The Royal Weddings Read online

  The Royal Weddings

  American Royalty: Book #2

  Written by Laura McGehee

  Copyright © 2017 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Laura Mitchell

  Images for cover art obtained from iStockPhoto.com

  Edited by Ryan Hume

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: McGehee, Laura, author.

  Title: The royal weddings / by Laura McGehee.

  Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2017. | Series: American royalty ; #2

  Summary: It’s a mad race to the altar as each of the children frantically search for a spouse to ensure their chance to rule. Each child makes equally questionable decisions in their choice of partner, resulting in one joint wedding day for all. The event brings out far too many lies about love, sexuality, and commitment, culminating in a tragedy that transforms life as the Washingtons know it.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016946194 | ISBN 9781680764789 (lib. bdg.) |

  ISBN 9781680765342 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Washington family (Fictitious characters)—Fiction. | Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. | Inheritance and succession—Fiction. | Weddings—Fiction. | Interpersonal relationships—Fiction. | Young adult fiction.

  Classification: DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016946194

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  To marriage, for lending itself so easily to farce

  The contagious electricity of hope filled the air, and Chelsea simply could not contain her excitement. She breathed in and out deeply; even though the crisp October chill hurt her lungs, she relished the pain. It felt worthwhile. It felt important. It made her pay attention to this moment, the one she was in right now, the one that she would tell her children and her children’s children about. She would describe the bitter bite of the air in her lungs, the charge of revolution that ignited the streets, and the chants to tear down the Wall (literally, metaphorically, spiritually) that arbitrarily separated peasant from Royal.

  She looked to her left, and then to her right. The fresh-faced idealists whom she had grown to love in the past few weeks surrounded her, and engulfed her in their joy. They huddled together, their scarves wrapped tightly around their faces, their breath steaming up Chelsea’s glasses. Normally Chelsea was very particular about the cleanliness of her glasses, but today a stranger’s breath on her glasses was magical—just another example of how Kennedy was bringing people together in a way that truly mattered.

  “Together we. Can. Change! #TearDownTheWall. Chatter it now!” shouted Augustus onstage. Chelsea chanted the slogan along with him, her throat raw from a day already consumed by yelling. She pulled out her GlassPhone™ and sent the hashtag flying into the Stream, where it joined hundreds of others advocating the same radical act of revolution. It wouldn’t even get close to breaking into the top trending Chatters, but Chelsea had recently discovered that moments could still be important, even if they didn’t trend.

  Augustus danced up and down the stage to his newest release, “CraZed Bi U,” perfectly hitting each and every beat with the kind of precision and finesse that only a thirteen-year-old androgynous boy could muster. While Chelsea was not the biggest Augustus fan, she absolutely loved to watch him move his youthful body to the sounds of well-produced electronic beats. If Kennedy’s slogans lit up with multicolored lights every time Augustus performed his signature “back-down breakdance,” then even better.

  What began as a ninth grade government assignment a few weeks prior had led the unsuspecting teenage girl into a deep passion she would never have been able to imagine. No one with any sense of what was trending liked the presidential candidate profile assignment, because the peasant Presidents were tediously boring in comparison to the beautiful collective of drama-filled Royals. The President and members of PHOGEO didn’t conduct illicit romances and throw wild parties in revolutionary-themed mayhem—they were middle-aged, overweight, and never did anything for the American public.

  But alas, it had been a tepid morning in government class like any other when Chelsea had unwittingly stumbled upon her fate. Mr. Moby had yawned and informed Chelsea she would be covering the radical underdog, Carlos Kennedy. Chelsea had groaned loudly and complained all through lunch, especially since her best friend, Samantha, had been assigned President Wszolek, who was at least the very first female President and therefore slightly more interesting than anyone else. So while Samantha had gloated, Chelsea had taken to the Stream.

  @Chels999: any1 wanna trade for Presidential candidate assignment?? Ughhhhh

  @Chels999: Seriously guys, I got this stupid Kennedy dude, and I think he sux

  But then she had received a curious response.

  @MirandaUnderground22: @Chels999 Check out Kennedy’s site, you might be surprised to find out what he’s about. We rally at the Wall every Tuesday at 2, come by?

  Chelsea had reluctantly started her research, and found that Kennedy had the sort of youthful, chiseled face that made her want to pay attention. He had a full head of thick dark hair, a square jaw, mocha skin, and brightly shining teeth. And then something curious started to happen as she read more about Carlos. Instead of spacing out while she glossed over his statements, she found herself actually comprehending Carlos’s ideas. Not only was she reading what he said, she found herself forming real opinions about his ideas. She was engaging with his thoughts, in a way that public education had miserably failed to inspire her to do up to this point.

  Chelsea had never really considered her views on any of the issues that adults talked about at dinner parties while she watched GlassTV™ in her room, but she suddenly found herself immersed. Why was there a wall that separated the peasants from the Royals? Why did the country’s infrastructure crumble the further one traveled from the Royal Village? Why did the peasants spend all of their time on the Stream talking about the Royals, instead of fighting for change?

  After the assignment was over—Mr. Moby had given Chelsea a B+, which she thought was entirely unfair—Chelsea did not want to stop following Carlos Kennedy. So she didn’t.

  @Chels999: @MirandaUnderground22 can I come by the rally this Tues?

  @MirandaUnderground22: @Chels999 for sure. we’re the ones with the magenta bandanas, profuse tattoos, and very vibrant spirits. can’t miss us.

  She was now at her fourth rally, and she had come to need this weekly shouting as much as she used to need the latest RoyalChatterStream episode of Who’s Wearing Underwear?

  “Are you ready for the man we all came here to see?” Augustus sang in a falsetto.

  “Yes!” Chelsea found herself screaming along with the throngs of people around her. She couldn’t hear her voice. She didn’t want to.

  “One more time—are you all ready for Carlos Kennedy?”

  “YES!” The crowd spoke as one, breathed as one, and moved as one.

  “I don’t think I can hear you. Are. You. Ready. For. Change?”

  “YES!”

  “Should we tear down the wall?”

  “YES!”

  Chelsea shouted as loud as she could, as if she didn’t know that Carlos would magically emerge after the third iteration of cheers. Of course she
did. He always emerged, without fail. Yet when smoke spurted from the bottom of the stage and the crowd fell silent, Chelsea fell silent with them. The smoke cleared to reveal none other than the gloriously beautiful face of Carlos Kennedy. Chelsea screamed as wildly as she could, engulfed in the camaraderie that had eluded her for her entire life up to this point. She felt truly alive, and thought that in all of her fourteen years, perhaps this moment was the best one yet.

  Carlos Kennedy smiled that shiny smile into the audience, and Chelsea felt her heart thud even faster. Wherever Carlos went, Chelsea would follow, she knew that to be true.

  “Hello, and thank you all for coming out on this cold October day!” Carlos shouted into the microphone. Everyone cheered, even though there wasn’t very much that was cheer-worthy in that sentence.

  “A few months ago, I was running this campaign out of my Maryland garage. Now, thanks to you, we are just a few miles away from the Royal Family themselves, and the mansion that they masquerade as a capital!”

  At the mention of the Royal Family, the crowd began to hiss and boo. Carlos smiled, and held up his hands to calm the crowd. Chelsea hissed along with them, even though she still had a framed portrait of her childhood hero Princess Emma hanging above her bed. She decided she would take that poor excuse for a role model down the second she returned home.

  “Now, now, they’re not evil people,” Carlos said generously. Her fellow supporters murmured their disbelief, and Chelsea murmured hers too. “They’ve just created an evil system. One that institutionalizes the kind of elitism that our ancestors sacrificed their lives to change!”

  Chelsea nodded proudly; she had learned all about the revolution and the genius of George Washington from her textbook, but she had also read the other side of the story on the dark corners of the rebellious peasantNet™ late at night. She had learned that the American Revolution was fought to disentangle the United States from their British overlords, and that the Founding Fathers had initially vowed to create a purely democratic, representative government. It had only been at the last moment that George Washington had convinced everyone he deserved to be King. Their entire existence could have been different, but now America valued heritage, birthright, and elite entitlement above all else. Chelsea spent her nights imagining an alternate history, one in which Washington had made the other choice and America was an idyllic land filled with love, acceptance, and peaceful harmony. There probably wouldn’t even be any economic woes, disenfranchisement, or racial tension. But they would never know that existence, not while the Royalty remained in power.

  “Tell me this,” Carlos said as he paced across the stage. “What gives just one man the right to decide the fate of the entire country? Did God himself choose the Washington lineage as our trusted leaders? Did all of us, as an American populace, vote the Washingtons into office? Did we sign up for the absolute madness that we were forced to witness at the Royal Birthday Party? No, we did not.”

  Chelsea felt the crowds around her squish together, and press her up against the stranger in front of her. But she didn’t mind.

  “Should our hard-earned money go toward funding their ridiculous Wedding pageantry? No, it shouldn’t. We have voices, and we deserve to be heard. We don’t want the Royalty to have PHOGEO oversight. We don’t want to spend billions of dollars per year perpetuating an industry founded on these deeply flawed people. We don’t want power-hungry princes and princesses scheming for even more power! We. Want. To. Rule.” Carlos spoke each word with a force that hit Chelsea like a spitball, specifically, the spitballs that Eli had thrown at the back of her head in fourth period Algebra.

  “We. Deserve. To. Be. Heard. We are ready for change!” Carlos shouted into his microphone, and Chelsea shouted with him. As he launched into further rhetoric about his vision of an ideal future without the embarrassing scar of American Royalty, Chelsea found her mind drifting away. She wondered what her family would think about her skipping school to come to a Carlos Kennedy rally. She wondered if they could hear Carlos’s vows to dismantle the Royalty from their house in the Royal Village just over the valley. She wondered if Eli’s obnoxious teasing meant that he liked her, as Samantha had said, or if he really was just an idiot. She wondered what they were having for dinner. Then, before she could savor the tenor of Kennedy’s voice and the smell of strangers’ breath filling the air, the crowd erupted into the sort of thunderous applause that could only mean the speech was over. Chelsea screamed along with them, entirely sure her voice would be gone tomorrow, but not caring in the slightest.

  After Carlos had waved and smiled for many minutes, he finally left the stage. Chelsea lingered as long as she could in the sea of jubilant supporters. She half-listened as a few kids from her school echoed the same rhetoric Carlos had declared on stage. She nodded and agreed, but found her mind delving into what would be waiting for her at home. As the hour of the end of the school day loomed closer, she knew that she had to head back home. Her mother would be busy with the twins and would need Chelsea’s help in preparing dinner.

  So she reluctantly said her goodbyes and trudged to the bus line that would deposit her in her suburban neighborhood, just on the other side of the Royal/peasant Wall, the most prosperous peasant village in the entire nation. When she walked through her front door, her mind singularly fixated on the way the light reflected off of Carlos’s eyes as he talked about the right of peasants to marry Royals, she was jolted quite rudely out of her fantasy. She found her mother and father perched uncomfortably in the parlor, staring at her with the pale sheen of an uncovered secret. Chelsea’s heart immediately caught in her throat. They knew. They had to know. The school had absolutely called them.

  “How was school today?” her mother asked.

  “Fine,” Chelsea answered. She shuffled her feet and eyed the stairs up to her room. She calculated the odds of sprinting up to her room before they unleashed whatever they knew upon her. Not great. So she squared her shoulders, looked determinedly at the ceiling, and announced her sins.

  “Actually, I skipped school today,” Chelsea said with a tremble in her voice. Not once in her fourteen years of life had she transgressed this badly. She was moving into unchartered, treacherous territory.

  “And why did you do that?” her father asked. She darted her eyes down and made eye contact with him for the first time. Even though he had grown a belly in the most recent years, he still had the same kind eyes that had looked down at her since she was a baby. She could not lie to him; she knew that. Yet telling the truth would hurt him; she also knew that. She looked back up at the ceiling and sucked in a deep breath.

  “I went to a Carlos Kennedy rally,” she said in a smaller voice than she had intended. She continued to stare at the spot she had chosen on the ceiling, because she could not bear to see the color drain out of her father’s face and the blush spread across her mother’s.

  “You did what?” her mother said in the soft voice that could only mean certain death was nigh.

  “I—uh. I went to a Car-Carlos Kennedy rally,” Chelsea stuttered. She felt herself begin to sweat profusely, and she yearned to be in the sanctuary of her room.

  “How dare you,” her mother uttered. All of the joy and success of the past few weeks were wiped way with the simple disgust evident in her mother’s voice. Chelsea couldn’t say anything, so she shifted her gaze to the ground.

  “That sort of activity is not tolerated in this family!” Chelsea’s mother said, and Chelsea felt herself nodding even though she absolutely did not agree. “You are not to continue with any of that. In fact, you are not to even speak that name in this house.” Chelsea continued to nod, even though she knew she would have to break that commandment.

  “You know that the Royal Family is how we make our living, don’t you?” Chelsea’s mother asked. Chelsea reluctantly nodded. Of course she knew; the entire tri-state area knew that Chelsea’s father was the Royal Trumpeter. It was a trumpeting honor of the highest degree, and yes, Chelsea wa
s proud of her father’s success. At least, she had been. But lately she had found herself agreeing when Carlos said that the people who supported the Royals were lazy leeches draining the peasant populace of their hard earned tax dollars. She knew they had their monstrous beige house, their GlassTV™, and their health insurance thanks to the Royal Family, and she also knew that there were a hell of a lot of people in this country who didn’t have any of that. Where was the equality in that? Nobody seemed to care, nobody except Carlos Kennedy.

  “Well?” Chelsea’s mother asked. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Chelsea looked up at her mother, and drew in a deep, ragged breath. Now was her time to voice these thoughts, to explain just how and why the Royal Family was a scourge on the face of the United States. But instead, she looked back down at her feet.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered.

  “Don’t apologize to me,” Chelsea’s mother said. “Apologize to your father.”

  Chelsea begrudgingly looked up and over at her father. His brown eyes twinkled back at her, but she found them dark and impassive. She would have given anything to know what he was thinking.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” Chelsea said. “It won’t happen again.”

  Chelsea’s father cleared his throat. But before he could say something, anything, the sound of the twins crying in the other room interrupted them. Chelsea’s mother stood up and marched by Chelsea.

  “This is not over,” she announced, leaving Chelsea alone with her father. She stood awkwardly for a few moments, shifting from foot to foot. Her eyes traveled to the wall covered with eight portraits of serene waterfalls, and she imagined the delightful serenity of only rushing water for company. When she stole a glance at her father, she saw that he was characteristically staring into the distance. It was the same place he looked before he shared a story from his childhood, or responded to Chelsea’s mother when she got angry. She wondered what secrets that distance contained, and if she would ever have a similar answer-riddled faraway place of her own. Her father withdrew a tiny trumpet from his breast pocket and held it up to his lips, emitting one miniature, mournful tune. Chelsea slowly began to shuffle toward the stairs. Whenever he played his tiny trumpet, she knew it was time to leave. But then her father cleared his throat abruptly.