Page 110 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

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By the time we leave the restaurant, the heavens have opened. It’s spectacular, the amount of summer rainfall that pounds around us, a vertical shimmering curtain from sky to ground. I laugh as Rory grabs my hand, yanking me into the downpour, and together we rush toward the black cab reserved for us. We climb, exhilarated and sloppy-wet, into the back seat, our stabilizing hands slipping along leather, and shoes sliding on the floor. We look drunk. We must seem drunk, though we aren’t, but acting against our inhibitions gives a rare sense of freedom.

Rory declares our destination, still managing to sound managerial in that resonant voice of his, like he expects the world to serve him without discussion, even with his face soaked and his fair hair drenched and darkened. I laugh at him as I admire him, and wonder how the fuck we ever ended up together.

We take a moment to straighten ourselves out. The cab rocks along cobblestones, shaking from side to side, and I have a lovely image of the beetroot I’d eaten soon coming back to greet me. I focus on Rory, who glances at his ghostly reflection in the cab window, neatening his hair and adjusting the skewed knot of his tie beneath his overcoat.

He meets my reflected gaze and fashions me a broad, boyish grin. He turns to me, tucking a strand of wayward hair behind my ear, his fingers skimming my neckline so delicately, so ticklishly, that I end up shrugging him away with a laugh.

And then his demeanor changes. He stares, frozen in place, attracted to something beyond the driver’s window, his eyes narrowing as he notices something he doesn’t want to see. “Great,” he mutters, cold and clipped, and his hand falls from my face to his lap.

“What is it?” I ask, but Rory’s taller and I can only make out the back of the driver’s large head.

I soon get the answer when the cab slows to a crawl, and unfriendly faces cast in shadow and masks surround us on both sides of the street. Horns honk, voices are amplified and rendered incoherent through cheap plastic megaphones. As we approach the blitz of lights that heralds the theater, the more the crowd of protesters seems to engulf us.

“I didn’t know they were against opera,” I murmur, trying to sound unaffected and beyond all this, watching as they thud wooden rods against the ground, onto which they’ve attached large signs.Fuck the Royals, again.Royals Out!And, to ram the point home,Can I be a princess too since you’re taking LITERALLY FUCKING ANYONE?

“I’d gie it another five meenits till I get ye there,” the driver pipes up, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Unless ye want tae jump oot?”

“No, thank you,” Rory says politely, taking my hand firmly in his. “We’ll wait.”

“This must be very annoying for you,” I say supportively, as the cab inches forward every ten seconds. Rory shoots me a warning glance I don’t understand until too late.

“Annoyin’?” the driver scoffs, giving me my answer there and then. “Naw. Guid oan ‘em, that’s whit ah say. Exercising their democratic right tae protest. Makes a man proud, seein’ everywan come th’gither tae boot these parasitic bastards oot. No afore time, eh?”

I keep my mouth shut after that, staring at the rain forking down the window and the bokeh-like glitter of streetlights captured within each bead. I keep forgetting what side of this political protest I’m supposed to be on, and that maybe I’m not even on a side at all —side, like politics is a sporting match;suck it up, your side lost. Instead, I wonder if I’m not a huge, sprawling mass of limbs spread across all four sectors of a political compass, cherry-picking the bits I like most from each quartile.

But with every new passing day, a nuanced approach to this topic quickly seems to erode. A cavern splits and spreads between each division, the two angry extremes, until by doing nothing, by saying nothing, I get the sense we’re becoming naturally marooned to a self-inflicted extreme. People either scream to get the royals to fuck or worship the ground they walk on — no in-between is allowed. I’m not even convinced it’s Royalists vs Antis anymore, but anti-Royalists vs. anti-Antis. The world has become a bitter, black-and-white beast, and either you’re on the street shouting at cabs, or you’re in a cab being shouted at.

Above all, I want Luke and his family to be safe. I want to see him happy for once. I don’t think they should be in power, but I don’t think they deserve death threats, either. I don’t think innocent shops and businesses should be broken into and looted. I don’t think things should be set on fire. I don’t think people should be brawling, fighting, intimidating others into their political stance, or being needlessly arrested for what they believe in. I believe the art of politics is persuasion, not terrorization.

But hey, maybe I’m just too naive and the revolution needs more than peace for its protests to be a success.

One thing I do know seems as clear as crystal to me: this most heavily public of fights is an artificial construct designed by the political machinations of Oscar Munro, the architect, the puppet master pulling the strings. And yet no matter how hard the protesters protest like it’s their own lives on the line, they never seem to stop and wonder who and what brought them to this point. What unraveled within themselves to create an inner poisonous hatred for a single celebrity family, a family they’ve been pushed to associate with every unfairness regarding the class system, a hatred so passionate thousands had to take to the streets and lambaste them?

Who benefits in getting rid of the Royals, in successfully steering a country gripped by hysteria through this political crisis? Who’s going to appear capable and prodigious at the end of this coup?

It’s as though no one else can see the ghostly, guiding hand of Oscar Munro. It’s like no one else realizes he’s purposefully destabilizing his own country and causing divisiveness for his own political gain.

Eventually, we arrive at the theater. The rain still pounds, producing puddles that well-dressed women step over, lifting beaded dresses and tightening black fur shawls around their shoulders. People duck beneath pointed, dome-shaped umbrellas; someone, usually a man, holds them out for a female companion while he gets veritably soaked.

We have no such umbrellas. Instead, Rory and I make a wild, splashing dash from cab to theater, greeted by the jeering noise of protesters. Gazing up at the tall, majestic theater, with its winged cherubs adorning each supportive Grecian column, I understand why a crowd has assembled a safe distance away behind metal barriers, a visible compromise between theater management and the protesters themselves.

Above the heavily polished entry doors, the wordsTHEATRE ROYALflare in bright yellow bulbs.

I’d laugh if it weren’t so futile. It’s as though the protesters are attracted, hypnotically, to the wordRoyal— the thing they claim most to despise. It’s a trigger word for them, the induction for mass hypnosis and hysteria, something they feed on like locusts to make their overloud point.

“Come on,” Rory mutters, and he ushers me inside, one hand holding the door open for me and another staving off the rain.

There’s an airport-style security check beforehand, and I wonder if it’s because they’re expecting trouble from the Antiro protests or if it’s just a sad sign of the times. My small handbag is thoroughly scanned, my empty pockets examined with a skeptical frown, as though I may have taken the effort to sew a false pocket inside my jacket. Perhaps it’s because we’re younger than almost everyone else here by some margin and therefore more in line with the age of a typical Antiro protester, but our bag search takes longer than everyone else’s.

Eventually, we’re deemed acceptable enough to enter the hallowed halls. It’s quiet inside, full of the same soft murmured conversations as the restaurant. As Rory collects our tickets, I eavesdrop eagerly in the foyer, listening intently to the words of the rich.

“Quite shocking,” a woman in a white fur coat —real?I blanch — murmurs to another woman, looking faintly traumatized, her towering hive of hair wobbling precariously as she shakes her head in revulsion. “In all my time here as a patron, I have never endured such rudeness. Suchvulgarity! Frankly, these people need to be kept off the streets — lock them up, that’s what I say.”

“I agree, Fanny. Whatever is the world coming to?” She gathers her beaded shawl close to her with a mournful shake of her head. “At least we still have the opera. No dreadful politicsthere.”

Rory returns to me, a pair of tickets in hand. As he strides through the crowd of people, cutting through the glitter of jewels on either side of him, I can’t help but think he’s the most radiant component in an astonishingly radiant scene. He’s more captivating than the glimmer of ornate earrings which decorate almost all the earlobes of the women in the foyer. He shines brighter than the diamond chokers and statement necklaces sprawled beneath fur coats, or of sapphire-set wedding rings sparkling on wrinkled fingers.

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