“Rémi,” Étienne said, standing outside the other man's dorm, “we need to talk.”

“What about, princeling? I’m too busy right now for anything less than a royal emergency.”

Rémi leaned casually in the doorway, bundled up in a sweater, his brown hair damp and flopping over his forehead; he must have showered after his volleyball game that afternoon. (Tennis, volleyball, or soccer? Étienne couldn't keep track.) Behind him, his roommate teetered back in his desk chair to see who was at the door.

The guy’s eyes got as big as dinner plates and he immediately sat up straight and fixed his hair.

Étienne learned a long time ago that his presence inspired…not exactly the truth out of people, but at least showed their priorities. The roommate wanted to look professional and tidy and adult. Rémi wanted to be as unruffled as possible, apparently.

Étienne took out the essay from his shoulder bag. “About this.”

“Oh, look. St-Guillaume finally decided to correct how you always misspell ‘recognisable.’”

“Rémi, could you please…?”

“Fine.”

Rémi stepped aside and waved Étienne into the room. Almost immediately, the roommate started packing up his stuff.

Étienne said, “This won’t take long. You can keep working.”

“No, that’s okay, I should be at the library anyways, you know, need to research.” The roommate packed up an armload of things and darted out the door like a spooked animal. Not before bowing at Étienne and losing a couple pencils on the way, though.

When the door shut, Rémi whistled. “Aren’t you intimidating, huh?”

He didn’t mean to be. Sure, he liked privacy and this wasn’t really a conversation he wanted to have overheard, but why wasn’t he able to ask for privacy like a normal person? Maybe even beg for it?

Well, Rémi made him work for everything, up to and including entering a room with him in it. Small victories.

Rémi even made it hard to open a conversation. Étienne found himself stalling. A cursory glance at Rémi’s desk saved him: “Are you reading Lure the Midnight Hour again?”

The novel–tome, really, a whole six hundred pages of meandering descriptions of class warfare and the economy and dry romance–was propped up next to a notebook. A few scrappy paper bookmarks stuck out of the pages. They’d read that in freshman lit. Rémi made his introduction to Étienne by rebutting every answer he gave in class, even when it made absolutely no sense to do so.

Rémi must have been reading for a while: beside the book was a cup of coffee that had stopped steaming, dried on the rim.

Rémi shrugged, taking a seat on the edge of his desk. “Freshman’s paying me to read it, so does that actually count? I’m getting paid for her term essay on it, too.”

“You’re helping someone cheat for money? You’re an heir.”

“Yeah? Mum’s got a tight chokehold on my finances ever since I…you know.” He waved his hand dismissively. No, Étienne did not know. He couldn’t imagine all the trouble Rémi got up to. “What, gonna snitch on me?”

“No.” He schooled his expression into something mild. “You can do whatever you like.”

So Étienne wasn’t the only one whose parents monitored his spending. Sometimes it made him feel like a child, but that was just how it worked when your money was connected by a capillary vein to the whole country’s expenses. And when you were still building up the same trust and goodwill you’d been working on for a decade.

“I want to take Chloé and Antoinette out next week, and I can’t let either of them pay. Chloé can’t tell apart a button from a nickel, and Antoinette’s always looking for a reason to feel disrespected.” Rémi arched his arms high above his head, stretching out his neck, his sweater lifting to reveal a scant inch of suntanned stomach.

He's taking out Chloé? Where are they going? I never noticed they'd gotten that close…

“Stop looking at me like that. I’m really good at this ghostwriting thing. I’ll use a typewriter and even throw in a few misspellings. I'll take examples from the best.” He gestured at the essay in Étienne’s hand.

“Yes, about this. I knew it was you immediately.”

“Aw, you weren’t even happy for a second when you saw all that red?”

Alright, admittedly, he was. The professor tossed the essays on the front desks and let the students find their own. Étienne’s dull interest flipped into a shot of alarm when he saw all the markings on the front page. And all the students before him had seen it too!

He got to his desk and thumbed through it. Marked with delightful little red corrections were misspellings he didn’t know were misspellings (and a few he planted on purpose), misplaced commas, logical errors, even an incorrect source attribution. On the front page was a shiny scarlet C.

And then he noticed the liquid corrector beneath the C. He scratched it off to find an A, in a blue pen instead.

Stolen story; please report.

Étienne knew how Rémi wrote his g’s and y’s, with hard slashes for the tails, and capital A’s that slanted. That struck him as a very weird thing to know.

Étienne asked now, “How did you do it?”

“Snuck into his office. Hey, if you ever want to misbehave again, turns out Chloé’s game.”

“Chloé?”

“Do you think I'm a bad influence?”

“No, it's…it's up to her.”

“Anyways, the marks were already typed up in St-Guillaume’s reports, so I didn’t actually change anything. And look, I’ll go over it with you.” Rémi took the essay and patted the spot beside him on the desk. “I didn’t mark a single thing that wouldn’t’ve been marked if you weren’t His Highness.”

Étienne was angry and didn’t even know why. So all the more reason to not express it. Instead, he said evenly, “Rémi, I promise, I wish professors would be harder on me. I worry about it with our project. I don’t want us to win the competition because of me.”

“It’s anonymous, right?”

“Yes, but what’s to stop M. Dupont from hinting at who’s in our group to M. Delphine? Maybe I should back out and take the class next semester instead.”

Rémi’s eyebrows shot up. “No way, man. Come on. You’re not gonna throw yourself on the sword because everyone else is treating you so stupidly.”

“I can’t stop them. It’s so frustrating.”

“Why the hell is it frustrating? You get the benefit of the doubt everywhere you go. Even in a school full of kids who get the world handed to them on a silver platter, you’re practically in control of the whole feast.”

Étienne felt emotion rising up in him. He took a breath. With anyone else, he would know for certain that he needed to stop here, to shut up, but Rémi…Rémi treated him like absolutely anyone else. Rémi never changed when he entered a room.

“I suppose it looks like that to everyone else, I understand that. But I feel as if I’m treated like a child no matter where I am. Here at school, everyone is so permissive and complimentary, as if I can’t handle a little challenge. And then at home, I…”

Rémi’s eyebrows dented together. He spoke whole sonnets with those damn eyebrows. “What’s up, Étienne?” The teasing angle had left his voice.

“At home, I suppose I’m more like…” He smiled self-consciously. “I’m a child who can’t do anything right. Is that essay any good? I don’t know. My tutor would say it’s awful and I need to redo it a thousand times until it’s fit to be read from a podium and heard by the whole kingdom. My teachers say it’s the best thing they’ve ever read.”

“And I say it’s not too bad. You have smart ideas, even if the execution kinda stumbles around.” Rémi shrugged, snapping the essay in the air. “You’re flat. It’s like you’ve never got an actual stance on anything. I want to hear you get excited about something.”

“...Yes. I suppose I don’t know what I’m actually trying to say.”

“It makes it hard for your friends to know who you are too, y’know.”

“Friends?”

“Yeah, stupid. I want to know what makes you happy or what pisses you off. Like, when you figured out it was me who messed with your paper, did it make you angry?”

“Not exactly,” he said carefully.

Rémi hopped off the desk. He lifted the essay and ripped it in two, then four, and let the pieces flutter to the ground, where they swished around the nearby bed. “Did that piss you off?”

“Rémi, what are you doing?”

Rémi pushed him, not hard, just enough for surprised adrenaline to leap up into his veins. “Did that?”

“Alright, that’s enough, I understand your point.” Étienne stepped back for the door. Clearly, he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Rémi. Why did he say all of that? Perhaps if he was lucky, INSIDER REPORTS ALARIE PRINCE FEELS BULLIED FROM BOTH SIDES: “IT’S LIKE I’M A CHILD” would be top of next week’s tabloids. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Rémi grabbed his shoulder and turned him back around. Étienne flinched before his brain really knew what was happening, but it was obvious a second later: Rémi had thrown his cup of lukewarm coffee at him.

His white shirt was soaked. For a second he simply stood there, shocked, feeling coffee trickle down his chest. Rémi gave him an utterly infuriating shrug that said, “And?”

Oh, it’s just Rémi, was all that flashed through the prince’s mind before he gave Rémi a shove. Unfortunately, he didn’t spend a lot of time shoving people, so he misjudged how much force was too much, and one of the men–or both, perhaps, it was all very confusing–slipped on the shredded pieces of paper on the hardwood. Next thing he knew, Étienne had toppled half-atop Rémi, both of them crashing onto the bed.

Rémi grabbed his upper arms, stilling them. Étienne was inches away from Rémi’s face. He tried in a panic to take stock of every body part to be sure no elbows or knees were digging into compromising spots. Instead, his brain told him, Rémi’s eyes are very green, aren’t they?

“Sorry,” Étienne said quickly. He tried to sit up, but Rémi was holding on tight. “I didn’t–”

Rémi laughed. A big, bright laugh that made Étienne feel silly doing anything except weakly chuckling in return. “What's Eavredor gonna do with a hothead like you on the throne, huh?”

“I’m not. I didn’t–”

“I know, chill. I’m teasing.” Rémi was grinning up at him, those green eyes with their flecks of brown crinkling crookedly. Everything smelled overwhelmingly like Rémi’s bizarrely strong coffee, which Étienne thought was a shame, though he didn’t really know why. Rémi said, “You’re good, man, you’re good.”

“Please don’t tell anyone.”

“Who the hell would I tell?” Rémi let his arms go. “I just saw a bit of the real you. I'm not giving that away for anything.”

The real you.

When did that become buried? Étienne always wanted to be the personable prince. He tried so hard to be that, donating to charities, talking to the locals, engaging with the theatre and dressage, even pressuring his parents (begging them) to let him go to La Belle Lavande so he could make friends who knew him as simply Étienne.

Did he lose that at some point along the way?

Or was it impossible for people to not see him as the isolated, buttoned-up prince, first and foremost?

Rémi patted his side. “Are you gonna get off of me or what?”

“Sorry, sorry.” Étienne sat up. He picked at the soaking, coffee-stained shirt, but all he could feel was Rémi’s hand on his ribs.

“Nah, I’m sorry too.” Rémi propped himself up on his elbows. “I’ll lend you a shirt. No one needs to see the prince with coffee all over him.”

Étienne got to his feet. He caught a glance of himself in the mirror. All that had changed was his hair was tousled out of place and there was a touch of a blush in his cheeks and the shirt was sticky and stained, but it was like looking at a totally different person.

“No. I’m alright,” he said, picking up his shoulder bag. “I think I’ll make it back to my dorm like this. I’ll see you tomorrow, Rémi.”