The Summer Prince (4 page)

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 got 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.