tell him he’d made me feel less alone too, the screen went dark, and this time Dean was gone for real. I didn’t know what had just happened, and I didn’t know if Dean was feeling even remotely about me the way I was feeling about him, but I was flying way too high at that moment to care.
Dean
HOMECOMING WAS THE last school event I would attend until I either returned to school after the election or began preparing to move to Washington, DC. For the rest of the election, I was given the choice to travel with either my mother or my father so that I could witness the election process in a way few people ever would. I could have traveled with Jeffrey Portman, my mother’s running mate, but while he was a perfectly nice man, he was as dull as a butter knife.
But rather than tag along with my parents, I was also given the opportunity to go out on my own. I frequently volunteered with Habitat for Humanity near home, and traveling allowed me to do so outside Florida. Schools often asked me to speak to their students about what it was like being Janice Arnault’s son, and I enjoyed standing on a stage talking to people my age about politics, trying to get them involved in the process that governed their lives. These were things I cared deeply about. I had more autonomy and was more active in the campaign than I think any child of a presidential candidate had ever been, and I loved it. I didn’t love the additional attention from the media or how often adults that I met felt empowered to insult me, but that was the price of helping my mother win, and I very much wanted her to win. I also didn’t love not getting to see my friends at school. Being able to talk to Dre helped with that.
There was an intimacy to talking to Dre over the Promethean app. An intimacy I didn’t feel when I was talking to Astrid or Tamal or any of my other friends. I think part of it was the feeling of privacy created by the app itself. It was as if there was a line from my heart to Dre’s phone, and I could pour out my secrets one word at a time to no one but him.
Despite that, I sometimes found myself wishing I could talk to Dre in person. I wanted to see him laugh instead of having to imagine it when he filled the screen with emojis. I wanted to hear the lilting sound of his voice and watch his prominent Adam’s apple bob when he spoke. It had only been a couple of weeks since Dre and I were locked in the greenroom at the first debate, and talking to him had become the thing I looked forward to most, which I found surreal, to be honest. Of all the people in the world to share a connection with, Andre Rosario was not the person with whom I would have expected it to happen. That said, I couldn’t have imagined not having him in my life, and I found myself wanting more.
“Jackson McMann is a cancer.” My mother sneered at her tablet. She and my father were sitting across from me at the breakfast table on Sunday morning before church, enjoying their coffee and trying to read the news. My parents were not, by nature, morning people, but my mother’s time in the military had made her one, and we were all on her schedule. I’d already gone for a run before getting to the table.
“He’s not going to win, is he?” I asked.
“No one’s worried about him winning,” my mother said. “But if he splits the vote, keeping me or Rosario from reaching two hundred and seventy electoral votes, then all bets are off.”
Without looking up from his iPad, my father reached out and rested his hand atop my mother’s. “That’s not going to happen, love.”
We had learned about this in my US government class when we’d covered the electoral college. “Doesn’t it go to Congress? The House votes for the president and the Senate chooses the vice president?”
My mother flared her nostrils. “And do you want to guess how many politicians McMann has in his pocket? I’d like to think our elected representatives aren’t foolish enough to throw in with a self-serving maggot like McMann, but a lot of them only care about lining their