The Summer Prince (5 page)

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.”

I spend the night alone and shivering, my cheek pressed against the window and my body covered in a nest of blankets. I tried sleeping, but all I could think of were the lights of the city and the ruffle of wind on the bay. The worst is this feeling that I’ve lost them
both
. The Enki of my foolish dreams and Gil, my best friend. He put me down on the glass and never once thought of me after. I’m afraid it will never be the same between us, and I’m furious for being afraid. How can I begrudge Gil that wide-eyed, worshipful happiness? How can I be jealous of him for the dance? But this ache that I know shouldn’t be there slides through every part of me.

I don’t actually know Enki. I’m not stupid. I’m aware this attachment I feel is the product of emotional investment in the largely stage-managed and manufactured spectacle of the royal election. I know that a thousand wakas are probably crying themselves to sleep tonight, just like me.

I’m an artist, after all, and I live for spectacle, for the construction of emotional states and the evocation of suppressed feelings. I can appreciate what Enki has done with his election — the way he subverted it while simultaneously triumphing within its rules. I don’t envy Queen Oreste in her efforts to manage him during this year. The summer kings of moon years might not have any political clout, but I think grandes underestimate the power of desire.

But Enki is also himself. He is the boy who turned a dance before the Queen into a political statement, the boy who came up from the verde to steal our hearts, and is it so silly, so unbelievable that I’d allowed myself to fantasize? To think that he might look at me in the way he looked at Gil tonight, that it might have been my lips he kissed, my cheek he caressed?

I squeeze my hand into a fist.
No.
That’s a story a little girl tells herself to fall asleep at night, and I am done with fairy tales. I want art, pure and clean and uncompromising. I want Gil to be happy and I
want to be happy for him. I can love Enki as the summer king without dreaming of his kisses.

On the horizon, I see a pale glow, the barest hint of dawn. The waves get higher and choppier. The wind whistles past the trusses. I know the signs; there’s a storm coming.

Down in the verde, they will be sealing their windows, huddling in spaces away from the waves. Even so, every year a few unlucky people are washed out. Last sun year, there was a big political debate over what the next Queen should do to help the plight of the catinga, but as far as I can tell, Oreste has done nothing but make a brief visit during her first coronation tour.

Before I know it, I scramble out from under the covers. I’m practically naked, but I’ve stopped shivering.

It’s almost dawn. Auntie Yaha and Mother snore in the other room. They won’t notice when I leave. They never do. I pull on my black overalls and high-necked jacket. My shoes and gloves are black too, with special grippy bottoms that are technically illegal without a license, though Gil’s mother didn’t say anything when I asked for them.

Hunting outfits
, Gil calls them, and my smile when I find my grafiteiro spray can is perhaps a little fierce, and very hungry.

You ask me why I want to die, like you have no idea, like you haven’t known all this time exactly what I want to do. It hurts to know that you don’t understand this part of me, though together we’ve made so much more of it than I could have ever dreamed on my own.

Samba is dance, it is spirit, it is the space between the world and nothing, between the orixás of my grandmothers and the Jesus of my grandfathers. It is a rhythm so fast you can hardly think it. It is a dance so subtle that when your feet move, you had better let yourself follow them. Samba is life.

In the pop-rattle-pop of the pandeiro and the whoop-whoo of the cuíca and the strum-pause-strum of the guitar, I am open, I am divine, my entrails are on the floor and anyone can read them.

Why do I want to die?

Why do you?

I jump a ride to the verde in four different pods, going all the way up to Gria Plaza with an Auntie’s secretary in a pale gray suit before I find a night janitor finally on her way back home. I make up some story about how I accidentally dropped my flash in the bay. I don’t sound like I’m from the verde, but I make sure I don’t sound like I’m from Tier Eight either, and anyway, she’s too tired to do much but shrug and let me sit across from her.

It’s hard to take the public lines this late, and if I used my flash, Auntie Yaha would know where I’ve gone. Gil and I learned this early: Cover your tracks and use the city. Pods will take you anywhere you want to go, but the city knows who calls them. For a moment, I feel as if Gil is beside me, but then I turn and realize his space is empty. Will it always be like that now?

“Up early for a student,” the woman says. Her skin is light, like mine. Usually that means you’re poor, but sometimes it just means you have a strange papai.

“I work some nights,” I say.

“Doing what?”

“Spiders,” I say. “Basic maintenance, you know.”

“You’re an engineer,” she says, and I smile because I know she doesn’t believe it.

“Good with my hands,” I say. She clicks her tongue and shakes her head. I look out the window, through the maze of trusses that extends as far as I can see this deep in the pyramid. Our pod shakes when it passes close to one of the giant spider bots as it ejects nanotubes from its thorax to repair one of the transport megatrusses. Our little pod is barely larger than one of its knee joints. The bots are at least two hundred years old by now, but the city keeps them running because they do their job and I suppose the Aunties don’t want to invite any new
tech into the city. Spider bots live in a concrete warehouse at the center of the base, a place so damp and dangerous only the gangs from the verde venture inside, and they never stay for long.

This one has dents like butterfly wings on its left side, and one of its legs is made of a darker metal than the others. A lot of the spider bots have gone into retirement these days, and only the engineers know for sure which ones still work.

“Did you catch the feeds tonight?” the woman asks. I turn around, forcing my expression into something neutral and curious.

“Did something happen?” I say, and my voice cracks on the last syllable. I cough.

She chuckles a little, and I wonder if that’s a blush I see creeping up her cheeks. “That Enki, crazy boy. He’s already lighting a fire under the Aunties.”

Gil, kneeling before our beautiful boy. Gil, his seat empty beside me.

“What … what did he do?”

“You really didn’t hear? Picked his first consort already, right under Oreste’s nose. Ay, you should have seen that samba, I thought my tabletop would catch fire.” She giggles. To my surprise, I join her, and if my laughter is a little hysterical, at least it’s genuine.