Red, White & Royal Blue(65)
He types out another text, this one to Luna: can you please go on anderson cooper or something and explain that paragraph you ghostwrote on tax law for the platform so people will stop asking? ain’t got the time, vato.
He’s been texting Luna all week, ever since the Richards campaign leaked that they’ve tapped an Independent senator for his prospective cabinet. That old bastard Stanley Connor flat-out denied every last request for an endorsement—by the end, Luna privately told Alex they were lucky Connor didn’t try to primary them. Nothing’s official, but everyone knows Connor is the one joining Richards’s ticket. But if Luna knows when the announcement’s coming, he’s not sharing.
It’s a week. The polls aren’t great, Paul Ryan is getting sanctimonious about the Second Amendment, and there’s some Salon hot take going around, WOULD ELLEN CLAREMONT HAVE GOTTEN ELECTED IF SHE WEREN’T CONVENTIONALLY BEAUTIFUL? If it weren’t for her morning meditation sessions, Alex is sure his mom would have throttled an aide by now.
For his part, he misses Henry’s bed, Henry’s body, Henry and a place a few thousand miles removed from the factory line of the campaign. That night after Wimbledon from a week ago feels like something out of a dream now, all the more tantalizing because Henry is in New York for a few days with Pez to do paperwork for an LGBT youth shelter in Brooklyn. There aren’t enough hours in the day for Alex to find a pretense to get there, and no matter how much the world enjoys their public friendship, they’re running out of plausible excuses to be seen together.
This time is nothing like their first breathless trip to the DNC in 2016. His dad had been the delegate to cast the votes from California that put her over, and they all cried. Alex and June introduced their mother before her acceptance speech, and June’s hands were shaking but his were steady. The crowd roared, and Alex’s heart roared back.
This year, they’re all frizzy-haired and exhausted from trying to run the country and a campaign simultaneously, and even one day of the DNC is a stretch. On the second night of the convention, they pile onto Air Force One to New York—it’d be Marine One, but they won’t all fit in one helicopter.
“Have you run a cost-benefit analysis on this?” Zahra is saying into her phone as they take off. “Because you know I’m right, and these assets can be transferred at any time if you disagree. Yes. Yeah, I know. Okay. That’s what I thought.” A long pause, then, under her breath, “Love you too.”
“Um,” Alex says when she’s hung up. “Something you’d like to share with the class?”
Zahra doesn’t even look up from her phone. “Yes, that was my boyfriend, and no, you may not ask me any further questions about him.”
June has shut her journal in sudden interest. “How could you possibly have a boyfriend we don’t know about?”
“I see you more than I see clean underwear,” Alex says.
“You’re not changing your underwear often enough, sugar,” his mother interjects from across the cabin.
“I go commando a lot,” Alex says dismissively. “Is this like a ‘my Canadian girlfriend’ thing? Does he”—he does very animated air quotes—“‘go to a different school’?”
“You really are determined to get shoved out of an emergency hatch one day, huh?” she says. “It’s long distance. But not like that. No more questions.”
Cash jumps in too, insisting he deserves to know as the resident love guru of the staff, and there’s a debate about appropriate information to share with your coworkers, which is laughable considering how much Cash already knows about Alex’s personal life. They’re circling New York when June suddenly stops talking, focused again on Zahra, who has gone silent.
“Zahra?”
Alex turns and sees Zahra sitting perfectly still, such a departure from her usual constant motion that everyone else freezes too. She’s staring at her phone, mouth open.
“Zahra,” his mother echoes now, deadly serious. “What?”
She looks up finally, her grip on her phone tight. “The Post just broke the name of the Independent senator joining Richards’s cabinet,” she says. “It’s not Stanley Connor. It’s Rafael Luna.”
* * *
“No,” June is saying. Her heels are dangling from her hand, her eyes bright in the warm light near the hotel elevator where they’ve agreed to meet. Her hair is coming out of its braid in angry spikes. “You’re damn lucky I agreed to talk to you in the first place, so you get this or you get nothing.”
The Post reporter blinks, fingers faltering on his recorder. He’s been hounding June on her personal phone since the minute they landed in New York for a quote about the convention, and now he’s demanding something about Luna. June is not typically an angry person, but it’s been a long day, and she looks about three seconds from using one of those heels to stab the guy through the eye socket.
“What about you?” the guy asks Alex.
“If she’s not giving it to you, I’m not giving it to you,” Alex says. “She’s much nicer than me.”
June snaps her fingers in front of the guy’s hipster glasses, eyes blazing. “You don’t get to speak to him,” June says. “Here is my quote: My mother, the president, still fully intends to win this race. We’re here to support her and to encourage the party to stay united behind her.”