Texas Symbol Analysis

Being…whatever he’s starting to suspect he might be, is definitely not universally appealing to voters. He has a hard enough time being half-Mexican.

He wants his mom to keep her approval ratings up without having to manage a complication from her own family. He wants to be the youngest congressman in US history. He’s absolutely sure that guys who kissed a Prince of England and liked it don’t get elected to represent Texas.

But he thinks about Henry, and, oh.

He plucks a pencil out of WASPy Hunter’s Harvard pencil cup and starts sketching lines on the map of Texas for the millionth time, redrawing the districts old white men drew years ago to force votes their way.

Alex has this spark at the base of his spine to do the most good he can, and when he sits here in his cubicle for hours a day and fidgets under all the minutiae, he doesn’t know if he is. But if he could only figure out a way to make Texas’ vote reflect its soul…he’s nowhere near qualified to single-handedly dismantle Texas’ iron curtains of gerrymandering, but what if he—

“Did you forget that you’re working on the campaign of someone Texas fucking created?” he says, and his voice has officially risen to the point where staffers in the neighboring cubicles are staring, but he doesn’t care. “Why don’t we talk about how there’s a chapter of the Klan in every state? You think there aren’t racists and homophobes growing up in Vermont? Man, I appreciate that you’re doing the work here, but you’re not special. You don’t get to sit up here and pretend like it’s someone else’s problem. None of us do.”

“I’ve never been more sure that I wanted to go into politics than when I went to Denver. I saw this young, queer guy who looked like me, sleeping at his desk because he wants kids at public schools in his state to have free lunches, and I was like, I could do this. I honestly don’t know if I’m good enough or smart enough to be either of my parents. But I could be that.” He drops his head down. He’s never said the last part out loud to anyone before. “And now I’m sitting here thinking that son of a bitch sold out, so maybe it’s all bullshit, and maybe I really am just a naïve little kid who believes in magical shit that doesn’t happen in real life.”

“Please don’t tell Mom.”

“Seriously?” she hisses. “You’re literally putting your dick in the leader of a foreign state, who is a man, at the biggest political event before the election, in a hotel full of reporters, in a city full of cameras, in a race close enough to fucking hinge on some bullshit like this, like a manifestation of my fucking stress dreams, and you’re asking me not to tell the president about it?”

“Um. Yeah? I haven’t, um, come out to her. Yet.”

Zahra blinks, presses her lips together, and makes a noise like she’s being strangled. “Listen,” she says. “We don’t have time to deal with this, and your mother has enough to manage without having to process her son’s fucking quarter-life NATO sexual crisis, so—I won’t tell her. But once the convention is over, you have to.”

He wears a key to his childhood home around his neck, but he doesn’t know the last time he actually thought about the boy who used to push it into the lock.

Maybe losing the job isn’t the worst thing that could have happened.

“I always felt like Texas claiming me as their son was, you know, kind of conditional.” He paces, rubbing the back of his neck. “The whole half-Mexican, all Democrat thing. There’s a very loud contingent there that does not like me and does not want me to represent them. And now, it’s just. Not being straight. Having a boyfriend. Having a gay sex scandal with a European prince. I don’t know anymore.”

He loves Texas—he believes in Texas. But he doesn’t know if Texas still loves him.

“Hey,” Alex says. Henry turns back to him, his eyes silver in the wash of the streetlight. “We won.”

Henry takes his hand, one corner of his mouth tugging gently upward. “Yeah. We won.”

Alex reaches down into the front of his dress shirt and finds the chain with his fingers, pulls it out carefully. The ring, the key.

Under winter clouds, victorious, he unlocks the door.