Miss Meteor

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  Lita walks (only a little unsteadily) away from Junior, who watches her go for a long moment. He looks sad, or confused or something, and I know I should be watching Lita, too, but I can’t stop watching him. Wondering why he doesn’t go back to his date.

  “It’s a fine machine, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Bradley is next to me. When did that happen? I tear my eyes resentfully from Junior.

  “I’ve driven this one myself. Six hundred and fifty horses of pure American muscle.”

  “I prefer Mustangs,” I say, picking the first car I can think of, my voice as chilly as I can make it with all these Junior feelings still swirling around.

  “The Mustang has a tendency to go out of fashion,” Mr. Bradley says, his voice all smooth and sleazy like every bad movie car salesman. “But the Corvette is timeless. A classic. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “The Mustang has character.” I try to channel Berto last summer as he debated cars with my mom in the yard. “The Mustang has a stubborn charm.” I look up at Mr. Bradley. “The Mustang might not look as flashy as the Corvette, or be as expensive, but it’s not going anywhere either.”

  “You’re a little spitfire,” he says, chuckling. “But it won’t do you a bit of good if you don’t get a handle on that bad attitude of yours.” He looks my outfit up and down. “You could put on a dress, sweetheart. Smile more. Date athletes instead of hospitalizing them. Maybe if you did, that little taco shack wouldn’t be empty tonight.”

  There’s half a root beer float left in my glass, and I’m about to throw it in this slimeball’s face, consequences be damned, when I hear it. When everyone hears it.

  “DID YOU JUST THROW YOUR NIPPLE AT ME?”

  Mr. Bradley disappears, and so do Junior and the Hair Pony, and it’s like there’s no one in the room but me, watching Lita and Kendra wrestle back and forth until they both fall backward into Mr. Bradley’s timeless, classic indoor fountain.

  When the paramedics are done examining Lita and Kendra for concussions, the party is pretty much over.

  I see Kendra first, her dress plastered to her, more orange Corvette than tasteful peach now that it’s soaked through. It’s not a good color on her, even without the stringy, tangled mess on top of her head and the eye makeup running down her face.

  Plus, the murderous scowl isn’t at all flattering. Fresa would say the crease between her eyebrows is well on its way to permanence.

  I’m almost ready to call it worth it for the visual alone until I see Lita, wrapped in one of those tinfoil-looking space blankets even though it’s at least eighty degrees in here, looking bedraggled and forlorn.

  My sisters are doing their best to do damage control with the sponsors, and Cole is trailing his furious sister and their possibly more furious mother out the door, looking guilty and sad. Junior is with the Hair Pony by the stairs, though he keeps shooting glances at Lita.

  I can’t decide if it makes me hate him more or less.

  The bottom line is, I, Chicky Quintanilla, Lita’s pageant manager, don’t run away this time. I walk over with a cupcake—sans jalapeños, unfortunately—and sit down beside her.

  “Thanks,” she says, sniffling a little as she takes it.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m . . . not even sure how to answer that.”

  “Yeah, of course. Sorry.”

  She looks at me, eyes wide. “It’s not like you told me to reach down my shirt and throw a Hot Tamale nipple at Kendra Kendall before viciously manhandling her into a fountain. What are you sorry for?”

  I laugh, because I think she’s trying to be funny, but the question sticks.

  What are you sorry for?

  She’s still waiting for an answer when I realize: I know Lita. I really know her. I know what she loves and what she’s afraid of and what makes her tick. I know who she’d be if she could be anyone—though, to be fair, that someone changes drastically depending on the situation.

  And now, when the whole town hates us, and we’ve already let life push us apart so far it would be so easy to blame each other. To let the pressure push us even farther out of orbit. But instead, we’re here. Taking care of each other.

  “I’m sorry for never telling you I missed you,” I say, before I can overthink it. Her eyes get even bigger somehow, her wet hair and the space blanket reflecting the fluorescent lights of the showroom and making her seem even more sparkly than usual.

  “I missed you too,” she says, and there’s a question in it. An “is this just because I’m soaked and pathetic, or do you mean it” kind of question. An “is this going to end when the pageant does” kind of question.

  And right now, call me crazy, but I’m not so sure I want it to. The thought bowls me over, like someone’s just told me the sky is green, or Selena’s enchilada pot pie is being featured in an elite food magazine.

  She smiles, and I can see it. I can see it all. Cactus birthday parties and diner tater tot nachos after school. Maybe we’ll go to some of Cole’s soccer games. Maybe we’ll joyride out to the desert when I get my license.

  And I can see it in her eyes, too, in her smile, that she’s imagining the same things, and I’m so hopeful I feel like a soap bubble about to burst . . .

  But that’s when Royce bangs through the double doors—missing the suit jacket Kendra probably demanded he give her to wear home. Everyone else is milling around outside, waiting for rides and gossiping a mile a minute.

  And I see it in Lita’s eyes just as I feel it in mine. Royce. Kendra. Everything that’s happened. All the reasons I pulled away. All the secrets that began our slow drift into opposite corners of space.

  My imagining turns darker now, sadder, from tater tot nachos to looking her in the eyes and telling her: I don’t just like boys, and I’ve been afraid of Kendra telling the world since fourth grade.

  My stomach knots up. Lita’s face closes off. And that little green shoot of renewing friendship is crushed under the heel of everything we’ve never said. Everything I can’t say. Everything I don’t know.

  “Freaks!” Royce says by way of greeting, his voice echoing through the massive, empty room. “This is private property! Get out!”

  And Lita looks at me, her mouth still slightly open, like we’d been in another world before Royce walked in and its debris is still floating around us.

  “Did you hear me?” He comes forward in that intimidating way of his that just makes everything in me shrivel up. “Date’s over! Go back to your hovels!”

  Lita looks at him, and then me, and then him again before she closes her mouth up tight and scampers from the room through the closest door.

  I almost call out to her. But what would be the point? Nothing has changed. And this second drifting is even worse, because now we know what it feels like. Not to know each other. We know what we’re heading for.

  But we go anyway. What choice do we have?

  Lita

  HOW THE METEOR Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase goes about eliminating contestants is one of the best tourists traps in this town.

  The Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase doesn’t cut girls after each event. If they did that, their families, friends, and hometown contingents would check out of their motels and go home the day their girls were eliminated. Instead, to keep everyone here buying our souvenirs and booking up room blocks and eating at our restaurants, the officials stretch out the pageant, one event per day. They never give out scores or call out which contestants will advance.

  So I, like every other girl up there, will have no idea how I’m doing until I’m standing in an evening gown on that last night.

  But after what’s already being called the Meteor catfight of the decade, I have a pretty good idea.

  I work at peeling away the six strips of duct tape on my boobs. Oil on my fingertips, rubbing at the edges.

  Everyone on this planet, I’m either going to hurt (Cole; the Quintanillas), lose (Chicky), or leave (Bruja Lupe).

/>   I worried at the duct tape, pulling it away from my skin.

  A long strip comes away.

  Underneath is not the comforting brown of my own skin, but pale stardust, a wide patch under my breasts.

  My breath rasps in my throat.

  Everything I’m screwing up trying to be Miss Meteor, it’s not making me more ready to leave this planet.

  It’s making the stardust take me faster.

  Bruja Lupe’s knock rattles my bedroom door. “Lita?”

  My breath is too thin to tell her not to come in.

  The door opens.

  I turn, just enough to catch her eyes.

  “Why is this happening?” I ask, my voice trembling.

  She presses her lips together. “Because it’s what we are.”

  “Then why aren’t you turning with me?”

  She lifts her eyes from the floor. “Because it already happened to me.”

  My hearts opens like a nebula.

  “What?” I ask.

  “This same thing happened to me.” She touches her shoulder in such an involuntary way, with the lightest shudder, that I know she’s telling the truth. I wonder if the Milky Way of silver and white in her black braid is the one mark left on her. It has always shimmered more than made sense, like the light was dancing over the gray.

  “Then how are you here?” I ask, with barely enough breath to get it out.

  Her smile is sad and beautiful as the collapse of a star. “You.”

  “What?” I ask. “How?”

  Bruja Lupe sinks down onto the bed. “For years, I thought I was just supposed to take care of you so someone would. And when I got my own stardust, all I did was worry about who would take care of you when I was gone. But then”—she looks out the window, at the sky—“I realized I wasn’t just taking care of you for you. I was taking care of you for me. I was a mother to you.”

  I can’t tell how quickly the insides of me are turning to stardust, but I swear, in this moment, I can feel my entire heart becoming a shapeless, glimmering thing all at once.

  “As soon as I decided I was your mother, even if most of this planet wouldn’t agree,” Bruja Lupe says, “that’s when it vanished.”

  I have never felt more loved, and more unlovable.

  It should make me thank Bruja Lupe, tell her how much she means to me.

  Instead I feel ready to bare my teeth like the stray cats in Hubert Humphrey Memorial Park.

  “So you could just decide to make it stop?” I ask. “How do I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Bruja Lupe says, her voice rising.

  “If you could decide, there has to be a way for me to.”

  “Don’t you think I would tell you if I knew? Don’t you think I wish I knew?”

  “So there’s something wrong with me that I can’t just decide, right?” I throw on jeans and my biggest sweatshirt, not my pajamas. “Like you?”

  “Lita,” Bruja Lupe says.

  I climb out the window I used to climb out of to meet Chicky, because I cannot be in this apartment with a woman whose love for me kept her in her body, on this planet.

  And who I, apparently, do not have enough heart for, enough love for, to do the same.

  “Lita,” Bruja Lupe calls.

  But she doesn’t stop me.

  I run into dimming streets, the sky red at the horizon and deep blue overhead. If I go fast enough, maybe I can get it over with. Maybe I’ll melt back into star-stuff. Maybe it’ll be easier being ice and dust and fire and far-off shimmer than it is to be a girl anyway.

  A hand I know stops me.

  “Lita,” Cole says.

  I hold my hands up between us. “Get away from me.”

  He pulls back. “What?”

  “People let me into their lives, and I ruin them. Or they just decide they don’t want me. Or I’m just not good enough or strong enough or whatever, okay?”

  “You really think you’ve ruined my life?” he asks.

  He takes a slow step toward me, and I feel the gravity of him.

  Two people like us don’t have the same mass as two planets or stars, not anywhere near. But we are far smaller than planets and stars, so the tiny pull we exert on each other is still one we can both feel.

  “Lita,” he says. “You’re one of my best friends in this town.”

  The words make me blink, like Cole might dissolve into nighttime and desert dust in front of me. “What?”

  “Is that really news to you?”

  “Strikers on the soccer team aren’t friends with girls like me.”

  “Then what have we been doing?”

  That’s when I start crying. Because I don’t know what I’ve been doing. To the Quintanillas, to Cole, to Bruja Lupe, who probably only still has customers because the tourists have failed to make the connection between her and the most disastrous contestant in the history of Miss Meteor.

  Cole doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t reel back.

  “You know, I don’t mean to brag, and I haven’t tried it out yet,” he says, glancing at his sling. “But I’m willing to bet I give a really great one-arm hug.”

  I pull the heel of my hand across my cheek. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know I don’t.”

  “Boys don’t like when girls cry.”

  “They thought I was a girl when I was born, remember? I’m immune to girl things. It’s like a superpower.”

  “Then why did you used to say I was gonna give you girl-germs?”

  “I was eight, okay? Just come here.”

  With one arm, he pulls me into him. Hard. I don’t realize how much I needed it until he does.

  Bruja Lupe is always there when I have a fever or a nightmare. Bruja Lupe loves me with a force that kept her on this planet. But she is not a hugger. I can’t remember when anyone hugged me like this. Maybe no one ever has.

  I never realized it before, but I know what Cole Kendall smells like enough for him to be familiar to me. His scent is as much about absence as a resemblance to something else. It’s not detergent or fabric softener (the fragrance doesn’t cling to him), or soap (he uses unscented bars from the dollar store), or deodorant (again, unscented), or body spray (he hates it; bus rides back from away games are the worst because they’re full of it). The closest thing I can place it to is the desert rock outside Meteor at night.

  Yes, the desert outside Meteor smells different at night.

  I return his half hug by sliding my arm under his.

  “You smell good,” I say.

  He laughs. “Considering I pretty much never go more than thirty-six hours without some kind of practice, that’s about the best compliment I can think of.”

  I laugh with him.

  Then I start crying again.

  “I’m sorry.” I set my forehead against his shirt. “I know you don’t need this right now.”

  “Like hell I don’t,” he says. “When you look at me, I know you see more than the shortstop, or the trans guy, or whatever people call me when they forget my name. Do you know how much I need that? Do you know what it’s like to have that when you usually don’t get it?”

  I pull back just enough that he doesn’t have to look quite as far down at me and I don’t have to look quite as far up. “Yes,” I say without thinking, because I realize right then that maybe he looks at me and sees more than the girl who greets every cactus by name.

  “And you wanna know what it’s called when people do that for each other?” he asks. “It’s called being friends.”

  “We’re really friends?”

  His laugh is pained. “Again, ouch.”

  “No, I mean”—I wipe my eyes on the backs of my hands—“you’ve always been really nice to me. But I thought that was because you felt sorry for me.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for you,” he says. “You have more people on your side in this town than you think. Not just Bruja Lupe.”

  “Like who?” I ask.

  “Okay, in no partic
ular order,” he says. “Chicky and her sisters are throwing themselves into trying to make you Miss Meteor.”

  I don’t say anything about how much it hurts, the way Chicky and I drifted apart. For years, I’ve pretended it didn’t matter, that it was just something that happened. But it’s like all the hurt I pretended wasn’t there is rearing up all at once.

  “Then there’s Junior,” Cole says. “He thinks you’re . . . well, he definitely thinks you’re entertaining. I’d count him as a friend if I were you.”

  “Junior,” I say, realizing something.

  “Yeah . . . ,” Cole says slowly.

  Chicky and Junior.

  If I can’t get anything else right before I leave this planet, I can help get them talking again. I can at least get them in the same part of town enough to give them a chance.

  It’s one thing I can do, something good I can leave behind.

  Chicky

  MY PARENTS CLOSE the diner the next day. For the first time in living memory.

  So when Junior Cortes knocks on my door, I answer it despite the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s not like things can get worse.

  “Hey,” I say, looking for evidence of Hair Pony. Glitter, or a scrunchie on his wrist, or a lipstick smear on his cheek. I don’t find anything, and I tell myself it doesn’t matter.

  “Hey,” he says, not quite meeting my eyes.

  We stand there in awkward silence for a minute that feels like a year.

  “So, you came to my house.”

  “Yeah,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “So check this out, I worked the early morning shift at the museum and the weirdest guy came in . . .” He looks at me now, looking for permission to tell me the story. To pretend things are normal.

  And even though I’m mad, and hurt, I’m also lonely, so I let him. Even though the pit in my stomach doesn’t go away.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Well, you always know it’s gonna be a weird one when the guy is wearing a tinfoil hat.”

  “Oh, here we go,” I say. More of Junior’s stories than you’d think begin with a tinfoil hat. “Was this one for enhancement or blocking?”

  “Blocking,” he says, laughing. “He didn’t want any interference.”