Miss Meteor

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  Lita

  THE DAY AFTER the swimsuit competition, a woman comes to Bruja Lupe with a headache so deep in her skull she can hardly speak.

  “Please,” she says, her voice so small and strained that even Bruja Lupe softens.

  Bruja Lupe enjoys taking money from those who want to cheat their own fathers, or who want a spell to make their daughters slimmer.

  But those who truly need her help, she never turns away.

  She doesn’t tell the woman to look into my eyes. She doesn’t claim I am a child of the stars. She only sits the woman at our kitchen table and gives her the hierbas that let her brain and forehead ease.

  “Thank you,” the woman says, with the relief of taking her first full breath since the headache came on.

  The woman has little money, so Bruja Lupe lets her keep it.

  The woman’s smile is so grateful and soft that seeing it feels heavy, like it holds everything I’ll lose about this planet.

  Later, I put on my third application of antibiotic cream—Cereza’s orders; I have a constellation of light burns on my back from the glue gun, matching the ones on Fresa’s fingers.

  The Quintanilla sisters really are the eighth marvel of the world. Because along with Buzz and Cole, they turned an event I just wanted to get through into one that had the whole audience cheering for me.

  The stardust on my back catches in the mirror.

  Except then it moves, even when I don’t.

  I look back toward the mirror.

  The glass isn’t showing my stardust.

  It’s showing the mobile of shiny paper stars twirling over my bed. They glint and turn, catching the moon outside my window and the light from the hall.

  That’s the sparkliness in the mirror. Not my own skin.

  The stardust on my back has vanished.

  Before all of it sinks into my brain, it’s fluttering in my chest, and I’m yelling for Bruja Lupe. My voice stumbles to call her.

  “What is it, mija?” Bruja Lupe comes through my door. “What’s wrong?”

  I try to breathe, like Uva told me to onstage.

  I pull up my pajama shirt and show her my back.

  Her gasp lights the whole room.

  “I know,” I say, shrugging back into my pajamas, afraid that if I look for one more second, this incredible thing will be gone, like stuff vanishing in the Greek myths the second you look at it too hard.

  “How?” Bruja Lupe breathes.

  “I don’t know.”

  I start to piece it together.

  I told off Kendra, the stardust got smaller.

  I took out the star cornhole player, the stardust spread.

  The judges gave me an impossible question, I got too rattled to give any other answer than the one Cole had given me, and the stardust spread.

  But when we dazzled them in the swimsuit portion, when we showed them part of all of us, the stardust left my back.

  In a way I still don’t completely understand, something about whether the stardust takes me is getting tethered to Miss Meteor.

  It’s the smallest chance. But I’m going to grab it in the tightest grip I can get.

  “What do I do?” I ask, my voice trembling.

  “What do you mean, what do you do?” Bruja Lupe asks, her voice catching with hope. “You keep going. If there’s the smallest chance it’ll save you, you show up to win.”

  “Except I still have no talent!” I blurt out.

  “What?” she asks.

  “I know, I know,” I say. “I was gonna do Cereza’s monologue because it has the least chance of me injuring anyone.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” She flaps her hands. “Memorize it!”

  “I have memorized it! Oh happy dagger, this is thy sheath, there rust and let me die.”

  Bruja Lupe cringes at my delivery.

  “I know,” I groan.

  “You sound like you’re reading the phone book.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m terrible!”

  Her eyes flash over the room, over the borrowed makeup and high heels scattered alongside my usual clothes and backpack.

  Something is clicking on in Bruja Lupe’s brain. I can see it, like a match lighting.

  “I have an idea,” she says.

  I don’t know if Bruja Lupe tells the Quintanilla sisters about my new talent, or if they just know. But by the next morning, I am dressed like the woman on a can of Rosarita beans. Ruffle sleeves, green and red ribbons on a white blouse, and a puffy skirt that looks like a cross between a puebla dress and a petticoat from an old Western.

  I shift my weight in Fresa’s borrowed cowboy boots, worn for the second time this week.

  And it’s Fresa who stands with me before I’m pulled backstage.

  “I’m scared,” I say, a fluffy feeling in my stomach.

  Now it’s not just everyone watching me.

  It’s the fact of the stardust on my body. It’s the possibility that me surviving and winning Miss Meteor might save me.

  “Don’t be scared,” Fresa says. “You’re gonna take these gringas down.”

  “I think I’m gonna throw up.”

  She claps my upper arms. “Then you’re gonna swallow it and keep smiling.”

  The fluffy-inside feeling gets worse through all the perfect talents before me. A girl who can gargle the Pledge of Allegiance while tap dancing. Another who twirls a flaming baton. Kendra Kendall singing “Somewhere Over the Space Rock,” a performance so moving it brings the audience to standing cheers.

  Then it’s me, the emcee sweeping a hand toward me as I climb the stage steps.

  I say quiet thank-yous to the pageant volunteers who set up everything Bruja Lupe and I brought with us. The little table. The pots and plates and the big clay bowl that holds the empty corn husks. With the little jars of spices, it all looks so pretty, I could be a star on a TV cooking show.

  The emcee-solicited applause fades.

  Then they’re all watching me.

  I swallow hard enough that Fresa sees it and nods her approval. I want to tell her I’m okay, I’m not sick. But I can’t.

  Because they’re all watching me.

  “So, the holidays are coming up in a few months”—I get closer to the little table—“and the holidays are all about family, and what better way to show your family you care than with a homemade dish?”

  A soft awwww comes from the audience, and my heartbeat settles.

  If I could face the question and answer and the swimsuit, I can do this.

  “Also, what better way to keep your second cousin from going on about that boyfriend you can’t stand than to make sure she’s too busy eating, right?” I say, my voice high and nervous.

  But they laugh.

  A real laugh, not a they-feel-sorry-for-me laugh.

  “Today I’m going to show you how to make tamales.” I lay out a corn husk. “I learned how to make the masa from the woman who’s been a mother to me my whole life, the woman we all know as Bruja Lupe Perez!” I stretch out a hand to give a showman’s call-out to Bruja Lupe, sitting in the audience.

  I didn’t tell Bruja Lupe I was mentioning this. But she preens, giving a dreamy, mysterious look that matches the witch they all think she is. Her hair looks like the graceful drape of a black scarf.

  My nerves knot in my throat.

  But I am doing this. Succeeding at this pageant not only means doing something I wanted to do before the sky takes me back.

  It might mean the sky doesn’t take me at all.

  I think of the stardust vanishing from my back, and it makes me brave, and reckless, and I just start talking.

  “And just so you know, she is open every day this week, and she can cure anything from insomnia to stage fright,” I say, even as my own hands tremble. “Guess I should have thought of that before I came up here, right?”

  They laugh again, fuller this time.

  “Today’s tamale filling comes courtesy of a Quintanilla family recipe th
at will soon be appearing on the menu at Selena’s, right here in town.”

  The Quintanilla sisters all cock their heads in unison, at the same angle.

  They are more alike than they will ever admit.

  I set a spoon into the filling bowl. I would usually just do it with clean hands, but a beauty queen never gets filling under her nails.

  Probably.

  It seems like something Fresa would tell me.

  “And I also owe a big thank you to the Quintanilla sisters,” I say, “who prepared me for this pageant by giving me perfect posture, a high tolerance for swallowing Vaseline, and a deeper acquaintance with duct tape than I ever wanted.”

  This laugh is more scattered, less even.

  More real.

  They did not expect me to make them laugh. I didn’t either.

  This is it. I can feel it humming along my body, the opposite of the prickling feeling I get before more stardust appears.

  This is it, the feeling of when I’m maybe winning. This is what I have to do to save myself.

  I have to grab hold of this pageant.

  I have to grab hold of this town and make them look at me.

  “If I’m walking a little funny, that last part’s why,” I say.

  The laugh this time is so loud I feel it echoing off the sky. I catch Cole laughing, the same kind of sudden, open-mouth surprised laugh as when I asked him what trip he was packing for.

  I can’t believe it either.

  I spoon the filling in. “If this seems hard when you start out, don’t worry, you’ll get it with enough practice.” I spread masa over the corn husk. “After the first five thousand or so, it’s a breeze.”

  The laugh now is almost affectionate, like I’m a strange-but-still-loved daughter.

  But out from the laughter, I hear a hard, shouted word.

  It’s a word that lands me back on the floor of the boys’ locker room.

  It’s the word Royce and his friends shouted at me the Halloween I dared to show up at school dressed up as Miss Meteor, with my cheap tiara and polyester sash and pageant smile, pretending I was a future beauty queen because back then, I still believed I could be.

  It’s the word that feels like plastic teeth tangling in my hair, like the plastic headband Royce and his friends put in place of the tiara. It had two antennae, the glittery foam balls on the end bouncing in time with how I was shaking.

  It’s a word Cole didn’t hear yelled at me, because he wasn’t allowed in the boys’ locker room. It’s a word I never got to tell Chicky about, because it happened around the time we stopped telling each other big things.

  It’s a word that means both what everyone thinks of me as a brown-skinned girl, and what they would think of me if they knew how much I was made of the stars.

  Alien.

  The audience’s laughter fades, everyone looking around for the source of the word.

  “They think they can come here, live here, take our jobs, and we’re just gonna let them?” a man from the back yells. “Go back home.”

  Every friend I have in the audience rushes toward this man.

  He is not a man with a hat made of aluminum foil, or a beard soaked in cheap whiskey from our liquor store.

  He wears neat, nice clothes. He is neither young enough nor old enough for everyone to chalk his words up to age or lack of it. He has a head of hair as full and well-styled as the judges’.

  But he does not wear the judges’ smiles.

  I do not know this man. He is not from Meteor. But I can tell from looking at him that he is the kind of man everyone listens to.

  He is a Jack Bradley kind of man, the kind of man Royce will probably grow up to be.

  “She’s an alien,” he shouts as the town security volunteers escort him out of the pageant grounds, my friends following behind. “You’re an alien,” he shouts, looking right at me before they shove him toward the exit.

  And because every friend I have in Meteor is out of their seat, moving to push him out of this event, there is no one I can look at.

  Not Bruja Lupe. Not Chicky. Not the Quintanilla sisters. Not Junior. Not Cole.

  The clouds have wisped away, and now the sun is as bright as a spotlight on the outdoor stage. It’s too bright to find any of them.

  This man, the kind of man people listen to, has just called me an alien in front of the entire Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.

  But I don’t yell after him.

  Because he is right.

  In the language of this world, I am an alien. The star-stuff in my body makes me not of this planet, even though this planet is where I have lived my whole life as a girl.

  And in the language of men like this, I am an alien, his word for brown-skinned girls who may or may not have been born here.

  Both ways, the meaning is the same. I am a girl who does not belong in Meteor, New Mexico. I am neither enough of Earth nor enough of this country. Alien. A girl as brown as the desert and as odd as fallen stardust.

  I lift my hands away from the half-finished tamale.

  I can feel new trails of stardust waiting under my skin.

  If I stay, it will come to the surface, showing up on my bare legs.

  I have already lost.

  Spreading my fluffy skirt in both my hands, I curtsy. I curtsy, not for the man who called me an alien. Not for Royce Bradley and his friends, who first burned that word into my brain. Not for the gringos who hate us.

  I curtsy for Bruja Lupe, and the Quintanillas, and the Corteses, and Cole, and Buzz and Edna, and Dolores, and everyone else who has ever been on my side.

  The crowd stills.

  I curtsy, deep as Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. Because losing Miss Meteor will probably be my last act on this planet, and I am at least going to make it a good exit.

  I leave the little table and the corn husks behind, my petticoat fluffing up as I descend the steps from the stage.

  When I get to the Meteor Meteorite Museum, Buzz is already there to let me in, like he knew I was coming. Like he knew where I’d go.

  I stand in front of the rock that brought me and Bruja Lupe here in the first place.

  Can I? I ask without speaking.

  A vein of iron winks through the rock, its way of saying yes.

  I put my arms around it, my cheek against its rough surface.

  In the air-conditioned chill of the Meteor Meteorite Museum, the grain of the rock is almost warm. I close my eyes and understand that maybe this is how human beings feel when they greet old friends.

  Maybe I have lost the Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.

  Maybe I lost it the moment that man threw a word at me that will stick to my body.

  But this—not that word, but this, my brown arms around this piece of the sky—is who I am.

  This is mine.

  A ribbon of light flashes bright enough that I can see it behind my eyelids.

  I open my eyes to streams of silver and gold.

  The light swirls and pulses within the rock, brightening and darkening like the rhythm of a heartbeat.

  All the star-stuff held in this rock is coming to life, just for this one moment. Even as it dulls and fades, I hold on, because this rock is as much my family as Bruja Lupe.

  It glows to tell me that I still have light in me.

  It is reminding me of everything I am made of as I say goodbye.

  Chicky

  AT THE FIFTIETH-ANNUAL Cornhole Championship, the stands fill by noon. I’ve been here for two hours already, too restless and nervous to stay home, and too reviled by this town to wander its streets.

  My sisters shove their way in beside me just as the church bells chime, to the spaces I saved for them with my bag and sweatshirt.

  “Lita?” I ask, and Uva shakes her head.

  “We stopped by Bruja Lupe’s to see if she needed a ride, but she wasn’t home.”

  “Dammit,” I say. I was counting on her being here. Counting on h
aving a chance to tell her how useless that man and his xenophobic shouting were.

  But now it’s going to have to wait. Because moments later—at 12:30 on the dot—the match officially begins.

  And I know Junior only entered to keep Lita from quitting the pageant. And I tell myself cornhole is stupid and everyone who plays it is stupid, and it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the pageant or the mission, and I’m only here because my parents want people to see our Selena’s T-shirts, etc.

  But if it doesn’t matter, why do I bite my nails every time Junior steps up to the board?

  There are multiple elimination rounds, teams of two competing against players from around the state as the crowd cheers and groans.

  Of course, Junior is paired up with Royce Bradley.

  Of course, they make it to the final round.

  The sun is high in the sky as they finally face off with a team from Cloudcroft, twin meatheads that look like they were carved from stone, in matching red tracksuits. They probably have a coach at their school, not just Mr. Bradley with a clipboard doing what my mom likes to call “reliving his glory days” in a tone she usually reserves for Fresa.

  The twins’ movements are so precise, so synchronized, that even the best Meteor has to offer looks a little ragtag by comparison.

  Royce approaches the board with his usual swagger, but Junior looks nervous, and I stand up before I realize I’m doing it.

  “Where are you going?” Cereza asks, and I’m about to make an excuse when Fresa says, “Like you don’t know.” And that’s all there is to it.

  Climbing down from the bleachers, my butt numb from sitting on metal for so long, I wonder what I’m doing. I’m not Junior’s girlfriend. We settled all that in front of the holy (and holey) Selena’s Diner wall.

  But Kendra Kendall is standing across from Royce in the spectator area, blowing him kisses in this ridiculous cheerleader outfit, and as much as I hate this, and her, I stand a few feet away where I know Junior will be able to see me. Because even if I’m not his girlfriend, I’m his . . . someone.. And he deserves to have someone in his corner.

  When he sees me, he smiles, and I swear some of the tension leaves his shoulders.