Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occurred to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you. And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it? Sometimes, even now, I still can’t.

on the map of you, my fingers can always find the green hills, wales. cool waters and a shore of white chalk. the ancient part of you carved out of stone in a prayerful circle, sacrosanct. your spine’s a ridge i’d die climbing.

“Shaan,” Zahra snaps. “Listen up, you fuck. We are in the air right now. FSOTUS is with me. ETA six hours. You will have a car waiting. We will meet the queen and whoever the fuck else we have to meet to hash this shit out, or so help me God I will personally make your balls into fucking earrings. I will scorched-earth your entire motherfucking life.” She pauses, presumably to listen to him agree because Alex can’t imagine him doing anything else. “Now, put Henry on the phone, and do not try to tell me he’s not there, because I know you haven’t let him out of your sight.”

“Sweetheart.”

I love him on purpose.”

“For what it’s worth,” he says to Philip, “that is the bravest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

“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.”

He’s on the way back to the airstrip when he sees it, emblazoned on the side of a brick building, a shock of color against a gray street. “Wait!” Alex yells up to the driver. “Stop! Stop the car!” Up close, it’s beautiful. Two stories tall. He can’t imagine how somebody was able to put together something like this so fast. 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.

This is it. October 2, 2020, and the whole world watched, and history remembered.

“You think?” his dad says. “Nah. Come on. I don’t think this election is gonna hinge on an email server.” Alex arches a brow. “You sure about that?”

Texas is gray for five more seconds, before flooding beautiful, beautiful, unmistakable Lake LBJ blue.