Red, White & Royal Blue (47 page)

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 the 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 leaves, 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 few 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 repetir
á
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.”

He turns to see Liam, almost the same as he remembers—tall, broad-shouldered, sweet-faced, scruffy.

He’s so mad he has such a specific type of dude and never even noticed it for so long.

“Oh my God, you came!”

“Of course I did,” Liam says, grinning. Beside him, there’s a cute guy grinning too. “I mean, it kind of seemed like the Secret Service were gonna come requisition me from my apartment if I didn’t come.”

Alex laughs. “Look, the presidency hasn’t changed me
that
much. I’m still as aggressive a party instigator as I ever was.”

“I’d be disappointed if you weren’t, man.”

They both grin, and God, on tonight of all nights it’s good to see him, good to clear the air, good to stand next to someone outside of family who knew him before all this.

A week after he got outed, Liam texted him:
1. I wish we hadn’t been such dumb assholes back then so we both could have helped each other out with stuff. 2. Jsyk, a reporter from some right-wing website called me yesterday to ask me about my history with you. I told him to go fuck himself, but I thought you’d want to know.