Dennis was born to royalty during a time when royalty was no longer an institution. However, his father made sure he knew it and constantly reminded him of his honorable bloodline. Dennis grew up in a wealthy family that gave him every material comfort he’d ever wanted. When he left for university at the institution his father had wanted him to attend, his parents bought him a new convertible Mercedes. On surface level, everyone thought Dennis had it all. He was a charming fellow, not super tall, but good-looking enough to be cute to the average onlooker. He could get any girl he wanted, and he did in his youth. It was just too easy for Prince Dennis.
Yet Dennis harbored a secret resentment tied to his privilege. He suppressed this sentiment during most of his childhood and teenage years because he bought into the idea of royalty; that his family was superior to other families in his community. He was an obedient child, after all, and wanted to make his parents proud, but his nature changed with puberty. While Dennis initially relished the riches and opportunities his father showered on him, he carried a chip on his shoulder because his lesser well-off peers didn’t take him seriously: they had to budget their allowances while Dennis could spend without limits. Dennis preferred to be known as a self-made man, not what his peers saw him as: a spoiled nepo baby.
During his master’s studies, Dennis got a tattoo, further fueling his family’s rage: his mother couldn’t talk to him for a year. He also started experimenting with men and rebelling against the expectations for marriage that his father and grandfather had especially wanted, which was to pass on the family name to the next generation. Dennis didn’t really care. He didn’t believe in bloodlines, kin, or any of that stuff. His mother thought the schools had brainwashed him, but Dennis was just naturally a progressive thinker: he would be okay with adoption if it came to it. Unlike his family, Dennis preferred to live in the present.
After Dennis finished his degree in biological sciences, he worked at a local biotech company perfecting formulations for academic wet lab experiments. It was tedious work, but it paid the bills. Science was not really Dennis’s passion, but as a child, he was curious about biology and found the biological diagrams enchanting. Plus, the labs weren’t terrible, and Dennis got to listen to his headphones while he worked. Music was his true calling: maybe in another life, he would think to himself.
One day after work at a weekly volleyball social, Dennis met James, an openly gay professional ten years his senior. They hit it off right away, went on a few dates, and did what gay men do when no one’s watching. The only problem was, Dennis was not gay, or at least he didn’t think himself to be deep down: he was simply in a state of rebellion. Dennis was experimenting, and after each intimate encounter with James, he would be overwhelmed with confusion and guilt, feelings he would learn to calm with a pack of cigarettes, or two, or three.
“Do you love me Dennis?” James said to him one night after sex.
Dennis paused. “I don’t think I know what love is,” he finally said to James.
James looked at Dennis for a moment, and he didn’t really know what to do. They had been casually dating for two months, had slept together a handful of times, and now love—or lack thereof—was on the table.
“I’m sorry,” Dennis said suddenly, got up, gave James a hug, a peck on the cheek, and drove home.
When Dennis entered his apartment, he walked to his bookshelf, filled with dense, heavy texts, and burst into tears. In a moment of fury, he toppled the shelf and threw books across the room, thrust a few against the wall—leaving dents in the paint—and screamed until his lungs felt like they were about to burst. Amid the brief cacophony, Dennis felt free at last from the tyranny of expectations bequeathed upon him by circumstance. In the raw, animalistic moment of deafening release, Dennis was finally Dennis—an animal naked, plain, and pure.
A year later, James organized Dennis’s funeral, and his parents did not attend. To his family, Dennis was nameless, had brought shame, and is without heir, the latter being the purpose of the aristocratic man and the duty of royalty. No matter the year, those are the divine laws God bestowed upon the family, as evidenced by the family’s immense fortune and influence. Great power brings a moral obligation to act righteously. Dennis was not deemed worthy of bearing the family name. Yet in death, Dennis’s memory lives on in James, his lover, his co-experimenter, his friend, and his surrogate father. Rest in peace young Dennis, for such is the curse of aristocracy.
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