Our team will need a couple hundred more points if we want to win this thing. Mason Everett checked the countdown clock on the wall—only thirty seconds left to go. He crouched behind a neon block, eyes scanning the black splatter-painted walls for any sign of the opposing team.
In the distance, he heard a blast and a shout of frustration from his friend Andre. With the amount of time it took to recharge after a hit, Mason knew Andre was basically out at this point. He had no idea how Chase, their other teammate, was doing.
Mason spotted a flash of blue. He darted to another neon structure and peered through a small peephole. Three of the blue team’s members were clustered inside a tall tower of painted plywood. Must be trying to ride out the clock, Mason thought to himself. If he could get all three of them, there was a good chance that his team would win.
Fifteen seconds on the clock. It was now or never.
He slipped out of his hiding place and jogged over to the tower. His footsteps gave him away. One of the blue team members looked over and spotted him. He gasped, and all of Mason’s targets raced away in different directions.
“Go, Mason, go!” Chase shouted to him from across the arena. But Mason felt himself hesitate. These players weren’t sitting ducks anymore—he’d have to sprint after one just for the chance that he might hit him.
“It’s pointless,” he said, as the clock counted off the last three seconds.
“Whatever, Mason,” Andre grumbled as a loud buzzer went off. “You still could have tried.”
Chase joined them, panting. “Please. Have you ever heard the words ‘Mason’ and ‘try’ in the same sentence?”
“Yeah, here’s one for you: I’ll try not to smack you,” Mason snapped. “And hey, aren’t you supposed to be nice to a guy on his birthday?”
“Yeah, as long as he helps you win at laser tag,” Chase joked.
They made their way out of the arena, pulling off their orange chest plates. As they hung their gear on the designated hooks, a large screen displayed the teams’ statistics:
blue team: 3,200 points
orange team: 3,050 points
congratulations, blue team!
His friends sighed at the screen and Mason tried to pretend he didn’t notice. It was just laser tag. Who really cared?
“Fine, sorry or whatever. Can we go now?” he grumbled.
It was no secret that Mason wasn’t exactly the type to take initiative, but neither were his friends. It’s why they were friends in the first place. They spent their days sitting in the back rows of classrooms, trying to go unnoticed by teachers as they doodled cartoons on their desks and worked to get past the school’s website blockers.
Mason and his friends trudged out of the laser tag arena, stopping by the arcade’s concession stand for one last round of nachos and sodas before heading home. As far as he was concerned, it was the perfect way to celebrate his seventeenth birthday.
He told himself to ignore the needling guilt in the back of his mind, where his friends’ words kept bouncing around. They weren’t disappointed in him, not really. And even if they were, they’d get over it soon enough.
***
Most of the lights in the house were out when Mason got home. It was late, so he figured his dad had already gone to bed. He was about to slip upstairs into his own bedroom when he spotted his dad sitting at the kitchen table.
“Uh, Dad?” Mason said quietly, stepping into the room. “Everything okay?”
His dad looked up at him with a tight smile. “Hey, bud,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “Happy birthday. Did you guys have fun?”
“Yeah . . . what’s going on?” As Mason stepped closer to his dad, he saw there were dozens of papers strewn across the table.
“Why don’t you sit down?” his dad suggested. “We need to talk.”
Had he done something? Nothing came to mind. Sure, he and his friends liked to goof around, but they usually didn’t get into the kind of trouble that led to a sit-down with his dad.
He slid into the chair across from his dad, and the room was silent for a minute. Mason didn’t dare look down at the papers to see if he could get any sort of clue from them—all he could do was stare at his dad’s face and the frown lines forming there. His dad was still pretty young—he’d just turned forty a few months ago—but in this moment he looked much older than Mason had ever seen.
“I want—” his dad started, then shook his head. “I need to tell you about your mother.”
“Oh.” Mason definitely hadn’t expected the conversation to go this way. He knew very little about his mother, but he’d always figured that was because there wasn’t much to tell. He knew she and his dad were young when they met and had Mason, and that things didn’t end well—he didn’t need his dad to tell him that part. He figured that since they never spoke about her, things must have been bad. He’d seen enough friends deal with messy custody battles and difficult family drama that he’d decided he’d rather not know.
His dad gathered several of the papers on the table, pulled them into a cluttered pile, and handed them to Mason.
“Emails?” Mason asked when he glanced at them. “Dad, what’s going on?”
“These are printouts of email conversations I’ve been having with your mother,” his dad explained slowly. Mason felt the pages drop out of his hands. One of them shifted to show a conversation dated from five years ago.
“You’ve been talking to her? But I thought . . . For how long?” Suddenly there were too many questions racing through his mind. Mason couldn’t get them all out at once.
“We never really lost contact. It was more difficult right after you were born, but we’ve been speaking regularly over the past few years now.”
“What?” Mason snapped. “And you never felt the need to tell me?”
“I couldn’t,” his dad insisted. “Or, at least, I thought I couldn’t. It’s what we agreed on. And now . . . well, just let me tell you everything.”
Mason angrily waved a hand in his dad’s direction and slumped back in his seat. “Go ahead.”
His dad licked his lips and took another deep breath. He kept his eyes down as he began, “You already know some of this—I met your mother when I was in my early twenties. I’d just graduated from college and was traveling the country for the summer before I was going to buckle down and get a job. I met her somewhere along the way. She was doing the same thing.”
Mason nodded. While he admittedly didn’t know much about the situation, his dad had mentioned a few snippets over the years.
“We hit it off instantly,” his dad continued. “I’d never met someone like her—we fell in love. And then, before we really had a chance to talk about plans for the future, she got pregnant with you.”
When his dad finally looked up at him, Mason was surprised to see the guilt in his eyes—he’d never seen his dad look like that before. “We made some fast decisions because we were worried about what her family would think. We decided to get married and tell everyone you were planned. We moved here, and things were fine for a while. But soon it became clear we didn’t actually know each other that well. We tried to make it work for a few months after you were born, but we just couldn’t do it. We were too different.”
“So you got divorced,” Mason finished. He’d already known that part too. “But here’s what I don’t get: Why couldn’t she still have stayed around? Why keep all the secrets? Didn’t she want to know me?”
His dad looked at him with pained eyes. “Of course she wanted to know you. But it wasn’t that simple.”
Mason could tell there was something his dad was leaving out. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.
“Well, your mom wasn’t—she isn’t American actually. She’s European. From a country called Evonia.”
“What?” Mason frowned. “I’ve never even heard of it.”
His dad sighed. “It’s a small country.”
Mason’s head began to pound. He could barely comprehend what he was hearing. He looked back down at the papers in front of him and noticed a name. “Louisa. Louisa Valmont.” He glanced up at his dad. “That’s her?”
His dad nodded again. “I should have told you about her sooner. I wish that I had.”
“I still don’t understand,” Mason said.
His dad picked up one of the papers and handed it to him. This time, Mason took a closer look at the actual document. There was a fancy crest at the bottom of each of Louisa’s email signatures, along with her full name: Lady Louisa Valmont, Countess of Wallinford.
“We thought keeping you here with me would be the best thing for you,” his dad explained, “especially since your birth was sort of scandalous in her social circles. And her parents . . . well, that doesn’t matter now. The point is it’s time I told you—not only is your mother from another country, she’s a countess. She’s a member of Evonia’s royal family.”
Mason’s jaw dropped. He certainly hadn’t seen that coming.
“And that’s not all,” his dad continued. “As her only child, you’re next in line to inherit her title.”