More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Mum, this is Alex,” Henry says, and adds, as if it’s not obvious, “my boyfriend.”
Henry grits his teeth. “It’s real,” he says. “All of it.”
Henry looks Philip square in the face and says, “I’ve been gay as a maypole since the day I came out of Mum, Philip.”
“Oh, my love,” and pulls him into her chest somehow, even though he’s nearly a foot taller.
Alex recognizes the glint in her eyes. He never knew—he always assumed Henry got it from his dad.
“I’m sorry, Henry,” she says. “I’ve failed you. I’ve failed all of you. You needed your mum, and I wasn’t there. And I was so frightened that I started to think maybe it was for the best, to let you all be kept behind glass.”
“Look at them, Mum. They’re not props of a legacy. They’re my children. And I swear on my life, and Arthur’s, I will take you off the throne before I will let them feel the things you made me feel.”
seconds, then: “I still don’t think—” Philip begins, but Bea seizes the pot of tea from the center of the table and dumps it into hi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Henry pulls Alex close and kisses him, whispers, “I love you I love you I love you,” and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if anyone sees.
It’s a mural of himself and Henry, facing each other, haloed by a bright yellow sun, depicted as Han and Leia. Henry in all white, starlight in his hair. Alex dressed as a scruffy smuggler, a blaster at his hip. A royal and a rebel, arms around each other.
He snaps a photo on his phone, and fingers shaking, types out a tweet: Never tell me the odds.
The doors to the Oval Office fly open and Nora comes careening in.
“The day of the leaks, I get an anonymous email. Obvious sockpuppet account, but untraceable. I tried. They sent me a link to a fucking massive file dump and told me they were a hacker and had obtained the contents of the Richards campaign’s private email server in their entirety.”
“There were—I mean, just, hundreds of thousands of emails,” Nora is saying as Alex climbs down onto the rug and starts staring at the pages, “and I swear a third of them were from dummy accounts, but I wrote a code that narrowed it down to about three thousand. I went through the rest manually. This is everything about Alex and Henry.”
Nora my LOVE
Basically, Richards hired a firm that hired the photographers who followed Alex and the hackers who breached your server, and then he hired another third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail.
“I drank like nine Red Bulls to get through all of those and ate a weed gummy to level back out, so I’m flying at fasten-seat-belts right now.”
Real
I’m taking this motherfucker down. It has to stick.”
It’s code, for Alex and Alex only: You’re the only one I trust.
“This isn’t a hacker,” Alex says. “Rafael Luna sent this to you. That’s your verification.” He looks at his mother. “If you can protect him, he’ll confirm it for you.”
“This is—this is good, June. Why the hell aren’t you writing all our speeches?”
“My life is cosmic joke and you’re not a real person,” Alex says, wheezing. “What?” Henry yells again. “I said, you look great, baby!”
“Five minutes for the rest of our lives,” he says, laughing a grim little laugh.
“You are,” he says, “the absolute worst idea I’ve ever had.” Henry’s mouth spreads into a slow smile, and Alex kisses it.
America: He is my choice.
I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us.
Amy at the front of the cheering crowd wearing June’s yellow HISTORY, HUH? T-shirt and a trans flag pin.
Senator Oscar Diaz, responding via satellite, that President Claremont’s primary value is upholding the Constitution, and that the White House was built by slaves, not our forefathers.
Alex grins, and he reaches into his pocket and produces a packet of Skittles, lobbing them underhand onto Luna’s desk.
Luna laughs in earnest. “Listen, you’ve had your first big sex scandal. No more sitting at the kids’ table.”
“You’re not the one who slagged off the crown and your own family in the emails that everybody in the world has read. I’ve got to handle that on my own before you come back over.”
They have to figure out how to do this for real now, how to love each other in plain sight. Alex thinks they’re up for it.
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.”
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.
“You’re looking at the proud father of four worldwide soon-to-be shelters for disenfranchised queer teenagers.”
“That’s amazing. I stupid love you. Wow.”
“Alex,” Henry tells him, “I can’t move to New York.” Bea looks up. “Why not?”
YEAH WHY NOT
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.”
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.”
He loves Texas—he believes in Texas. But he doesn’t know if Texas still loves him.
Nora deals in facts. It takes her razor’s edge, sometimes, to get him to pull his head out of his ass.
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—”
The Super Six. Alex doesn’t mind it.
He called Henry the North Star once. That wasn’t bright enough.
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.
“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.”
“You’re a leader. Go lead. You got this.”
“Come on, you backyard-shooting-range motherfuckers,” Zahra is muttering under her breath beside him when he falls in with his people.
“Nora, what’s the math?” June says, rounding on her, a slightly frantic look in her eyes. “I majored in nouns.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” “So, now it’s essentially—” “Whoever wins Texas,” Alex says, “wins the presidency.”
“I’m gonna go stress eat the cold pizza the polling people have. Sound good? Cool.” And she’s gone.
