Red, White & Royal Blue(53)

Alex stares at her, trying to process what she’s said.

“I feel like this is your starry-eyed romantic thing projecting onto me,” is what he decides to say, and she immediately withdraws her hand from his leg and returns to glaring at him.

“You know Evan didn’t break up with me?” she says. “I broke up with him. I was gonna go to California with him, live in the same time zone as Dad, get a job at the fucking Sacramento Bee or something. But I gave all that up to come here, because it was the right thing to do. I did what Dad did—I went where I was most needed, because it was my responsibility.”

“And you regret it?”

“No,” she says. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I—I wonder. Dad wonders, sometimes. Alex, you don’t have to wonder. You don’t have to be our parents. You can keep Henry, and figure the rest out.” Now she’s looking at him evenly, steadily. “Sometimes you have a fire under your ass for no good goddamn reason. You’re gonna burn out like this.”

Alex leans back, thumbing the stitching on the armrest of the chair.

“So, what?” he asks. “You want me to quit politics and go become a princess? That’s not very feminist of you.”

“That’s not how feminism works,” she says, rolling her eyes. “And that’s not what I mean. I mean … I don’t know. Have you ever considered there might be more than one path to use what you have? Or to get where you want to be to make the most difference in the world?”

“I’m not sure I’m following.”

“Well.” She looks down at her cuticles. “It’s like the whole Sac Bee thing—it never actually would have worked out. It was a dream I had before Mom was president. The kind of journalism I wanted to do is the kind of journalism that being a First Daughter pretty much disqualifies you from. But the world is better with her where she is, and right now I’m looking for a new dream that’s better too.” Her big brown Diaz eyes blink up at him. “So, I don’t know. Maybe there’s more than one dream for you, or more than one way to get there.”

She gives a crooked shrug, tilting her head to look at him openly. June is often a mystery, a big ball of complex emotions and motivations, but her heart is honest and true. She’s very much what Alex holds in his memory as the sanctified idea of Southerness at its best: always generous and warm and sincere, work-strong and reliable, a light left on. She wants the best for him, plainly, in an unselfish and uncalculating way. She’s been trying to talk to him for a while, he realizes.

He looks down at the magazine and feels the corner of his mouth tug upward. He can’t believe June kept it all these years.

“He looks so different,” he says after a long minute, gazing down at the baby Henry on the page and his easy, unfledged sureness. “I mean, like, obviously. But the way he carries himself.” His fingertips brush the page in the same place they did when he was young, over the sun-gold hair, except now he knows its exact texture. It’s the first time he’s seen it since he learned where this version of Henry went. “It pisses me off sometimes, thinking about everything he’s been through. He’s a good person. He really cares, and he tries. He never deserved any of it.”

June leans forward, looking at the picture too. “Have you ever told him that?”

“We don’t really…” Alex coughs. “I don’t know. Talk like that?”

June inhales deeply and makes an enormous fart noise with her mouth, shattering the serious mood, and Alex is so grateful for it that he melts onto the floor in a fit of hysterical laughter.

“Ugh! Men!” she groans. “No emotional vocabulary. I can’t believe our ancestors survived centuries of wars and plagues and genocide just to wind up with your sorry ass.” She throws a pillow at him, and Alex scream-laughs as it hits him in the face. “You should try saying some of that stuff to him.”

“Stop trying to Jane Austen my life!” he yells back.

“Listen, it’s not my fault he’s a mysterious and retiring young royal and you’re the tempestuous ingénue that caught his eye, okay?”

He laughs and tries to crawl away, even as she claws at his ankle and wallops another pillow at his head. He still feels guilty for blowing her off, but he thinks they’re okay now. He’ll do better. They fight for a spot on her big canopy bed, and she makes him spill what it’s like to be secretly hooking up with a real-life prince. And so June knows; she knows about him and she hugs him and doesn’t care. He didn’t realize how terrified he was of her knowing until the fear is gone.

She puts Parks back on and has the kitchen send up ice cream, and Alex thinks about how she said, “You don’t have to be our parents”—she’s never mentioned their dad in the same context as their mom like that before. He’s always known part of her resents their mom for the position they occupy in the world, for not having a normal life, for taking herself away from them. But he never really realized she felt the same sense of loss he does deep down about their dad, that it’s something she dealt with and moved past. That the stuff with their mom is something she’s still going through.

He thinks she’s wrong about him, mostly—he doesn’t necessarily believe he has to choose between politics and this thing with Henry yet, or that he’s moving too fast in his career. But … there’s the Texas Binder, and the knowledge of other states like Texas and millions of other people who need someone to fight for them, and the feeling at the base of his spine, like there’s a lot of fight in him that could be honed down to a more productive point.