Red, White, page 34
“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. “Mostly important,” 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. They 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.
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.
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 Austin’s Palmer 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 returns to the room, 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 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.”
