The State of Us Read online

  “It’s a lot harder to commit mass murder with a knife.” I stopped and flashed Dean a cold look. “Anyway, how can you sit and argue about this shit when our parents’ lives might be in danger?!”

  Dean held my eyes for a moment before looking away. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought if you were fighting with me, you wouldn’t worry about your parents as much as I’m worrying about mine.”

  I opened my mouth to fire the next insult but stopped short. Dean had been trying to help, albeit in a deeply strange way. Goading him into a fight wouldn’t have been my preferred method for distracting him, but he deserved some credit for the effort.

  “Sorry for popping off like that. It’s just that I keep imagining all the things that could be happening and every scenario is worse than the next.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dean said. “It was a bad idea anyway. It’s not as if it would have been a fair fight.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “Didn’t we already establish this? I’d decimate you.”

  “Historically, ‘decimate’ meant to kill one in ten of a group of people, and even in modern usage it doesn’t mean to defeat someone or something but rather to destroy a large portion of it.”

  The tiny 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 to him, and I was starting to wonder if I might be safer out in the hall, but we were each dealing with the stressful situation in our own way. “I told him to go for it because I figured he’d flame out during the primaries. Who was gonna vote for my dad, right?”

  “Quite a lot of people, as it turns out,” I said.

  Dre’s laughter dissolved; his smile faded. “Yeah. When that little kid died after being separated from his parents at the border, and my dad made that speech, I was like, ‘Oh shit. He’s got a real chance.’”

  “I remember the speech. It was a good one.” It had been better than good. The speech had galvanized the Democratic Party behind Rosario and had helped him stand out from the other candidates and secure the nomination.

  “After that, I wished I’d asked him to wait,” Dre said. “But it’s not like I could change my mind without being a total ass.”

  “Is it the attention that bothers you?” I asked.

  Dre shrugged. “Partly. I mean, I know I’m graduating next year and going to college, but I can’t do anything without everyone watching and judging and offering snarky commentary.”

  “You were famous before anyone knew who your father was,” I said. “How is this different?”

  “The people who knew me from Dreadful Dressup didn’t care about me. They only cared about whether Mel and I were gonna do some zombie shit for our next video or go in a creepy Cthulhu direction. Now it’s like I can’t do anything without someone thinking I’m making a statement. People I’ve never met want to know everything about me. I’m not into changing the world; I just wanna do monster makeup.”

  “Oh.” It seemed silly to have that kind of platform and not want to help people with it, but I didn’t press Dre about it. “What’s the other part?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘partly.’ So what’s the other part?”

  Dre’s shoulders slumped. “I know this is gonna sound silly, but I miss my dad. He was, like, my best friend, and now he’s never around.” There was a moment where it looked like Dre was going to tear up, but then he shook it off. “Anyway, I want my dad to win because he’s my dad and he’d be the first Mexican American president and I think he’d actually be good at the job, but I kind of want him to lose because I’m selfish and I liked my life the way it was before.”

  “I get it.”

  “You do?” Dre’s eyebrows were drawn together, and he wore this shocked look like I’d admitted to secretly believing in soci
alized medicine. “I figured you’d be all about it. Like you’ve probably got campaign stickers in your locker at school and already know how you’re gonna decorate your bedroom in the White House.”

  I shrugged and nodded. “Those things are true, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live a normal life. Before I was the Republican presidential candidate’s son, I was the governor’s son, and before that I was the war hero’s kid. I don’t even know what it’s like to not live under the spotlight. To not have to worry about how I dress or what I say.

  “People make fun of me for being so reserved, but it’s better than having them mock me for getting in trouble or embarrassing my family. Not doing either of those things is pretty important to me, though it comes with a price.” I’d never admitted any of that before, not even to my friends, but Dre might have been the only person in the world at that moment capable of understanding.

  Dre’s eyes were wide, somewhere between surprise and pity. “Of all the stuff to have in common, I never figured this would be one.”

  “You’re lucky your dad asked you, though,” I said. “My mother never gave me a choice.”

  Dre

  TALKING TO DEAN like he was a normal person and not the button-down shirt–wearing antithesis of everything I believed in was weird. I might’ve once bet Mel that Dean slept hanging upside down in his closet and had underwear labeled for each day of the week, but he was different from what I’d expected, and talking to him was the only thing keeping me from tearing the door off the hinges and forcing the agent outside to tell me what the hell was going on. Even weirder was that talking to Dean was kind of okay.

  Maybe I should have been reassured that I hadn’t heard anyone yelling outside the door or felt the ground shake from an explosion, but my overactive mind filled in the blanks. I was sure that what I was imagining was worse than the reality, but I couldn’t help myself. I don’t know what I would’ve done if Dean hadn’t been in the greenroom with me. Talking and arguing with him kept me from fully panicking.

  “But you had to know she was gonna run, right?” I said. “Your mom’s practically been campaigning since the start of her second term as governor.” Whereas my dad’s candidacy had felt like a long shot, Governor Arnault’s had felt inevitable.

  Dean was sitting on the couch, twisting and untwisting the cap on his water bottle. He had the best posture of anyone I’d ever seen, but I wondered if he ever relaxed. Not that this was a relaxing situation.

  “Sure,” Dean said. “I knew. Everyone knew. It still would have been nice if she had asked me, though.”

  The longer I spent with Dean, the more I realized he was more complex than I had originally given him credit for. He wasn’t quiet because he had nothing to say, he was just more reserved than me. Okay, compared to me, everyone was more reserved. But I was starting to pick up on his tells. The twitch of his lip meant he thought something was funny; he flared his nostrils when he was thinking about something he didn’t like; his eyebrows dipped in the middle when he was talking about his mom.

  “I would have said yes, of course,” he added.

  “Of course,” I echoed. But the way Dean narrowed his eyes made me wonder if he would have wanted to say yes.

  Dean cleared his throat. “Either way, it’s going to be interesting for whoever winds up in the White House.”

  “‘Interesting’ hardly covers it,” I said. “Like, am I gonna have any privacy at all? I’ll have to move to DC and start a new school for the last five months of senior year. How am I gonna make friends when everyone I meet’ll have to be cleared by Secret Service agents? And it’s not like I’ll be able to sneak out to go to parties.”

  “You seem like you’re pretty good at making friends,” Dean said. “I’m sure you’ll be okay.”

  “But what about dating? I’ve never even had a boyfriend. How am I going to navigate all that?”

  Dean shrugged it off. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Not a big deal?” I knew there were bigger, more important issues than me getting a boyfriend, but sometimes it felt like it was the only thing on my mind. Ever since I’d come out, I’d been dreaming of my first perfect date and my first perfect kiss and my first perfect . . . everything else. It felt like a big deal to me, and I didn’t understand how Dean could be so blasé about it. “I suppose it’s because you’ve gone on lots of dates.”

  “No.”

  “No girlfriends or boyfriends or anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “And you’re not worried you’re going to miss the opportunity to find that perfect special someone who’s out there waiting for you and without whom you’ll wind up alone and lonely for the rest of your life, living with a bunch of shelter dogs and eating cake frosting right out of the container?”

  Dean chuckled and rolled his eyes, which for him was the equivalent of boisterous laughter. “I’m really not. And you shouldn’t be either. I mean, first of all, you’re assuming that everyone in the world wants to fall in love and that sex is the end-all-be-all of the teenage experience. It’s not.”

  I let out an exasperated sigh. “I know. But I wasn’t assuming it about everyone.”

  “Just me.”

  “Wait, let me guess. Sex isn’t your thing?” I threw it out there as a joke because I had assumed Dean was as obsessed with guns, girls, and glory as the majority of voters expected the seventeen-year-old son of the Republican candidate for president to be.

  Dean cocked his head to the side and pursed his lips, pausing a moment before answering. “It’s not not my thing. Truthfully, I don’t know.”

  The admission caught me off guard, and I had a million questions. Was I the only person who knew? Was I the first person he’d ever admitted that to? What, exactly, had he even actually admitted to? Why had he told me? Was it because he knew I was gay? I didn’t ask those or any of the million other questions I had. Instead, I said, “Okay?” which Dean seemed to interpret as confusion.

  “Asexuality is a spectrum, right?” he said. “I’m somewhere on that spectrum, though I’m not sure where yet. There could be someone out there I might want to have sex with, but I’m honestly not in a hurry to find them.”

  This was blowing my mind. Hearing Dean Arnault admit he was on the asexual spectrum had totally made me forget that we were having this conversation because we were trapped in a room due to a potential threat to one or all of our parents’ lives. Nothing about Dean had made me think for a second that he was like me, and the more I thought about it, the more I wondered what else we might have in common.

  “So if there was someone,” I said, unable to keep myself from prying, “do you know what they might be like?”

  There was that twitch of the lip, that barely there smile. “Not yet. But I believe I’ll know them if I find them.”

  Dean’s answer was frustrating but also honest, and I couldn’t fault him for it. “Aren’t you afraid I might tell someone?”

  The easy expression Dean was wearing slipped, and he flared his nostrils. “Are you planning to tell someone?”

  “No! I just—”

  “Because if you tell anyone, I’ll simply deny it. I’ll say you made it up, and no one will believe you.” Dean looked like he was on the verge of a nuclear meltdown. His face went pale and he looked a bit sick. I don’t know if he’d meant to tell me his secret, if it’d slipped out due to the stress of worrying about our parents, or if he’d just needed to tell someone and I was the first person he thought he could remotely trust with the information, but I didn’t want him thinking I was going to run off and blab to everyone about him.

  “I’m not gonna tell,” I said. “I wouldn’t do that to you or anyone. Not ever.”

  “Promise?” Dean asked.

  “On my parents’ lives.” At that moment, I couldn’t have made a more serious pledge.

  Dean’s smile didn’t return, but he looked a little less freaked out. “Thank you.”

  Dean

  BEING TRAP
PED IN the greenroom with the son of my mother’s chief political rival while not being able to talk to my parents or discover anything about what was going on was terrifying. Neither Dre nor I could get a signal or connect to Wi-Fi, and it felt like we were completely cut off from the world. I was sure my parents would contact me if they could, which was what was worrying me. Something was either blocking cell signals or preventing my parents from using their phones. I hoped it was the former and prayed it wasn’t the latter.

  I was doing my best to project an exterior of calm because that’s what my mother would have expected me to do. She would have told me to lead by example, and I was trying, but it wasn’t easy. My fear felt too big for my body, and I wanted to scream it out, but doing so wouldn’t have helped my parents, and it would have probably upset Dre even more.

  “Are you scared?” Dre asked.

  “I used to have nightmares about situations like this when I was younger,” I said. “I’d seen protesters outside one of my mother’s rallies when she was running for governor, and there were these people screaming and yelling. I don’t even remember what they were saying, but I remember the hate in their eyes. It was the first time I realized people actually hated my mother and might want to hurt her, and I couldn’t stop being scared for her.” I cleared my throat.

  Dre was watching me curiously. When he didn’t reply immediately, I assumed I’d spooked him by revealing too much. But then he said, “I meant about coming out. Are you scared about what would happen if you came out?”

  I felt foolish and lowered my eyes.

  “For the record,” Dre said. “I’m scared for my parents too.”

  If I hadn’t been locked in that room, I would have made an excuse to leave and fled from the conversation. I was feeling vulnerable and embarrassed for telling Dre that story. But since I couldn’t leave, I did what any self-respecting southerner would have done. I pretended it had never happened.