The Summer Prince Page 5

  “Your mamãe is great,” I said. “I wish mine were half so interesting.”

  He beamed at me, and I beamed back, bubbly with the joy of our discovery.

  Then a judge asked me over to explain my entry, and suddenly, my parents were there just as they’d promised. The four of us walked over to my installation. I was the second-youngest person selected to exhibit for the Tier Eight contest, which filled me with a pride that barely matched my terror. I’d used every skill I possessed to create something that I felt sure my musician papai would be able to appreciate.

  I nervously explained the piece, an overwrought exploration of the life of seminal pre-dislocation musician Maria Bethânia, complete with twenty-eight paintings of her early life and a life-sized ancient tombstone scrawled with graffiti. I meant this to convey how endings give rise to new beginnings, but mostly it conveyed that I wasn’t very good at graffiti. Mamãe pasted on her best university-president smile and hugged me. The judge nodded thoughtfully. And Papai shook his head sadly and said, “It’s nice, June, but where’s her music?”

  In its own way, that was worse than what happened after. To Papai, music was the highest form of art. Nothing I did could come close.

  When they gave out the awards, it surprised no one that Gil’s mamãe won the first prize. But more than a few heads turned when the last judge called out my name for third place. I was nearly at the podium when she nervously explained that my name had been read in error, could I please take my seat. I turned, numb with horror, but not before I glanced at the judge’s fono array, listing the exhibitors. She had accidentally arranged it in reverse order — I wasn’t third from the top, but third from the bottom. Forty-seventh out of fifty. I ran out of the auditorium; at least now I wouldn’t have to sit beside my papai’s quiet disappointment.

  I didn’t go far, just up the stairs to the roof of the exhibition hall. Gil found me a few minutes later, a gesture so unexpectedly generous that my tears dried on my cheeks.

  “I was terrible,” I said. “At least you admit it.”

  Gil smiled. “Nothing about June Costa is terrible.” I liked the way my name tasted on his lips, as if I were a sweet and juicy fruit, rarely in season.

  “But I wasn’t any good. Not like your mamãe.”

  He stepped closer to me, and across a bridge of centimeters, I noted how his angles were already rounding, his muscles filling to match his height, the awkwardly broad planes of his forehead and cheeks subtly transforming into something that would be beautiful. But he was already the most beautiful person in the world to me just then.

  “I think you’re good. I mean, that gravestone was a little …”

  I gave a shaky laugh. “Too much? Sometimes I wish I could make music like my papai. Real art.”

  Gil caught my hand and twirled me left, then right, then caught me against his chest. We laughed in tandem.

  “What you do is real art.”

  “He doesn’t think so. He loves Maria Bethânia. I thought he’d appreciate …”

  “He will, June. He loves you.”

  For a moment, I believed him. If I tried hard enough, if I made myself good enough, if one day I won the prize instead of running out of the auditorium …

  “The best artist in Palmares Três,” I repeated for him, loving the peppery audacity of the words. Believing them just enough to make anything possible.

  I never told you this, but I can feel my death. I’ve felt it since that first night, when they knelt me before the altar and I drank the wine, ate the sacred wafer, the body and blood of Jesus and Yemanjá, marrow and gristle and bone and nanobots. The Holy Communion roared behind my eyes, and the doctor said I wouldn’t feel a thing (the only place in the body with no nerve endings: the brain), but I did. The bots spoke to me then like the city speaks to me now. They said move, move, move, which meant die. Did I know that then? I’m not sure.

  The knowledge that I would die was like açaí, rich and bitter, and all I could think was that I wanted more.

  Mother is waiting for me when I stumble back home. My clothes are wet and my hair is like a nest of seaweed, and I’m almost sad that Auntie Yaha isn’t there with her, since it makes her crazy when I don’t “look my best.”

  Mother has crossed her arms and legs. Her lips are pursed and I think about how Mother is always like that now, careful to not open any part of herself. Papai hated that side of her. And I will never be like her, no matter what.

  “It’s almost two in the afternoon,” she says.

  I shrug, standing awkwardly in the vestibule, dripping on the tiles. I want to take off my clothes, but I don’t dare in case Mother notices the smeared paint and guesses at what I’ve spent this day doing.

  “And there was a storm,” she says. “But then, I see you already knew that.”

  “I took a walk,” I say finally, because there’s no getting away if I don’t pretend to have this conversation.

  “You missed school.”

  “It’s the day after the election. Enki’s going to the verde with the Queen in a few hours. Do you think anyone’s in school?”

  “The responsible wakas are. I’m sure Bebel —”

  “I’m sure Bebel is perfect as ever. Unfortunately, you have me.”

  Mother’s lips are squeezed so tight, it’s a wonder they don’t turn to diamonds. “She has scored above you on every exam this year, June,” she says, as if I didn’t even speak. “You know as well as I do there are only so many slots open in the university programs. Do you want to have to go to Tier Eight Community?”

  I grimace. “I’m an artist.”

  “And you don’t want to go to the University of Palmares? Train in their art program with Juliana Consecu? Exhibit in their gallery? You don’t want that kind of pedigree?”

  Of course I do, which is why Mother has to bring it up. She’s always been the one interested in my art — as though she could use it to win me from Papai, as though I wasn’t good enough to prove myself to him on my own. And even with him dead, she can’t shake the habit.

  “An artist can create anywhere,” I say.

  Her lips unbend slightly. I wouldn’t dare call it a smile, but it’s a little looser than her habitual expression. I guard myself against it. “And an artist can only support herself with proper connections.”

  “Well,” I say, “wouldn’t you know all about that.”

  She doesn’t even flinch. She just narrows her eyes, closing even more of herself. That’s Mother all over — these days I can’t even hurt her.

  I sigh. “Where’s Auntie Yaha, anyway?”

  “Damage control with that ambassador from Tokyo 10. Your Gil put on quite a show.”

  I giggle without meaning to. I don’t understand how that was just last night, and this is only this afternoon, and so much has happened I feel as if I could squeeze a whole lifetime inside.

  My mother is halfway to her room, but she pauses in a strangely tentative way and turns back around.

  “June,” she says, “are you … what happened with Gil, last night, you looked …”

  She literally can’t force it out. My laughter gets louder, harder.

  “Don’t strain yourself, Mother,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  And, just then, it’s nothing but the truth.

  These days Mother is mostly a housewife, but she used to be one of the most important grandes in Palmares Três. She was the president of the University of Palmares, one of our three big schools. Not quite the best, though you never said that in her hearing. When he was alive, Papai was a music professor there. He taught modern trends in interpretations of twentieth-century classical music. They met when she first started in administration, and he’d already been teaching for years. He’d been married once, when he was a waka, but it ended badly and he’d never tried again until Mother.

  I think they loved each other. At least, I can remember the way Papai would sometimes sing to Mother when she’d had a bad day at work. I remember the trip through the
flat cities that she’d arranged for their fortieth anniversary. Papai had never seen Salvador, and I remembered how excited he was to visit the famed ruins of Rio de Janeiro. He must have taken a hundred holos on the glass beach at Ipanema, smiling like a child from inside his decontamination suit, and I looked dutifully at each one when he came back.

  That was a year before he died, my papai.

  I’ve never looked at that footage since.

  I didn’t know it then, but that trip was how Mother met Auntie Yaha, who was Auntie Yaha even then, and the newly appointed flatling ambassador of Palmares Três. She was young for an Auntie, much younger than my mother, but still about fifty, definitely no waka.

  We had a fight the morning of their wedding. I asked her if she’d slept with Auntie Yaha when Papai was still alive. If while Papai was destroying bandwidth taking every possible angle of the Ipanema glass, wondering if it would be here or here that Tom Jobim had seen that most famous schoolgirl walking to the beach every morning, she had snuck out of her hotel room and betrayed him with the woman who was now supposed to be my new mother.

  “You know nothing,” Mother had said. “Your papai is gone. He left me and I’m still here. What would you have me do, become a nun?”

  “It hasn’t even been a year!” I screamed. “If you’re so desperate, why not just pay for it?”

  “You stupid waka,” she said, leaning forward. She was in her wedding dress — bright red — and seated before the changing mirror. “What do you know of love?”

  “Papai loved you,” I said, because I believed it.

  Mother scrunched her face, like she’d accidentally caught a whiff of the verde. “Your papai is dead.”

  “Stop saying that!”

  She gave me a pitying look. She raised her hands like she might embrace me, but I flinched and she rested them again in her lap. “Oh, filha,” she said. “Won’t you let it go? Your mamãe is about to be married.”

  “Papai was right,” I said, standing. “Better to die than get old like this.”

  I used to love my mother, you understand.

  Some days, I’m almost sure she used to love me.

  The revelation of my second piece of public art happens far more successfully than my first.

  Just like I guessed, Queen Oreste escorts an even-more-dazzling Enki through the streets of the verde. Enki is smiling and silent, as though he knows that after his face and his words and his kiss have been on the holos nonstop for the last day all he really needs to do is let us look at him. On the tiny holo in my room (I couldn’t bear to watch this with Mother), I wonder if his eyes look even brighter, his lips even redder. I wonder which mods he’s picked already, and which he’ll choose as his year goes on. It’s one of the chief benefits of being summer king — a license to receive the rare and expensive self-modification technology that even the Aunties don’t have much access to. He could make his skin glow like a lantern, he could access holos and feeds with his contracting pupils, he could even use a simple twitch of his fingers to steer his own pod through the tunnels of the city. Those are all the mods I’ve heard of the summer kings using, but watching Enki now I wonder if he will bother with any of them. From the beginning, Enki has lived to surprise us. To pull on the turbans of the Aunties and laughingly subvert their every desire. How would his mods be any different? For the first time, I wonder how many mods exist in the cities that don’t have laws against them like Palmares Três. What could Enki turn himself into, given the opportunity?

  But for now he walks through his old neighborhood, smiling as though he doesn’t notice the catinga that the Queen guards against with a scented handkerchief. Tens of thousands line the streets, cheering as he walks past. A lot of wakas, of course, but even more grandes, and I’m surprised at how much they all seem to love him. I’ve seen the footage of other moon years, and now I’m sure of it — Enki is our most popular summer king in even grande memory, let alone waka. I don’t see Gil, but then I didn’t expect to. None of my pings are from him either, though I’ve got about twenty from what seems like my entire class. Including Bebel. She could hardly help but gloat over my holo debut last night. Every time a caster starts to show the footage, I switch. I know what I must have looked like, standing alone while watching the two of them. More important, I know what I felt like, and I don’t need to feel that ever again, let alone thirty times an hour.

  I wish Gil were with me, but prior experience tells me he’s probably sleeping it off. And when he wakes up? Will he move on from Enki, like he does most everyone else, or will their relationship turn into something deeper?

  But, no, I won’t anticipate anything until it happens — everyone knows that summer kings screw like mayflies.

  I turn back to my holo, make the volume amphitheater loud, and wait for what only I know is about to happen.

  Enki pauses a moment before stepping out onto the terraces. I could swear he’s waiting for the flitting cameras to have time to zoom over the water and stabilize themselves in the still-gusting wind before he steps out. Enki always did love an entrance.

  When he steps out, his loose embroidered shirt billows behind him. To his left, Queen Oreste keeps a hand on her crimson turban, which is threatening to blow away. Some angles pull back to capture the breathtaking backdrop of the algae vats reflecting the lingering wisps of storm clouds. Framed by the terraced vats, Enki and the Queen stand like statues.

  And then, the first camera notices. The chatter on my feeds gets cacophonous as the vidders and casters try to figure out what they’re seeing. I turn down the volume.

  A second later, what had been a strange, unexpected splash of color at the corner of a hundred angles resolves itself into something recognizable.

  Into a mural.

  “It looks like a picture of Enki kissing someone,” Sebastião says on my main feed. He pauses. “Goodness, he’s kissing that waka from last night. Someone in the verde wants to cause trouble — if Oreste wasn’t happy about Enki’s behavior last night, I can only imagine how she’ll feel now. We’ll hold for Oreste’s reaction.” Sebastião waves his hand a little helplessly. “It’s nice, though, isn’t it?”

  I grin and fall back on my bed with stifled joy. Gil was harder for me to draw, though I’ve known him for years. But a painting like this is so necessarily reductive, and I know far too much of Gil to ever capture his essence in paint. In some ways, I feel like that about Enki, though we’ve never even met.

  I flip through the other feeds and they’re all discussing my art — who painted it, what it means, how Oreste and the Aunties will react to yet another affront by the wakas against the dignity of the office. They’re sure that it’s wakas, though it seems to me that it could just as easily have been a grande from the verde.

  Oreste and Enki can’t see the mural, though it’s clear from their expressions they know something has happened. Enki starts to laugh and dashes to the railing of the terrace. He cranes his neck, but can’t see it from that vantage. So he walks over to some waka at the front of the crowd — a girl so overcome by his presence I wonder if she might faint — and borrows her fono.

  He looks at it for a moment and though the feeds are chattering — How will he react? Where is Gil and has he seen this? What will the Aunties do? — I hear them like a buzz in my ears.

  “I am June,” I whisper into my sleeve, and hope I won’t vomit.

  Enki silently hands the fono to the Queen. It’s an old model, nearly as big as his palm, and it doesn’t project very well, but she can get the gist. In a fit of highly uncharacteristic emotion, Oreste hurls the fono over the railing and into the bay. Enki looks back at the waka, who stands there with her face pale and mouth open. He shakes his head and turns out to the water, facing the buzzing cloud of cameras.

  And he salutes them.

  “From one artist to another,” he says, to me, to me, and then I’m muffling my screams with my pillow and Gil finally pings me.

  I’m barely in school for ten minutes be
fore Principal Ieyascu pings me to say that she wants me in her office. Being the kind of girl who has attempted to keep illicit pop-art activities on the deep down low, I’m a little worried.

  “What could it be?” I ask Gil, who sits beside me though every waka in the school has been falling over him since he walked in. We’re supposed to be studying, but even the teachers don’t bother to keep us quiet.

  He looks around and then leans close to my ear. “You were careful, right?”

  “Unlike you, I tried to keep my face out of the holos.”

  Gil laughs and flashes that superstar smile that hasn’t worked on me since we were fourteen. “Oh, but you’re missing out, June. I have an interview tonight with Sebastião; you want to come along?”

  He tosses this out as casually as an invitation to his house for dinner, but even I gasp a little. Sebastião is our top gossip caster, the kind of feed-hound who is a celebrity in his own right.

  “Gil …”

  His smile falls away. “June, sometimes you have to step out.”

  “I don’t want to be … not that girl.”

  Not the one left behind on the dance floor. The one whose stupid, half-formed dreams of the summer king broke in full view of a million people. Gil can see what I mean, and he still hasn’t really explained what happened that night, so we leave it. He’s happy and high as a comet. I won’t be the one to bring him down.

  “I’ll just have to see what the giant wants. If I’m not back in an hour, look for my body.”

  Gil bites his lip a little — a disarming gesture from before he became Tier Eight’s resident sex god. I smile at him, run my fingers through his thick, kinky hair, and leave before I can do anything stupid like cry or beg him to come with me.