Red, White & Royal Blue: Chapters 3–5

His mother doesn’t want him fake-dead anymore, though, and he’s stopped getting a thousand vitriolic tweets an hour, so he counts it as a win.

First class today was an elective he’s taking out of a combination of morbid fascination and academic curiosity: The Press and the Presidency.

He’s always been the most indulgent of Alex’s antics.

He’s always been the most indulgent of Alex’s antics.

When Luna looks up and sees Alex in his doorway, he drops his pen on a haphazard pile of papers and leans back in his chair.

“I resent the idea I can’t come visit a dear family friend without ulterior motives.”

He kicks his foot innocently where it’s dangling over the armrest, like he’s asking something as innocuous as the weather.

He smirks. “I know Richards is promising Independents a centrist platform with big shake-ups on non-social issues. And I know part of that platform might not line up with Connor’s position on healthcare. Somewhere to start, perhaps. Hypothetically, if I were going to engage with your scheming.”

“Chances of your mother facing off against a candidate who’s not the...anointed messiah of right-wing populism and heir to the Richards family legacy?”

“Chances of your mother facing off against a candidate who’s not the...anointed messiah of right-wing populism and heir to the Richards family legacy?”

“Chances of your mother facing off against a candidate who’s not the...anointed messiah of right-wing populism and heir to the Richards family legacy?”

Alex swings his foot back over the armrest so he can plant both feet on the floor and fold his arms indignantly.

“Mmm.” June swallows a bite. “Good thing. Oh! Oh my God. Ronan Farrow tweeted about my essay for New York magazine, and we totally engaged in witty Twitter repartee. Part one of my long game to force him to be my friend is underway.”

Alex exchanges an incredulous look with June.

June’s expression changes from pinched apprehension to pinched dread.

“I’ve been thinking,” Ellen says, “this time around, y’all—the ‘White House Trio.’” She puts it in air quotes, as if she didn’t sign off on the name herself. “Y’all shouldn’t only be faces. Y’all are more than that. You have skills. You’re smart. You’re talented. We could use y’all not only as surrogates, but as staffers.”

The attached message says, But we were ever so careful, dear, which surprises a big enough laugh out of Alex that Zahra ejects him from her weekly debriefing with him and June.

They compare notes on the trials and tribulations of having older sisters.

Before he learned of exorbitant turkey expenditures from CNN, he was watching the highlights of last night’s Republican primary debate.

He was going to finish an outline for an exam, then study the demographic engagement binder he convinced his mother to give him for the campaign job.

A minute and a half later: Henry, in a massive, palatial, hideous bed of white and gold linens, his face looking slightly pink and recently scrubbed, with a beagle’s head on one side of his pillow and an obese Siamese cat curled up on the other around a Jaffa Cake wrapper.

Leo, for his part, is unfazed and mollifies her with compliments between fits of tinsel.

Oscar does laugh, then, enjoying his brazenness.

Except eventually there was a lot of yelling, followed by a lot of quiet, and soon Alex and June were teenagers and both their parents were in Congress, and Alex was student body president and lacrosse cocaptain and prom king and valedictorian, and, very intentionally, it stopped being a thing he had time to think about.

Alex spends the entire 26th holed up in the Social Secretary’s office with June, going over the waivers they’ve gotten for everyone to sign after a daughter of a Real Housewife fell down the rotunda stairs last year; Alex remains impressed that she didn’t spill her margarita.

It’s an equation he is not nearly sober enough to parse.

Nora’s short curls are swept to one side with a silver pin shaped to match the sharp geometric lines on the bodice of her black dress; June’s gown is a plunging Zac Posen number in a shade of midnight blue that perfectly complements the navy-and-gold color palette they chose.

...with extreme trepidation, Henry starts bopping his head a little.

He slips out onto the portico without really thinking about it, and the instant the door closes behind him, the music snuffs out into silence, and it’s just him and Henry and the garden.

“’m not bored,” Henry mumbles. “What are you doing out here? Doesn’t America’s golden boy have some swooning crowds to beguile?”

It’s freezing and Alex is only wearing his suit jacket, but his chest feels warmed from the inside with liquor and something heady his brain keeps stumbling over, trying to name.

Usually, there’s something about the set of Henry’s mouth that betrays a bit of friendliness, but sometimes, like right now, his mouth pinches in the corner instead, pins his guard resolutely in place.

Henry shakes his head ruefully. “I’d be a writer.”
He thinks he already knew this about Henry, somehow, but it’s still kind of disarming.

“Not exactly seen as a worthwhile pursuit for a man in line for the throne, scribbling verses about quarter-life angst,” Henry says dryly.

There’s another reason he never cared to examine things beyond the basic benchmark of being attracted to women.

He looks at June—ahead of him now, caramel highlights in her swinging ponytail catching the midday sun—and he knows her place too. The intrepid Washington Post columnist, the fashion trendsetter everyone wants to have at their wine-and-cheese night.

She’s made easy friends with her coworkers, since competence translates directly to popularity in the campaign social culture, and nobody’s better at numbers than her.

“Let me lay out some observations for you,” she says. “You extrapolate. First, you’ve been, like, Draco Malfoy-level obsessed with Henry for years..."

And in one great mercurial swing, Alex is not just angry anymore. He’s sad too.

He considers texting Nora, asking her if he can come over to finally have some big epiphany.