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bluedalahorseLong before season 2 aired, I was trying to figure out what form sargust would take, and what Sara and August’s arcs would be like. So I did a whole lot of writing about it—just trying to figure out their brains and what they think of one another.
I also had this one idea where it turned out August’s mother was Kristina’s unfortunate romance from her teenage years, and that ended up playing a role in the cover-up of the video. And meanwhile Sara is on an elaborate self-assigned spy mission to make August fall for her and get revenge on him. August doesn’t know it yet.
There’s some weirdnesses and some inaccuracies. I assumed middle names were a thing in Sweden when they aren’t, really. At any rate, it’s an interesting study in what I wrote early, early on before I was ever on social media for this show.
Content note for toxic masculinity and disordered eating, I suppose. And the usual YR subject matter.
It isn’t Christmas break at Årnäs if someone doesn’t end up behind a door, sobbing, at least once.
This was true even before August’s father died, because sometimes that person was Pappa himself. He’d turn up the sound system in his office so no one could hear him, only, everyone knew what that music meant. Pappa never thrived in winter with its few, filtered hours of sunlight. (Though at least winter left him too inert to do anything. Early spring, a time when Pappa’s energy had returned enough let him finish tasks, but his winter despair hadn’t faded? That could be more dangerous. Was, in fact, more dangerous.)
This year August’s mother doesn’t bother covering her sobs with music—if she’s upset, she wants you to know it—and Pappa’s speakers were some of the first things they put away after the funeral. So it’s not like she could, anyway. If she even cared about remembering Pappa. Which she doesn’t.
When August walks by the old office and hears his mother crying inside, he hesitates, but doesn’t say anything. That’s only polite. Even when the door’s cracked open.
But their house is old, and the floorboards creak, so Mamma hears him out in the hall.
“Come in and sit with me,” she says. “I need to talk to you.”
“I’ll come back another time,” August says, because underneath his mother’s usual post-holidays exhaustion, there’s a warning tone.
“No, now. We have to talk now.”
The door opens a little more and Mamma grabs August by the arm, pulling him inside. Together they’re surrounded by bare minimalist shelves and boxes full of their packed up contents. What was even the point of packing Pappa’s things up if they never took them anywhere? Mamma motions August into an old desk chair, the kind that swivels around, before sitting across from him on one of the storage cartons. Her face is blotchy red, her makeup is smeared, strands of her hair are sticking to her cheeks—but her mouth and narrowed eyes signal anger.
Mamma isn’t going to cry in front of him, August realizes. Not this time.
She’s kept whatever she’s about to say locked inside since before Christmas Eve. Now that Christmas Day has ended, it’s all coming out.
“We have to talk about what you’ve done,” Mamma begins. “You know they traced the video of Wilhelm and that other boy to your phone. What were you thinking? With anything digital, they can figure out who did it as easy as anything—”
She freefalls into it: the damage to the crown’s reputation, the threat to August’s future, the dangers of social media and how she doesn’t know how kids manage these days, the legal consequences and the specific wording of the laws he’s broken. That’s mixed in with reassurance that she still loves him, that she figures he didn’t mean to have things play out quite the way they did. There’s also some regurgitated podcast script about toxic masculinity and why boys fall prey to it. August swivels back and forth in the desk chair, says I know and again I know, Mamma at intervals to show he’s listening even if he’s got one arm folded across his chest and he can’t look her in the eye. He is listening, except that it’s with half an ear because there’s no way Mamma can tell him something he hasn’t already told himself. Or she’s telling him about something (the consequences, it’s the legal consequences) that he googled late at night, when he wanted to know how badly he’d fucked himself over. Anyway, Mamma can’t stick to a point, when she talks like this.
August’s mother has never been good at telling him off. Which is why it catches him by surprise when she finally asks,
“Why did you do it? I thought you and Wille were friends.”
Why? A thousand possible answers scrape together in August’s head like microphone feedback at a school assembly. He squeezes the spot between his neck and shoulder, where his muscles have been tense for days.
“I thought we were friends too,” he finally says.
Mamma tilts her chin up, trying to look up at him with the same intensity she’d use when she could look down at him from above. “And what does that mean?”
“We don’t get along,” he says. “Not like me and Erik. I mean Wille pretended to get along with me, we had some laughs, but he hides things from me, you know? He was never grateful for all the help I gave him. And then out of nowhere he embarrasses me, tells everyone we have no money.”
“Everyone already suspects we have no money.”
“But it’s tasteless to talk about it in front of all our friends. Anyway the video was only supposed to be a joke. I didn’t mean to post it, in fact when I filmed it I was—”
“Drinking? Drunk?”
“Yes. That.” August knows his mother isn’t stupid about what goes on at Hillerska (like she didn’t do her own drinking back in the nineties, and in fact, she organized some of the parties herself) but he decides she doesn’t need to know about socialist Simon Eriksson’s drug running. “Sorry. I do feel awful about it, okay? I’m sorry. Really. I just thought it was funny, at the time. I don’t even care that he likes boys. No one cares.”
His mother is silent. She tugs on the arm of his desk chair so August is facing her again, and fixes his hair, the way she always did before church when he was little. For a moment, it’s oddly soothing.
“Sometimes people are in relationships that they have to keep secret,” she says, letting her hand fall away. “And if you want to be close to the crown, you have to understand that. I can’t believe I have to tell you that…”
What follows is another lecture, this one meandering around the point about what it means to be nobility. The responsibility of it. Protecting the monarchy even if it means letting your own heart break. That sort of rhetoric is odd coming out of Mamma, with her own family connections being so obscure and dishonored by now she doesn’t like to mention their surname. (The iron ore her great-uncle sold to Germany in the 1940s probably didn’t help, either.) Mamma’s speech might have been more convincing from Pappa, who was always proud to announce himself as the queen’s cousin.
“…maybe you’d know what I mean about secrets,” Mamma says. “If you’d been a girl.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” August must have spaced out and missed a few sentences. “A girl could… do what I did.”
“Not that,” says Mamma. “I—I’m not ready to tell you the whole story. There was someone I loved once, before I married your father. We had a secret relationship. We couldn’t be together, so we broke it off, but we promised one another that if we had daughters, we’d name them after one another. You would have had her name.”
Her name. That’s not where August thought the conversation was going. August is so used to thinking of his mother as romantically boring, given her involvement with basic Rickard, that this is an absurd and welcome distraction from his recently forged criminal non-record.
“Are you coming out to me as bisexual, Mamma?” he says. “Because if you want to, I support you. Not everyone’s doing it for attention.”
(Felice definitely is, though. August has been aggressively trying not to care about her bombshell instagram announcement, since he has her blocked anyway, except Nils posted a screencap to one of their group texts and now all the guys keep bothering him for his official statement.)
“I can’t even unpack that comment right now.” Mamma huffs, and gets up from the storage crate she’s been sitting on this whole time. “I’m not gay or leaving your stepfather—I’m not, but—I can imagine a little bit of how Wilhelm is feeling right now. How devastating it must be for him to have that information out in the world.” She places her hand on August’s back. “I love you, and I know you were in a bad place last term and I could have been there for you more. I’m not going to let this ruin your life. But also, you should have thought this through.”
“I know, Mamma.”
When his mother squeezes his shoulder, August hopes he’ll feel the weight of guilt pulling him down, but instead he feels the fluttering lightness that comes with relief.
It’s only later, after their conversation, that he loses his appetite for the rest of the day.
It doesn’t return in the days that follow.
—
It’s not that August isn’t eating at all. That’s like some precious snowflake thing that ballerina-types do. A few of the girls at school do modeling or influencer work and they’re always whining over celery sticks. August would never do that, but he’s started to look at the calorie count of everything in the fridge. The yogurt, the milk, the juices. And then anything without a label, he’ll look up online. Just to inform himself. Then he’ll use the information to plan a run or a workout.
Even before now, August has recorded how many calories he burns during his exercise sessions. He tracked that once for a middle school fitness assignment, long before Hillerska, and the habit stuck. What he’s doing now is just thinking more critically about the relationship between diet and exercise. Giving himself more control. Balancing intake and output.
The more August thinks about it, the more he decides it’s a perfectly rational thought process.
He doesn’t even have to work that hard to eat less or skip meals, and not get noticed doing it. The excuses are easily crafted. Sorry, I made myself a sandwich earlier. I would have had breakfast but I overslept. Or he’ll start a petty argument. That’s always good for leaving the table dramatically. By New Year’s Eve, August has a rotation of strategies he can use when someone wants to feed him. He figures he won’t need it once he’s back at school, where he has much more control over his life.
Only one other thing helps August to feel in control, and that’s texting Sara Eriksson.
—
About my future dorm room, she says, in a message that arrives in the undefined night hours between January first and second. I want a single.
When Sara contacts August that time, he’s swiping through his socials in the dark with no discernable end goal. He’s muted his usual group texts, since his friends are still doing lit-exam-level analysis on the Hillerska girls’ instagram posts. Or they’re all posting tryhard vacation pictures from their ski cabins or Morocco or wherever while trying to act like it’s no big deal. Sara’s precise I’d-like-to-speak-to-a-manager request is at least honest in its aspiring elitism. August feels the skin around his cheeks stretch and realizes it’s a smile.
First years don’t get singles, August texts back. On reflection, that looks like he’s scaling back his part of their bargain, so he adds, but I’ll negotiate for you. What do you need a single for?
I don’t share well, is all Sara replies.
Still. It’s a reply. And she already knows about the video. Every other text he’s sent to a classmate this break, he’s felt his secret attached to the back of his neck like some parasitic worm. But Sara already knows. He doesn’t have to hide it from her. Is that why he feels like he’s high—or something as good as high—when they’re texting?
I have a single, August texts. If you need a place for privacy, I’ll copy you a key for my room. It’s a variation on something he’s said to other girls. Erik used to distribute keys too. You can be alone there whenever you want to.
I can’t be alone if you’re there annoying me.
A minute passes, and August spends that minute puzzling over Sara’s response before she follows up her text with a heart emoji that suggests she’s… maybe teasing? Maybe just making him sweat this out?
Whatever. If she’s doing the primary school thing where they tease you because they like you (she kissed him before the Christmas services, August reminds himself) he can counter with enough chivalry to confuse her into a corner.
He’s fairly certain he doesn’t like Sara back that way. Except, she’s cute enough and her hair smells nice and he liked touching her enough that he’d do it again. You don’t exactly turn away a cute girl who’s throwing herself at you, unless you’re one of those guys who gets too caught up in feminist virtue signaling. Right?
You can come over when I’m there too, if you want, he types. We could talk or watch a movie. Or study.
You mean that we could mess around, Sara responds. Three dots indicate she’s drafting a follow-up. Unless you think we should mess around… with textbooks?
What subject? August asks her. Anatomy? Romance languages?
Gross, texts Sara, accompanied by emojis signalling disgust and laughter. I think I hate innuendo.
August waits until his phone goes cold and silent in his hands, at which point he assumes that Sara must have deemed it his turn.
He assumes wrong, because just when he’s planning out a response, Sara texts him one more time.
How about this, she says. When we come back to school, why don’t you tell me, in plain language, exactly what you intend to do to me?
—
The next day they’re back to texting mundane good morning shit, but August keeps scrolling up to what Sara said the night before about plain language. Keeps reading it over again. Why does it feel so bold? Vocabulary-wise, there’s nothing too scandalous about Sara’s statement. She’s just used omission to put all the explicit language into his head, made it his responsibility to imagine himself telling it to her. Dirty talk by proxy. It must be true what they say about the quiet ones.
Also, with what Sara knows about the video, she must really hate her brother. Even if Sara hasn’t admitted it to herself yet. That gives August a bit of a thrill—not that he dislikes Simon personally, despite what people might assume, although Simon was annoying and pushy about the party money—it’s just that, you aren’t supposed to hate your brother, the same way August isn’t supposed to hate Wilhelm. Maybe resents or envies is a better verb; whatever the case, Sara probably feels a similar mixture of socially unspeakable emotions about Simon.
Suddenly Sara’s texts, even the good morning ones, are a lighthouse after months alone at sea. Come safely into harbor. You are not alone.
Although: it’s also possible Sara is messing with him. In fact, this may be the next phase in whatever operation she and Felice and Madison McCoy are carrying out to humiliate him. August isn’t too concerned. They must think they’re this inseparable girl coven, but Felice has no idea how much Sara’s already betrayed her. A few leaked texts—not even the bolder ones—and August could have them screaming at one another. As for Madison, she actually believes in astrology, so what can she really do to him? Yell at him in English about how he’s such a dark Capricorn?
Exactly. He has the Sara situation entirely under his control. Nothing to worry about there.
Now if only his mother would leave him alone about breakfast.
“You can’t just have a protein shake,” Mamma says for the hundredth time, making the kitchen walls close in with her repetition. Above the clatter of dishes she’s loading into the sink—their now-dismissed housekeeper never used to make so much noise—she adds, “Eat some real food, please.”
“I’ll be fine, Mamma.” Leaning back against the refrigerator, August pockets his phone and takes a sip of the protein shake just to prove it. “I read the label.”
“I’m sure it’s full of chemicals. I don’t want you crashing during our video call today.”
“Video call?” August keeps testing Sara to see if she’ll video chat with him, but there’s no way Mamma knows about that.
“Twenty minutes from now. About your education. Don’t you remember?” Mamma turns around to face him. “It is exceptionally kind of Her Majesty to pay your tuition. And we are family, so we owe her our time.” She clasps her hands tidily in front of her, but the effect is ruined by her dishwashing gloves. “Between you and me, I think she intends to include you in more going forward. With Erik gone, Wilhelm needs you.”
“I told you, Wille and I don’t get along,” says August. Then he remembers—the queen’s phone call, after the funeral. A purposeful energy he hasn’t felt since before then surges through his legs, even as he knows it shouldn’t. “But she did say he needed me. Last term. If she still means it—“
“She does,” Mamma says. “Now help me wash up some, or at least go make yourself look presentable.”
August chooses the second option. It takes longer than he intends; with his mother’s instructions to go make yourself look presentable reverberating in his head, he’s stuck in front of his bathroom mirror, wondering what wasn’t presentable about him in the first place. Was it his skin—hair—teeth? Maybe he should start paying attention to his teeth, more. Fuck. Now he’s going to be wondering about that.
When he returns, his mother is at the dining room table, laughing in front of her laptop. She and the queen are reminiscing about something that happened their first year at Hillerska—a bird that got into the English teacher’s classroom and disrupted lessons for twenty minutes. August can’t reconstruct the entire story by himself, since they’re speaking in sentence fragments and nicknames, the way you do when you’ve shared a memory so many times it becomes a sort of code. Was it Mamma who let the bird in, deliberately? Mamma has to cover her face with hands, she’s laughing so hard.
August waits outside the view of the camera lens, knowing this part of the conversation isn’t meant for him. When his mother beckons him over, he catches the queen’s expression as it shifts from nostalgic mirth to stern, regal composure. Both are masks, in their way. August prefers the second mask to the first. His own mamma could never manage to look quite so stern.
Her Majesty begins with New Year-appropriate greetings, followed by observations one expects from extended family members. One comment about August’s height, and then another—like a jab right below the ribs—about his growing resemblance to his father.
Next, she relates the news that Wilhelm won’t be returning to Hillerska next term. With Wilhelm elevated to the role of crown prince, he’ll be needed at the palace to learn more about his duties. He wants to be close to his family for the foreseeable future. The subtext of this is these are the talking points for when the journalists come to find you.
“Wilhelm is still recovering after a difficult semester,” says Her Majesty. “But I think he’ll want to spend time with you at Easter. Will you attend services with us?”
It’s less of a question, and more of a command. Not that August minds something that gives him purpose. “Of course, Your Majesty.”
“Perfect,” says the queen. “We’ll prepare guest rooms for you in the palace. In the meantime, the new year is a perfect time to set goals for your final term at Hillerska. We’ll be checking in on your grades and exam scores. I hope you understand.”
Mamma assures the queen that August has always gotten high marks. (She leaves out the part where increasingly that’s only been due to last-minute adrenaline rushes, and that over break she called in a favor to get him a Ritalin prescription.) August’s palms start to sweat as he wonders why he’s gotten out of punishment this easily. He knows that if Wille had his say, they wouldn’t be on this video call at all. He also knows that Wille has some input, or he’d be here too, and their mothers would be forcing a reconciliation earlier than Easter. Naturally, the crown wants to see that August is taking school seriously if they’re paying his tuition. Go to classes, don’t fail them, show up to rowing practice? Pretend to be friends with Wilhelm for the rest of his life, and fake smiles while shaking hands? Surely there’s more that’s expected of August, when Her Majesty could have him put on trial and sent to jail.
The conversation swerves away from academics and toward August’s social life.
“As for conduct,” Her Majesty continues. “As a prefect, August, you already know what it means to be a model to other students. To finish the year strong, and to preserve the reputation of the crown, we encourage you to avoid too many social distractions.” She pauses, and the set of her jaw becomes even more serious. “Parties with drinking, hazing rituals, girls—”
“Girls?” Mamma interrupts. “Perhaps August could see one girl. If she’s appropriate.”
“Is there currently someone?” Her Majesty asks. “I think I remember Wilhelm mentioning—Felice Ehrencrona, was it?”
“Not Felice, no. Not anymore. There’s no one specific. I only thought…”
“Close relationships come with risks, even at this age. If a girl found out why August and Wilhelm quarreled—”
“Ina. He’s only a teenage boy. They’re both just boys.”
It’s the first time August has ever heard his mother address the queen by a nickname. At least, to her face. Mamma sounds like a teenager herself, desperate and breathless, with just a hint of teenage girl fury that August can’t take seriously. Why all this fuss over girls, all of a sudden? When have they ever talked about that aspect of his life? Why does Mamma care?
“To be fair, Louise,” says Her Majesty, enunciating each syllable. “You don’t understand it like I do. How relationships make a person vulnerable.” Even through the blur of the laptop, one can see her resemblance to Wilhelm—the cheekbones, the thoughtful (if more somber) gaze. “You never did. This isn’t something we can share as mothers.”
“No,” says Mamma, looking down at the table. “You’re right. Forgive me.” She places a hand on top of August’s, looks back up. At him this time, instead of at the queen. “Do you understand what your cousin needs from you, right now?”
August swallows. He nods, leans toward the camera, and begins his apology. It’s stock phrases at first: being sorry for the pain he caused, grave errors in judgement—layers of drafted words that he uses to shove down and bury a term’s worth of annoyance at Wille. Whom, he says, he always wanted to be loyal to. To look after.
“Like Erik wanted me to.” Only when August mentions Erik does he start to feel conviction about what he’s saying. “Like I’m going to try and do for now on. I wish I hadn’t done what I’d done. I promise to end my time at Hillerska in your service. That I’ll do what’s best for Wilhelm.”
Her Majesty Queen Kristina of Sweden is silent in a way that reminds of August of mountains. Tough and gray and unchanging.
“Our families have lost so much in recent years,” she says. “We need to stand by one another.”
When the video call ends a few minutes later, August’s mother tells him to give her some time alone.
—
Rickard brought an exercise bike into one of the storage rooms when he moved in. In spite of his ongoing protest of Rickard’s boring existence, August uses the bike when the weather or time of day prevents him from running outside. Every time August’s darker thoughts catch up to him, he kicks up the resistance on the gears and pedals harder.
After the video conference with the queen, and all of Mamma’s fuss about girls, and August having to hear both of them say Felice’s name like they knew anything about that situation at all, there’s no resistance setting high enough.
Close relationships come with risks…
August’s relationship with Sara isn’t close. Not even with the dodgy text flirting or the kisses exchanged before Christmas. He doesn’t like her back like that. Does she even like him like that? Why does the answer to the question even matter?
They aren’t a couple. They’re only an alliance. Countries make alliances. His ancestors entered unhappy marriages for centuries to secure alliances.
Alliances can be politically advantageous.
Even at this age…
You know what? Fuck this. Fuck the part where two old women think they can mess with his private life. He is an adult, he has been for quite some time when it comes to girls, and if they want to get involved and set rules about that now, then it’s too late.
(On the other hand, fuck this in other ways. He’s not really a real adult. He’s young and he made a mistake and he was high when he took the video and he felt awful afterward, he’s said. August wants his mother to be strong enough to make it alright for him. It’s not like he’s thirty-five or old or whatever. Plenty of other guys his age do the exact same thing, it’s just that they haven’t done it to the crown prince of Sweden and they don’t get caught.)
But also, the queen is allowed to mess with his private life. That’s her right. That’s what being queen means. If that isn’t her right, then everything else falls apart.
If a girl found out why August and Wilhelm quarreled…
Maybe August should warn Sara? She found out on her own. She saw him with his phone in the library. If the people at the palace knew what she knew, would they try to buy her off? Intimidate her? Hurt her?
No. Sara is the dangerous one. She witnessed what he did, and she doesn’t have to tell the palace if she tells. She can tell law enforcement, or the media, or anyone else who will listen.
What Her Majesty and Mamma don’t understand is that August has to placate Sara to protect all of them. He is doing this for the family.
It’s time to feed Sara with more attention. She’s like one of the rare plants Pappa kept in the greenhouse, needing frequent checks and care. Besides, they haven’t texted in five hours, and yesterday the intervals between their texts were two to three hours at most. August stops pedaling, pulls out his phone, swipes over to Sara’s account on Instagram as his breath comes out in puffs.
He isn’t sure what his strategy is yet or what he’s going to say to her. As much as Sara struggles with conversational nuances, she’ll see through a superficial compliment about her appearance right away. (She is pretty, in a secretive sort of way that sneaks up on a person, but you can’t just say that without looking like a simp or a creeper. Which August is not. He’s pretty sure. Perhaps he would have crossed a line that day in the stables, if he’d been less charming about messing with her.)
There’s no secretly pretty selfies at the top of Sara’s Instagram today, only an old pixelated photo with little kids wearing animal hats and pulling a sled through the snow. Wait, that’s Simon (in the red panda hat) and Sara (with the polar bear hat and the pink coat) and they’ve got to be… six and seven? August can’t read the caption because Sara’s composed it in Spanish for once. The emojis and the mi hermanito <3 suggest devoted affection in a way that makes the post-cycling sweat run cold down August’s back.
What if she doesn’t hate her brother so much after all?
August needs to keep Sara from talking. How? His thoughts race like he’s still pedaling on the bike and adrenaline courses through his limbs. He swipes back and forth through the apps on his phone, looking for something, anything that will tug Sara closer to him.
Finally, a solution appears where he least expects it—in the inbox for his Hillerska email.
—
To: <august.horn.22@hillerskaskolan.org>
From: <rektor.lilja@hillerskaskolan.org>
Subject: Winter Open House (Student Panel)
August,
I trust that you and your family are enjoying a restful Christmas break.
As we discussed before the holidays, Hillerska is hosting its Winter Open House shortly after we return to school. The admissions committee wants to organize a well-rounded panel of students to speak about their Hillerska experience and answer any questions from prospective families. Would you be able to sit on the panel in your role as a prefect? You would be excused from your morning classes.
One additional request: we still need one panelist to represent non-residential students. Do you know someone you’d recommend for that role? Preferably someone polished and responsible. Please let us know as soon as possible. As you’re aware, these admissions events are a vital part of our outreach to future Hillerska students.
Regards,
Headmistress Lilja
[Author’s Note: I didn’t finish the email chain for this part, but August essentially rolls high enough on persuasion that he convinces Lilja to put Sara on the admissions panel. So now Sara is getting responsibilities at school and making connections.]
—
If you want to win over a girl with gifts and favors, you have to cater to her interests. It’s not that August didn’t know that. He’s just never put it into practice like this before.
He went too generic, with Felice. All that insufferable talk of restaurants, when he didn’t even know he was broke. Putting Sara on the headmistress’s radar costs August nothing, and when they’re on the phone the evening before he returns to Hillerska, she actually says it’s thoughtful of him to include her like that. Thoughtful. She’s got to be fucking with him.
Unless she isn’t?
As August folds clothes and stacks them carefully in his suitcase, Sara explains on speakerphone about how she wants to be a prefect too, someday. She wants nothing more than to help out with Hillerska events. When she was younger, her mother used to take her and Simon to the public library all day—Sara doesn’t say why—and she used to sit between shelves and read the horse and school and etiquette books. She knows the right way to serve coffee and tea in multiple countries, the correct wording for invitations, every last thread of proper dress codes. She has been training for this her whole life.
“Those details matter,” Sara declares. “They’re so much work. And if they’re done right, everything runs smoothly, but no one notices. If they aren’t, everyone notices, and it’s a disaster.”
August laughs. There’s a sudden lightness in his chest.
“Did I say something funny?” Sara asks, after a moment.
“Not at all,” August says. “You’re just the only one who gets it. Finally.” He means it. Everyone calls him annoying behind his back, but they’re the ones benefiting from the events and rituals he’s organized. Hypocrites. “If you want, I’ll let you help me out with prefect work.”
“Are you trying to get me to do all your work?” Sara asks, deliberate as a lawyer. “Or are you trying to be alone with me?”
“We’ll do my work together. Promise.” This isn’t that cliché where the popular boy manipulates the quiet girl into taking on his homework and responsibilities—that shows a lack of control, and August is too much of a control freak to let Sara complete his entire checklist. “That way you’ll know what to do, so you can be in the running for prefect your third year. It really should be you, you know?” Except that she lacks the family connections—but August keeps quiet about that. “The headmistress has to know that.”
“Where and when would we do this, exactly?”
“You’re the one who said something about us being alone.” He lowers his voice, even though he’s in his room and no one else can hear him. “You’re the only girl I can trust, Sara.”
Sara giggles, maybe in a nervous way. “You’re saying that to make fun of me.”
“I need you. I mean it. Besides, it gets boring doing school mailings by myself. I’ve practically memorized all our classmates’ middle names by now.”
“Really? Then what’s mine?”
She’s challenging him. August has the full names of most students memorized—he wasn’t lying on parents’ weekend when he promised Wille he’d be his nomenclator—but everyone, not just him, thought of Sara as “that mousey Bjärstad girl” before she started spending time with Felice.
Bjärstad’s a place to start. August closes his eyes, pictures it on the envelope. “Your brother’s Simon Mikael, so… Belén? You’re Sara Belén.”
“You almost pronounced it right,” Sara says. “Now I’m allowed to look your middle name up in the Hillerska directory. It’s only fair.”
The sound of Sara typing charges the air. August’s brain fills in the blank with the name Sara’s about to say, and he halts in the middle of packing. Suddenly all the familiar items of clothing and toiletries in front of him blur into a mess of shapes he can’t identify.
He has to talk to his mother about his middle name. Immediately.
“…your middle name is Kristian…” Sara’s voice sounds crackly and distant. “August Kristian… are you still there? Is something wrong?”
“I have to go,” he says. “Something’s come up.” He’s already on his feet, wandering down the stairs toward the living room, where it’s too public to talk to her like this. To keep Sara from asking questions, he adds, “I’ll text you from the road tomorrow, alright?”
“Then come find me at school the day after.”
“Yes. Somewhere private.”
He tells her good night, and she tells him good night back. They scramble through a few more parting greetings before they both hang up, maybe since none of Sara’s etiquette books had guidance about strategic flirting in the age of cell phones, maybe because August is carrying too much nervous energy to think clearly. Somehow good night feels like as much trouble as anything else they’ve discussed.
—
August is so agitated by the revelation about his middle name and the conversation with Sara that he vaults over the back of the sofa and onto the empty cushion next to his mother.
“Augge.” Mamma grabs his arm, more to steady herself than to steady him. “You scared me.”
August scoots back, shaking her off. “You haven’t called me Augge since I was six.”
“You haven’t jumped on furniture since you were six, either,” Mamma says. “Now what is it you need to tell me?”
Mamma’s gaze drifts back over to the television screen—the only light in the living room—where a casually-dressed, blandly-smiling chef explains how to make some depressing root vegetable casserole. Cooking shows, that’s all she’s had on lately since they lost all their money. August grabs the remote from the coffee table, pauses the program with force, and interrupts his mother before she can object.
“My middle name’s Kristian,” he says. “Like Kristina. That’s on purpose. She’s the girl you promised. You chose it because—because of her.”
For once August can’t quite bring himself to use titles. You can’t say Her Majesty or my cousin the queen when you’re referring to someone your mother secretly made out with at boarding school in the 1990s. (That’s so fucking weird. And probably the deeply-rooted subconscious reason that August can’t agree with the other guys about girl-on-girl being hot. At least he’s solved that one, finally.)
“Yes,” Mamma replies, still staring at the frozen TV screen. “That’s true. She and I were—well. Officially we weren’t anything but close friends. If anyone asks, your middle name is because she’s your pappa’s cousin. Which is the other reason we chose it. It can be both.”
“Did Pappa know about you?” August asks.
“He learned about it when you were just beginning to walk and climb,” says Mamma. “He may have always suspected. I don’t think he was comfortable with it. But him knowing didn’t have anything to do with—with what happened.”
What happened. The suicide. Again Mamma reaches out to place her hand on August’s arm; again he moves away. This is all happening so fast. Hot cables of anger are twisting and tangling in August’s stomach now. The anger hisses at his mother. This isn’t how things are supposed to work.
“Are you blackmailing her?” he says. “Will you threaten to tell everyone about your relationship if she goes after me? Is that the only reason I’m not getting punished for everything?“
“No!” Mamma’s hands are out in front of her, in a stop gesture. “No. It isn’t like that. We mutually agreed that it would be best to keep negative attention off of you and Wilhelm.” She lowers her voice now, and August wonders if that’s to keep Rickard from hearing their fight, upstairs. “Don’t you see how we understand the threat of everything getting out? You’re still young. You deserve a second chance.”
“Maybe I do,” says August. “But isn’t that why I made an apology? I shouldn’t be safe because you have tabloid secrets. It should be because I’ve been there for Wilhelm. Even if Wille doesn’t appreciate everyone I introduced him to and how I put him on the rowing team and everything else.” He curls his fingers into his palms, tight and then tighter. “I was ready to give up Felice, Mamma. If Wille had wanted to go out with her, I would have let him. Not that it matters anymore.” August un-clenches his fists, flops back against the couch, lets his gaze drift toward the ceiling. “He doesn’t like girls and I’m totally over Felice.”
The last four words are a lie that sting the inside of August’s mouth and make his voice wobble. He recovers by telling himself the lie will be true soon enough. Felice’s impending social justice true crime phase is as basic as girls get, and that should soon dissolve any attraction he feels.
Anyway, his mother is saying something to him, something about how she talked to the queen again today, and… wait, what?
“…changed her mind when it comes to you and girls,” she says. “I convinced her. I know it hurt when Felice broke up with you. I want you to be able to move on. It’ll be good for you.”
“You didn’t have to make it a big deal.” August refuses to look at his mother. “Why did you even bring it up?”
“I wouldn’t, normally. Except.” Mamma nudges him, about to say something embarrassing. “You’ve been texting with someone recently.”
“I text a lot of people.”
“You’re always blushing over your phone.”
“No I’m not, Mamma.” Even as he says it, August feels heat creeping across his cheeks and down his neck.
“You can’t see your face.” Mamma smiles for the first time since they started talking. “I can.” She counts off points on her fingers, like she’s been observing him this whole time. “Also, you’re jumpy. Any time Rickard or I get a text alert you think it’s your phone and you’re always checking to see. And I heard you saying good night to her in the hall just now. You sounded different than usual, actually… sort of sweet.” Mamma sounds surprised. “I wish you’d tell me who she is.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” says August, getting up from the sofa. Because Mamma doesn’t look like she’s going to let this drop unless he admits to something, he adds, “For now.”
“For now,” she echoes, still smiling. “I see.”
“Mamma, stop.”
“Just let me tease you, please. It’s fun. You’re never like this…”
This is such an absurd fucking turn of events. August’s mother is laughing softly to herself as he goes back upstairs. It’s not the same as her laughter when she was reminiscing with the queen about the bird in the English classroom—or perhaps it is that same laughter, in a more rested state. It should be more annoying, August thinks, but it reminds him of when he was younger. When they didn’t fight so much.
—
As August packs his final items for school, he lists the things he’s learned:
First, Mamma thinks he’s simping for Sara Eriksson.
Second, she thinks it’s sweet.
Third, she never calls anything else August does sweet, at least not lately.
Fourth, Sara called him thoughtful, for the panel invitation.
Fifth, no one thinks sweet and thoughtful boys leak scandalous videos to the internet.
Maybe he can use this.
Thank you for joining me on this journey through my early fandom days!
I also had this one idea where it turned out August’s mother was Kristina’s unfortunate romance from her teenage years, and that ended up playing a role in the cover-up of the video. And meanwhile Sara is on an elaborate self-assigned spy mission to make August fall for her and get revenge on him. August doesn’t know it yet.
There’s some weirdnesses and some inaccuracies. I assumed middle names were a thing in Sweden when they aren’t, really. At any rate, it’s an interesting study in what I wrote early, early on before I was ever on social media for this show.
Content note for toxic masculinity and disordered eating, I suppose. And the usual YR subject matter.
It isn’t Christmas break at Årnäs if someone doesn’t end up behind a door, sobbing, at least once.
This was true even before August’s father died, because sometimes that person was Pappa himself. He’d turn up the sound system in his office so no one could hear him, only, everyone knew what that music meant. Pappa never thrived in winter with its few, filtered hours of sunlight. (Though at least winter left him too inert to do anything. Early spring, a time when Pappa’s energy had returned enough let him finish tasks, but his winter despair hadn’t faded? That could be more dangerous. Was, in fact, more dangerous.)
This year August’s mother doesn’t bother covering her sobs with music—if she’s upset, she wants you to know it—and Pappa’s speakers were some of the first things they put away after the funeral. So it’s not like she could, anyway. If she even cared about remembering Pappa. Which she doesn’t.
When August walks by the old office and hears his mother crying inside, he hesitates, but doesn’t say anything. That’s only polite. Even when the door’s cracked open.
But their house is old, and the floorboards creak, so Mamma hears him out in the hall.
“Come in and sit with me,” she says. “I need to talk to you.”
“I’ll come back another time,” August says, because underneath his mother’s usual post-holidays exhaustion, there’s a warning tone.
“No, now. We have to talk now.”
The door opens a little more and Mamma grabs August by the arm, pulling him inside. Together they’re surrounded by bare minimalist shelves and boxes full of their packed up contents. What was even the point of packing Pappa’s things up if they never took them anywhere? Mamma motions August into an old desk chair, the kind that swivels around, before sitting across from him on one of the storage cartons. Her face is blotchy red, her makeup is smeared, strands of her hair are sticking to her cheeks—but her mouth and narrowed eyes signal anger.
Mamma isn’t going to cry in front of him, August realizes. Not this time.
She’s kept whatever she’s about to say locked inside since before Christmas Eve. Now that Christmas Day has ended, it’s all coming out.
“We have to talk about what you’ve done,” Mamma begins. “You know they traced the video of Wilhelm and that other boy to your phone. What were you thinking? With anything digital, they can figure out who did it as easy as anything—”
She freefalls into it: the damage to the crown’s reputation, the threat to August’s future, the dangers of social media and how she doesn’t know how kids manage these days, the legal consequences and the specific wording of the laws he’s broken. That’s mixed in with reassurance that she still loves him, that she figures he didn’t mean to have things play out quite the way they did. There’s also some regurgitated podcast script about toxic masculinity and why boys fall prey to it. August swivels back and forth in the desk chair, says I know and again I know, Mamma at intervals to show he’s listening even if he’s got one arm folded across his chest and he can’t look her in the eye. He is listening, except that it’s with half an ear because there’s no way Mamma can tell him something he hasn’t already told himself. Or she’s telling him about something (the consequences, it’s the legal consequences) that he googled late at night, when he wanted to know how badly he’d fucked himself over. Anyway, Mamma can’t stick to a point, when she talks like this.
August’s mother has never been good at telling him off. Which is why it catches him by surprise when she finally asks,
“Why did you do it? I thought you and Wille were friends.”
Why? A thousand possible answers scrape together in August’s head like microphone feedback at a school assembly. He squeezes the spot between his neck and shoulder, where his muscles have been tense for days.
“I thought we were friends too,” he finally says.
Mamma tilts her chin up, trying to look up at him with the same intensity she’d use when she could look down at him from above. “And what does that mean?”
“We don’t get along,” he says. “Not like me and Erik. I mean Wille pretended to get along with me, we had some laughs, but he hides things from me, you know? He was never grateful for all the help I gave him. And then out of nowhere he embarrasses me, tells everyone we have no money.”
“Everyone already suspects we have no money.”
“But it’s tasteless to talk about it in front of all our friends. Anyway the video was only supposed to be a joke. I didn’t mean to post it, in fact when I filmed it I was—”
“Drinking? Drunk?”
“Yes. That.” August knows his mother isn’t stupid about what goes on at Hillerska (like she didn’t do her own drinking back in the nineties, and in fact, she organized some of the parties herself) but he decides she doesn’t need to know about socialist Simon Eriksson’s drug running. “Sorry. I do feel awful about it, okay? I’m sorry. Really. I just thought it was funny, at the time. I don’t even care that he likes boys. No one cares.”
His mother is silent. She tugs on the arm of his desk chair so August is facing her again, and fixes his hair, the way she always did before church when he was little. For a moment, it’s oddly soothing.
“Sometimes people are in relationships that they have to keep secret,” she says, letting her hand fall away. “And if you want to be close to the crown, you have to understand that. I can’t believe I have to tell you that…”
What follows is another lecture, this one meandering around the point about what it means to be nobility. The responsibility of it. Protecting the monarchy even if it means letting your own heart break. That sort of rhetoric is odd coming out of Mamma, with her own family connections being so obscure and dishonored by now she doesn’t like to mention their surname. (The iron ore her great-uncle sold to Germany in the 1940s probably didn’t help, either.) Mamma’s speech might have been more convincing from Pappa, who was always proud to announce himself as the queen’s cousin.
“…maybe you’d know what I mean about secrets,” Mamma says. “If you’d been a girl.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” August must have spaced out and missed a few sentences. “A girl could… do what I did.”
“Not that,” says Mamma. “I—I’m not ready to tell you the whole story. There was someone I loved once, before I married your father. We had a secret relationship. We couldn’t be together, so we broke it off, but we promised one another that if we had daughters, we’d name them after one another. You would have had her name.”
Her name. That’s not where August thought the conversation was going. August is so used to thinking of his mother as romantically boring, given her involvement with basic Rickard, that this is an absurd and welcome distraction from his recently forged criminal non-record.
“Are you coming out to me as bisexual, Mamma?” he says. “Because if you want to, I support you. Not everyone’s doing it for attention.”
(Felice definitely is, though. August has been aggressively trying not to care about her bombshell instagram announcement, since he has her blocked anyway, except Nils posted a screencap to one of their group texts and now all the guys keep bothering him for his official statement.)
“I can’t even unpack that comment right now.” Mamma huffs, and gets up from the storage crate she’s been sitting on this whole time. “I’m not gay or leaving your stepfather—I’m not, but—I can imagine a little bit of how Wilhelm is feeling right now. How devastating it must be for him to have that information out in the world.” She places her hand on August’s back. “I love you, and I know you were in a bad place last term and I could have been there for you more. I’m not going to let this ruin your life. But also, you should have thought this through.”
“I know, Mamma.”
When his mother squeezes his shoulder, August hopes he’ll feel the weight of guilt pulling him down, but instead he feels the fluttering lightness that comes with relief.
It’s only later, after their conversation, that he loses his appetite for the rest of the day.
It doesn’t return in the days that follow.
—
It’s not that August isn’t eating at all. That’s like some precious snowflake thing that ballerina-types do. A few of the girls at school do modeling or influencer work and they’re always whining over celery sticks. August would never do that, but he’s started to look at the calorie count of everything in the fridge. The yogurt, the milk, the juices. And then anything without a label, he’ll look up online. Just to inform himself. Then he’ll use the information to plan a run or a workout.
Even before now, August has recorded how many calories he burns during his exercise sessions. He tracked that once for a middle school fitness assignment, long before Hillerska, and the habit stuck. What he’s doing now is just thinking more critically about the relationship between diet and exercise. Giving himself more control. Balancing intake and output.
The more August thinks about it, the more he decides it’s a perfectly rational thought process.
He doesn’t even have to work that hard to eat less or skip meals, and not get noticed doing it. The excuses are easily crafted. Sorry, I made myself a sandwich earlier. I would have had breakfast but I overslept. Or he’ll start a petty argument. That’s always good for leaving the table dramatically. By New Year’s Eve, August has a rotation of strategies he can use when someone wants to feed him. He figures he won’t need it once he’s back at school, where he has much more control over his life.
Only one other thing helps August to feel in control, and that’s texting Sara Eriksson.
—
About my future dorm room, she says, in a message that arrives in the undefined night hours between January first and second. I want a single.
When Sara contacts August that time, he’s swiping through his socials in the dark with no discernable end goal. He’s muted his usual group texts, since his friends are still doing lit-exam-level analysis on the Hillerska girls’ instagram posts. Or they’re all posting tryhard vacation pictures from their ski cabins or Morocco or wherever while trying to act like it’s no big deal. Sara’s precise I’d-like-to-speak-to-a-manager request is at least honest in its aspiring elitism. August feels the skin around his cheeks stretch and realizes it’s a smile.
First years don’t get singles, August texts back. On reflection, that looks like he’s scaling back his part of their bargain, so he adds, but I’ll negotiate for you. What do you need a single for?
I don’t share well, is all Sara replies.
Still. It’s a reply. And she already knows about the video. Every other text he’s sent to a classmate this break, he’s felt his secret attached to the back of his neck like some parasitic worm. But Sara already knows. He doesn’t have to hide it from her. Is that why he feels like he’s high—or something as good as high—when they’re texting?
I have a single, August texts. If you need a place for privacy, I’ll copy you a key for my room. It’s a variation on something he’s said to other girls. Erik used to distribute keys too. You can be alone there whenever you want to.
I can’t be alone if you’re there annoying me.
A minute passes, and August spends that minute puzzling over Sara’s response before she follows up her text with a heart emoji that suggests she’s… maybe teasing? Maybe just making him sweat this out?
Whatever. If she’s doing the primary school thing where they tease you because they like you (she kissed him before the Christmas services, August reminds himself) he can counter with enough chivalry to confuse her into a corner.
He’s fairly certain he doesn’t like Sara back that way. Except, she’s cute enough and her hair smells nice and he liked touching her enough that he’d do it again. You don’t exactly turn away a cute girl who’s throwing herself at you, unless you’re one of those guys who gets too caught up in feminist virtue signaling. Right?
You can come over when I’m there too, if you want, he types. We could talk or watch a movie. Or study.
You mean that we could mess around, Sara responds. Three dots indicate she’s drafting a follow-up. Unless you think we should mess around… with textbooks?
What subject? August asks her. Anatomy? Romance languages?
Gross, texts Sara, accompanied by emojis signalling disgust and laughter. I think I hate innuendo.
August waits until his phone goes cold and silent in his hands, at which point he assumes that Sara must have deemed it his turn.
He assumes wrong, because just when he’s planning out a response, Sara texts him one more time.
How about this, she says. When we come back to school, why don’t you tell me, in plain language, exactly what you intend to do to me?
—
The next day they’re back to texting mundane good morning shit, but August keeps scrolling up to what Sara said the night before about plain language. Keeps reading it over again. Why does it feel so bold? Vocabulary-wise, there’s nothing too scandalous about Sara’s statement. She’s just used omission to put all the explicit language into his head, made it his responsibility to imagine himself telling it to her. Dirty talk by proxy. It must be true what they say about the quiet ones.
Also, with what Sara knows about the video, she must really hate her brother. Even if Sara hasn’t admitted it to herself yet. That gives August a bit of a thrill—not that he dislikes Simon personally, despite what people might assume, although Simon was annoying and pushy about the party money—it’s just that, you aren’t supposed to hate your brother, the same way August isn’t supposed to hate Wilhelm. Maybe resents or envies is a better verb; whatever the case, Sara probably feels a similar mixture of socially unspeakable emotions about Simon.
Suddenly Sara’s texts, even the good morning ones, are a lighthouse after months alone at sea. Come safely into harbor. You are not alone.
Although: it’s also possible Sara is messing with him. In fact, this may be the next phase in whatever operation she and Felice and Madison McCoy are carrying out to humiliate him. August isn’t too concerned. They must think they’re this inseparable girl coven, but Felice has no idea how much Sara’s already betrayed her. A few leaked texts—not even the bolder ones—and August could have them screaming at one another. As for Madison, she actually believes in astrology, so what can she really do to him? Yell at him in English about how he’s such a dark Capricorn?
Exactly. He has the Sara situation entirely under his control. Nothing to worry about there.
Now if only his mother would leave him alone about breakfast.
“You can’t just have a protein shake,” Mamma says for the hundredth time, making the kitchen walls close in with her repetition. Above the clatter of dishes she’s loading into the sink—their now-dismissed housekeeper never used to make so much noise—she adds, “Eat some real food, please.”
“I’ll be fine, Mamma.” Leaning back against the refrigerator, August pockets his phone and takes a sip of the protein shake just to prove it. “I read the label.”
“I’m sure it’s full of chemicals. I don’t want you crashing during our video call today.”
“Video call?” August keeps testing Sara to see if she’ll video chat with him, but there’s no way Mamma knows about that.
“Twenty minutes from now. About your education. Don’t you remember?” Mamma turns around to face him. “It is exceptionally kind of Her Majesty to pay your tuition. And we are family, so we owe her our time.” She clasps her hands tidily in front of her, but the effect is ruined by her dishwashing gloves. “Between you and me, I think she intends to include you in more going forward. With Erik gone, Wilhelm needs you.”
“I told you, Wille and I don’t get along,” says August. Then he remembers—the queen’s phone call, after the funeral. A purposeful energy he hasn’t felt since before then surges through his legs, even as he knows it shouldn’t. “But she did say he needed me. Last term. If she still means it—“
“She does,” Mamma says. “Now help me wash up some, or at least go make yourself look presentable.”
August chooses the second option. It takes longer than he intends; with his mother’s instructions to go make yourself look presentable reverberating in his head, he’s stuck in front of his bathroom mirror, wondering what wasn’t presentable about him in the first place. Was it his skin—hair—teeth? Maybe he should start paying attention to his teeth, more. Fuck. Now he’s going to be wondering about that.
When he returns, his mother is at the dining room table, laughing in front of her laptop. She and the queen are reminiscing about something that happened their first year at Hillerska—a bird that got into the English teacher’s classroom and disrupted lessons for twenty minutes. August can’t reconstruct the entire story by himself, since they’re speaking in sentence fragments and nicknames, the way you do when you’ve shared a memory so many times it becomes a sort of code. Was it Mamma who let the bird in, deliberately? Mamma has to cover her face with hands, she’s laughing so hard.
August waits outside the view of the camera lens, knowing this part of the conversation isn’t meant for him. When his mother beckons him over, he catches the queen’s expression as it shifts from nostalgic mirth to stern, regal composure. Both are masks, in their way. August prefers the second mask to the first. His own mamma could never manage to look quite so stern.
Her Majesty begins with New Year-appropriate greetings, followed by observations one expects from extended family members. One comment about August’s height, and then another—like a jab right below the ribs—about his growing resemblance to his father.
Next, she relates the news that Wilhelm won’t be returning to Hillerska next term. With Wilhelm elevated to the role of crown prince, he’ll be needed at the palace to learn more about his duties. He wants to be close to his family for the foreseeable future. The subtext of this is these are the talking points for when the journalists come to find you.
“Wilhelm is still recovering after a difficult semester,” says Her Majesty. “But I think he’ll want to spend time with you at Easter. Will you attend services with us?”
It’s less of a question, and more of a command. Not that August minds something that gives him purpose. “Of course, Your Majesty.”
“Perfect,” says the queen. “We’ll prepare guest rooms for you in the palace. In the meantime, the new year is a perfect time to set goals for your final term at Hillerska. We’ll be checking in on your grades and exam scores. I hope you understand.”
Mamma assures the queen that August has always gotten high marks. (She leaves out the part where increasingly that’s only been due to last-minute adrenaline rushes, and that over break she called in a favor to get him a Ritalin prescription.) August’s palms start to sweat as he wonders why he’s gotten out of punishment this easily. He knows that if Wille had his say, they wouldn’t be on this video call at all. He also knows that Wille has some input, or he’d be here too, and their mothers would be forcing a reconciliation earlier than Easter. Naturally, the crown wants to see that August is taking school seriously if they’re paying his tuition. Go to classes, don’t fail them, show up to rowing practice? Pretend to be friends with Wilhelm for the rest of his life, and fake smiles while shaking hands? Surely there’s more that’s expected of August, when Her Majesty could have him put on trial and sent to jail.
The conversation swerves away from academics and toward August’s social life.
“As for conduct,” Her Majesty continues. “As a prefect, August, you already know what it means to be a model to other students. To finish the year strong, and to preserve the reputation of the crown, we encourage you to avoid too many social distractions.” She pauses, and the set of her jaw becomes even more serious. “Parties with drinking, hazing rituals, girls—”
“Girls?” Mamma interrupts. “Perhaps August could see one girl. If she’s appropriate.”
“Is there currently someone?” Her Majesty asks. “I think I remember Wilhelm mentioning—Felice Ehrencrona, was it?”
“Not Felice, no. Not anymore. There’s no one specific. I only thought…”
“Close relationships come with risks, even at this age. If a girl found out why August and Wilhelm quarreled—”
“Ina. He’s only a teenage boy. They’re both just boys.”
It’s the first time August has ever heard his mother address the queen by a nickname. At least, to her face. Mamma sounds like a teenager herself, desperate and breathless, with just a hint of teenage girl fury that August can’t take seriously. Why all this fuss over girls, all of a sudden? When have they ever talked about that aspect of his life? Why does Mamma care?
“To be fair, Louise,” says Her Majesty, enunciating each syllable. “You don’t understand it like I do. How relationships make a person vulnerable.” Even through the blur of the laptop, one can see her resemblance to Wilhelm—the cheekbones, the thoughtful (if more somber) gaze. “You never did. This isn’t something we can share as mothers.”
“No,” says Mamma, looking down at the table. “You’re right. Forgive me.” She places a hand on top of August’s, looks back up. At him this time, instead of at the queen. “Do you understand what your cousin needs from you, right now?”
August swallows. He nods, leans toward the camera, and begins his apology. It’s stock phrases at first: being sorry for the pain he caused, grave errors in judgement—layers of drafted words that he uses to shove down and bury a term’s worth of annoyance at Wille. Whom, he says, he always wanted to be loyal to. To look after.
“Like Erik wanted me to.” Only when August mentions Erik does he start to feel conviction about what he’s saying. “Like I’m going to try and do for now on. I wish I hadn’t done what I’d done. I promise to end my time at Hillerska in your service. That I’ll do what’s best for Wilhelm.”
Her Majesty Queen Kristina of Sweden is silent in a way that reminds of August of mountains. Tough and gray and unchanging.
“Our families have lost so much in recent years,” she says. “We need to stand by one another.”
When the video call ends a few minutes later, August’s mother tells him to give her some time alone.
—
Rickard brought an exercise bike into one of the storage rooms when he moved in. In spite of his ongoing protest of Rickard’s boring existence, August uses the bike when the weather or time of day prevents him from running outside. Every time August’s darker thoughts catch up to him, he kicks up the resistance on the gears and pedals harder.
After the video conference with the queen, and all of Mamma’s fuss about girls, and August having to hear both of them say Felice’s name like they knew anything about that situation at all, there’s no resistance setting high enough.
Close relationships come with risks…
August’s relationship with Sara isn’t close. Not even with the dodgy text flirting or the kisses exchanged before Christmas. He doesn’t like her back like that. Does she even like him like that? Why does the answer to the question even matter?
They aren’t a couple. They’re only an alliance. Countries make alliances. His ancestors entered unhappy marriages for centuries to secure alliances.
Alliances can be politically advantageous.
Even at this age…
You know what? Fuck this. Fuck the part where two old women think they can mess with his private life. He is an adult, he has been for quite some time when it comes to girls, and if they want to get involved and set rules about that now, then it’s too late.
(On the other hand, fuck this in other ways. He’s not really a real adult. He’s young and he made a mistake and he was high when he took the video and he felt awful afterward, he’s said. August wants his mother to be strong enough to make it alright for him. It’s not like he’s thirty-five or old or whatever. Plenty of other guys his age do the exact same thing, it’s just that they haven’t done it to the crown prince of Sweden and they don’t get caught.)
But also, the queen is allowed to mess with his private life. That’s her right. That’s what being queen means. If that isn’t her right, then everything else falls apart.
If a girl found out why August and Wilhelm quarreled…
Maybe August should warn Sara? She found out on her own. She saw him with his phone in the library. If the people at the palace knew what she knew, would they try to buy her off? Intimidate her? Hurt her?
No. Sara is the dangerous one. She witnessed what he did, and she doesn’t have to tell the palace if she tells. She can tell law enforcement, or the media, or anyone else who will listen.
What Her Majesty and Mamma don’t understand is that August has to placate Sara to protect all of them. He is doing this for the family.
It’s time to feed Sara with more attention. She’s like one of the rare plants Pappa kept in the greenhouse, needing frequent checks and care. Besides, they haven’t texted in five hours, and yesterday the intervals between their texts were two to three hours at most. August stops pedaling, pulls out his phone, swipes over to Sara’s account on Instagram as his breath comes out in puffs.
He isn’t sure what his strategy is yet or what he’s going to say to her. As much as Sara struggles with conversational nuances, she’ll see through a superficial compliment about her appearance right away. (She is pretty, in a secretive sort of way that sneaks up on a person, but you can’t just say that without looking like a simp or a creeper. Which August is not. He’s pretty sure. Perhaps he would have crossed a line that day in the stables, if he’d been less charming about messing with her.)
There’s no secretly pretty selfies at the top of Sara’s Instagram today, only an old pixelated photo with little kids wearing animal hats and pulling a sled through the snow. Wait, that’s Simon (in the red panda hat) and Sara (with the polar bear hat and the pink coat) and they’ve got to be… six and seven? August can’t read the caption because Sara’s composed it in Spanish for once. The emojis and the mi hermanito <3 suggest devoted affection in a way that makes the post-cycling sweat run cold down August’s back.
What if she doesn’t hate her brother so much after all?
August needs to keep Sara from talking. How? His thoughts race like he’s still pedaling on the bike and adrenaline courses through his limbs. He swipes back and forth through the apps on his phone, looking for something, anything that will tug Sara closer to him.
Finally, a solution appears where he least expects it—in the inbox for his Hillerska email.
—
To: <august.horn.22@hillerskaskolan.org>
From: <rektor.lilja@hillerskaskolan.org>
Subject: Winter Open House (Student Panel)
August,
I trust that you and your family are enjoying a restful Christmas break.
As we discussed before the holidays, Hillerska is hosting its Winter Open House shortly after we return to school. The admissions committee wants to organize a well-rounded panel of students to speak about their Hillerska experience and answer any questions from prospective families. Would you be able to sit on the panel in your role as a prefect? You would be excused from your morning classes.
One additional request: we still need one panelist to represent non-residential students. Do you know someone you’d recommend for that role? Preferably someone polished and responsible. Please let us know as soon as possible. As you’re aware, these admissions events are a vital part of our outreach to future Hillerska students.
Regards,
Headmistress Lilja
[Author’s Note: I didn’t finish the email chain for this part, but August essentially rolls high enough on persuasion that he convinces Lilja to put Sara on the admissions panel. So now Sara is getting responsibilities at school and making connections.]
—
If you want to win over a girl with gifts and favors, you have to cater to her interests. It’s not that August didn’t know that. He’s just never put it into practice like this before.
He went too generic, with Felice. All that insufferable talk of restaurants, when he didn’t even know he was broke. Putting Sara on the headmistress’s radar costs August nothing, and when they’re on the phone the evening before he returns to Hillerska, she actually says it’s thoughtful of him to include her like that. Thoughtful. She’s got to be fucking with him.
Unless she isn’t?
As August folds clothes and stacks them carefully in his suitcase, Sara explains on speakerphone about how she wants to be a prefect too, someday. She wants nothing more than to help out with Hillerska events. When she was younger, her mother used to take her and Simon to the public library all day—Sara doesn’t say why—and she used to sit between shelves and read the horse and school and etiquette books. She knows the right way to serve coffee and tea in multiple countries, the correct wording for invitations, every last thread of proper dress codes. She has been training for this her whole life.
“Those details matter,” Sara declares. “They’re so much work. And if they’re done right, everything runs smoothly, but no one notices. If they aren’t, everyone notices, and it’s a disaster.”
August laughs. There’s a sudden lightness in his chest.
“Did I say something funny?” Sara asks, after a moment.
“Not at all,” August says. “You’re just the only one who gets it. Finally.” He means it. Everyone calls him annoying behind his back, but they’re the ones benefiting from the events and rituals he’s organized. Hypocrites. “If you want, I’ll let you help me out with prefect work.”
“Are you trying to get me to do all your work?” Sara asks, deliberate as a lawyer. “Or are you trying to be alone with me?”
“We’ll do my work together. Promise.” This isn’t that cliché where the popular boy manipulates the quiet girl into taking on his homework and responsibilities—that shows a lack of control, and August is too much of a control freak to let Sara complete his entire checklist. “That way you’ll know what to do, so you can be in the running for prefect your third year. It really should be you, you know?” Except that she lacks the family connections—but August keeps quiet about that. “The headmistress has to know that.”
“Where and when would we do this, exactly?”
“You’re the one who said something about us being alone.” He lowers his voice, even though he’s in his room and no one else can hear him. “You’re the only girl I can trust, Sara.”
Sara giggles, maybe in a nervous way. “You’re saying that to make fun of me.”
“I need you. I mean it. Besides, it gets boring doing school mailings by myself. I’ve practically memorized all our classmates’ middle names by now.”
“Really? Then what’s mine?”
She’s challenging him. August has the full names of most students memorized—he wasn’t lying on parents’ weekend when he promised Wille he’d be his nomenclator—but everyone, not just him, thought of Sara as “that mousey Bjärstad girl” before she started spending time with Felice.
Bjärstad’s a place to start. August closes his eyes, pictures it on the envelope. “Your brother’s Simon Mikael, so… Belén? You’re Sara Belén.”
“You almost pronounced it right,” Sara says. “Now I’m allowed to look your middle name up in the Hillerska directory. It’s only fair.”
The sound of Sara typing charges the air. August’s brain fills in the blank with the name Sara’s about to say, and he halts in the middle of packing. Suddenly all the familiar items of clothing and toiletries in front of him blur into a mess of shapes he can’t identify.
He has to talk to his mother about his middle name. Immediately.
“…your middle name is Kristian…” Sara’s voice sounds crackly and distant. “August Kristian… are you still there? Is something wrong?”
“I have to go,” he says. “Something’s come up.” He’s already on his feet, wandering down the stairs toward the living room, where it’s too public to talk to her like this. To keep Sara from asking questions, he adds, “I’ll text you from the road tomorrow, alright?”
“Then come find me at school the day after.”
“Yes. Somewhere private.”
He tells her good night, and she tells him good night back. They scramble through a few more parting greetings before they both hang up, maybe since none of Sara’s etiquette books had guidance about strategic flirting in the age of cell phones, maybe because August is carrying too much nervous energy to think clearly. Somehow good night feels like as much trouble as anything else they’ve discussed.
—
August is so agitated by the revelation about his middle name and the conversation with Sara that he vaults over the back of the sofa and onto the empty cushion next to his mother.
“Augge.” Mamma grabs his arm, more to steady herself than to steady him. “You scared me.”
August scoots back, shaking her off. “You haven’t called me Augge since I was six.”
“You haven’t jumped on furniture since you were six, either,” Mamma says. “Now what is it you need to tell me?”
Mamma’s gaze drifts back over to the television screen—the only light in the living room—where a casually-dressed, blandly-smiling chef explains how to make some depressing root vegetable casserole. Cooking shows, that’s all she’s had on lately since they lost all their money. August grabs the remote from the coffee table, pauses the program with force, and interrupts his mother before she can object.
“My middle name’s Kristian,” he says. “Like Kristina. That’s on purpose. She’s the girl you promised. You chose it because—because of her.”
For once August can’t quite bring himself to use titles. You can’t say Her Majesty or my cousin the queen when you’re referring to someone your mother secretly made out with at boarding school in the 1990s. (That’s so fucking weird. And probably the deeply-rooted subconscious reason that August can’t agree with the other guys about girl-on-girl being hot. At least he’s solved that one, finally.)
“Yes,” Mamma replies, still staring at the frozen TV screen. “That’s true. She and I were—well. Officially we weren’t anything but close friends. If anyone asks, your middle name is because she’s your pappa’s cousin. Which is the other reason we chose it. It can be both.”
“Did Pappa know about you?” August asks.
“He learned about it when you were just beginning to walk and climb,” says Mamma. “He may have always suspected. I don’t think he was comfortable with it. But him knowing didn’t have anything to do with—with what happened.”
What happened. The suicide. Again Mamma reaches out to place her hand on August’s arm; again he moves away. This is all happening so fast. Hot cables of anger are twisting and tangling in August’s stomach now. The anger hisses at his mother. This isn’t how things are supposed to work.
“Are you blackmailing her?” he says. “Will you threaten to tell everyone about your relationship if she goes after me? Is that the only reason I’m not getting punished for everything?“
“No!” Mamma’s hands are out in front of her, in a stop gesture. “No. It isn’t like that. We mutually agreed that it would be best to keep negative attention off of you and Wilhelm.” She lowers her voice now, and August wonders if that’s to keep Rickard from hearing their fight, upstairs. “Don’t you see how we understand the threat of everything getting out? You’re still young. You deserve a second chance.”
“Maybe I do,” says August. “But isn’t that why I made an apology? I shouldn’t be safe because you have tabloid secrets. It should be because I’ve been there for Wilhelm. Even if Wille doesn’t appreciate everyone I introduced him to and how I put him on the rowing team and everything else.” He curls his fingers into his palms, tight and then tighter. “I was ready to give up Felice, Mamma. If Wille had wanted to go out with her, I would have let him. Not that it matters anymore.” August un-clenches his fists, flops back against the couch, lets his gaze drift toward the ceiling. “He doesn’t like girls and I’m totally over Felice.”
The last four words are a lie that sting the inside of August’s mouth and make his voice wobble. He recovers by telling himself the lie will be true soon enough. Felice’s impending social justice true crime phase is as basic as girls get, and that should soon dissolve any attraction he feels.
Anyway, his mother is saying something to him, something about how she talked to the queen again today, and… wait, what?
“…changed her mind when it comes to you and girls,” she says. “I convinced her. I know it hurt when Felice broke up with you. I want you to be able to move on. It’ll be good for you.”
“You didn’t have to make it a big deal.” August refuses to look at his mother. “Why did you even bring it up?”
“I wouldn’t, normally. Except.” Mamma nudges him, about to say something embarrassing. “You’ve been texting with someone recently.”
“I text a lot of people.”
“You’re always blushing over your phone.”
“No I’m not, Mamma.” Even as he says it, August feels heat creeping across his cheeks and down his neck.
“You can’t see your face.” Mamma smiles for the first time since they started talking. “I can.” She counts off points on her fingers, like she’s been observing him this whole time. “Also, you’re jumpy. Any time Rickard or I get a text alert you think it’s your phone and you’re always checking to see. And I heard you saying good night to her in the hall just now. You sounded different than usual, actually… sort of sweet.” Mamma sounds surprised. “I wish you’d tell me who she is.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” says August, getting up from the sofa. Because Mamma doesn’t look like she’s going to let this drop unless he admits to something, he adds, “For now.”
“For now,” she echoes, still smiling. “I see.”
“Mamma, stop.”
“Just let me tease you, please. It’s fun. You’re never like this…”
This is such an absurd fucking turn of events. August’s mother is laughing softly to herself as he goes back upstairs. It’s not the same as her laughter when she was reminiscing with the queen about the bird in the English classroom—or perhaps it is that same laughter, in a more rested state. It should be more annoying, August thinks, but it reminds him of when he was younger. When they didn’t fight so much.
—
As August packs his final items for school, he lists the things he’s learned:
First, Mamma thinks he’s simping for Sara Eriksson.
Second, she thinks it’s sweet.
Third, she never calls anything else August does sweet, at least not lately.
Fourth, Sara called him thoughtful, for the panel invitation.
Fifth, no one thinks sweet and thoughtful boys leak scandalous videos to the internet.
Maybe he can use this.
Thank you for joining me on this journey through my early fandom days!
