Majesty

Nina sank onto the picnic blanket, which was spread out on the grass before the open-air stage. The amphitheater at the center of John Jay Park was completely packed, the ground covered in a multicolor quilt of beach towels and blankets. Conversations bubbled up around them, laughter rising lazily into the air like smoke.

“I’m so impressed you got Shakespeare in the Park tickets. What time did you have to get in line?” she asked.

Ethan stretched his arms overhead with an exaggerated sigh. “Six a.m. When you were still in bed, Sleeping Beauty.”

Nina smiled, though she worried the real reason Ethan had gotten up early was because he’d been lying in bed awake, his mind spinning with anxiety. She knew that Jeff still wouldn’t speak to him.

Though Jeff didn’t seem to be losing any sleep over it, from the photos Nina had seen on all the royal-obsessed blogs. He’d been out almost every night this week, in a group that included Sam and Marshall—and Daphne.

Nina and Ethan had been pointedly left off the guest list.

“Thanks for getting the tickets. I’m sure Romeo and Juliet in the park wasn’t your top choice for how to spend a Friday night,” she said, trying to sound upbeat.

“It’s okay; next week we can go to a movie. That I pick.”

“Oh goodie, something with lots of explosions and car chases.”

“Hey, give me some credit,” Ethan objected. “I like zombie movies, too.”

Nina still couldn’t believe that he’d waited in a five-hour line for her. Jeff would never have done that, but then, he wouldn’t have needed to. He could have gotten backstage passes with the snap of his fingers—and then they would’ve had to stay backstage all night. The Prince of America couldn’t exactly sit out here in the middle of a crowd. It would be a security and logistical nightmare.

One of the actors walked out onstage, and Ethan sat up, rummaging in his backpack before emerging with a pair of square-rimmed glasses.

“I love when you wear those,” she murmured. He looked so adorably nerdy in glasses.

“Can you keep it down?” Ethan nudged her with his elbow. “Some of us are trying to enjoy the play.”

Nina had read Romeo and Juliet in middle school, had seen the movie version where Juliet wore a ridiculous pair of white angel wings. Tonight, though, the story felt different. Now, instead of sighing over the beautiful language, Nina found herself upset that Romeo and Juliet wanted to be together at all.

Relationships simply couldn’t work when people came from opposite worlds. No matter how long they managed to keep it secret, circumstances would eventually tear them apart. And it would be so much worse than if they’d never found each other in the first place.

In real life, love against the odds wasn’t enough. All it had done for Nina was hurt the people she cared about—caused the paparazzi to harass her parents, gave complete strangers the right to call her ugly names. In real life, impossible love caused more pain than it did joy.

As the play ended, the amphitheater broke out in applause, and Nina came to herself slowly. She’d nearly forgotten where she was. She wiped at her cheeks, a little embarrassed that she’d teared up.

“You okay?” Ethan asked, as everyone around them began packing up their things.

She hugged her knees to her chest. “Ethan. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“What?” he asked, bewildered. “You haven’t hurt me.”

“But you are hurting! And we both managed to hurt Jeff! We shouldn’t have ever…”

Ethan leaned forward. “What are you saying, that we shouldn’t have ever gotten together?”

“I don’t know!” She closed her eyes, her heart aching. She hated that she’d put Ethan in a position where he could lose his best friend. That she’d put Jeff in a position where he already had.

Ethan wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Nina took a deep breath, feeling her back rise and fall beneath his touch.

“Jeff will get over this—maybe not right away, but eventually. We’ve been friends for too long for him not to forgive this.” Ethan sounded confident, but Nina had a feeling he was trying to convince himself as much as her.

“Of course it would have been better if he’d learned the truth from us,” Ethan went on. “But I’d be lying if I said I regret that he found out. We would have told him soon anyway. And in the meantime, you and I can stop hiding.”

“We haven’t been hiding,” Nina pointed out. If they had, the reporter wouldn’t have ever found out about them.

“I don’t mean on campus. I mean with the royal family.” Ethan let his hand fall to the base of her spine. “I was thinking we could go to Beatrice’s wedding together.”

Nina blinked.

“Ethan,” she said hesitantly, “do you realize what you’re saying? This will be the most media-heavy event of our lives. If that reporter wanted to make a story out of nothing but campus rumors, think of how much worse it’ll be when we’re at the wedding together!” She shook her head. “We were both invited; can’t we just hang out at the reception without giving everyone a story?”

“I don’t think we’ll be a story,” Ethan argued. “The other guests are all more important and gossip-worthy. Who’s going to talk about you and me when there are foreign royalty around? Besides,” he added, in a lower tone, “I want to be there with you.”

Nina wanted to be there with Ethan, too. Yet she wasn’t ready to be in the spotlight again, her photo printed in the tabloids. She had worked so hard to dissociate herself from all the gossip, and if she went to the wedding with Ethan, it would start chasing her all over again.

“I’ll think about it,” she promised, and glanced toward the river.

A few hundred yards away, on the edge of the park, stood the oxidized green form of the Statue of Liberty. Floodlights illuminated the statue’s face, casting her features in a golden-green blaze. She looked more dynamic from this angle, as if she’d been caught in a swirl of motion—as if she’d picked up the torch and was about to strike someone with it, to defend liberty itself.

Nina knew that when the French had shipped the statue over, it had almost ended up in another city instead: in Boston or Philadelphia or even that regional shipping city, New York. Of course, Congress had insisted that it stay right here in the nation’s capital, where it belonged.

“Want to go up?” she asked abruptly.

When Ethan realized where she meant, he groaned. “Right now? Why?”

“Why not?” Nina answered. It was a very Sam sort of reply.

The woman at the ticket office didn’t bother charging them for tickets, since the monument closed within half an hour. “This late, you’ll have it to yourselves,” she said with a wink.

Sure enough, when Ethan and Nina reached the elevator, they ran into several groups of people on their way down, but no one else heading up.

“This is so unbelievably cheesy of you,” Ethan muttered, though he didn’t actually sound displeased.

“That’s me, the queen of all things cheesy and touristy. Get used to it.”

No one else was on the circular viewing platform at the top. It was several degrees cooler up here than it had been at the statue’s base. Nina stepped forward, the wind whipping her hair.

Washington wasn’t a beautiful city, not the way Paris or even London was. It was too messy, having grown through the centuries without much of a central plan. One-way streets tangled and looped over each other in blithe confusion, Revolutionary monuments standing next to clunky new housing developments with rooftop pools.

That was Washington, Nina thought, a city of contradictions: crowded and cruel and thrilling and lovely all at once.

“Behold, my son. Everything the light touches is your kingdom,” Ethan growled behind her, and she burst out laughing.

“Aren’t you glad I made us come?” She spread her hands out. “I bet you haven’t been up here since your fourth-grade field trip!”

“Actually, my mom used to take me up here sometimes. She was always thinking of activities for us to do,” Ethan explained. “Dragging me all over the capital to national landmarks and museums—teaching me history, but also teaching me who I was. As if she needed to make up for whatever sense of identity I was supposed to have gotten from my dad.”

Nina looked over. The moonlight gilded Ethan’s profile, tracing the curve of his upper lip, the straight line of his nose.

“You can tell me about it, if you want.” She reached for his hand. Ethan didn’t answer, but squeezed her fingers. She took that as a sign to keep going.

“I know what it’s like to grow up with a nontraditional family,” she said quietly. “To be the person hiding in the nurse’s office with a fake headache on Bring Your Dad to School Day. To have people look at us like we’re somehow missing a piece. I know what it’s like to grow up knowing that your family is different, and sometimes feeling ashamed that it’s different, and then hating yourself for being ashamed, because you love your family more than anything, even if it doesn’t look like everyone else’s.”

She dared a glance at him. “Sorry. I don’t know why I said all that.”