Daphne looked up, and her eyes narrowed. “Can I help you with something?”

  She spoke with effortless disdain, as if she had no idea who Nina was. As if she and Nina hadn’t crossed paths countless times, hadn’t both been on the Washingtons’ trip to Telluride over spring break—Daphne as Jeff’s guest, Nina as Sam’s.

  Was Daphne truly so self-absorbed that she didn’t remember Nina? Or was she acting this way on purpose, sharpening her politeness like a weapon to put Nina in her place?

  “Are you talking to me?” Nina asked innocently.

  One of the other girls, hearing their exchange, interrupted. She took in Nina’s black cotton dress and pursed her lips. “You don’t go to St. Ursula’s.” It wasn’t a question, yet there was a query folded into it: What are you doing here?

  “You’re right. I don’t,” Nina agreed, breezing past them and out the door.

  She found Sam on the dance floor, jumping with copious amounts of energy and a distinct lack of rhythm. When she saw Nina, Samantha squealed and gave her friend an affectionate squeeze. That was Sam, a creature of physical touch. She was always leaning her head on Nina’s or Jeff’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around their torsos from behind, tapping them on the arm to get their attention. She used to get in trouble for hugging people at royal appearances, until the palace pretty much gave up on sending her to appearances at all.

  “This song is the worst,” Sam shouted over the music. “We should go revoke Ethan’s DJ privileges.”

  “It looks like Jeff is in charge of music, actually.” A delicious shiver traced down Nina’s spine as she spoke his name. What if, what if, what if whispered in her brain.

  What if she were braver? What if she told Jeff how she felt before he jetted off on his world tour, and she went to college, and their paths inevitably diverged?

  “Should we go outside?” Sam suggested.

  Nina blinked, jarring herself from her absurd daydreams. She knew better than to dwell on hypotheticals, especially when they were so far removed from reality.

  She and Sam headed onto the patio that wrapped around the back of the palace. The gardens unfolded before them, neat rows of hedges intersecting the beds of roses and violets and daylilies. Moonlight danced over the paths, gleamed on the iron railing that circled the gardens like a border of antique lace.

  “You didn’t tell me the girls at this party would all be wearing white,” Nina blurted out as she collapsed onto a bench.

  Sam glanced down at her white dress in confusion. It wasn’t really her style, with its poufed sleeves and sweetheart neckline, though the lime-green Converses and red plastic wristwatch—which Nina was almost certain Sam had won from an arcade game—definitely were. Nina wondered if Sam had changed out of her heels the moment she got home, or if she’d actually worn a kids’ plastic watch and sneakers to her graduation.

  “Sorry, I should have warned you,” Sam agreed. “Though I figured you wouldn’t want to look so cliché. We’re like an army of brides, or ghosts. Ghost brides?”

  Sam was pacing back and forth across the terrace with all the pent-up energy of a caged tigress. When she got like this, she became more amplified—not louder, exactly, just…more. More vibrant, more awake, more unapologetically Sam.

  “Sit down,” Nina told her, well aware that she was one of the only people who commanded the Princess of America so brusquely. Sam smiled self-consciously, then sat next to her on the bench.

  “Can you believe we graduated this week? It’s the end of an era,” Nina mused.

  “Is it?”

  Sam drummed her red-painted nails in a pattern that echoed the music from inside.

  Nina glanced over. “Graduation is very much the end of an era. You know, one chapter concludes, another begins?”

  “For most people, sure. But nothing about my life is really changing, is it? Graduation is just a fake milestone in my case. I’m still…”

  “Still the princess?”

  “I was going to say still pointless.”

  It was rare to hear Sam talk like this. Her position with the monarchy was so much more nebulous than Beatrice’s; there was no defined role for Sam, no set of responsibilities, just a seemingly endless list of what she couldn’t do. From what Nina could tell, being a Washington came with constraints alongside the unimaginable privilege.

  She nudged Sam’s shoulder with her own. “Cut the pity party, okay? You’re about to go abroad for six months. You can whine when you’re back.”

  She was relieved when Sam relaxed into a smile. “I deserved that. It’s just that this party feels like all the other parties Jeff and I have ever thrown. There aren’t even any boys here to crush on. I’ve known everyone in that room since lower school.”

  “I don’t know if that precludes you from having a crush on them,” Nina said quietly.

  “True! But I’ve already kissed all the ones worth kissing. I’m ready for someone new.” A wicked gleam sparked in Sam’s eyes as she added, “What about you, though? Are you interested in anyone here?”

  Nina hoped a telltale flush hadn’t risen to her cheeks. “Not really.”

  As if on cue, the doors slid open, and there he was, the boy she’d loved in secret for as long as she could remember. Prince Jefferson. He looked as unattainably dreamy as ever in his button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his tie long since discarded. He held up a bottle of champagne, eyes dancing. “I wondered where you two had gone.”

  Nina couldn’t help smiling at the thought that he’d noticed her absence. She always caught herself smiling around Jeff; he was like a human candle, bringing a warm glow everywhere he went.

  “You know it’s bad form to run away from your own party,” he went on, looking at Sam, who laughed.

  “You and Ethan chased us off with your atrocious taste in music.”

  “Well, I’m not about to put you in charge,” he teased. “We all know that if you take over, the night becomes—”

  “Epic?” Sam offered.

  “I was going to say unpredictable. Like that time you said we should celebrate our birthday at a bar, then you booked a private room at a karaoke lounge.”

  Nina jumped in. “Technically speaking, a karaoke lounge is a bar.”

  “Exactly!” Sam exclaimed, triumphant.

  “But Jeff has a point,” Nina went on. “The night did spin out of control once we got there.”

  She knew Sam had picked the karaoke lounge because she wanted to stand onstage and perform. To be the focal point of everyone’s attention for once, instead of her usual role as the Washington sibling America largely ignored.

  “Karaoke is my nemesis. I lost my voice that night,” Jeff recalled, then lifted the bottle of champagne. “Anyone want to open this?”

  “Champagne?” Sam shook her head dramatically. “Who do you think I am? Daphne?”

  Nina looked over, afraid the reference to Jeff’s girlfriend would shatter their easy camaraderie—or, worse, prompt Jeff to go back inside and ask Daphne to join them. But all he said was, “We’re celebrating. Champagne seemed appropriate.”

  “If we must,” Sam groaned.

  Jeff held the bottle toward Nina. “You’ll do the honors, won’t you, Nina? You seem like you can open champagne. You’re so good at…you know. British things.”

  “Champagne is French,” Nina corrected him, and Sam laughed.

  “You know what I mean!” Jeff persisted. “You’re the one who reads Jane Austen and Edith Wharton and goes to art-museum openings. Sam and I are hot-dogs-and-beer people. We’re out of our depth trying to open champagne.”

  Nina would have fallen even more in love with him for that remark—for remembering that she loved Jane Austen and Edith Wharton—except she wasn’t sure it was possible to love him any more than she did.

  “Fine,” she agreed, and Jeff’s fingers brushed hers as he handed her the bottle.

  It was heavier than she’d expected, its label inscribed with a curlicued script. Nina unpeeled the gold foil from the top, then gingerly coaxed out the cork. It opened with a festive pop.

  “Here you go,” she said, but Jeff waved it toward her as he took a seat on the bench.

  “You opened it, you go first.”

  Nina lifted the bottle straight to her lips. It was cold, its bubbles tasting like honey and brioche and uncomplicated joy. She handed it to Sam, who took a sip and then passed it to Jeff.

  “This reminds me of when we used to share a milkshake between the three of us,” Nina said softly.

  “And just like he did with milkshakes, Jeff is having more than his fair share.” Sam elbowed her brother. “You can’t chug half the bottle!”

  He lowered the champagne from his lips with a slightly guilty expression. “You said you didn’t like it!”

  “I’m full of contradictions, okay? And as you pointed out, we’re celebrating.”

  Nina felt slightly illicit as she took the bottle back from Jeff. Was it weird of her to drink after him? They used to do it without a thought when they were kids, but now Nina second-guessed everything when it came to Jeff.

  Her feelings for him were Nina’s most closely guarded secret. She clutched them to her chest as if they were precious and infinitely fragile, something that needed to be protected at all costs. She’d never breathed a word to anyone, not even Sam. Especially not Sam.

  Nina knew, on a logical level, that her love for Jeff was hopeless. Aside from the fact that he was the Prince of America and her best friend’s brother, he and Nina wouldn’t even make sense as a couple. Nina was private, while Jeff was outgoing and effervescent; Nina did things methodically, while Jeff was impulsive; Nina was happiest in quiet spaces like libraries, while Jeff was at home in a loud sports stadium, shouting and wearing face paint.

  She had never consciously decided to love him; her love for him had just appeared one day, slipping under her skin and entwining itself around her heart so tightly that she couldn’t shake it loose—and didn’t really want to. She couldn’t explain it, and she certainly could never act on it. No matter the what-ifs that kept swirling in her brain.

  “Nina. Are you excited about King’s College?” Jeff asked, interrupting her thoughts. “I have to admit, I’m jealous you’ll be there without us.”

  “I think you two will have more than enough fun jet-setting around Asia,” Nina pointed out. The twins hadn’t announced where they would go to school after their gap year, but everyone assumed that they would start at King’s College next fall, as nearly every member of the royal family—except Beatrice—had done before.

  Jeff shook his head. “Please don’t say jet-setting. We’re backpacking.”

  “You can carry a backpack onto your private plane, but it doesn’t make you a backpacker,” Nina teased.

  She was surprisingly excited at the prospect of starting school without Sam and Jeff this fall. As much as she loved her best friend, Nina had always felt torn between the two very different facets of her life: the royal part, where she attended receptions with dukes and duchesses and curtsied to people, and the normal part of her life, where she and her parents baked frozen pizzas in the oven and sometimes forgot to clean the house for weeks at a time, until dust bunnies gathered in the corners like a small army and Nina had to hunt down the vacuum to vanquish them all.

  It would be refreshing to take a step back from this royal world, which she didn’t really belong in anyway. To act like a normal teenager, worry about her classes and whether her roommate was nice and whether she’d had too much to drink at a party, instead of worrying about her unrequited love for a prince.

  “We’ll miss you, though.” Sam turned on the bench to give Nina another of her fierce hugs.

  Jeff met Nina’s gaze over Sam’s shoulder. “Yeah. We will.”

  That was the dangerous thing about him. He had a way of drawing people in, making them feel seen. He was so very charismatic, which was why the monarchy kept trotting him out at events where they needed goodwill—visits to elementary schools or sports events or, once, a ballroom-dancing competition on national TV.

  But Nina didn’t care about the Jeff whose face was plastered on magazines. She loved the real Jeff, the boy who used to toboggan around the palace with her on placemats; who woke them all up at the ski house by pounding on their door and shouting that the powder waited for no one; who smiled easily, yet somehow made those smiles seem precious because they were his. To other people he might be larger than life, the romantic hero of a storybook, but to Nina he was just the boy she’d grown up with.

  That was what made her feelings so dangerous.

  She couldn’t let herself forget that he was a prince, because he would never stop being one, and she needed to find a way to make herself stop loving him.

  If only she knew how.

  4

  samantha

  Princess Samantha was already bored of her own party.

  She and Jeff had thrown so many of these parties before, to celebrate their birthday, or a school victory in football, or simply the fact that it was a Friday and their parents were out of town. But no matter the occasion, the party never really changed. It was the same claustrophobic set of classmates and peers, the same people coupling and then uncoupling, flirting or feuding or making up rumors. Especially the girls, who acted nice to Sam’s face, then whispered to one another that she wasn’t pretty enough, skinny enough. Wasn’t enough like them.

  Well, Samantha had never cared all that much about what other girls thought of her. It was much less stressful to hang out with Jeff and his friends than to deal with the judgmental stares and backhanded comments of her female classmates. The only girl Sam had ever really trusted was Nina.

  Speaking of Nina, where had she gone? Sam glanced around the party, which spilled out of Ambassador’s Hall—the enormous downstairs reception space named for the portrait of Lord Thomas Jefferson—and into the neighboring rooms. Music and shrieks of excitement echoed against the centuries-old walls.

  She paused to say hi to Maddie Falco, the goalie on the varsity soccer team and one of the few girls at school Sam genuinely liked. She got roped into a game of beer pong with her friends Rohan and JT; she laughed as the guys tried, and failed, to make a pyramid of plastic cups. She told a loud, rambling story about how in third grade, she’d planted her emergency tracker inside Jeff’s backpack—even then, Sam had hated the thought of anyone watching her movements. Everyone laughed as she recounted that it had taken weeks for palace security to figure out what she’d done. In those days, she and Jeff had been inseparable.

  Yet no matter what she did, the vague restlessness refused to go away. It felt like Sam had grown too large for her own skin, like there was a lingering itch somewhere deep in her bones. As Nina had said, high school graduation was supposed to be a major milestone, yet Sam didn’t feel changed. She didn’t feel anything at all, except disappointed that this party was just as stale and predictable as all the others.

  The footmen had set up a folding table along one wall—a plastic table from storage, because no one wanted sticky drink rings on an antique that belonged in the national collection. The table’s surface was scattered with half-empty bottles of liquor and soda, a few stray paper napkins, and a porcelain plate of sliced limes, which were nearly gone.

  Sam could have called one of the footmen to have it replenished, yet some impulse made her grab the plate and stroll out into the hallway. Her steps quickened as she passed the throne room and reception halls, where the lights were off. She and Jeff used to tell each other that the ghost of Queen Thérèse haunted these rooms at night. Even now, Sam half believed it—the rooms felt cavernous and full of secrets, their vast dark spaces hidden behind velvet ropes. The sounds of the party chased her down the hall, muffled by the thick carpets and heavy oak furniture.

  She pushed open the double doors that led to the now-empty kitchens. It was surprisingly cool in here; the rows of gas burners were all off. Cast-iron pans and soup pots were stacked in open shelving above them; knives gleamed in an enormous chopping block. She turned in a slow circle, wondering which of the half-dozen refrigerators might contain limes.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Sam looked up, startled, to see a boy about her age. She would have assumed he was one of the kitchen staff, except that he was so blatantly out of uniform in a faded T-shirt, denim jacket, and charcoal narrow-leg pants. His dark hair curled around his ears, but it was his eyes that drew her in: a brown that glittered with bright flecks of green. Something about him seemed familiar, though Sam couldn’t say why.

  “I live here,” she informed him, stating the obvious. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I work here.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. Sam’s eyes drifted to the tattoos tracing his forearms: a set of three birds in flight, a tiger ready to pounce, a name written in a scripted font, though Sam couldn’t get close enough to read it.

  The silence felt strained. Sam set down the plate and retreated a step. “Okay, well…I just came down here for some limes.”

  “For your sorority-girl vodka sodas?”

  That was it. “Is there a reason you don’t like me, or are you this rude to everyone?”

  “I never said I don’t like you.”

  “You didn’t need to say it. Your tone made it abundantly clear.”

  Sam stared at him in unmistakable challenge, and he let out a breath. “Look, I don’t really care about you, but I do have a problem with your family,” the stranger told her. “Or at least, what your family stands for.”

  “You mean America?”

  “I was actually talking about elitism.” He lifted his hands in a sardonic gesture. “Though, come to think of it, America doesn’t exactly stand for a ton of great things either.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9