The Summer Prince (8 page)

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 before 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.

Even if she somehow knows everything, I don’t care. The mural that the mushi bots have by now succeeded in scrubbing out of existence was one of the triumphs of my admittedly short career. Enki saluted me on camera. Gil could barely speak when we first saw each other.

My lights are warm and I watch their faint glow reflected along the opaque glass walls of Principal Ieyascu’s waiting room.

“Will you
please
turn those down, June?”

I whirl around and look up, surprised to see Principal Ieyascu with her arms crossed and her expression — as usual — forbidding. She’s a grande’s grande, and has been principal at this school long enough to know Auntie Yaha from her waka days. She’s also giant, nearly seven feet tall, and hates sitting down.

“Turn … what?” I say, suddenly too nervous to do more than gape.

She rolls her eyes and takes a few clicking steps toward me. “Those body modifications under your skin, June. The ones that are certainly against school policy and quite possibly violate the Queen’s edicts against technological self-modification, should I choose to press the issue.”

I swallow and take a deep breath, which brings the lights down to a subtle glow. I should be able to control the brightness at will, but I haven’t practiced enough to be good at it.

“It will have to do,” Principal Ieyascu says. “Now, shall we go inside my office?”

She presses a hand to the dark glass wall, which pulls apart smoothly at her touch. Her actual office is only slightly less chilly. There’s a single glass table, clear of everything except a twenty-first-
century fountain pen I know must be worth at least a million reals. The chair behind the desk I think might be made of actual dead-cow-skin leather. For her guests, there are two seats of molded glass. They look uncomfortable, and there’s only one free.

The other girl has a thick puff of dark honey hair she swears is natural but we all know must be modded. She’s fidgeting in the glass chair, but smiles at me when I sit next to her.

I force myself to smile back, since it wouldn’t do for Principal Ieyascu to see me be petty. At least I know that if Bebel the Perfect is here, then my graffiti exploits are probably still a secret.

“So why are we here?” I ask, craning my head to look up at Ieyascu, who has of course chosen to pace before her glass wall instead of sitting down like a normal non-giant.

“If you don’t rediscover your manners, June, you might find yourself back in class.” She pauses and looks between the two of us. “And I think you would regret that very much.”

Regret
not
being in the principal’s office? That’s strange, even for Ieyascu, so I bob my head and mutter a dutiful apology. Bebel dips her honey bush too, though we both know she didn’t do anything to warrant an apology. I grit my teeth. That’s Bebel all over — always careful to be considerate when someone important is watching.

“Well, good. As I’m sure you are wondering — even though you were far more discreet about it, Bebel — there is a reason why I’ve called you both here. I trust you have heard of the Queen’s Award?”

This is like asking us if we’d heard of the summer king, and did we know one has just been elected? Bebel nods politely. Every moon and sun year (and sometimes other years, if she feels like it), the Queen sponsors one high school student, providing full tuition to any university program plus a showcase of her talent and stipend money as she starts her career. The list of past recipients could double as a guide to the most important people in Palmares Três. Queen Oreste herself won about a billion years ago when she was a waka. When I was younger, Mother would make a point of taking me to the exhibitions of the
finalists, as though she really thought that one day I could join their ranks.

Bebel and I gape at Ieyascu.

“You have? Good. Then perhaps you will understand the honor bestowed upon you — the result of certain
connections
or not — when I inform you that you, June, and you, Bebel, have each been named one of the ten finalists.”

I don’t even register her jibe. I’m too busy trying to keep the room in the proper orientation. Bebel shrieks a little and then turns to me with a huge grin on her face.

“June!” she says.

“Bebel?”

“Good luck!”

“Uh … thanks. You too.”

Ieyascu raps her desk and we turn back to face her, abruptly. “The final decision will be made in winter, at the end of the summer king’s term. Until that point, you will do whatever you can to prove to the Queen that you have the talent to make yourself worthy of the honor. You submit nothing formally to her. Rest assured that having picked you out of the hundred thousand eligible wakas, she has her eye on your endeavors, and you should strive to make them as impressive as possible.”

Bebel is glowing bright as her fake honey hair. She’s a singer and a musician, which is why we’re on the same art track. I can see her already confecting visions of being featured on all the feeds, of the rapturous audiences who will fall over themselves to compliment her talent.

She’s Bebel the Perfect, and I know that whoever the other eight wakas are, she has a good chance of winning.

But I’m her competition, and that means she won’t. I remember that other contest, that utter failure, and feel a gladness close to fury that I’ve been given this second chance. To prove myself to him, to do something with my art so great that no one can deny it.

Bebel leaves before me, dashing out the door with most un-Bebel-like haste, probably to gloat with her friends. Ieyascu’s voice reels me back before I can escape as well.

“June,” she says. Her voice is softer, almost weary. She’s standing beside one of her glass walls, which she’s turned into a window. For a moment, I swear she looks
old
, like in the video-holos of the twentieth century, all wrinkled and broken down. The effect passes and she straightens her shoulders.

“I hope, for Yaha’s sake, that you rise to this occasion. We’ve all noticed how you’ve been slipping this past year. If you fall now — well, let’s just say that Yaha will have a lot to answer for, Auntie or not.”

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. Quick as that, my joy at this opportunity has turned cold and bitter.

Like everything Mother and Auntie Yaha touch these days.

“Thank you,” I say, almost meaning it. “I’ll do my best.”