If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
—KATHARINE HEPBURN
ROYCE TAKES MY hand and I feel his warmth. Every time he touches me, there’s a spark between us. I smile to myself—I am so in love with this boy.
We’re at his house. His parents aren’t around. Just us hanging outside by his pool in the evening, lazing in lounge chairs. Everything about this backyard is perfect. The pool. The fountains. The furniture. The meticulously landscaped trees and bushes. A line of statues and columns.
“What was it like growing up here?” I ask.
“Just like growing up anywhere else,” he says. “It’s just home. It’s all I’ve known. I guess it is a little like living in a bubble though, and the older you get the more you can’t see that it’s a bubble. Mason still doesn’t realize the bubble is going to pop one day.”
I want to tell him what I’ve figured out about Mason but let him finish his story.
“Anyway, one summer—I think I was ten or eleven—Mason and I were sitting on opposite edges of the pool, and he poured a bucket of water over one of the maids. He wasn’t trying to be funny. He was being mean and he knew it. You want to know the saddest part? At the time I thought it was funny too. We laughed our asses off.”
“You were kids,” I say.
“Privilege is like having blinders. It’s hard to feel unloved or unwanted because everyone wants your money, so you get the attention. I guess that isn’t really what you’re asking. But when everything is handed to you, there’s no room to write your own story because there’s no struggle. Your life becomes a story centered on accumulating things, all these things you own, instead of about the struggle to live, or the struggle to survive, or the struggle to stay in America, which is a far more interesting story than mine.”
“Interesting? You think I would choose to go through this? Being illegal? Being deported? God, Royce.”
“No, of course not, but you asked me what it was like to grow up here.” He smiles at me cheekily.
“About Mason,” I say.
“What about Mason?”
“He keeps hitting on me,” I say. “It’s creepy.”
“Yeah, I know,” Royce says unexpectedly, his face calm behind his aviator shades. “I’m sorry about that. When we were little, Mason liked taking away my toys and making me cry. It was his favorite game. Remember that girl I told you about? My first serious girlfriend?”
I nod. Girlfriend number five. Not one of the hand-holders, but the first girl who broke his heart.
“She cheated on me with Mason. I found out when he sent me a Snapchat of the two of them hooking up.”
“That’s awful,” I say. “Your brother is a complete psycho.”
“He likes showing me that he can have whatever I have, that he can take away everything I care about. He dumped her soon after. He got what he wanted out of her. I think it’s why he went for Kayla, because you kept turning him down. Kayla was close enough to hurt you, to mess with us.”
“Jeez,” I say, not even able to contemplate the depths of Mason’s instability.
“It’s why I didn’t want to introduce you to him that first night in D.C. He was a National Scholar too, did I tell you? He’s smart as a whip but lazy as a dog. He got kicked out of Harvard, then Stanford, and so now he’s at USC.”
“Wow, he’s seriously messed up.”
“Yep. The price of privilege. I think someone wrote a book about it,” Royce jokes, as it’s a famous title and he’s trying to make light of the situation.
I shake my head. “Royce Blakely, you surprise me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know that you’re the smartest boy I’ve ever met, right?”
“Nah, unlike Mason I only got into Stanford because of my dad. But that’s okay. I’m smart enough to know a good thing when I see it. Like you.”
I laugh.
“Come on,” he says, leaping into the pool. He enters with barely a splash. “Come on!” he yells after me again.
We swim for a while. While we’re hanging by the edge, I tell him something I’ve been worried about since the trial. “I feel like I’ll be less of a person if I move back to the Philippines,” I confess.
“First of all, you’re not going anywhere. Secondly, you shouldn’t feel that way. Listen to what you’re saying. That Filipinos are lesser? Come on. Being an American makes you feel superior. Talk about privilege.”
“I guess so. When people ask me about what I’ll miss, I usually say you—and then friends of course. But I’ll miss this way of life too.”
“You’re not going to miss me, Jas. Because I’ll be wherever you are.”
I so want it to be true.
“Also, I was going to ask you,” he says, sounding nervous. “I wanted to do this in a more creative way, but things got busy.”
“You’re not going to ask me to prom are you?”
Royce shrugs his shoulders, looking guilty. “How did you know?”
I laugh. “I didn’t! I was joking. Looks like you ruined your own surprise.”
He curses softly, but he’s laughing too. “Well, what do you say? Will you go with me? To prom?”
“Of course, if you’ll go with me to mine,” I say, kissing him so that I taste the saline from the pool on his lips.
Then we’re out of the pool and back on the loungers.
“Royce,” I say, getting his attention so he’s looking at me as he dries off. “You don’t have to stay with me, you know,” I say. I step out and grab a towel, wrapping it around my body. “I mean if I have to leave the country, you need to go on with your life. You can’t keep worrying about me.”
He frowns, then takes me in his arms and wraps his hands around my towel, holding me tight. “Stop saying that,” he says. “You’re staying right here. I’ll think of something. I promise.”
I don’t want to make him mad, but I can’t rely on his family for a solution to our problem. We already tried that once.