“Ribbon. Bike wheel. I should know better.”
“Yeah, well, Bradley should know better too.”
Sports at Meteor Central High were the one thing Cole always had, and I took that from him.
“You’re out for the season,” I say.
“Just the cornhole championship,” he answers, like it’s nothing. “The doctor my mom made me see agrees with Cereza and Lupe. He says I’ll be good for soccer in the winter and I can work up to the baseball stuff for the spring. He just doesn’t want me throwing right now.”
It’s just then that I put something together.
Sports aren’t just something Cole loves.
They’re his future.
He’s talked about college, close enough that he could drive back to Meteor on weekends if he wanted to, far enough that no one would expect him to if he didn’t. I know he both loves this town, and needs breathing room from it. And how good he is on the field is how he’s gonna make that happen.
It was how his older brother got to UNM. The same older brother that, according to rumor, set down the rules of how his teammates were gonna treat the first transgender guy to join their team. “So you guys are gonna look out for my little brother or I’m gonna kick all your asses, sound good?”
I finish with the flowers in time for the oven to beep.
“I hope you’re hungry,” I say.
Cole laughs. “Always.”
“Good.” I borrow Mrs. Kendall’s oven mitts to pull the casserole dish out. Bruja Lupe helped me put the enchiladas together before her Barbara Stanwyck movie marathon with Liz Peterford. “Because I brought you something else.”
But now Cole sighs. “Please don’t serve it for me, my mother keeps trying to do that. I do have full use of my other arm.”
“I won’t.” I set the casserole dish down and stick a serving spoon in it. “You’re gonna do it yourself.”
Now he looks wary. “Is this some kind of exam?”
“Not an exam. Practice.” I pull down plates. “Green enchiladas stain less than anything else Bruja Lupe and I make. This is good experience learning to eat with your other arm. Before you have to do spaghetti or something.”
He shakes his head, like he’s humoring me. But he does it. He pushes the books aside, and we sit at the kitchen table together, Cole as patient learning to eat with his nondominant hand as he is waiting for the right moment on the soccer field.
I say a prayer of thanks that the enchiladas turned out, that I learned how to make something more than the same sugar cookies.
Cole spears his fork into one. “It’s ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’”
“What?” I ask.
“Kendra’s song. It’s ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’”
I look down at my plate so he won’t see me cringing. Even I know how many past Miss Meteor contestants have tried that one.
“Oh wait, I’m not done.” Cole sets down his fork and holds up a hand to stop me reaching for words. “Modified to ‘Somewhere Over the Space Rock.’”
Now I set down my fork. “Oh no.”
“Oh yes. I wish I didn’t, but I now know the words by heart. And no, I’m not gonna sing it.” He picks the fork back up and stabs the tines into another piece of enchilada. “Not even for you.”
“Is she gonna wear the Dorothy Gale dress?”
“In Meteor Central High colors.”
“Leave this town while you still can, Cole,” I deadpan.
“Oh, I plan on it,” he says. “But I’m probably not gonna go that far, you know that.”
“And why is that, exactly?” I ask. Probably a hundred colleges—some of them far from Meteor—would want him for their baseball team. Maybe soccer even more. There’s not a striker in the district who hasn’t wished they had Cole Kendall’s mix of patience and speed.
“Because I love this place,” he says, in a way that almost makes me believe his relationship with this town isn’t as complicated as it is. But only almost. “And I want to be able to get back here when I want to. I just don’t want to live here. I want to live somewhere I don’t have to follow everyone else’s rules to get to be who I am. I wish that place was here, but it’s just not, at least not right now.” Cole shakes his head, smiling. “Believe it or not though, I am gonna miss some things about this place.”
“So am I,” I say, and I feel like my heart’s crumbling to stardust.
“Oh yeah?” he asks. “You’re out of here, too, when you get the chance?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you going?”
I’m trying to figure out how to give an answer that’s not far away, like, galactically far away, when the sound of keys being set down makes me stand up.
I brace for the sight of Kendra’s curling-iron curls.
Worse.
Mrs. Kendall’s high heels click into the kitchen. They match her shell tank that looks like it came from a sweater set. She dresses like this even on her days off. I wonder if it rubbed off on her son. Cole always looks a little nicer than he has to.
I realize, just now, that it’s the richest guys in town who always show up in wrinkled shorts and flip-flops in brands none of us know because nowhere in Meteor sells them.
Before my brain has a chance to give Meteor men’s fashion any further consideration, it lands on something else.
Cole’s father’s trips to Chicago, and Duluth, and Omaha.
Is he never here for Cole’s games not because he’s busy with deals and presentations, but because he’s looking for work?
Mrs. Kendall sets her eyes on us. “What is going on here?”
Cole stands up. “Mom.”
“Haven’t you done enough?” she asks me.
“Mom, please.”
But I don’t want Cole to have to defend me to his mother. I broke her son. I’d hate me too. So I don’t even take the time to walk to the front door.
“Lita,” Cole says.
But I’m already climbing out one of those wide-open windows.
Before I can scramble out of Mrs. Kendall’s hydrangea bushes, I hear more than I want to.
“That’s the girl who almost cost you your future, and you let her into this house?” Mrs. Kendall asks.
“She didn’t cost me anything,” Cole says. “I’m back in soccer in the winter and baseball in the spring. For all I know, this’ll be good for me. I actually get some time off before soccer season. Maybe I actually get time for the fifteen things that hurt every day to heal a little instead of just icing them down and going back to practice.”
I crouch down in the hydrangeas, more to make myself small than to hide.
“You can’t lose focus now,” Mrs. Kendall says.
“My focus should be cornhole?” Cole asks. “There’s no college in the world that’s gonna give me a scholarship for it. I don’t even like it. I just do it because everyone wants me to.”
“You can’t get distracted.”
“Do I look distracted? I’m doing homework. How many of the guys in my class do you think are gonna touch any of this before next Sunday night?”
“That’s its own distraction.”
“School?” Cole laughs. “Really?”
I shut my eyes.
Sports isn’t just Cole’s future.
It’s a weight on him.
Whatever nerves I feel about Miss Meteor is nothing next to the pressure that’s on him. Because nobody expects me to win. Everyone expects him to.
“Don’t worry,” Cole says. “I get it, Mom. We all get it.”
Whatever jokes we make about my grasp on sarcasm, I catch it. I hear it hardening his voice. “I’m too much of a dumb jock to get a scholarship with my grades or my test scores, so I better make sure I stay at the top of the team lineup. Message received.”
Chicky
IT’S A MARK of how bad I feel that no one speaks to me the next morning. No well-meaning lecture from my mom, no goofy jokes from my dad, not even a catty remark from Fresa. It’s l
ike they know I can’t feel any better or worse than I already do, so they don’t even try.
When the sun is high in the sky and everyone’s at the diner, I finally make my way out of my room and downstairs. My dad has left out carnitas and pinto beans de la olla and rice from last night’s dinner—he knows I like to fry an egg on top of my leftovers for breakfast—and it all smells amazing as usual, but I’m not even tempted. I don’t deserve the joy of food.
I don’t deserve anything good.
Not after I set Lita on a path to destruction, abandoned her and Cole on the field, and utterly failed to stand up to Royce Bradley. Not after I walked away from another best friend who just wanted to know me.
Even if he was kind of pushy.
Even if he made it pretty clear he wants to do more than just be my friend.
I groan as I shove my feet into my shoes, hating myself for obsessing about it when there are so many worse things to obsess about. More immediate things. More disastrous, catastrophic things.
No more Junior drama, I tell myself, stern and uncompromising. Not today.
But even my strictest ban isn’t enough. As I wander aimlessly through the residential streets of Meteor—avoiding the museum, and the diner, and Lita’s house, and even the Kendalls’ block—he’s all I can think about. Him and our friendship, which until last night was the least complicated thing in my life.
Would it be so bad? I wonder, as I walk past the bench where we mock people, just out of view of the diner windows. Would it be so bad to hold his hand? Kiss him? Laugh at the dumb jokes that usually make me roll my eyes? When I picture it, the early afternoon sun beating accusingly down, it’s not bad at all.
But it’s not good either.
Not the kind of good that makes your stomach swoop and your palms sweat.
Not the kind of good that leads to more than kissing . . .
Turning west, I skulk past Hubert Humphrey Memorial Park, remembering the long summer after seventh grade—my first summer without Lita—and the way Junior and I would eat paletas in the grass and talk around all the things that made me sad.
He never pushed me. Never pressured me. He’s always just been home base. A place I felt safe. And that’s something, maybe even something big.
But now he’s pushing, and it’s making me realize I don’t know him. Not in the deep, enduring way that my mom knows my dad, not even in the destructive but intense way my sister knows Berto. I don’t know what fuels him or what makes him tick or who he’d be if he could be anyone.
Not even close.
And how are you supposed to decide if you want more, when you don’t even know what you have? I replay this question over and over, walking the orbit of Pluto until long after I should have been chased indoors by the heat.
No answer comes.
After I start recycling reasons to berate myself, I realize people are looking at me. And not just in the way they usually do.
First, two girls from school giggle behind their hands as they pass me on their way to the track. This in and of itself wouldn’t be particularly alarming—especially after what happened on the field. But as I scowl at their backs, a few words of their conversation drift back to me on the scrap of a breeze:
“I heard they attacked him, like, screaming and stuff.”
“Oh, I totally believe it. They are such freaks.”
When they turn the corner I thump my forehead painfully against Saturn’s monkey bars. I’ve been so busy thinking about this stupid Junior situation that I didn’t even anticipate half the school playing telephone with the story of what happened yesterday.
And of course they are.
I head toward downtown instinctively, knowing I need to get to the diner, to strategize with my sisters before half the school becomes the whole school.
But the people who stare as I pass the library aren’t even kids from my school. They’re not kids at all. Mrs. Tate, who runs the desk at the Chamber of Commerce, gives me the side eye as she passes on her lunchtime walk with Mrs. Perkins, the head of the PTA at Meteor Central. They don’t even wait until they’ve passed before they start vilifying me in hissing whispers. It’s almost like they want me to hear.
“Now, Nancy, say what you will about the boy’s lifestyle, but that family has been through enough this year without having to deal with a bullying incident on top of it all!”
“Oh, you’re absolutely right, Susan. You don’t have to agree with everything about a political movement to know bullying is just plain wrong. Makes you wonder what the parents are teaching those kids. They work an awful lot, you know . . .”
My limbs start to go numb before Mrs. Perkins trails off. A bullying incident? Lita crashed her bike into Cole because Royce Bradley is a jerk, but something tells me the bully they’re talking about isn’t him.
I stand up, my ears ringing slightly. Is it just my imagination, or is everyone downtown staring at me? My palms start to sweat as I walk toward the diner. I need Cereza. Or Fresa. Even Uva will do in a pinch.
When I pass the bench outside the hardware store, Old Vinny and Rick are smoking cigars like they always do on Tuesdays. They’re usually nice to me, but today their eyes go wide the moment I’m in view.
“I heard those tough girls rolled up on the skinny boy riding motorcycles! Casting spells, they were, just like in the movies.”
“What’s that you said? Shells?”
“No, SPELLS! Like MAGIC! Broke his arm clean in half, and that’s not the worst of it! They say the girls went after his sister next!”
“A BLISTER, was it?”
I break into a run, my sweat going cold even in 105-degree weather. The back doors of the diner swing open just like normal, but there’s no one in the kitchen. Voices drift back from the dining room. My mom’s, and a man’s. I’m not even sure why, but I creep up to the kitchen door to listen, not making a sound, close enough that their indistinct voices become actual words.
“. . . sure you understand,” the man’s voice is saying, and my blood suddenly goes colder than my sweat. That’s not just a man out there. It’s Jack Bradley, Royce’s father. “Considering the incident yesterday, the pageant board feels it’s more than fair.”
“The incident?” my mom asks, incredulous. “It was a couple of teenagers and a bike crash, Jack. You can’t seriously be considering this.”
“I think you’ll find the PTA is calling it more than just a bike crash,” Mr. Bradley says, his voice oozing condescension. “Considering the boy’s . . . unique situation . . . the charges are more akin to bullying. And as you know, our school board and our pageant committee have expressed a clear zero-tolerance policy for abuse of any kind.”
The irony of these words coming from Royce’s father’s mouth makes me want to launch the entire Bradley bloodline straight into the sun.
“And I’m sure the case will be examined,” my mom says, using the no-nonsense voice she usually reserves for the health inspectors. “But I don’t see what Selena’s has to do with it.”
Selena’s? I press my ear even closer to the door. Sure, everyone hates us, but what can this possibly have to do with the diner?
“Given that every one of your employees were involved in the incident, the pageant board doesn’t feel it would be . . . prudent for any of the official Miss Meteor events to take place in this establishment.”
“The board doesn’t? Or you don’t?”
“As chairman, I won’t pretend my opinion isn’t valued,” he says. “After all, the Kendall boy is one of my son’s closest friends. You can’t imagine how he’s suffering today. His friend maimed. His chances at the championship all but ruined . . .”
“Jack, I’m very sorry for the Kendall boy, and for your son’s . . . hardships,” my mom says. “But the meet and greet is our biggest night of the year.”
I can hear it in her voice now. Fear. The kind she’s never shown to me.
“You know how tough it is to own a business in this town.” I can almost hear
my mom’s pride disappearing as she swallows it. “We need this.”
I know, in this moment, that I will never forgive myself for making my mother admit these things to Jack Bradley. Ever.
“Yes,” he says, all fake resignation. “Restaurants. Such a fickle business, Clarita. I always say people will always need cars! That’s what keeps the lights on!” He laughs, one of those awful salesman things that sounds like it was made in a plastic mold. “I imagine you can’t say the same for . . . noodle casserole con pollo?”
He says pollo like polo. I’ve never wanted to throw fryer oil on someone so badly, and I work in a kitchen with Fresa three nights a week.
“I’d like to appeal to the board,” my mom says, stiff, professional.
“I’m afraid with such short notice, there’s no time for an appeal. There’s always next year.” I can hear his shiny shoes heading for the door, and the words my mom isn’t saying. Without this event, without pageant week, we might not make it to next year.
“Where will it be?” she asks. “The meet and greet. Maybe we could . . . cater? Would that appease the board?” I hate that she’s asking him this. I hate that he has this power over her. Over all of us.
“Ah, yes, well as I said, short notice. I’ve offered the local Bradley Dealership as the host and sponsor. We’ll be . . . outsourcing the catering. I’m sure you understand.”
The bell on the door dings. Jack Bradley is gone.
And my mother is crying.
I should go comfort her, but what can I say? Sorry I literally ruined your life? I can’t even look at her until I fix this, so I ease back out the double doors and sprint as fast as I can toward home, hoping like hell someone else has a plan.
When I burst through the front door, the phone is already ringing.
“Lita?” I pant into the receiver.
“Yeah, this is Perez,” she says in her most serious detective voice. Or is it buddy cop? I can’t tell today, but at least I know she’s serious.
“Did you hear?”
“Roger that, Quintanilla, it’s all over town. Over.”
Buddy cop, then. “What do we do?” I ask, clutching at a stitch in my side.
“We meet at the cactuses. At sundown. Bring all the firepower you’ve got, do you copy?”
Miss Meteor Page 10