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“Why don’t we start…” Henry says, turning his head to squint at him. This close Alex can just make out the silhouette of Henry’s strong royal nose. “… with you telling me why exactly you hate me so much?”
“Do you really want to have that conversation?”
“Maybe I do.”
Alex crosses his arms, recognizes it as a mirror to Henry’s tic, and uncrosses them.
“Do you really not remember being a prick to me at the Olympics?”
Alex remembers it in vivid detail: himself at eighteen, dispatched to Rio with June and Nora, the campaign’s delegationto the summer games, one weekend of photo ops and selling the “next generation of global cooperation” image. Alex spent most of it drinking caipirinhas and subsequently throwing caipirinhas up behind Olympic venues. And he remembers, down to the Union Jack on Henry’s anorak, the first time they met.
Henry sighs. “Is that the time you threatened to push me into the Thames?”
“No,”Alex says. “It was the time you were acondescending prickat the diving finals. You really don’t remember?”
“Remind me?”
Alex glares. “I walked up to you to introduce myself, and you stared at me like I was the most offensive thing you had ever seen. Right after you shook my hand, you turned to Shaan and said, ‘Can you get rid of him?’”
A pause.
“Ah,” Henry says. He clears his throat. “I didn’t realize you’d heard that.”
“I feel like you’re missing the point,” Alex says, “which is that it’s a douchey thing to say either way.”
“That’s… fair.”
“Yeah, so.”
“That’s all?” Henry asks. “Only the Olympics?”
“I mean, that was the start.”
Henry pauses again. “I’m sensing an ellipsis.”
“It’s just…” Alex says, and as he’s on the floor of a supply closet, waiting out a security threat with a Prince of England at the end of a weekend that has felt like some very specific ongoing nightmare, censoring himself takes too much effort. “I don’t know. Doing what we do is fucking hard. But it’s harder for me. I’m the son of the first female president. AndI’m not white like she is, can’t even pass for it. People willalwayscome down harder on me. And you’re, you know,you,and you were born into all of this, and everyone thinks you’re Prince fucking Charming. You’re basically a living reminder I’ll always be compared to someone else, no matter what I do, even if I work twice as hard.”
Henry is quiet for a long while.
“Well,” Henry says when he speaks at last. “I can’t very well do much about the rest. But I can tell you I was, in fact, a prick that day. Not that it’s any excuse, but my father had died fourteen months before, and I was still kind of a prick every day of my life at the time. And I am sorry.”
Henry twitches one hand at his side, and Alex falls momentarily silent.
The cancer ward. Of course, Henry chose a cancer ward—it was right there on the fact sheet.Father: Famed film star Arthur Fox, deceased 2015, pancreatic cancer.The funeral was televised. He goes back over the last twenty-four hours in his head: the sleeplessness, the pills, the tense little grimace Henry does in public that Alex has always read as aloofness.
He knows a few things about this stuff. It’s not like his parents’ divorce was a pleasant time for him, or like he runs himself ragged about grades for fun. He’s been aware for too long that most people don’t navigate thoughts of whether they’ll ever be good enough or if they’re disappointing the entire world. He’s never considered Henry might feel any of the same things.
Henry clears his throat again, and something like panic catches Alex. He opens his mouth and says, “Well, good to know you’re not perfect.”
He can almost hear Henry roll his eyes, and he’s thankful for it, the familiar comfort of antagonism.
They’re silent again, the dust of the conversation settling. Alex can’t hear anything outside the door or any sirens on the street, but nobody has come to get them yet.
Then, unprompted, Henry says into the stretching stillness, “Return of the Jedi.”
A beat. “What?”
“To answer your question,” Henry says. “Yes, I do like Star Wars, and my favorite isReturn of the Jedi.”
