nearly four weeks later
“Let me just get this hair, love.”
“Mum.”
“Soz, am I embarrassing you?” Catherine says, her glasses on the tip of her nose as she rearranges Henry’s thick hair. “You’ll thank me when you’ve not got a great cowlick in your official portrait.”
Alex has to admit, the royal photographer is being exceedingly patient about the whole thing, especially considering they waffled through three different locations—Kensington Gardens, a stuffy Buckingham Palace library, the courtyard of Hampton Court Palace—before they decided to screw it all for a bench in a locked-down Hyde Park.
(“Like a common vagrant?” Queen Mary asked.
“Shut up, Mum,” Catherine said.)
There’s a certain need for formal portraits now that Alex is officially in “courtship” with Henry. He tries not to think too hard about his face on chocolate bars and thongs in Buckingham gift shops. At least it’ll be next to Henry’s.
Some psychological math always goes into styling photos like these. The White House stylists have Alex in something he’d wear any day—brown leather loafers, slim-fit chinos in a soft tan, a loose-collared Ralph Lauren chambray—but in this context, it reads confident, roguish, decidedly American. Henry’s in a Burberry button-down tucked into dark jeans and a navy cardigan that the royal shoppers squabbled over in Harrods for hours. They want a picture of a perfect, dignified, British intellectual, a loved-up boyfriend with a bright future as an academic and philanthropist. They even staged a little pile of books on the bench next to him.
Alex looks over at Henry, who’s groaning and rolling his eyes under his mother’s preening, and smiles at how much closer this packaging is to the real, messy, complicated Henry. As close as any PR campaign is ever going to get.
They take about a hundred portraits just sitting on the bench next to each other and smiling, and part of Alex keeps stumbling over the disbelief he’s actually here, in the middle of Hyde Park, in front of God and everybody, holding Henry’s hand atop his own knee for the camera.
“If Alex from this time last year could see this,” Alex says, leaning into Henry’s ear.
“He’d say, ‘Oh, I’m in love with Henry? That must be why I’m such a berk to him all the time,’” Henry suggests.
“Hey!” Alex squawks, and Henry’s chuckling at his own joke and Alex’s indignation, one arm coming up around Alex’s shoulders. Alex gives into it and laughs too, full and deep, and that’s the last hope for a serious tone for the day gone. The photographer finally calls it, and they’re set loose.
Catherine’s got a busy day, she says—three meetings before afternoon tea to discuss relocating into a royal residence more centrally located in London, since she’s begun taking up more duties than ever. Alex can see the glint in her eye—she’ll be gunning for the throne soon. He’s choosing not to say anything about it to Henry yet, but he’s curious to see how it all plays out. She kisses them both and leaves them with Henry’s PPOs.
It’s a short walk over the Long Water back to Kensington, and they meet Bea at the Orangery, where a dozen members of her event-planning team are scurrying around, setting up a stage. She’s tromping up and down rows of chairs on the lawn in a ponytail and rain boots, speaking very tersely on the phone about something called “cullen skink” and why on earth would she ever request cullen skink and even if she had in fact requested cullen skink in what universe would she ever need twenty bloody liters of cullen skink for anything, ever.
“What in the hell is a ‘cullen skink’?” Alex asks once she’s hung up.
“Smoked haddock chowder,” she says. “Enjoy your first royal dog show, Alex?”
“It wasn’t too bad,” Alex says, smirking.
“Mum is beyond,” Henry says. “She offered to edit my manuscript this morning. It’s like she’s trying to make up for five years of absentee parenting all at once. Which, of course, I love her very much, and I appreciate the effort, but, Christ.”
“She’s trying, H,” Bea says. “She’s been on the bench for a while. Let her warm up a bit.”
“I know,” Henry says with a sigh, but his eyes are fond. “How are things over here?”
“Oh, you know,” she says, waving her phone in the air. “Just the maiden voyage of my very controversial fund upon which all future endeavors will be judged, so, no pressure at all. I’m only slightly cross with you for not making it a Henry Foundation–Beatrice Fund double feature so I could unload half the stress onto you. All this fund-raising for sobriety is going to drive me to drink.” She pats Alex on the arm. “That’s drunk humor for you, Alex.”
Bea and Henry both had an October as busy as their mother’s. There were a lot of decisions to be made in that first week: Would they ignore the revelations about Bea in the emails (no), would Henry be forced to enlist after all (after days of deliberation, no), and, above all, how could all this be made into a positive? The solution had been one Bea and Henry came up with together, twin philanthropic efforts under their own names. Bea’s, a charity fund supporting addiction recovery programs all over the UK, and Henry’s, an LGBT rights foundation.
To their right, the lighting trusses are going up quickly over the stage where Bea will be playing an £8,000-a-ticket concert with a live band and celebrity guests tonight, her first solo fund-raiser.
“Man, I wish I could stay for the show,” Alex says.
Bea beams. “It’s a shame Henry here was too busy signing papers with Auntie Pezza all week to learn some sheet music or we could have fired our pianist.”
“Papers?” Alex says, cocking an eyebrow.
Henry shoots Bea a silencing glare. “Bea—”
“For the youth shelters,” she says.
“Beatrice,” Henry admonishes. “It was going to be a surprise.”
“Oh,” Bea says, busying herself with her phone. “Oops.”
Alex looks at Henry. “What’s going on?”
Henry sighs. “Well. We were going to wait to announce it—and to tell you, obviously—until after the election, so as not to step on your moment. But…” He puts his hands in his pockets, in that way he does when he’s feeling proud of something but trying not to act like it. “Mum and I agreed the foundation shouldn’t just be national, that there was work to be done all over the world, and I specifically wanted to focus on homeless queer youth. So, Pez signed all our Okonjo Foundation youth shelters over.” He bounces on his heels a little, visibly tamping down a broad smile. “You’re looking at the proud father of four worldwide soon-to-be shelters for disenfranchised queer teenagers.”
“Oh my God, you bastard,” Alex practically yells, lunging at Henry and throwing his arms around his neck. “That’s amazing. I stupid love you. Wow.” He yanks back suddenly, stricken. “Wait, oh my God, this means the one in Brooklyn too? Right?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Didn’t you tell me you wanted to be hands-on with the foundation?” Alex says, his pulse jumping. “Don’t you think maybe direct supervision might be helpful while it gets off the ground?”
“Alex,” Henry tells him, “I can’t move to New York.”
Bea looks up. “Why not?”
“Because I’m the prince of—” Henry looks over at her and gestures at the Orangery, at Kensington, sputtering. “Here!”
Bea shrugs, unmoved. “And? It doesn’t have to be permanent. You spent a month of your gap year talking to yaks in Mongolia, H. It’s hardly unprecedented.”
Henry moves his mouth a couple times, ever the skeptic, and swivels back to Alex. “Well, I’d still hardly see you, would I?” he reasons. “If you’re in DC for work all the time, beginning your meteoric rise to the political stratosphere?”
And this, Alex has to admit, is a point. A point that after the year he’s had, after everything, after the finally opened and perfectly passable LSAT scores sitting expectantly on his desk back home, feels less and less concrete every day.
He thinks about opening his mouth to say as much.
“Hello,” says a polished voice from behind them, and they all turn to see Philip, starched and well groomed, striding across the lawn.
Alex feels the slight flutter through the air of Henry’s spine automatically straightening beside him. Philip came to Kensington two weeks ago to apologize to both Henry and Bea for the years since their father’s death, the harsh words, the domineeringness, the intense scrutiny. For basically growing from an uptight people-pleaser into an abusive, self-righteous twat under the pressure of his position and the manipulation of the queen. “He’s fallen out with Gran,” Henry had told Alex over the phone. “That’s the only reason I actually believe anything he says.”
Yet, there’s blood that can’t be unshed. Alex wants to throw a punch every time he sees Philip’s stupid face, but it’s Henry’s family, not his, so he doesn’t get to make that call.
“Philip,” Bea says coolly. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“Just had a meeting at Buckingham,” Philip says. The meaning hangs in the air between them: a meeting with the queen because he’s the only one still willing. “Wanted to come by to see if I could help with anything.” He looks down at Bea’s Wellington boots next to his shiny dress shoes in the grass. “You know, you don’t have to be out here—we’ve got plenty of staff who can do the grunt work for you.”
“I know,” Bea says haughtily, every inch a princess. “I want to do it.”
“Right,” Philip says. “Of course. Well, er. Is there anything I can help with?”
“Not really, Philip.”
“All right.” Philip clears his throat. “Henry, Alex. Portraits go all right?”
Henry blinks, clearly startled Philip would ask. Alex has enough diplomatic instincts to keep his mouth shut.
“Yeah,” Henry says. “Er, yes. It was all right. A bit awkward, you know, just having to sit there for ages.”
“Oh, I remember,” Philip says. “When Mazzy and I did our first ones, I had this horrible rash on my arse from some idiotic poison-oak prank one of my uni friends had played on me that week, and it was all I could do to hold still and not rip my trousers off in the middle of Buckingham, much less try to take a nice photo. I thought she was going to murder me. Here’s hoping yours turn out better.”
He chuckles a little awkwardly, clearly trying to bond with them. Alex scratches his nose.
“Well, anyway, good luck, Bea.”
Philip walks off, hands in his pockets, and all three of them watch his retreating back until it starts to disappear behind the tall hedges.
Bea sighs. “D’you think I should have let him have a go at the cullen skink man for me?”
“Not yet,” Henry says. “Give him another six months. He hasn’t earned it yet.”
Blue or gray? Gray or blue?
Alex has never been so torn between two equally innocuous blazers in his entire life.
“This is stupid,” Nora says. “They’re both boring.”
“Will you please just help me pick?” Alex tells her. He holds up a hanger in each hand, ignoring her judgmental look from where she’s perched atop his dresser. The pictures from election night tomorrow, win or lose, will follow him for the rest of his life.
“Alex, seriously. I hate them both. You need something killer. This could be your fucking swan song.”
“Okay, let’s not—”
“Yes, okay, you’re right, if the projections hold, we’re fine,” she says, hopping down. “So, do you want to talk about why you’re choosing to punt so hard on this particular moment in your career as a risk-taking fashion plate?”
“Nope,” Alex says. He waves the hangers at her. “Blue or gray?”
“Okay, so.” She’s ignoring him. “I’ll say it, then. You’re nervous.”
He rolls his eyes. “Of course I’m nervous, Nora, it’s a presidential election and the president gave birth to me.”
“Try again.”
She’s giving him that look. The “I’ve already analyzed all the data on how much shit you’re full of” look. He releases a hiss of a sigh.
“Fine,” he says. “Fine, yeah, I’m nervous about going back to Texas.”
He tosses both the blazers at the bed. Shit.
“I always felt like Texas claiming me as their son was, you know, kind of conditional.” He paces, rubbing the back of his neck. “The whole half-Mexican, all Democrat thing. There’s a very loud contingent there that does not like me and does not want me to represent them. And now, it’s just. Not being straight. Having a boyfriend. Having a gay sex scandal with a European prince. I don’t know anymore.”
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 cracked 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.”
“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 up 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.
He steps back and watches Henry take it all in—the butter-yellow siding, the big bay window, the handprints in the sidewalk. Alex hasn’t been inside this house since he was twenty. They pay a family friend to look after it, wrap the pipes, run the water. They can’t bear to let it go. Nothing’s changed inside, just been boxed up.
There are no fireworks out here, no music, no confetti. Just sleeping, single-family homes, TVs finally switched off. Just a house where Alex grew up, where he saw Henry’s picture in a magazine and felt a flicker of something, a start.
“Hey,” Alex says. Henry turns back to him, his eyes silver in the wash of the streetlight. “We won.”
Henry takes his hand, one corner of his mouth tugging gently upward. “Yeah. We won.”
Alex reaches down into the front of his dress shirt and finds the chain with his fingers, pulls it out carefully. The ring, the key.
Under winter clouds, victorious, he unlocks the door.
