The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

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    His mamãe was the best artist at that show, the disaster that became the yardstick by which I measured all others. Her series of child-sized mannequins depicting the stages of life of a waka in Palmares Três made me bite back tears. She dressed a child in a smock made lovely by a border of hand-stitched coffee beans and sugarcane. The older ones wore a shimmering aquamarine dress with a wistful bow gathered like flowers beneath her chin; a soccer jersey for a team that didn’t exist and shockingly orange cleats; and the last mannequin came of age in a simple wide skirt and blouse in blushing pink and a turban the color of dried blood.
    I had known Gil before the show, but he was new to our school and new to our tier — a strange, awkward boy with more angles than sides and eyes as large as oranges. We smiled at each other during lunch and talked a few times, but whispers always seemed to follow the new boy wherever he went. I couldn’t understand what they meant and I didn’t know if I dared let the whispers follow me too.
    But then he attended the art show when I hadn’t expected to see him, and he introduced me to his mamãe. I thought at first that she was his sister. She looked so young beside him, her face fresh in a way that antiaging treatments could never replicate.
    “June, this is my mamãe. She’s also in the show. Entry thirty-seven.”
    No one exhibiting in this contest could be older than thirty — it was a special, unusual opportunity for artists normally overlooked. I wondered about what that meant, and what the gossip I hadn’t understood must have pricked and torn apart. Gil held his angles at a firm hundred and eighty degrees, staring at me with monstrous eyes at once hurt and proud and so watchfully angry.
    And then I remembered. “Entry thirty-seven? The clothes?” The theme of the contest was “Graceful Beginnings,” and I didn’t think anyone had captured its spirit better.
    “Oh, yes,” she said, and grinned at me, less self-conscious than poor Gil. “Did you like it?”
    “It’s amazing!” I said. “My favorite in the whole show. If I could wear that dress with the bow, I’d die happy.”
    His mamãe and I talked for another ten minutes before one of the judges called her away. I started to say something to Gil, because he was staring at me again, and I knew already that I would hate to hurt him. But before I could get a word out, he draped his long arms and scrawny chest over my blossoming one. I hugged him back. In a city that thought wakas were useless, having a baby at sixteen would be as tough for the kid as the mother.
    “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 tombstonescrawled 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