The Royal We (3 page)

Cilla scanned the crowd, which wasn’t easy, given that the pub was essentially a long chain of cramped rooms.

“I wish Gaz would invest in a stepstool,” she groused. “His hair would be so easy to spot if he weren’t so bloody short.”

“I think we walked right past them,” I said, gesturing toward the larger of the two front rooms. “Half of the girls in here are loitering over there.”

We peered to our right, and eventually I recognized Nick’s head, and saw that it was bent at an angle toward a group that included golden-blond India Bolingbroke. Standing to either side, like wardens, were Gaz and Joss, chatting up a gloomy guy with six rings in his nose.

“Oi!” Clive called out behind us, coming from the bar and carrying a large tray of shot glasses and Guinness pints. “You’re just in time.”

We let him pass through the crowded, uneven doorway—precious cargo, after all—then pushed through the crush until our hands found the shot glasses.

“Yikes,” I said, pulling back a moment. “I wasn’t expecting it to be warm.”

Nick reached in and took a pint and a shot for India.

“You chase the warm with the cold,” he instructed. “Right, all, this is Bex’s first chaser. Let’s have a toast.”

“Three cheers to the lemons!” Gaz shouted, thrusting his hand in the air so hard that he spilled some whiskey on his cheek.

Cilla nudged me. “See what I mean?” she said. “Not a bloody lick of sense.”

“How about a real toast?” Clive interjected. “One that uses words in a sensible order.”

I held up my shot and thought for a second. “Thanks, everyone, for the warm welcome. Sorry about the Revolution.”

Nick hoisted his pint glass. “We’ll get you next time.”

The warm whiskey went down like sweet, spicy fire. I gulped the Guinness as quickly as I could, and put down my empty glass to see Nick watching approvingly.

“Joss,” he said. “You’re officially spared from The Glug this year. We’ve got a ringer.”

Joss turned away from her date, who looked like Edward Scissorhands up close but without the roiling inner life. “I didn’t want to do it anyway,” she said. “College-sponsored drinking games are the tool of the patriarchy, right, Tank?” Then she nodded toward the door. “Heads up, Clive. Penelope Six-Names, your four o’clock.”

“Not again,” he said, gesturing at an eager-looking girl with straw-like bangs, a sunburn, and two large, full glasses. “Six-Names knows better than to bring him a drink we didn’t see the bartender pour.”

“I have no idea what anyone is talking about,” I said to no one in particular as Clive slipped away to head off Six-Names at the pass.

“Never you mind about The Glug, you’ll soon find out,” Nick said. Then he went very still. “This song is brilliant,” he said.

Everyone around Nick seemed to agree, and pretty soon, our entire room was screaming the chorus of “Wannabe.” Nick smiled wide and shouted along, but—much like how he did not chug his Guinness, and wholly skipped the shot—he let his friends dance and rage around him, freely idiotic, like youthful, well-educated court jesters sans the belled hats. I sensed a reserve in his body language, suggesting he wasn’t as comfortable outside the safety of Pembroke’s walls, and I wasn’t sure if that was natural shyness or the hesitation that comes from knowing you’re not just in the spotlight, you
are
the spotlight. For me, partying next to Mr. July in the previous year’s unsanctioned Hot Princes of the World calendar ended up being no weirder than walking into a Cornell house party and bumping into half the basketball team. Well-wishers, limelight seekers, curious fans—they’re everywhere. The only difference was that this particular center of attention had a lot more self-control, and a bigger birthright.

And a more protective posse. That night, and many times since, I noticed how seamlessly Gaz and Clive, the PPOs, and a few other acquaintances from Nick’s Eton days knew how to close ranks, no matter where we were (The Bird was a favorite because the small rooms made it easier to keep an eye on their quarry). Girls and guys alike sidled up wearing their ancestries or their social standings on their sleeves, and the lads gracefully deflected them—they were like a human condom, strategically positioned to keep everything treacherous out of the hot zone—which left Nick free to chat up girls who didn’t seem like they wanted something from him beyond what any young thing might want from an attractive guy at a bar. The whole operation ran smoothly enough that it never got in the way unless you were one of the misguided missiles seeking royal heat. India Bolingbroke was on the inside circle; Penelope Six-Names, conversely, peered over Gaz’s shoulder and protested, “I just want to say hi! I’m family! We’re third cousins!”

“
Everyone’s
a third cousin,” Gaz said, twirling her and dipping her with surprising grace.

My edges were fuzzy, thanks to the alcohol. Everyone’s edges were fuzzy a lot of the time at Oxford, which is probably why most of these details never leaked: People think they’re telling the truth, but no one can remember for sure. Sometimes when we went out, I’d get a phone number written on my hand, and then forget and wake up with only half of it still there. Other times I’d stumble home on my own. But, more often than I ever intended, I’d end up with Clive. I had no interest in a relationship that would constrict my time in England—which makes me laugh out loud now, given that I ended up in the most constricting relationship
in
England—and it wasn’t the shrewdest move to jump into bed with a guy living practically on top of me, but the whiskey wasn’t always on my side. Fortunately, Clive was. He swore leaving Oxford with a steady girlfriend would make it too hard to build a serious journalism career, because he’d need freedom to chase a story (or presumably, an attractive source), making our friends-with-benefits arrangement mutually satisfying.

Mostly. Making out with Clive sometimes felt like sucking face with a math experiment. He fixated on a weird numerical pattern, nine turns of the tongue clockwise and nine turns the other way, like he’d memorized instructions from a magazine. It seemed odd at first, a guy with so much else going for him having so little game, but the longer I watched him with Nick the more I understood Clive did himself no favors. He took his role as Nick’s wingman-in-chief almost as seriously as his journalistic aspirations. In fact, generations of men like Clive had spent their lives making sure their own Nicks didn’t get snookered by opportunists or social climbers or enemies, nor poisoned, nor impulsively married to the peasant girl selling flowers on Tottenham Court Road. Whether Nick wanted to be or not, he was the sun, and everyone revolved around him. And anyone who resented this arrangement had the very fabric of the universe working against them: Like me and Lacey, like gravity itself, it simply was.

W
hen Nick and I got engaged, a newspaper column claimed I’d come to Oxford to sweep Nick off his feet as a way of legitimizing my father’s fridge-furniture empire to the world—which is patently absurd, not least because the Coucherator was already the top-selling appliance in Luxembourg. The truth is, I rarely thought about Nick at first, and saw him even less. He’d been absent from communal meals in the Dining Hall, and wasn’t particularly gregarious during passing encounters in the hallway. I got more information from the papers than from living with him: There was a story about him spending his reclusive mother’s birthday with her at Prince Richard’s country estate, Trewsbury House, complete with grainy photos of him exchanging a terse-looking handshake with his father (
NICK AND DICK: NOT SO THICK?
the headline wondered); and a gossipy tidbit claiming he’d gotten his teeth whitened after an heiress named Davinia snubbed his summer advances because she thought they were too yellow. Clive, who seemed to relish having the inside scoop, dissected these for me at length whenever we walked to lunch or the market (he swore Nick’s teeth
were
lighter). I knew Lacey was dying of curiosity from her room at Cornell, so I dutifully listened for repeatable tidbits, but frankly, I had other priorities. The first of which involved giving Lady Bollocks no reason to poison my Weetabix.

And the second of which should have been school, but this was my first trip overseas, and everything outside academia felt so much more alluring to me: the identical array of gothic arches on the Bodleian Library; the Bridge of Sighs, an ornate, arcing enclosure gracefully connecting two parts of Hertford College; the snarky gargoyles atop the spire of the town’s biggest church. They begged to be sketched, and I answered whenever I could, often in the peaceful, chilly morning hours when I could pick a spot and let the town wake up around me. Drawing has always taken me out of my own head. At Oxford, it helped me be in the moment completely, instead of wondering what Lacey was up to, or which baseball announcers were bugging Dad the most. Despite how welcoming most people had been, I missed my family. I missed knowing which way to look before crossing the street. I missed network TV and American football and the way Diet Coke tastes in the States. But with a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of me, I’m home.

On the last morning of First Week, I got up predawn and headed across the street to Christ Church. Ostensibly I wanted to draw the glow of sunrise over the college’s meadow, all wild grass and pastured cows and squawking geese, but the Iowan in me also itched to stretch her legs, and my body demanded cardiovascular activity to offset the noble sport of drinking I’d undertaken. I started down the mud-and-gravel trail, under the canopy of tall, spiky trees whose leaves were preparing for their seasonal suicide leap, and snaked around the river—blissfully alone with my sketchbook and my thoughts, interrupted only by the occasional bark of the coxswain and the rhythmic splash of the crew team’s oars reaching me through the mist. The road led me past a quaint folly bridge arching over the Isis that would fit perfectly into a series I was doing on the curves of Oxford. I hopped off the path and scrambled around the wooded edge in search of a flat rock to sit on, so lost in trying not to fall over a tree’s root that instead I tripped over the outstretched legs of a man in a hooded sweatshirt. I let out a shrill yelp and he leapt to his feet, knocking over his light and landing in a weird defensive position.

“Shit!” he said.

I squinted at him. “
Nick?
”

In that instant, the hood on his sweatshirt slipped to reveal his face still frozen in a comical O of surprise. He had been sitting on a plaid blanket, surrounded by papers and books, as if he were on the quad at Pembroke in the afternoon and not a clammy field at dawn. Unsure what to do, I bent to pick up one of the papers strewn about the grass, which had flipped and scattered when he jumped.

“Are you doing a crossword?” I asked, bemused. “It’s barely even light out.”

Nick gave a shy
I’m busted
shake of the head, and pushed back his hood completely. He was pink-cheeked. “Yeah, the
Times
cryptic,” he said.

“
Cryptic
is one word for this,” I agreed.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

It occurred to me, as his breath normalized, that he might’ve thought I’d followed him.

“I’m just on a run,” I explained, gesturing feebly to my athletic clothes and earth-splattered shins. “Well, more of an, um, art jog. I came out to sketch.” Then I froze. “Am I in someone’s crosshairs right now?”

Nick relaxed. “You’ve not been shot yet, so that’s a good sign,” he said. “I’ll have them drop their weapons if you can answer a clue or two. It’s all tricks and wordplay and it’s impossible.” He handed me a printed sheet and pointed to one. “Like this. ‘New pay cut with Post Office work is loony.’ Gibberish.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m still trying to figure out why your salacious secret life outside Pembroke involves word puzzles,” I said. “It’s not very scandalous.”

“It would be if anyone ever saw how blank these are.” Nick sighed, taking back the crossword. “Freddie is brilliant at them, and he goads me about it. So I have to practice in private until I’m respectably competent. Someday I am going to finish one before he does.”

“And this is your only way to do it in peace, because you don’t ever really get to be alone,” I said, not realizing until too late that I’d worked this out aloud.

Nick looked surprised, but pleasantly. “The PPOs and I have a pact—they let me lose them once a week, and I pretend not to know that they followed me here anyway,” he said. “As long as I’ve no idea
where
they are, I mostly forget about them.”

“Well, I should leave you to it, then,” I said. “I don’t want to step all over your one moment of privacy.”

He dropped back down onto the blanket. “Oh, don’t go racing away on my account. I’ve got loads of coffee to share and you look like you need it.”

“What, no morning tea?”

“I am going to tell you something extremely dramatic that would rock the monarchy to the core,” Nick said, opening the Thermos and pouring into the lid. “I am not a fan of tea. Gran keeps insisting that I’m simply not drinking it properly. After a while I gave in and told her she was right. It is not worth it to argue with the Queen about her PG Tips.”

“So your secret perversions are crosswords and coffee,” I said, settling in beside him and taking the steaming cup. “Truly depraved.”

“My father would agree with you.” But that time he wasn’t smiling.

“My dad and I once had a fight because I refuse to put ketchup on my hot dogs,” I said.

“That’s possibly the most American sentence I’ve ever heard.”

“I am possibly the most American person at Pembroke,” I pointed out. “But rest easy. We made up. The hole in our relationship was patched with Cracker Jack.”

Nick’s face was blank.

“Candied popcorn, with peanuts,” I clarified. “They sell it at baseball games. There’s always a prize inside, like a ring or something. I keep all mine—one for every game Dad and I ever went to together. I must have fifty by now.”

I felt Dad’s absence right then. Against all odds, the Cubs had a shot at winning the division, and it was hard for us to have our traditional pregame panic attacks, thanks to the time difference and the fact that he kept accidentally hitting send on all his emails in mid-sentence.

As if reading my mind, Nick asked, “So you two are close, then?”

“Yeah, my dad’s the best,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest. “We like to road-trip to away games and eat the grossest snacks we can find along the way, just the two of us.”

I picked at my shoe, swallowing a lump in my throat. Nick seemed to sense that my mood was shifting, and picked up the crossword again.

“‘Decrepit and remote cathedral church,’ two words, five and four letters,” he read from the crossword sheet. He frowned. “It’s an anagram, I think.”

“Do you honestly enjoy doing those, or is this just a competition?”

“When you get one right, you feel like the most brilliant person alive, which I could do with a bit more often,” he said. “But it mostly boils down to a competition with Freddie.”

“I know how that feels,” I said. “Lacey is really competitive, and she usually wins.”

“I find it hard to believe that you’re the loser, landing here at Oxford,” Nick said.

“I’m totally lucky to be here,” I said. “But she didn’t even apply. She claims pre-med does not allow for a year abroad.” It was a direct quote. “You know, when we applied to colleges, I didn’t think it made a difference where I went if what I wanted was art, so I followed her to Cornell. But after a while, that felt like her experience, not mine. Sometimes I wonder…”

Nick let me trail off.

“I’ve never told anyone this, actually,” I said. “But in eighth grade, Lacey cheated at algebra. Math was her one weakness, and I was pretty good at it. She spent the entire night before the test freaked out that she was going to fail, or worse, get a lower grade than I did for the first time ever. And then halfway through the test, I noticed her copying mine. Of course our grades came back identical, with all the same mistakes, but she told the teacher I’d copied
her
.”

Nick’s blue eyes got wide.

“Yeah. Pretty ballsy,” I said. “But I knew she wasn’t being malicious. She just didn’t know how to handle the role reversal when she wasn’t doing better than I was.”

“So what did you do?”

“I took the fall,” I said. “Told them I was afraid of being branded the stupid twin. They felt sorry for me, I got a month of detention, and after that, I threw a couple of tests so it’d look like I was making steady improvement.”

“That’s very stand-up of you,” Nick said, pouring me more coffee.

“It was also cowardly of me,” I said. “She was so grateful, she did all my chores for the month that I was grounded, and loaned me her favorite shirt, which…in Lacey currency, she might as well have given me gold bars.” I smiled at the memory. “It stresses her out when things don’t come easily, and I’ve always hated seeing her like that. But I probably didn’t need to be
that
laid-back. The cheating thing was the first time I
volunteered
myself into the sacrificial role, and now it’s almost like I’m stuck there.”

“Is that why you came all the way to Oxford, do you think?” Nick asked.

“I’m not sure I ever thought of it that way,” I said. “Maybe. I love being a twin, but people always want to define you in relation to each other, and I guess we slip into that trap, too.”

“I certainly know that feeling,” Nick said, tapping his crossword wryly.

“Not to get all philosophical on you before breakfast,” I teased.

“Yes, I prefer my philosophy with a side of toast, but we can’t have everything.”

A light breeze ruffled Nick’s crossword pages. He clamped a foot down on them and cocked his head contemplatively.

“I’m sorry it’s taken this long for us to have an actual conversation,” he said.

“It’s all good. We’re talking now. Even if it was mostly me yapping about my sister.”

“I feel like I have to be so careful all the time,” he said. “I have a non-hilarious conversation just once, and then the next day the papers write that I’m ‘Nick the Prick,’ because I wasn’t grinning like a madman. But if I’m having too much fun, I’m a drunken lout.”

Nick’s bitter tone, it turns out, was because both of these had already happened.

“It gets exhausting. I forget how to be sometimes when I’m not
on
,” Nick continued. “That’s why I like coming out here at dawn. I have insomnia but I can’t roam the halls like some medieval ghost when my room starts to feel constricting. I have to get
out
.”

“Well. You never have to be
on
with me. I promise,” I said, kicking out my legs and lying down on the blanket. “You can do your crosswords and drink your heathen coffee and chill. You’re not
my
sovereign.”

“Yes, your ancestors saw to that.” He grinned, stretching out next to me, folding his arms under his head. Then he jerked upward.

“Notre Dame,” he said. He felt around for the crossword and glanced at it. “Yes, ‘decrepit’ means it’s an anagram of ‘and remote,’ and you get Notre Dame, in France.”

“I’m taking credit for that,” I said. “All this philosophizing unlocked your potential.”

He scrawled the answer into the boxes in pen. “Nonsense. I’m just extremely clever.”

“Not clever enough to do those in pencil,” I said, tapping a portion of the page where several answers were angrily scribbled out.

“I have confidence in me,” he said.

I blinked. “Is that a
Sound of Music
quote?”

“Er, what? Maybe. I don’t know. Yes,” he admitted. “They show it here every year on Christmas. But we watch in secret because Gran thinks Christmas Day should be reserved for prayer and reflection. She was steaming mad one year when she caught us, but Freddie got us off the hook by arguing any movie with nuns in it counts as a religious experience.”

I laughed. “I like him already.”

“Everyone does,” Nick said. “You’ll meet him soon enough.”

Our eyes met. After a beat, I nodded. It was a casual statement, couching an assumption of friendship and permanence. It was also a subtle expression of trust. Nick likes to tell me that’s the moment he knew, but he’s as revisionist as
The Bexicon
. He didn’t feel a lightning bolt as we sat on the cold ground passing around a Thermos, and neither did I. What I
did
feel was welcome. Sitting there, thousands of miles from my usual life, I’d been scooped into his.