Free The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson Page A

for the Queen’s Award,” I tell him in a rush. It was hard to hold it in this long, but it’s no good talking when he needs to dance.
    “June!” He hugs me and I let myself enjoy the thrill of his surprise and approval before I have to ruin it with the truth.
    “Auntie Yaha pulled strings,” I say. “I didn’t really earn it. But I’ll win anyway, no matter what I have to do. There won’t be anything she can say to me if I win it.”
    Gil looks sad, as he always does when I talk about my family. “You mean your mamãe?”
    “Papai too,” I say softly. “He’d be proud, I’m sure of it. I’ll make real art. Great art.”
    Gil’s jittery, almost vibrating. I rub my hand up and down his sweat-slick back until he relaxes a little and leans into it. “Nice night?” I say.
    “Dazzling,” he says, like a sigh. “Enki is …”
    I hold my breath.
    “Just like he seems. Only, deeper.”
    “I’m so happy for you, Gil.”
    “Don’t be. I think I’m drowning in him. And I’m hardly his only one.”
    “Well,” I say, flicking my toes at a carp that gets too close. “He’s hardly your only one either.”
    Gil and I solved our virginity problem together a few years ago, but unlike him, I haven’t done much since.
    “He could be. June, he could. Last night, he took me to the very top, to the light, and he pushed me back against that hot glass. I thought it would burn me, and we did it again and again.”
    I imagine it and feel myself flushing. “That doesn’t sound very discreet.”
    Gil laughs. “I don’t know, he said he talked to the bots and they promised to leave us alone.”
    “He talked … what does that even mean?”
    “How should I know? Maybe it’s a new mod?”
    But I’m almost sure the Aunties don’t have anything that would let a human chat with a bot. I wonder what Enki is doing. If he’s gettinghimself into trouble, will he drag Gil into it also? Suddenly, I’m very glad that Enki picked Gil instead of me. If my dreamy love for him had turned this hard and real, I don’t know how I’d be able to deal with it.
    “Gil,” I say, holding his hand until he looks at me. “Listen. You do what you want to do, that’s the way it’s always been, and I don’t want to change that. But Enki is the summer king. The summer king , Gil. He stopped being a boy you could love the moment Oreste crowned him, and he will be dead this time next year. So you can’t let yourself … I mean, I don’t want you to … don’t be hurt. That’s all. I just don’t want you to hurt.”
    I never thought he’d get mad at me, but I thought maybe he’d be dismissive and mocking. I thought maybe he’d tell me I couldn’t understand because I’m so inexperienced. But he just starts to cry.
    “He told me about the others,” he says. I wrap my arms around his waist, hold him. “I asked. It shouldn’t have meant anything. It did.”
    “Maybe that’s what the moon year is for, querido. Make us love him and break our hearts.”
    “Enki is different.”
    He is. I think that’s what makes this worse.

    This is the story of a war between the wakas and the grandes.
    You might think I’m speaking of something universal, of youth and age, because I’ve read the classics and the teachers would have us believe that’s all we’re seeing here, a repeat of that endless struggle between virility and senescence, between spontaneity and care, between creativity and knowledge.
    You know, insert your bullshit here.
    Here’s the thing: There hasn’t been “age” in that old-fashioned, Dorian Gray sense in about two hundred years. Ever since the Hoshigawa technique was perfected back when men were still only 30 percent of the world population. Death before a hundred and fifty has becomeoptional. And these days, two hundred is pretty much guaranteed. Ms. Hoshigawa herself only died last year, the day after her two hundred and fifty-first birthday. Vertical cities around the world had a day of mourning. Gil