Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

The way you speak sometimes is like sugar spilling out of a bag with a hole in the bottom.

Come back to me when you’re done being flung through the firmament, you lost Pleiad.

“Why don’t we talk about how there’s a chapter of the Klan in every state? You think there aren’t racists and homophobes growing up in Vermont? Man, I appreciate that you’re doing the work here, but you’re not special. You don’t get to sit up here and pretend like it’s someone else’s problem. None of us do.”

He wants to call Henry. He guesses it makes sense—they’ve always been fixed points in each other’s worlds, little magnetic poles. Some laws of physics would be reassuring right now.

you still bloody care so much.” He leans down and presses a kiss into Alex’s hair. “And you are good. Most things are awful most of the time, but you’re good.”

If Alex’s head is a storm, Henry is the place lightning hits ground. He wants it to be true.

“Would it make any difference at all if I told you not to see him again?” Alex looks over at Henry, looking rumpled and nauseated and terrified at the corner of the bed. “No.”

So you need to figure out if you feel forever about him. And if you don’t, you need to cut it the fuck out.”

History, huh? Bet we could make some.

The phrase “see attached bibliography” is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.

Should I tell you that when we’re apart, your body comes back to me in dreams? That when I sleep, I see you, the dip of your waist, the freckle above your hip, and when I wake up in the morning, it feels like I’ve just been with you, the phantom touch of your hand on the back of my neck fresh and not imagined? That I can feel your skin against mine, and it makes every bone in my body ache? That, for a few moments, I can hold my breath and be back there with you, in a dream, in a thousand rooms, nowhere at all?

Tho I long for the actual sunlight contact between us I miss you like a home. Shine back honey & think of me.

“I just know it’s different when it’s your own kid.” His dad laughs too, rubbing a hand over his goatee. “It’s really not. Not to me, anyway. I see you.”

“Sometimes you just jump and hope it’s not a cliff.”

Alex is so in love he could die.

He thinks about roots, about first and second languages. What he wanted when he was a kid and what he wants now and where those things overlap. Maybe that place, the meeting of the two, is here somewhere, in the gentle insistence of the water around his legs, crude letters carved with an old pocket knife. The steady thrum of another person’s pulse against his.

Goddamn, I love him. It keeps coming back to him, and it’s getting harder to look into Henry’s soft smiles and not say it.

I used to think, if I pictured the person I wanted to be and took all the crazy anxiety in my brain and narrowed it down to that point, I could rewire it. Use it to power something else. It’s like I never learned how to just be where I am.”

You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent,

“I never thought I’d be stood here faced with a choice I can’t make, because I never … I never imagined you would love me back.”

“What do you want?” “I want you—” “Then fucking have me.”

“I’m terrified, and my whole life is completely mad, but trying to give you up this week nearly killed me. And when I woke up this morning and looked at you … there’s no trying to get by for me anymore. I don’t know if I’ll ever be allowed to tell the world, but I … I want to. One day. If there’s any legacy for me on this bloody earth, I want it to be true. So I can offer you all of me, in whatever way you’ll have me, and I can offer you the chance of a life. If you can wait, I want you to help me try.”

When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.

There’s stuff to figure out. But way worse people with way bigger problems than me get elected all the time.”

Did you know the reason the King James translation of the Bible exists is because the Church of England was so displeased with James for flaunting his relationship with Villiers that he had the translation commissioned to appease them?”

With me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.

Have you ever had something go so horribly, horribly, unbelievably badly that you’d like to be loaded into a cannon and jettisoned into the merciless black maw of outer space?

Here lies Prince Henry of Wales. He died as he lived: avoiding plans and sucking cock.

But the first time I saw you. Rio. I took that down to the gardens. I pressed it into the leaves of a silver maple and recited it to the Waterloo Vase. It didn’t fit in any rooms.

“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.”

He hates himself, but he doesn’t regret anything,

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.

There’s this side of him that’s … unknowable.” He takes a breath. “But the thing is, jumping off cliffs is kinda my thing. That’s the choice. I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.”

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.

“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.”

I’m not gonna tell you what to do with your life. I’m busy trying to get my own shit together. Look at this.” He lifts his sleeve. “Nicotine patch, bitch.”

am a changed man, unburdened by the demons of my past,” Luna says solemnly, with a jerk-off hand gesture.

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

“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.”

law school,” she says, as simply as she said dick you down all those months ago,

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.

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.

It’s 2020, and Texas is a battleground state for the first time in years.

“Take anything you want and know you deserve to have it.”

To every person in search of somewhere to belong who happened to pick up this book, I hope you found a place in here, even if just for a few pages. You are loved. I wrote this for you. Keep fighting, keep making history, keep looking after one another.