The Royal We (4 page)

N
ick’s serious blue eyes stared deeply into mine. “Does it hurt? Do you want to stop?”

He was worried about my comfort, even in the heat of the moment.

“I’m great,” I panted, desperately trying not to stare directly up the Royal Nostrils. “Just another Sunday.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Nick said. “Your performance is extremely important to this country. No pressure.”

I did feel pressure, but mostly in my brain. Gaz and Nick were undefeated at The Glug, and their streak rested on the newbie’s shoulders. Which were upended in a handstand position, my palms flat on a table that kept me off the ground, while Cilla and Clive held my legs.

Nick straightened and nodded to the adjudicator, a brown-haired guy with a reedy beard and a giant stuffed lemon on his head.

“Right, the Gazholes are set,” said the Lemonhead (which is actually the job’s official name). “And the BeatNicks are ready. Let the finals begin in three, two, one…glug!”

A slim hose was shoved in my mouth, Nick tilted the Pimm’s vat, and I started to drink.

The colleges at Oxford are creative and saucy in their social traditions. Worcester College used to do a Half-Naked Half Hour every Wednesday in the library. In late October, on the day British Summer Time changes to Greenwich Mean Time, Merton College holds a ceremony in which students claim to mend the space-time continuum by walking around backward in formal dress while drinking port. And legend has it that Lincoln College, physically linked to Brasenose College by a locked door, centuries ago barred entry to a Brasenose student who was fleeing a mob; as a faint apology for getting that person brutally killed, Lincoln opens the door to Brasenose for five minutes on Ascension Day during Easter week and serves any incoming students free beer…that has been lightly poisoned with ground-up ivy, because why
not
.

One could argue Pembroke’s indulgence in insanity, The Glug, also constitutes attempted murder by alcohol. The legend goes that in 1878, a surprise two feet of snow began falling during Pembroke’s traditional Second Sunday Party on the quad (at the beginning, accordingly, of Second Week—celebrating being that much closer to the
end
of term), and The Glug was invented as a way to get hammered quickly and stay warm enough to continue the outdoor party tradition. It involves teams of five competing elimination-style to see who can guzzle the most from their upended jug of Pimm’s without breaking lip-lock with the straw, vomiting, or passing out cold—like the posh English cousin to a keg stand. Once you tap out, by choice or biology, you then have to pass The Reckoning: a full thirty seconds without falling. It is the kind of insane, irresponsible, potentially fatal activity that is catnip to college kids, and Joss—who’d thrown up three times last year—seemed glad to retire. Lady Bollocks refused to participate entirely.

“Pimm’s is to be
sipped
. It’s what separates us from the hooligans,” she snapped when she caught Gaz coaching me in the hall. She’d aimed the last word at me.

“Don’t worry about Bea,” Gaz counseled. “She is allergic to fun.”

She also had a point. The Glug was about as regal as a root canal. Fortunately, we sailed quickly through the early rounds, and now we were in the finals.

And really buzzed.

I was the leadoff hitter, so to speak. Despite never getting used to the discomfiting presence of a judge staring at my mouth at close range, I glugged for a solid thirty-one seconds—the record is a superhuman one minute and four seconds—and then passed The Reckoning with ease. I had out-chugged Penelope Six-Names by twenty seconds.

“Suck it, BeatNicks!” I whooped, as Cilla let out a howl of glee. We then performed a triumphant chest bump that ended with me belching involuntarily as we yelped in pain.
The Bexicon
nailed it again: There was no more delicate paragon of womanhood at Oxford that year than I.

“That was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Gaz announced, as Clive and Nick about fell over laughing.

“Which part?” Cilla wheezed. “The bumping, the burping, or the mashed boobs?”

“Yes,” Gaz replied serenely.

Nick and I attempted a high five. I swung wildly and missed.

“A classic case of Pimm’s Blindness,” he laughed. “So tragic in one so young.”

“I think it’s more that some of my brain cells just exploded.”

“Try again,” he said, raising up my arm. “If you watch the other person’s elbow at the last second, you’ll never miss.”

We high-fived with a satisfying smack.

“Genius!” I said. “Lacey will love that.”

“No, sorry, it’s a state secret. Very sensitive government information,” he said.

I felt arms wrap around me from behind. Clive lifted me up and whirled me around before setting me back on my feet.

“Clive!” Cilla shouted as I struggled to regain my balance. “Never spin a Glugger until half an hour after The Glug.”

“Now you’ve done it,” Gaz said. “She’ll be too Brahms’d to stand up at the trophy ceremony.”

“Sorry,” Clive said, steadying me. “But that was ace. That record is going down today.”

Unfortunately, Clive had barely gone up when he got penalized for breaking the lip-lock rule. Cilla and Gaz more than made up for it, though, and after the BeatNicks’ best player fell twice during The Reckoning, we’d built an impenetrable lead of more than a minute.

“Go on, Nicky boy,” Gaz said, rubbing together his hands. “Stick it to ’em.”

A terrified-looking guy called Terrance, lean as a toothpick and just as pointy, approached the table. He was an alternate—his older brother had partied too hard the night before—and though Nick’s turn was a formality at this point, Terrance’s team clearly expected its last Glugger to make a massive fool of himself, and the poor kid knew it. He offered Nick a wobbly handshake, and somewhere, Popeye and Twiggy doubtless took deep, meditative breaths as Nick was hoisted upside down…and drank for a pathetic seven seconds.

“Must not have eaten enough,” he said once he was upright again.

“After all your training?” moaned Gaz. “We could’ve made history! I bet thirty quid on you to crack a minute!”

I could swear Nick winked at me, but it was so slight, I may have imagined it. Terrance turned purple when he realized what happened, and when he was righted fifteen seconds later, he was roundly cheered by the entire crowd for this small individual victory against both Glug royalty and the real thing.

“Well done! You thumped me,” Nick said, clapping Terrance on the back.

Terrance just nodded, looking as though he was trying very hard to keep an avalanche of Pimm’s from decorating Nick’s shoes.

“Bloody sportsmanship,” Gaz grumbled, even as the Lemonhead declared us the winners.

Gaz was mollified by the fact that, as the Glugger with the best time, we gave him the Glug Mug trophy—a giant bottle entirely papered over with old Pimm’s labels—to keep in his window facing the quad. By the time we folded our arms around each other for the team photo that would hang in the JCR, everyone’s spirits and blood-alcohol levels were equally high. I remember Clive wriggling in and giving me a firm, overlong kiss on the cheek, and as the camera flashed, I had the distinct feeling that I’d been marked.

So when a knock came at my door much later that night, I was surprised that it was not Clive but Nick, holding the Glug Mug in one hand and a large carryall in the other. He still wore the traditional Glug uniform of microscopic shorts and a sweat headband.

“I talked to Gaz,” he announced, “and we decided this should go to you. Consider it your Cy Young trophy.”

“For baseball’s best pitcher?”

“Unless the Internet lied to me,” Nick said. “A pitcher can also be called a
jug
, which you chugged very nicely at your first Glug, so the Mug…” He paused. “I think I just wrote a poem.”

“It was beautiful,” I said. “I will take my Cy Young award and streak the quad with it.”

“Precisely what Gaz had hoped, I’m sure,” Nick said. “And Mr. Young, too.”

The polite thing to do was to invite him in, but my brain boiled over on me—was there a protocol for this? Was it crass to encourage a royal to park his stately behind on an unmade bed, even when there was nowhere else to sit? Was Nick even allowed to be here, given that my room was not bulletproof?
Was
my room bulletproof? No one had given
me
a dossier.

I came up with a workaround.

“Where should I put it?” I asked, pushing the door wide and gesturing at the space, which was an avalanche of books and printed pages. Oxford prefers intimate, often one-on-one sessions with professors, rather than seminars. It sounds great, but there is nowhere to hide, and I was learning that the hard way. I’d promised myself I would return to the grind after The Glug, but naturally, I was too wasted to do anything but shuffle some papers around and then watch DVDs.

Nick strode confidently inside—etiquette problem solved—and put the trophy on my desk. “Are you actually studying after a Glug? That has to be a first.”

“It’s my special time with Hans Holbein,” I said, flopping dramatically onto my bed. “Which is a problem, because I just realized our discussion is supposed to be about Hans Holbein the
Younger
, so now I have to start over.”

“Just say this: ‘Hans Holbein the Younger is the man whose portraits of Nicholas’s corpulent great-great-great-something-or-other Henry the Eighth are routinely ignored by filmmakers who want him to be a chiseled Adonis,’” Nick offered. “And maybe these will help.”

He handed me the bag he’d been holding. I peered inside and saw a mélange of weird-yet-delicious American junk food: Cracker Jack, Twinkies, Chiken in a Biskit, a slightly crushed box of strawberry Pop-Tarts, and a crumbled bag of Bugles. It looked like someone ransacked a 7-Eleven.

“This is perfect,” I said. “This is
unbelievable
.”

Nick looked pleased. “It’s to combat homesickness,” he said. “When you talked about your sister, it was like your volume setting got turned down a bit. Not that it needed to be,” he amended. “You just seemed blue. So I looked up America’s most revolting-sounding snack food and had someone in my network of spies send me a package.”

“Ceres?” I asked around the foil Pop-Tart wrapping I was opening with my teeth.

“I would never reveal my sources,” Nick said. “More importantly, is that woman surfing on a coffin?”

He gestured toward my open laptop. I had forgotten to pause what I was watching on it.

“If that’s Holbein research, then I seriously underestimated him,” Nick said.

“Turns out you can’t watch a DVD and type at the same time, so obviously I prioritized,” I said. “And yes, she is. A coven buried her alive. Her vampire brothers blackmailed someone into breaking all magical bonds for five minutes, but
that
started a tsunami. She’s making the best of it.”

Nick stared at me. “Pause that,” he said, walking over and quietly shutting the door.

I obeyed, thinking of how Lacey would react to me watching
Devour
with a prince dressed more like one of the Royal Tenenbaums while I wore ratty pajama bottoms and a Cubs T-shirt with no bra. She would stroke out.

“Right,” Nick said, sinking onto my bed. “I need a complete account of what’s going on here. And not a word to Gaz or Clive, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

I scooted back on the bed to put a little social distance between us.

“Lacey promised to send me every new episode of our favorite show, which is this crazy-bad supernatural soap opera. I think the writers make all their decisions by throwing darts at a bulletin board,” I said. “There are vampires, werewolves, witches, one shape-shifter, a private investigator who can smell the future, and two panthers who seem like they know too much.
Actual
panthers, not CGI.”

Nick blinked. “Oh no. Night Nick is about to become obsessed with this.”

“Is that your insomniac side?” I guessed.

“More like his evil twin,” he said. “Freddie and I have a running joke about how once it gets late enough, Night Nick takes over, and Night Nick is a total bastard to Day Nick. He does things like watch TV for hours, instead of going to bed. Night Nick once watched all three
Lord
of the Rings
movies instead of resting up for an official appearance with Gran. Day Nick got his ears boxed for it.” He sighed. “At least those are good. Night Nick usually has the worst taste.”

This is true. He is the only person I know who has sought out every cut-rate sequel to every dance movie of the past twenty-odd years, and I once caught him voting in the finals of a web series called
So You Wanna Be the Next Real Housewife?
(“It will be a crime if Ashleigh doesn’t win this, Bex,” he’d told me seriously. “Just look at her lip implants.”) I’d almost choked on my breakfast when the
Guardian
recently reported that our go-to TV program is
Morning Worship
.

Nick rewound the bit of
Devour
I’d been watching.

“Amazing,” he said. “You’d think the coffin would sink.”

“
That
’s the part that’s bugging you?”

A knock came at the door. Cilla barged in just as Nick slammed shut the laptop, closely followed by Clive, who tossed him a newspaper. On the front page, in the bottom right corner, a headline read,
NICK SAYS NO TO POLO
: “Horses Are Terrifying Beasts.”

“Crikey, who did you plant that one with?” Nick asked.

Clive looked smug. “Penelope Six-Names. I told you she was weak.”

“She comes from a long line of fools,” Cilla said. “My great-granddad once saved the life of
her
great-granddad after he fell on a pitchfork during a routine game of lawn bowling.”

“Oh, ‘fell on,’ right,” Clive said. “Remind me never to play any games with your family.”

“How did you pass the security check?” I joked.

“My dad used to be one of Richard’s PPOs,” Cilla said. “Skills with unconventional weapons were an asset.”

“Did you have to say ‘terrifying beasts’?” Nick frowned, examining the paper. “I don’t have to sound
wimpy
in these things, you know.”