texas was too close to call was in 1976. In 1976, we went blue. It was Jimmy Carter, in the wake of Watergate. He just barely squeezed out fifty-one percent of our vote, and we helped him beat Gerald Ford for the presidency.
“Now, I’m standing here, and I’m thinking about it … A reliable, hardworking, honest, Southern Democrat versus corruption, and maliciousness, and hate. And one big state full of honest people, sick as hell of being lied to.”
The crowd absolutely loses it, and Alex almost laughs. He raises his voice into the microphone, speaks up over the sound of cheers and applause and boots stomping on the floor of the hall. “Well, it sounds a little familiar to me, is all. So, what do y’all think, Texas? ¿Se repetirá la historia? Are we gonna make history repeat itself tonight?”
The roar says it all, and Alex yells with them, lets the sound carry him off the stage, lets it wrap around his heart and squeeze back in the blood that’s drained out of it all night. The second he steps backstage, there’s a hand on his back, the achingly familiar gravity of someone else’s body reentering his space before it even touches his, a clean, familiar scent light in the air between.
“That was brilliant,” Henry says, smiling, in the flesh, finally. He’s gorgeous in a navy-blue suit and a tie that, upon closer inspection, is patterned with little yellow roses.
“Your tie—”
“Oh, yes,” he says, “yellow rose of Texas, is it? I read that was a thing. Thought it might be good luck.”
All at once, Alex is in love all over again. He wraps the tie once around the back of his hand and reels Henry in and kisses him like he never has to stop. Which—he remembers, and laughs into Henry’s mouth—he doesn’t.
If he’s talking about who he is, he wishes he’d been someone smart enough to have done this last year. He wouldn’t have made Henry banish himself to a bunch of frozen shrubbery, and he wouldn’t have just stood there while Henry gave him the most important kiss of his life. It would have been like this. He would have taken Henry’s face in both hands and kissed him hard and deep and on purpose and said, “Take anything you want and know you deserve to have it.”
He pulls back and says, “You’re late, Your Highness.”
Henry laughs. “Actually, I’m just in time for the upswing, it would seem.”
He’s talking about the latest round of calls, which apparently came in while Alex was onstage. Out in their VIP area, everyone’s out of their seat, watching Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer parse the returns on the big screens. Virginia: Claremont. Colorado: Claremont. Michigan: Claremont. Pennsylvania: Claremont. It almost fully makes up the difference in votes, with the West Coast still to go.
Shaan is here too, in one corner with Zahra, huddled with Luna and Amy and Cash, and Alex’s head almost spins at the thought of how many nations could be brought to their knees by this particular gang. He grabs Henry’s hand and pulls him into it all.
The magic comes in a nervous trickle—Henry’s tie, hopeful lilts in voices, a few stray bits of confetti that escape the nets laced through the rafters and get stuck in Nora’s hair—and then, all at once.
10:30 brings the big rush: Richards steals Iowa, yes, and sews up Utah and Montana, but the West Coast comes storming in with California’s fifty-five fucking electoral votes. “Big damn heroes,” Oscar crows when it’s called to raucous cheers and nobody’s surprise, and he and Luna slap their palms together. West Side Bastardos.
By midnight, they’ve taken the lead, and it does, finally, feel like a party, even if they’re not out of the woods yet. Drinks are flowing, voices are loud, the crowd on the other side of the partition is electric. Gloria Estefan wailing through the sound system feels fitting again, not a stabbing, sick irony at a funeral. Across the room, Henry’s with June, making a gesture at her hair, and she turns and lets him fix a piece of her braid that came loose earlier in a fit of anxiety.
Alex is so busy watching them, his two favorite people, he doesn’t notice another person in his path until he collides with them headfirst, spilling their drink and almost sending them both stumbling into the massive victory cake on the buffet table.
“Jesus, sorry,” he says, immediately reaching for a pile of napkins.
“If you knock over another expensive cake,” says an extremely familiar whiskey-warm drawl, “I’m pretty sure your mom is gonna disinherit you.”
He turns to see Liam, almost the same as he remembers—tall, broad-shouldered, sweet-faced, scruffy.
He’s so mad he has such a specific type of dude and never even noticed it for so long.
“Oh my God, you came!”
“Of course I did,” Liam says, grinning. Beside him, there’s a cute guy grinning too. “I mean, it kind of seemed like the Secret Service were gonna come requisition me from my apartment if I didn’t come.”
Alex laughs. “Look, the presidency hasn’t changed me that much. I’m still as aggressive a party instigator as I ever was.”
“I’d be disappointed if you weren’t, man.”
They both grin, and God, on tonight of all nights it’s good to see him, good to clear the air, good to stand next to someone outside of family who knew him before all this.
A week after he got outed, Liam texted him: 1. I wish we hadn’t been such dumb assholes back then so we both could have helped each other out with stuff. 2. Jsyk, a reporter from some right-wing website called me yesterday to ask me about my history with you. I told him to go fuck himself, but I thought you’d want to know.
So yeah, of course he got a personal invitation.
“Listen, I,” Alex starts, “I wanted to thank you—”
“Do not,” Liam interrupts him. “Seriously. Okay? We’re cool. We’ll always be cool.” He makes a dismissive gesture with one hand and nudges the cute, dark-eyed guy at his side. “Anyway, this is Spencer, my boyfriend.”
“Alex,” Alex introduces himself. Spencer’s handshake is strong, all farmboy. “Good to meet you, man.”
“It’s an honor,” Spencer says earnestly. “My mom canvassed for your mom when she ran for Congress back in the day, so like, we go way back. She’s the first president I ever voted for.”
“Okay, Spence, be cool,” Liam says, putting an arm around Spencer’s shoulders. A beam of pride cuts through Alex; if Spencer’s parents were Claremont volunteers, they’re definitely more open-minded than he remembers Liam’s being. “This guy shit his pants on the bus on the way back from the aquarium in fourth grade, so like, he’s not that big of a deal.”
“For the last time, you douchebag,” Alex huffs, “that was Adam Villanueva, not me!”
“Yeah, I know what I saw,” Liam says.
Alex is just opening his mouth to argue when someone shouts his name—a photo op or interview or something for BuzzFeed. “Shit. I gotta go, but Liam, we have, like, a shitload to catch up on. Can we hang this weekend? Let’s hang this weekend. I’m in town all weekend. Let’s hang this weekend.”
He’s already walking away backward, and Liam is rolling his eyes in an annoyed but fond way, not in a this-is-why-I-stopped-talking-to-you way, so he keeps going. The interview is quick, cut off mid-sentence: Anderson Cooper’s face looms on the screen overhead like a disgustingly handsome Hunger Games cannon, announcing they’re ready to call Florida.
“Come on, you backyard-shooting
-range motherfuckers,” Zahra is muttering under her breath beside him when he falls in with his people.
“Did she just say backyard shooting range?” Henry asks, leaning into Alex’s ear. “Is that a real thing a person can have?”
“You really have a lot to learn about America, mijo,” Oscar tells him, not unkindly.
The screen flashes red—RICHARDS—and a collective groan grinds through the room.
“Nora, what’s the math?” June says, rounding on her, a slightly frantic look in her eyes. “I majored in nouns.”
“Okay,” Nora says, “at this point we just need to get over 270 or make it impossible for Richards to get over 270—”
“Yes,” June cuts in impatiently, “I am familiar with how the electoral college works—”
“You asked!”
“I didn’t mean to remediate me!”
“You’re kinda hot when you get all indignant.”
“Can we focus?” Alex puts in.
“Okay,” Nora says. She shakes out her hands. “So, right now we can get over 270 with Texas or Nevada and Alaska combined. Richards has to get all three of those. So nobody is out of the game yet.”
“So, we have to get Texas now?”
“Not unless they call Nevada,” Nora says, “which never happens this early.”
She barely has time to finish before Anderson Cooper is back onscreen with breaking news. Alex wonders briefly what it’s going to be like to have future Anderson Cooper stress hallucinations. NEVADA: RICHARDS.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“So, now it’s essentially—”
“Whoever wins Texas,” Alex says, “wins the presidency.”
There’s a heavy pause, and June says, “I’m gonna go stress eat the cold pizza the polling people have. Sound good? Cool.” And she’s gone.
By 12:30, nobody can believe it’s down to this.
Texas has never in history gone this long without being called. If it were any other state, Richards probably would have called to concede by now.
Luna is pacing. Alex’s dad is sweating through his suit. June is going to smell like pizza for a week. Zahra is on the phone, yelling into someone’s voicemail, and when she hangs up, she explains that her sister is having trouble getting into a good daycare and agreed to put Zahra on the job as an outlet for her stress. Ellen, too tense to stay upstairs, is stalking through it all like a hungry lioness.
And that’s when June comes charging up to them, her hand on the arm of a girl Alex recognizes—her college roommate, his brain supplies. She’s got on a poll volunteer shirt and a broad smile.
“Y’all—” June says, breathless. “Molly just—she just came from—fuck, just, tell them!”
And Molly opens her blessed mouth and says, “We think you have the votes.”
Nora drops her phone. Ellen steps over it to grab Molly’s other arm. “You think or you know?”
“I mean, we’re pretty sure—”
“How sure?”
“Well, they just counted another 10,000 ballots from Harris County—”
“Oh my God—”
“Wait, look—”
It’s on the projection screen now. They’re calling it. Anderson Cooper, you handsome bastard.
Texas is gray for five more seconds, before flooding beautiful, beautiful, unmistakable Lake LBJ blue.
Thirty-eight votes for Claremont, for a grand total of 301. And the presidency.
“Four more years!” Alex’s mom outright screams, louder than he’s heard her scream in years.
The cheers come in a hum, in a rumble, and finally, in a storm, pressing from the other side of the partition, from the hills surrounding the arena and the city surrounding the streets, from the country itself. From, maybe, a few sleepy allies in London.
From his side, Henry, whose eyes are wet, seizes Alex’s face roughly in both hands and kisses him like the end of the movie, whoops, and shoves him at his family.
The nets are cut loose from the ceiling, and down come the balloons, and Alex staggers into a press of bodies and his father’s chest, a delirious hug, into June, who is a crying disaster, and Leo, who is somehow crying more. Nora is sandwiched between both beaming, proud parents, screaming at the top of her lungs, and Luna is throwing Claremont campaign pamphlets in the air like a mafioso with hundred dollar bills. He sees Cash, severely testing the weight limits of the venue’s chairs by dancing on one, and Amy, waving around her phone so her wife can see it all over FaceTime, and Zahra and Shaan, aggressively making out against a giant stack of CLAREMONT/HOLLERAN 2020 yard signs. WASPy Hunter hoisting another staffer up on his shoulders, Liam and Spencer raising their beers in a toast, a hundred campaign staffers and volunteers crying and shouting in disbelief and joy. They did it. They did it. The Lometa Longshot and a long-awaited blue Texas.
The crowd pushes him back into Henry’s chest, and after absolutely everything, all the emails and texts and months on the road and secret rendezvous and nights of wanting, the whole accidentally-falling-in-love-with-your-sworn-enemy-at-the-absolute-worst-possible-time thing, they made it. Alex said they would—he promised. Henry’s smiling so wide and bright that Alex thinks his heart’s going to break trying to hold the size of this entire moment, the completeness of it, a thousand years of history swelling inside his rib cage.
“I need to tell you something,” Henry says, breathless, when Alex pulls back. “I bought a brownstone. In Brooklyn.”
Alex’s mouth falls open. “You didn’t!”
“I did.”
And for a fraction of a second, a whole crystallized life flashes into view, a next term and no elections left to win, a schedule packed with classes and Henry smiling from the pillow next to him in the gray light of a Brooklyn morning. It drops right into the well of his chest and spreads, like how hope spreads. It’s a good thing everyone else is already crying.
“Okay, people,” says Zahra’s voice through the rush of blood and love and adrenaline and noise in his ears. Her mascara is streaming, her lipstick smeared across her chin. Beside her, he can hear his mother on the phone with one finger jammed into her ear, taking Richards’s concession call. “Victory speech in fifteen. Places, let’s go!”
Alex finds himself shuffled sideways, through the crowd and over to a little corral near the stage, behind the curtains, and then his mother’s on stage, and Leo, and Mike and his wife, and Nora and her parents and June and their dad. Alex strides out after them, waving into the white glow of the spotlight, shouting a jumble of languages into the noise. He’s so caught up that he doesn’t realize at first Henry isn’t at his side, and he turns back to see him hovering in the wings, just behind a curtain. Always hesitant to step on anyone’s moment.
That’s not going to fly anymore. He’s family. He’s part of it all now, headlines and oil paintings and pages in the Library of Congress, etched right alongside. And he’s part of them. Goddamn forever.
“Come on!” Alex yells, waving him over, and Henry spares a second to look panicked before he’s tipping his chin up and buttoning his suit jacket and stepping out onto the stage. He gravitates to Alex’s side, beaming. Alex throws one arm around him and the other around June. Nora presses in at June’s other side.
And President Ellen Claremont steps up to the podium.
EXCERPT: PRESIDENT ELLEN CLAREMONT’S VICTORY ADDRESS FROM AUSTIN, TEXAS, NOVEMBER 3, 2020
Four years ago, in 2016, we stood at a precipice as a nation. There were those who would have seen us stumble backward into hatred and vitriol and prejudice, who wanted to reignite old embers of division within our country’s very soul. You looked them square in the eye and said, “No. We won’t.”
You voted instead for a woman and a family with Texas dirt under their shoes, who would lead you into four years of progress, of carrying on a legacy of hope and change. And tonight, you did it again. You chose me. And I humbly, humbly thank you.
And my family—my family thanks you too. My family, made u
p of the children of immigrants, of people who love in defiance of expectations or condemnation, of women determined never to back down from what’s right, a braid of histories that stands for the future of America. My family. Your First Family. We intend to do everything we can, for the next four years and the years beyond, to continue making you proud.
* * *
The second round of confetti is still falling when Alex grabs Henry by the hand and says, “Follow me.”
Everyone’s too busy celebrating or doing interviews to see them slip out the back door. He trades Liam and Spencer the promise of a six-pack for their bikes, and Henry doesn’t ask questions, just kicks the stand out and disappears into the night behind him.
Austin feels different somehow, but it hasn’t changed, not really. Austin is dried flowers from a homecoming corsage in a bowl by the cordless phone, the washed-out bricks of the rec center where he tutored kids after school, a beer bummed off a stranger on the spill of the Barton Creek Greenbelt. The nopales, the hipster cold brews. It’s a weird, singular constant, the hook in his heart that’s kept tugging him back to earth his whole life.
Maybe it’s just that he’s different.
They cross the bridge into downtown, the gray grids intersecting Lavaca, the bars overflowing with people yelling his mother’s name, wearing his own face on their chests, waving Texas flags, American flags, Mexican flags, pride flags. There’s music echoing through the streets, loudest when they reach the Capitol, where someone has climbed up the front steps and erected a set of loudspeakers blasting Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” Somewhere above, against the thick clouds: fireworks.
Alex takes his feet off the pedals and glides past the massive, Italian Renaissance Revival façade of the Capitol, the building where his mom went to work every day when he was a kid. It’s taller than the one back in DC. Everything’s bigger, after all.
It takes twenty minutes to reach Pemberton Heights, and Alex leads the Prince of England up onto the high curb of a neighborhood in Old West Austin and shows him where to throw his bike in the yard, spokes still spinning little shadow lines across the grass. The sounds of expensive leather soles on the cracked front steps of the old house on Westover don’t sound any stranger than his own boots. Like coming home.
Red, White & Royal Blue Page 35