“The line of succession!” he hollered back.
“I don’t get it! What line?”
Nicolai’s smile was gone. “Ryan, you’ve had too much to drink tonight.”
“What, this?” He gestured to his beer. “Nonsense. American beer is like having sex in a canoe.”
Magnus rolled his eyes, and Nicolai warned,“Ryan.”
“Because they’re both fucking close to water!”
Nicolai turned me away from Ryan, steering me back toward Magnus and John Bourbon. “Ryan’s in fine form.”
Magnus raised a blond eyebrow and nodded. “All night, to everyone. He’ll be groveling tomorrow in the group text.”
“Oh yes, the group chat.” Nicolai plucked his phone from his suit jacket’s inner breast pocket and began thumbing the screen. “You don’t mind if I add Lexi to the chat, right?”
The dubious look Magnus and John shared was a five-alarm fire bell in my head.
Jimmy had never added me to his family’s private group chat because we hadn’t been officially married yet. I’d only been in satellite chats with his sisters and their friends.
I touched Nicolai’s arm. “Hey, sweetie. It’s okay. I don’t have to be in your text groups. I don’t care in the slightest.”
“No, no. It’s fine with them,” he said, like he hadn’t seen their reactions. “And you should friend her on your private social media accounts. You can find her profile in my friends list.”
“I don’t know that it is all right with them.” My phone buzzed in my reception bag hanging off my wrist. “But I guess it’s done now. Guys, um, Magnus and John.” I pointed to each of them because I had remembered their names and was proud of myself. “I can just leave the group. It’s not a problem.”
“Not at all,” John Bourbon said. “This should be quite interesting.”
“Why?”Dear God, I didnotwant to be in the middle of a gross dude-chat full of misogyny or worse.“Whyshould it be interesting?”
“It’s no prob,” Magnus said. “There are a lot of inside jokes about boarding school. Don’t be offended if some of them get a little weird. Also, we can be chatty. And maybe a little bitchy. You don’t have to read all the texts that come through because there area lotof them.”
Magnus’s thoroughly American accent stood out so much in this very England-English crowd. “Are you American?” I asked him.
John Bourbon bobbled sideways, shoving Magnus with his shoulder.
Magnus winced. “It’s the accent, right?”
“All these guys sound British. You sound like you’re from California.”
“Yeah, that,” he said. “One of my grandfathers and a great-grandfather spent most of World War II in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was mostly orange orchards back then, and some other sorts ofinstitutions,you know. One spent the war onone of the ranches with orange groves. Everyone in my family has been taught to speak English with a Southwestern American accent from the cradle ever since, to the point where everyone knows who we are, just by how we speak English.”
“That’s cool, though!”
Ryan smirked at Magnus. “If one wants to soundAmerican,I suppose.”
Magnus didn’t even look at Ryan. “Some of our instructors at Le Rosey, the boarding school we all went to, preferred a southern-English accent to an American one. They were adamant about pronunciation, even rather snide, and so it came up on the playground.”
I nodded. “Kids are jerks.”
“Yes.” Magnus sipped his drink. “Kids are jerks.”
Ryan smirked again. “The problem is, if you take a mob of children from all over the world and insist that we all speak the King’s English as intended, we end up sounding boringly, generically English. Our pronunciation is the equivalent of off-brand beans on toast.”
Okay, so the subject of schoolyard bullying seemed to be a sore one.
I moved on. “So your great-grandfather got his accent while he was out on a farm picking oranges, huh? Was he a farmhand?”
