The Summer Prince Read online

  I’ve discovered my next art project. Its immediate grip eases, and I realize that we’re outside. I stop in my tracks and turn to him.

  “I need to get into your mamãe’s cosmetic stash,” I say.

  This is a new request, and a little daring, since his mother has a cosmetic and costumer license that allows her to get regulated tech. But Gil just shrugs. “Anything for a new idea,” he says. “What is it this time?”

  “She won’t miss it too much, I promise,” I say, and kiss him on his cheek.

  For a moment, I wonder if his eyes are a little too distant. Did some part of that conversation back in school disturb him? Stupid Bebel implying that his mamãe was too young to care about him properly? But then he shakes his head and does a little shuffle-dance and looks so much like the carefree, gentle Gil I love that I stop worrying.

  “What’s the project?” he asks, like he always does.

  I hold his hand and tell him about my tree.

  Five hours later, I am watching a light sink into my skin. The knot of tiny crystalline tubes has submerged halfway, but I need more skin implant gel to finish the job. I want to implant two branches’ worth of lights today, from my collarbone to my elbow on my left side. Today’s final one glitters in the crook of my elbow. I almost like how it looks, with my hyper-permeable skin lufting gently at its edges. My skin is usually too dark to see the veins underneath, but the gel reveals their intricate tracery. Still, my skin is getting more opaque by the minute. I click my tongue and look at the door hopefully, as though that will make Gil hurry. I misjudged the amount of gel I needed, which posed a problem, given that we’d used the last from Gil’s mamãe’s supply closet. But you need a cosmetics license to buy even the most low-level body-modding tech, and they don’t give those to wakas. Gil left half an hour ago, promising to find some. I hope he doesn’t get caught. But I feel safe enough; he never does.

  And perhaps my thoughts summon him, because the door slides open a moment later, and he dashes in with a flushed smile and a clear tube in his hand.

  “Have they finished counting the votes yet?” he asks, tossing it to me.

  I pop open the tube and smear on just a little. My skin tingles but it doesn’t hurt. “Since five seconds ago when you checked your fono? How did you get this?”

  “A vendor I know in Gria Plaza,” he says. “I was afraid I’d miss the announcement.”

  “But you still went?” I say as the light finally stops sinking just below my top layer of skin.

  He shakes his head and turns up the volume on Sebastião. It won’t be much longer now. “I couldn’t leave you like that, June,” he says.

  Gil rubs my upper arm; my lights flash in his wake. I’m impressed with even this minor realization of my great idea. The colored lights came from Gil’s mamãe as well, though I was sure they’d never been intended for skin implanting. My latest art project is a body tree, all done in colored skin lights. When I’m done, the branches and leaves should travel all the way down my torso and up my neck. The tips of the branches will brush against my unadorned cheeks. It should be very dramatic, but at the moment, I look a little strange.

  On the left-hand holo, they’re showing a recap of the final competition. Octavio’s poem is first, and if he spoke it to me just then, I might be tempted to forget even Enki. The poem speaks of longing and love — and I have to wonder if the one he loves is dead, because how else could they resist him? And how else could he leave them?

  Pasqual is next, and the plaintive string section playing the melody of “Manhã de Carnaval” gives me shivers. He plays the guitar from the front of the stage.

  “I’d forgotten how pretty that song can be,” Gil says a little wistfully, into the silence that follows his last note.

  “Traitor,” I say again, without much conviction.

  And then it’s Enki’s turn. We’ve already seen this once, but Gil and I reach for each other at the exact same moment. His pulse thrums beneath my fingertips and my own lights flash like falling stars. The wakas in the audience stop their screaming. They’re like us: breathless and silent, waiting for their beautiful boy.

  Here’s how Enki becomes the summer king:

  He walks into the spotlight dressed like a slave in old-Brazil: off-white burlap sackcloth trousers, ragged at the hem, short-sleeved shirt with a jagged gash of a collar. His ear-length dreadlocks are loose and lighter colored than I’ve seen them. Later, we will learn that he has snuck out of the city to literally rub road dust into his hair.

  His feet are bare, like the poorest refugee from the flat cities. Like someone unaware of even the most basic courtesy due the Queen of the most powerful city in South America.

  There’s a gasp when he first lifts his right leg. The skin on the soles of his feet is even lighter than mine, and I’m as light-skinned as anyone is allowed to be in Palmares Três.

  He puts his foot down. Pauses. Lifts up the other.

  Still balanced on one leg, he spins. We’re so tense, so worried and exhilarated, that laughter pops like a bubble. It’s gentle, barely there, but Enki smiles. He puts his foot down and now, again, he’s barefoot on the stage.

  His rudeness of going barefoot would be bad enough in the presence of the Aunties.

  But he’s facing Queen Oreste.

  We wonder what will happen. Our worries change from Maybe he won’t win to Maybe the Queen will turn him out of the city.

  “My Queen,” says Enki. His voice isn’t very low, but it’s smooth as a guitar.

  He doesn’t bow, though he’s a boy, because only the summer king doesn’t bow to the Queen.

  For a very long time, she is still. She doesn’t seem to breathe, and neither do we. Her eyebrows are drawn together — her only sign of emotion.

  “What is this, Enki?” says the Queen. “Do you not honor me?”

  Enki’s smile is wide and bright. “I give you the greatest honor,” he says.

  “You are dressed in the manner of a slave,” says she, “in a city where there are none.”

  “There aren’t,” he agrees, though now his smile seems too sharp for his words. “But there is the verde.”

  “And what of it?”

  “I am dressed in the manner of my people.”

  “Are we not your people?” And we see that the Queen is torn between amusement and anger. Enki is leading her in a dance, but has not tapped out its rhythm.

  “You are everything to me.”

  “And yet you come before us hardly as a king.”

  “I come before you,” says Enki, “as a simple verde boy.”

  He takes a quick step back, almost skipping, and his dust-lightened hair bobs around his ears.

  “I will leave you as a king.”

  And when the drums start, that’s how he dances: as a king.

  Gil’s mother is a tailor, so she always has piles of cloth she doesn’t know what to do with. Gil says he’s sick of clothes, he doesn’t know why I like them so much, and I say that I’m an artist, and an artist who neglects personal adornment is like a singer who can’t keep a tune.

  Anyway, Gil is full of shit, because when I take the time to make him beautiful, he’s happy as a cock. He’s just too lazy to think about it, and he knows he’d be gorgeous in sackcloth. I love Gil’s mother because she doesn’t care what we do. With so many orders for the celebration of a new summer king, she can hardly see past silk and sequins, so when we come racing into her studio practically screaming with joy, she tosses some fabric at us and mutters something about a new turban for one of the Aunties.

  “There’s tape in the basket,” she calls, “but stitch what you can — I still need some!”

  “No worries,” I say, sifting through the swatches of fabric with steady hands. “I know how to use a needle.”

  She grins at me. “Just ’cause I taught you, filha. Now go on, and take care of my boy.”

  This doesn’t even get a rise out of Gil. He just laughs and waves her on. “June’s Auntie Yaha g
ot us tickets to the reception tonight. We’re about to meet the summer king himself, Mamãe,” he says. “I’m burning so bright, you could as well take care of a meteor.”

  Gil’s mother laughs, but her eyes are frowning. “That Enki,” she says, “he may be a meteor, but you’re just a boy, Gil. He’ll burn you up.”

  Gil puts a mocking hand on his heart, though he knows his mother is serious. “Oh, but to burn up in that comet’s tail,” he says, and then I’m laughing, I can’t help myself.

  “It’s all right,” I say before she can start again. “Enki won’t notice us anyway. He’ll have the Queen to worry about, remember?” The king isn’t the Queen’s consort in any technical sense, but he’ll be expected to stay close to her during his first public appearance after the election.

  She still seems hesitant, as though there’s something she’s forgotten to say and she can’t remember if it’s important. “Oh, Oreste. I thought she would eat him alive on that stage! I remember how it was with Fidel …” She would have been the same age as Fidel back then, I realize. Gil’s mamãe is so mature it’s easy to forget that she’s nearly as young as us. She laughs wistfully. “We were mad that year, I swear. I don’t know how any of us survived it.”

  I remember seeing Enki’s name flash across the holo; the screaming of the crowd as they showered him with feathers and flowers and love notes. I remember how happily he smiled and how carefully he walked in his bare feet to accept the circlet of cacao from the Queen.

  “We’ll survive it,” I say, while I remember that our kings never will.

  We walk into the ballroom at the top of Royal Tower precisely one hour late. Auntie Yaha is there with Mother. Auntie Yaha smiles when she sees the two of us and she waves, though she doesn’t break away from Mother and another man I eventually recognize as the ambassador Ueda-sama. The views from up here are majestic and nearly panoramic. A corner of the ballroom floor is a giant glass bubble that projects out into the city from a precise angle, such that you can see all the way down through the hollow body of Palmares Três and into the bright green-blue waters of the bay. Tonight, a web of lights glitters all the way down to the water. To mark Enki’s election, the legendary lights of our pyramid city have turned celebratory. They flash and sparkle like the implants in my skin, and I’m grateful that I took the time to place a few more before we arrived here. Now, if you squint, it looks like it might be a branch of a tree. At least that’s what Gil swore, and he knows I’d kill him if he lied. This party is more than exclusive; no more than five hundred people have been allowed into this special room. Five hundred well-connected, influential people, and even Auntie Yaha must have had to call in a favor to get Gil and me inside. Camera bots buzz overhead, broadcasting us to the rest of the city on this celebratory, festive night.

  The lights of Palmares Três are white, so we “sparkle on the bay” as the song says, though if you ask me they could use some color. I press my nose into the smudge-proof glass and make out the greening hump of A Castanha, one of the four volcanic islands that dot the bay like petrified gods. Up here, suspended above the water, I feel as though I can do anything.

  Enki hasn’t arrived yet. The dozen wakas in the room have been eyeing Gil since we entered. I outdid myself this time, putting him in black, which he likes, but with every element subtly asymmetric — not so much lopsided as rakish. Myself I clothed as simply as possible: a strapless wrap of blue secured with a blue flower, and a matching one in my ear.

  One does not, as Gil’s mother would tell me, upstage glowing skin.

  “Would you dance?” Gil asks, extending his one gloved hand toward me in a gesture so formal I nearly laugh. But it also feels right in this enclave of the Aunties — and now of our very own summer king. I take Gil’s hand.

  “My pleasure,” I tell him, just as formally.

  No one else is dancing, which is exactly why he asked me.

  The music is classical: so familiar I could sing the bass line in my sleep, but it’s still insistent for all that. That’s the thing about samba. Four hundred years and the famous standards still don’t sound old so much as familiar. Gil and I have joked that if we hear “Eu Vim da Bahia” one more time, we might throw ourselves into the bay, but then I’m caught off guard by João Gilberto’s deceptively difficult rhythmic patterns, his gentle voice, and I think, okay, there’s worse music to be forced to listen to.

  The song changes to something faster, good for dancing. I’m not a great dancer, but I know how to follow. Gil is the best sort of partner: one who makes you look more skilled than you are.

  I feel when Mother notices us. In the corner of my eye, I can see her go still and turn away from the ambassador, who seems confused. Auntie Yaha purses her lips and I smile. Gil’s in another world, of course. I’ll tell him what a scene we made when we’re done and he’s had time to come back down. Gil dances like an orixá, and he knows it. He’s charming and smart and gorgeous and all the wakas we know are crazy for him. I’m lucky he’s my best friend.

  We’re moving fast, I have to pay attention if I don’t want to make an ass of myself. But even so, I’m getting lost in the rhythm. The one-two-three that my feet know better than my brain. The way my hips shake and the feel of the polymer silk sliding over my breasts. Gil spins me one way and then the other. I laugh and he dips me. I kick up one leg, not caring that anyone can see up my dress or that I’m in danger of losing my shoe. Gil smiles that secretive, crooked smile. He pulls me up and then his arms are on my hips and I’m flying above his head as the samba pulses around us and I see the city glittering beneath me.

  This is the best moment of my life.

  And then I see him.

  He’s on the edge of the glass floor, alone, though a crowd surrounds him like a horseshoe. He’s looking at us with those bright eyes. Maybe Gil can tell that something has happened because he puts me down gently and turns around.

  Even I can see the spark when Gil meets Enki’s eyes. The air leaves the room. Or maybe that’s just me, wondering if my heart might fall out of my chest when I lose the comforting warmth of Gil’s hands. He heads toward Enki, still dancing, though I don’t think he realizes it.

  Enki is dressed simply, though he no longer wears the “verde boy” clothes from his final performance. Leather sandals, white pants, and a loose blue shirt. He looks like he might be selling cupuaçu in Gria Plaza, and he’s captured the attention of every person in the room.

  But Enki only has eyes for Gil.

  Should I have known this would happen? I feel my disappointment like some foreign object lodged in my chest. Completely irrational.

  It’s like what Gil’s mamãe told me, when Mother first got engaged to Auntie Yaha five months after my papai died. Love is complicated, she said, and it never works the way you think it should.

  Gil and Enki don’t speak. Or maybe they do, but none of us can hear it. Maybe in the way Gil touches Enki’s palms, the way Enki’s feet start that shuffle-shuffle, there’s a conversation. I’ve loved you for so long and You’re beautiful, won’t you dance? I didn’t bring a fono with me, but there’s a holo array on the far wall, behind the band, and I can see them reflected in it from different angles. Gil and I have been in the background of a dozen gossip items — inevitable, when your stepmother is an Auntie — but this is the first time anyone will remember our names.

  Gil, the one who caught the eye of the new summer king.

  June, the one left behind.

  Above me, the buzzing camera bots let me know I’m in their eyes, a lone figure suspended over the city. I wonder how my skin lights will look on the holos. Can they see the swirls? The colors? Can they see how frantically they pulse when I look at the two of them, together?

  I can’t tell if Gil is leading, or Enki. They move slowly — the song has switched to “Velha Infãncia” and though I know they both could be flashy, they instead make a dance of their intimacy. Enki pauses, still and watchful as a deer. His hand is raised. Fingertips hardly
touching, Gil moves in a circle around him — a satellite orbiting our newly chosen moon. Enki smiles at him, full and uninhibited, and my hands cover my mouth, my lights strobe helplessly.

  Gil closes his eyes for a moment. He stops moving. Slowly, he sinks to his knees like he’s falling through water. The singer falters and then it’s just the violin and the guitar and the drums, insistent as a heartbeat.

  Gil kneels there, head bent, penitent and worshipful before our new summer king. Alone on the dance floor, I am the only one facing Enki. I’m the only one who can see his surprise, the slight bob in his throat as he regards the top of my best friend’s head. I expect Enki to touch his shoulder, like the Queen would a petitioner. I expect him to say something that acknowledges Gil’s gesture without exposing too much of himself.

  But this is Enki, and I should know better.

  “Coração,” Enki whispers. I have never heard his voice in person before. It is the same, but it makes me shiver — a ghost from my dreams has entered my waking life. Gil’s shoulders begin to tremble. I think he is crying. I want to go to him, and I know I have no place in this.

  Enki squats, bending so his head is below Gil’s. He puts one hand under Gil’s chin and lifts.

  “Thank you,” Enki mouths.

  And then they kiss.

  Have I stumbled? Or just lost the feeling in my feet? Because I feel the smooth glass of the floor through the thin fabric of my dress and I think I’ve fallen. I wonder if I’ve stopped breathing. Suddenly, Auntie Yaha is beside me.

  “June, June,” she says, so insistently I wonder how long she’s tried to get my attention. I look up at her, expecting disapproval, and getting something that confuses me. Her lips frown, but her eyes are sad. It’s her eyes that make me take her hand.

  “Come,” she says, “filha, come. Your mother and I will take you home.”