The State of Us by Shaun David Hutchinson Page 0,4

bit of gratefulness I’d felt toward him before was already evaporating. The last thing I needed from Professor Dean was a vocabulary lesson. “Whatever,” I said. “I’d still kick your ass in a fair fight.”

Dean was smiling when he finally looked up, and he caught my eye and winked. “If you say so.”

“I do!”

“Fine, then.”

“Fine!” He was still smiling, so I scowled back and resumed pacing. “I don’t know what I did to wind up stuck in a room with you, but I’m sorry for it.”

“You’re not stuck in here with me,” Dean said. “We’re stuck in here together, and my mother always says accidents are just opportunities in disguise.”

“Your mom also thinks people like me don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else, so excuse me if I’m not super keen on anything she has to say on anything.”

Dean

“KNOW YOUR ENEMY” is what my mother would have said. “Be kind to strangers” is what my father would have told me. I didn’t know whether Dre was a stranger, my enemy, or both. The only thing I knew for certain was that he hated me, though I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve his ire. He obviously believed the propaganda about my mother—that she was going to attempt to overturn the Supreme Court decision granting marriage rights to same-sex couples—but he didn’t know me at all.

“My dad turned down his Secret Service detail.” Dre had been pacing around the room eating strawberries for a solid five minutes, acting like I didn’t exist.

“I wasn’t aware that was something he could do.”

Dre nodded. “The only person who can’t refuse a Secret Service detail is the sitting president.” He paused and set down the now-empty bowl. “He said he didn’t want to waste the taxpayers’ money.”

“That seems like a poor decision.”

“‘Idiotic’ was the word my mom used,” he said. “She yelled at him for a solid twenty minutes and told him that if anyone hurt him, they’d better kill him because if they didn’t, she would.”

Each time Dre wasn’t looking directly at me, my eyes darted toward the door. “It sounds like your father might need the Secret Service just to protect him from your mother.”

A sharp laugh escaped Dre, and he looked embarrassed by it. “Yeah, he might.” His smile faded, and he threw up his hands. “How are you so calm? I mean, I’m freaking out. Why aren’t you freaking out?”

“Just because I don’t vocalize every fear that scurries through my brain doesn’t mean I’m not absolutely terrified that my mother and father are potentially in a life-threatening situation at the moment. The best I can do is pray that everything turns out all right because otherwise I might pound on the door until someone tells me what’s going on or my knuckles bleed.”

I half expected my tirade would quiet Dre for a while, or at least confuse him into silence, but it seemingly had the opposite effect.

“I was pissed at my dad for making me come here,” he said. “Ever since he started campaigning, he doesn’t have time to hang out with me unless he needs something from me, like being his prop kid at the debate tonight. Only I had plans with Mel that I had to bail on, and I feel like an asshole for being pissed because he might be hurt and all I can think is that I didn’t want to be here in the first place and I was hoping he’d lose so we could go back to our normal lives. I don’t want my dad to die thinking I was mad at him.”

I wasn’t sure if Dre had meant to say all of those things, or what I should respond to. He obviously had some unresolved feelings surrounding his father’s run for president, which I could relate to.

“Have you ever told your father what you told me?”

Dre flopped into a chair, finally relaxing a little for the first time since we’d been locked in the greenroom. “He asked me before he ran if I was okay with it.”

That came as a surprise, and I couldn’t hide my shock. “He did?”

Dre nodded. “Yup. Told me he had a shot, mostly because of the attention he got as the AG working on those immigration cases, but that he’d wait until after I graduated high school if I wanted.”

“Why didn’t you ask him to wait, then?”

“Because I didn’t think he had a chance in hell!” Dre’s wild laugh was unsettling. The stress seemed to be getting