Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston Page 0,39

why it’s not working.

When he’s in the campaign offices, he keeps gravitating over to the big, busy whiteboards of the polling section, where Nora sits every day enshrined in graphs and spreadsheets. She’s made easy friends with her coworkers, since competence translates directly to popularity in the campaign social culture, and nobody’s better at numbers than her.

He’s not jealous, exactly. He’s popular in his own department, constantly cornered at the Keurig for second opinions on people’s drafts and invited to after-work drinks he never has time for. At least four staffers of various genders have hit on him, and WASPy Hunter won’t stop trying to convince him to come to his improv shows. He smiles handsomely over his coffee and makes sarcastic jokes and the Alex Claremont-Diaz Charm Initiative is as effective as ever.

But Nora makes friends, and Alex ends up with acquaintances who think they know him because they’ve read his profile in New York magazine, and perfectly fine people with perfectly fine bodies who want to take him home from the bar. None of it is satisfying—it never has been, not really, but it never mattered as much as it does now that there’s the sharp counterpoint of Henry, who knows him. Henry who’s seen him in glasses and tolerates him at his most annoying and still kissed him like he wanted him, singularly, not the idea of him.

So it goes, and Henry is there, in his head and his lecture notes and his cubicle, every single stupid day, no matter how many shots of espresso he puts in his coffee.

* * *

Nora would be the obvious choice for help, if not for the fact that she’s neck deep in polling numbers. When she gets into her work like this, it’s like trying to have a meaningful conversation with a high-speed computer that loves Chipotle and makes fun of what you’re wearing.

But she’s his best friend, and she’s sort of vaguely bisexual. She never dates—no time or desire—but if she did, she says it’d be an even distribution of the intern pool. She’s as knowledgeable about the topic as she is about everything else.

“Hello,” she says from the floor as he drops a bag of burritos and a second bag of chips with guacamole on the coffee table. “You might have to put guacamole directly into my mouth with a spoon because I need both hands for the next forty-eight hours.”

Nora’s grandparents, the Veep and Second Lady, live at the Naval Observatory, and her parents live just outside of Montpelier, but she’s had the same airy one-bedroom in Columbia Heights since she transferred from MIT to GW. It’s full of books and plants she tends to with complex spreadsheets of watering schedules. Tonight, she’s sitting on her living room floor in a glowing circle of screens like some kind of Capitol Hill séance.

To her left, her campaign laptop is open to an indecipherable page of data and bar graphs. To her right, her personal computer is running three news aggregators at the same time. In front of her, the TV is broadcasting CNN’s Republican primary coverage, while the tablet in her lap is playing an old episode of Drag Race. She’s holding her iPhone in her hand, and Alex hears the little whoosh of an email sending before she looks up at him.

“Barbacoa?” she says hopefully as Alex drops onto the couch.

“I’ve met you before today, so, obviously.”

“There’s my future husband.” She leans over to pull a burrito out of the bag, rips off the foil, and shoves it into her mouth.

“I’m not going to have a marriage of convenience with you if you’re always embarrassing me with the way you eat burritos,” Alex says, watching her chew. A black bean falls out of her mouth and lands on one of her keyboards.

“Aren’t you from Texas?” she says through her mouthful. “I’ve seen you shotgun a bottle of barbecue sauce. Watch yourself or I’m gonna marry June instead.”

This might be his opening into “the conversation.” Hey, you know how you’re always joking about dating June? Well, like, what if I dated a guy? Not that he wants to date Henry. At all. Ever. But just, like, hypothetically.

Nora goes off on a data nerd tangent for the next twenty minutes about her updated take on whatever the fuck the Boyer–Moore majority vote algorithm is and variables and how it can be used in whatever work she’s doing for the campaign, or something. Honestly, Alex’s concentration is drifting in and