Beatrice was startled into laughing. Connor glanced over at her with something akin to surprise.
Perhaps it was because of that laugh that he slowed his steps and paused to examine a series of graphic art prints: the ones from the fifties that looked like pages ripped straight from a comic book.
Beatrice came to stand next to him. “You’re a comics guy?”
She saw Connor debate how much of himself to reveal. “My mom is,” he said at last. “When I was growing up, she worked as a graphic artist. She did sketches for some of the major superhero comics: Poison Rose, the Ranger, Captain Storm.”
“I bet you loved getting free comics,” Beatrice ventured.
He glanced back at one of the prints, lined in electric-blue ink. “She used to sketch me a comic strip of my own whenever she had the time. The Adventures of Connor. I had a different superpower each week—flying, invisibility, high-tech battle suits. She’s the reason I wanted to apply for the Guard. I thought it was as close as I could get to being a real-life superhero. Not just the physical stuff, but also the sense of … honor, I guess.” He shrugged, as if unsure why he’d admitted all of that.
“That makes sense,” Beatrice said quietly. Even if she hadn’t seen all the comic-book movies, she knew that superheroes operated according to a code of morality that felt almost archaic in the modern world. They protected the weak, served something much greater than themselves. No wonder Connor had felt called to the Revere Guard.
“Your mom sounds really special,” she went on.
Connor nodded. “She would like you.” It was a casual enough statement, but there was something else folded into it: a promise, or at least a possibility.
Things between them shifted after that—slowly, but they shifted all the same. Connor began sitting next to Beatrice during her lectures, instead of in the row behind her, then debated the course material with her on the walk back to her dorm. They traded books. He had a wicked sense of humor, and did impressions of her professors or classmates that made her laugh so hard she cried. Sometimes, in unguarded moments—when they were running along the Charles River and he challenged her to a race, or when Beatrice insisted that they go to the frozen-yogurt shop and he dared her to try every flavor—he seemed almost playful.
And when he accompanied her to royal functions, Connor no longer stood stone-faced to one side. Now he caught Beatrice’s eye whenever someone made a bad joke or an outlandish remark, forcing her to look away lest she burst out laughing. They even developed a silent system, using her purse as a signaling device. If she slid it back and forth from one forearm to another, it meant she wanted to leave, at which point Connor would walk over with a fabricated excuse and help her escape.
As time went on, Beatrice slowly pieced together Connor’s story. He’d grown up in West Texas, in a town called El Real—“How typically Texan to call a town real, as if the rest of the world is just made up,” Connor had joked. His dad worked as a post office clerk, and his younger sister, Kaela, had just started college.
The more she learned about Connor, the more Beatrice revealed about herself: her opinions of people, her frustrations. She attempted jokes. As strange and unexpected as it might be, she’d begun to think of Connor as her friend.
And Beatrice had never had a close friend, not the way that Sam had Nina or Jefferson had Ethan. Even in elementary school, she’d struggled to form connections with her classmates. Half the time she had no idea what they were talking about—their references to TV shows or Disneyland were completely lost on her, as if they were speaking a bewildering foreign language. The other girls were unerringly polite, but always held themselves at a distance. It was as though they could smell her inherent otherness, like wild cats.
Eventually Beatrice had given up on trying to make friends. It was just easier to keep to herself, to seek the approbation of adults rather than that of her peers.
Until Connor, she hadn’t realized what a relief it was, having someone who knew her so well. Someone she could simply talk to, without having to weigh every last word before she spoke.
It had been jarring when she graduated, and they left the informality of Harvard to come back to court, with all its etiquette and expectations. Beatrice had secretly feared that things between her and Connor might change. But while he did start calling her Your Royal Highness in public, in private they slipped right back into their easy camaraderie.
“You’re so quiet,” Connor said now, interrupting the princess’s thoughts. His eyes met hers in the mirror. “What’s going on, Bee?”
“My parents want me to interview potential husbands tonight.”
The words rattled out violently into the room, like the discharge of musketry during the annual Presentation of the Troops.
Beatrice wasn’t sure what had possessed her to say it so bluntly. She hadn’t wanted to talk about this with Connor at all. Which was foolish, really, given that he knew practically everything else about her: that she hated bananas, and called her grandmother every Sunday, and had dreams of her teeth falling out whenever she got stressed.
Why did it feel so strange, then, to tell Connor that her parents wanted her to start thinking about marriage?
Maybe her subconscious had made her say it, hoping to gauge his reaction—to elicit a flare of jealousy.
Connor stared at her with a curious expression, tinged with something that might have been disbelief. “Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You’re going to meet some guys that your parents have picked out and then marry one of them?”