Red, White & Royal Blue(119)
And President Ellen Claremont steps up to the podium.
EXCERPT: PRESIDENT ELLEN CLAREMONT’S VICTORY ADDRESS FROM AUSTIN, TEXAS, NOVEMBER 3, 2020
Four years ago, in 2016, we stood at a precipice as a nation. There were those who would have seen us stumble backward into hatred and vitriol and prejudice, who wanted to reignite old embers of division within our country’s very soul. You looked them square in the eye and said, “No. We won’t.”
You voted instead for a woman and a family with Texas dirt under their shoes, who would lead you into four years of progress, of carrying on a legacy of hope and change. And tonight, you did it again. You chose me. And I humbly, humbly thank you.
And my family—my family thanks you too. My family, made up of the children of immigrants, of people who love in defiance of expectations or condemnation, of women determined never to back down from what’s right, a braid of histories that stands for the future of America. My family. Your First Family. We intend to do everything we can, for the next four years and the years beyond, to continue making you proud.
* * *
The second round of confetti is still falling when Alex grabs Henry by the hand and says, “Follow me.”
Everyone’s too busy celebrating or doing interviews to see them slip out the back door. He trades Liam and Spencer the promise of a six-pack for their bikes, and Henry doesn’t ask questions, just kicks the stand out and disappears into the night behind him.
Austin feels different somehow, but it hasn’t changed, not really. Austin is dried flowers from a homecoming corsage in a bowl by the cordless phone, the washed-out bricks of the rec center where he tutored kids after school, a beer bummed off a stranger on the spill of the Barton Creek Greenbelt. The nopales, the hipster cold brews. It’s a weird, singular constant, the hook in his heart that’s kept tugging him back to earth his whole life.
Maybe it’s just that he’s different.
They cross the bridge into downtown, the gray grids intersecting Lavaca, the bars overflowing with people yelling his mother’s name, wearing his own face on their chests, waving Texas flags, American flags, Mexican flags, pride flags. There’s music echoing through the streets, loudest when they reach the Capitol, where someone has climbed up the front steps and erected a set of loudspeakers blasting Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” Somewhere above, against the thick clouds: fireworks.
Alex takes his feet off the pedals and glides past the massive, Italian Renaissance Revival fa?ade of the Capitol, the building where his mom went to work every day when he was a kid. It’s taller than the one back in DC. Everything’s bigger, after all.
It takes twenty minutes to reach Pemberton Heights, and Alex leads the Prince of England up onto the high curb of a neighborhood in Old West Austin and shows him where to throw his bike in the yard, spokes still spinning little shadow lines across the grass. The sounds of expensive leather soles on the cracked front steps of the old house on Westover don’t sound any stranger than his own boots. Like coming home.
He steps back and watches Henry take it all in—the butter-yellow siding, the big bay window, the handprints in the sidewalk. Alex hasn’t been inside this house since he was twenty. They pay a family friend to look after it, wrap the pipes, run the water. They can’t bear to let it go. Nothing’s changed inside, just been boxed up.
There are no fireworks out here, no music, no confetti. Just sleeping, single-family homes, TVs finally switched off. Just a house where Alex grew up, where he saw Henry’s picture in a magazine and felt a flicker of something, a start.
“Hey,” Alex says. Henry turns back to him, his eyes silver in the wash of the streetlight. “We won.”
Henry takes his hand, one corner of his mouth tugging gently upward. “Yeah. We won.”
Alex reaches down into the front of his dress shirt and finds the chain with his fingers, pulls it out carefully. The ring, the key.
Under winter clouds, victorious, he unlocks the door.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I came up with the idea for this book on an I-10 off-ramp in early 2016, and I never imagined what it would turn out to be. I mean, at that point I couldn’t imagine what 2016 itself would turn out to be. Yikes. For months after November, I gave up on writing this book. Suddenly what was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek parallel universe needed to be escapist, trauma-soothing, alternate-but-realistic reality. Not a perfect world—one still believably fucked up, just a little better, a little more optimistic. I wasn’t sure I was up to the task. I hoped I was.
What I hoped to do, and what I hope I have done with this book by the time you’ve finished it, my dear reader, is to be a spark of joy and hope you needed.
I couldn’t have done any of this without the help of so many. To my angel of an agent, Sara Megibow, thank you for driving this crazy bus. I went into this whole experience hoping to find one person who felt even half of what I feel for this book, and you matched me from the first moment we spoke. Thank you for being the champion this book needed and the reassurance always at my back. To Vicki Lame, my editor, the Texas girl who fought for this book and always saw in it what it could mean to people. Thank you for giving this your all, for forever being the person in the corner of the ring with the water bottle. You and the team at St. Martin’s Griffin have literally made dreams come true. Thank you to my publicity team, DJ DeSmyter and Meghan Harrington, and to everyone else who threw themselves behind this book.