Miss Meteor

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  “And you’re in a car with some of the weirdest residents of Meteor,” Chicky says. “Except maybe Cole.”

  “Yeah,” Cole says, “picture of Meteor normalcy, right here.”

  Junior merges onto the highway.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “To where Meteor would’ve been founded if it weren’t for uncertainty about geological integrity,” Cole says.

  “And if the government hadn’t cordoned it off for a decade of investigation,” Junior says.

  I lean forward to Chicky in the front seat. “We’re going to the crater?”

  The crater. The place where the stuff I’m made of first touched this planet.

  Junior turns off the highway onto a dark dirt road and parks the car as close as he can get it to that hollow the meteor left in the Earth.

  Then we’re off in the night air, the stars thick above us. They’re distant as dreams and close as relatives. They’re as much mine as I am theirs. They’re mirrors of my body and heart.

  I breathe in the almost-midnight chill of the desert. We all do. We run down into the bowl of the crater, laughing and clutching at each other to keep one another from sliding down the dirt slope.

  And we do it, that caper Chicky has us all out on. We throw a flashlight onto Junior’s drawing, and we pull small rocks from the edges of the crater.

  When Cole reaches for a bigger one, I reach out to stop him. “You can’t do that. You’re hurt.”

  “They’re rocks, not boulders,” he says. “And you really think I’m gonna miss this?”

  So we all do it.

  We move rocks, a few at a time, into arcing paths that reach out from the crater’s center. I thought it would look like petals, that everyone would recognize it as a flower pattern. But as we add more stones, it starts to look like a galaxy made of rocks.

  That’s when I realize how much genius is in this caper.

  The stones look like the whirls of galaxy arms.

  Exactly the kind of sign that people on this planet would expect from otherworldly visitors.

  After we set down the last handfuls of rock, Chicky and Junior flop down on the slope of the crater. They laugh and shove each other’s shoulders in a way that would look brotherly and sisterly if I didn’t know better.

  I settle onto the ground a little ways away, far enough to let them feel alone, close enough that I can still wave to them like I’m sending greetings across a lake.

  Cole stands over me. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

  I am still getting used to having friends beyond cactuses and neighborhood pets.

  Cole looks toward Chicky and Junior, who are nudging sand onto each other’s shoes.

  “Giving them a minute alone?” he asks.

  “That obvious?”

  “To me, maybe. But not to them. I don’t think anything’s obvious to them at the moment.”

  “Not even how they feel?”

  “People are slow about that sometimes, even when they’re quick about everything else.”

  He sits down next to me. I can feel the warmth of him on my left side, a break in the night air’s chill.

  Cole looks out into the crater opening in front of us. “Don’t give up yet, okay?”

  I try to place what he’s saying.

  “The pageant,” he says.

  After the swimsuit competition, I had a shot. But I ran out of the talent portion.

  Now I have no chance.

  “It’s gonna be Kendra or it’s gonna be that girl from Quemado,” I say.

  “The blond chick in the American flag bikini?” Cole draws back. “No way. Fresa wore that exact same one, and better if you ask me.” He traces his hand through the fine dirt between us. “No, I think we really need to worry about”—he considers it—“tasteful green one-piece, Lady Macbeth monologue.”

  “Oh please don’t tell Cereza that,” I say. “She was set on me doing Shakespeare.”

  “Well, you kinda did.”

  “You mean while hurtling toward you on a bike I could barely ride?”

  “Most original staging of the death of Juliet in the history of New Mexico.” He puts his right hand to his chest. “It brought tears to my eyes.”

  “It brought tears to your eyes because I gave you a concussion,” I say. “Okay, fine. What about the girl with the really bright-blue eyes?”

  “Eh.” He shrugs. “She’s okay.”

  “Okay? Her skin looks like it was poured out of the full-fat cream Mrs. Quintanilla stocks at the diner. Except she doesn’t have any fat on her.”

  He looks at me. “Overrated.”

  Overrated?

  A blond white boy with this much height on me is calling a milk-skinned girl with that kind of body overrated?

  “You know who I think has gotta be on the judges’ radar?” Cole asks. “Vintage two-piece with matching swim skirt.”

  “The girl from Magdalena?” I ask. “Oh yeah, she’s good.”

  “She could win this.”

  “I hope so.” I’d like to see her win. Especially after hearing she borrowed the swimsuit from her aunt, who she calls her favorite person in the world. “But do girls that nice ever win?”

  “Lita. She was dancing on pointe shoes while playing the violin. If she doesn’t place in the top five, the taste of the judges is beyond hope.” He picks up a handful of fine dirt and slowly lets the wind take it, like gravity stripping away stardust. “Don’t count yourself out either. The rhinestone Space Rock? I’ve got to hand it to Chicky’s sisters. Genius.”

  “Girls like me don’t win.”

  He brushes his hand on his jeans. “Girls like you?”

  It’s not even just my height, or my baby fat, or my mediocre posture.

  “Girls who don’t even call their mothers ‘mom,’” I say. “You and Kendra and your mom and your dad, you’re the kind of family this town wants. Not me and Bruja Lupe.”

  Cole looks out onto the crater. He’s not watching Chicky and Junior try to stick little bits of sagebrush under each other’s shoelaces.

  He’s looking into the dark in front of us.

  His laugh is as light as the whisper of the stars, and almost as sad.

  “My dad’s gone, Lita,” he says.

  I stare at him, trying to get him to turn his head.

  “What?”

  “He left,” Cole says. “He’s not traveling for work in Helena or Phoenix or Albany. He left.”

  The words drop and pull me down, like I’m falling into the crater.

  It all falls together.

  How Cole’s father can never seem to make his games.

  How Cole sometimes mixes up what city his father is in on any given business trip.

  The overdue bills stuffed into a drawer.

  “So there’s your perfect family,” Cole says. “No one else in this town knows that except you, me, my sister, and my mom. And probably our pastor, but I don’t know. So in case you were still wondering if we were friends.”

  “You didn’t have to tell me that for me to know we’re friends.”

  “I know,” he says. “But I really had to tell someone, and I wanted it to be you.”

  Friends. The word is still its own kind of music, and I let it cycle through my head until it makes a song.

  I will miss this boy in a way that’s breaking through me, fast as a shooting star.

  So I decide to say it, because why hold back now, when I don’t know how much more time I get on this tiny little planet?

  “I’m gonna miss you, Cole,” I say.

  He gives me a weird look, part question, part smile. “You’re not getting rid of me after graduation. You know that.”

  I change the subject before I start thinking about it too hard.

  “I see what you’re doing, by the way,” I say, and then nod toward Chicky and Junior. “So do they.”

  “What am I doing?” he asks.

  “Not letting your sister
get away with it anymore.”

  He doesn’t ask what it is. He knows. Everything he’s tried to give Kendra a pass for. Everything he’s let slide because she’s his sister. But he’s been slowly calling her on it, the way he’s been trying to with Royce for years.

  He looks into the crater. “I’m starting to wonder if maybe I could make things a little better around here for someone else like me.”

  “You definitely can,” I say. I think of everyone he’s already made it better for around here. Daniel Llamas and Beth Cox and Oliver Hedlesky. Chicky and me. “You’ve been sticking up for everyone but you for a really long time.”

  He nods like maybe he knows I’m right.

  “I’m serious,” I say. “Since your brother graduated, you’ve been the only reason half the school doesn’t wish for another meteor to fall on the cornhole team.”

  He laughs. “Weirdest compliment ever.”

  I want so much for this boy. I want so much for all of us. I want Cole to get the chance to love this town forever even if he doesn’t stay here. I want him to find a place where he can be who he is without feeling like he has to earn it. And I want that same choice for Chicky, and for Junior, and for me. I want places on this earth where Cole is seen for everything he is. I want places where the only insults Chicky ever gets are the ones from her sisters. I want places where Junior’s art is seen for how beautiful and brilliant it is, instead of something the Royces of the world can make fun of.

  I want places on this earth where I am a girl made of stardust, not one crumbling back into it.

  Just then, a meteor drags a thread of light across the sky. I wonder where it’s been, what stars it has seen, what might become of the star-stuff it’s carrying.

  Where it might fall, what wonder it might seed into the ground where it lands.

  Cole shuts his eyes like he’s making a wish, so I do too.

  “What’d you wish for?” I ask.

  He smiles. “I’m not telling you that.”

  “Because then it won’t come true?”

  He laughs. “Because I’m not telling you.”

  The woven-together sounds of Chicky and Junior’s distant laughs is soft enough that I could fall asleep to it.

  Being in the hollow of this crater where I first touched this planet, the inside of me feels like streams of light, like my veins are becoming the same glowing ribbons that shined off the rock.

  I am so lit up with that feeling of glowing that when Cole’s fingers and mine brush between us, I think I might burn him.

  But he doesn’t pull back.

  We stay.

  My eyes are still shut when the laughter fades, when it turns to the growing sound of footsteps.

  I open them when Cole pulls me to my feet.

  “What—”

  Chicky claps a hand over my mouth before I can say anything else.

  Junior leads us all into a shadowed patch of the crater, unlit by the moon.

  “What is going on?” I whisper when Chicky’s hand gives.

  Cole silently flicks his head toward the opposite edge of the crater.

  Figures cluster along the rim of the basin.

  “Do you come in peace?” one of them calls out.

  “Do you bring greetings from your world?” another shouts.

  “Have you come to destroy our planet?” a third asks.

  We should have known this week would bring out the tourists not just to Meteor, but to where the meteor hit.

  “Come on.” The boys hurry us toward the edge that will get us close to the road.

  “Wait!” Chicky whisper-shouts.

  We all stop.

  Chicky raises an eyebrow at me. “These tourists want a show. What do you say we give them a real beaut?”

  “A what now?” Cole asks.

  “Gentlemen,” Chicky puts on her mafia don voice to address Junior and Cole. “If you’ve got the stomach, we could use a couple of guys with good brains and fast wheels.”

  “Who even talks like that?” Junior asks, but he can’t hide his own smile.

  “You two gonna stand there”—Chicky keeps on with the voice—“or you two gonna get the getaway car ready?”

  She sounds so sure, and her Vito Corleone is so convincing, that the boys sneak off through the shadows like they’ve been dispatched on a mission by M herself.

  Chicky pulls me onto the ground. “Stay down.”

  My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my neck.

  “Gym roof, fourth grade?” she whispers.

  I almost tell her that this is where I leave her, that I can’t do this. Not with the years we lost.

  Not with why we lost them.

  Then I feel the stardust snaking down to my knees. And the feeling of it glimmering across my skin leaves me with a question:

  This whole time, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve wanted to take with me from Meteor, what I’ve wanted to take with me from this planet.

  But now I’m starting to wonder: What do I want to leave behind?

  “You’re not serious,” I say. “That took months of planning,”

  Her eyes are flashing, thinking. “How about Maddie Bascom’s birthday party?”

  I think back on how we hid and made enough ghost noises that everyone thought the bowling alley was haunted. The right sounds, at the right time. “Simultaneous approach?”

  “You got it,” Chicky says.

  We crawl into a hollow where they won’t see us.

  “Ready?” Chicky asks, holding my forearms.

  I nod.

  We’ve both picked up from Cereza how to be loud.

  But this is not shouting an order across Selena’s or proclaiming Juliet’s last words.

  These are the strangest, most otherworldly sounds our voice boxes can make, like we are our own spaceship. Buzzing and whirring like we are the little green men people so often imagine. Pitching high and low as though we are part machine and part living things from other planets. Even a few robotic, nasal yells of “Greetings, Earthlings!”

  This is us. This is how we acted out movies when we were little. It’s how we came up with note-passing schemes so elaborate we were sure we could sell the plans to MI6. This is how we convinced half the girls in our class that we once saw a spaceship deliver the mail.

  The tourists reward us with wondering gasps that fill the crater’s basin.

  They lean forward, like they’re considering coming down to greet us.

  Chicky and I grab each other’s hands, and we run, staying low enough and deep enough in the crater edge’s shadow that the onlookers can’t see us. We fly up the far slope, pitch ourselves over the edge, and race toward the road.

  Junior is driving, and Cole is in the front passenger side, and they’ve left the back door open for us to throw ourselves in. Between that and how they’ve stayed out of the tourists’ view, they’re the best getaway men two girls could ask for.

  “Go, go, go,” Chicky yells, so Junior’s already rolling out of park by the time we reach the car.

  Chicky shoves me in front of her, forcing me in before her. I grab her arm and pull her halfway in, then grab the loop on her jean shorts to tug her the rest of the way into the car, and we’re a heap of limbs by the time we get the door closed.

  “Seat belts, ladies,” Junior says, trying to sound patient.

  But he loves this. He loves that Chicky is both stranger and more of a leader than she realized.

  Chicky and I buckle up like he asks. But as he gets up to sixty-five, we lean out the windows and yell “Greetings, Earthlings!” over the rush of the highway.

  Chicky doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t look embarrassed to have done any of this in front of Junior, the friend she loves, and the Meteor cornhole hero. She keeps smiling over at me every mile or so.

  She looks not just humoring or kind.

  She looks almost proud.

  In that moment, all four of us are meteors. We outrun the headlights going by in the distance on
the highway. We outrun anyone who could see us. Only the gaze of the stars and the setting moon catches us.

  Junior stops the car a mile or two from the edge of town. We’re still blanketed in the star-dusted dark, Meteor’s lights in the distance before us. There’s a bubbly feeling in the car. Our bodies are humming from breathing the chilled desert air outside town, and none of us is ready for this night to be over.

  I’m not ready for this night to be over. Because I don’t know how many I have left on this tiny, imperfect planet.

  “So,” Cole says.

  We all look at him.

  “You wanna go to a party?”

  Chicky

  WHEN WE PULL up in front of the Bradleys’, my first thought is that this is more kids than even go to MCH.

  This might be more kids than live in the state of New Mexico.

  Only a mile or so from the dealership, on a piece of land that’s small enough for the neighbors to see the place but big enough that they can’t hear it, Royce’s house is the perfect place for a party, I have to admit.

  For a while, we just sit in the car and watch. It’s barely midnight and there’s already someone passed out in a lawn chair, two people making out like they’re alone in a bedroom, and—yep, two girls Jell-O wrestling in a kiddie pool.

  “I’m not so sure about this . . . ,” I say, but Junior has already opened his door.

  “We’ve already been to one other world tonight,” he says, grinning back at Lita who looks just as freaked out as I do. “Why not make it an intergalactic caper?”

  “KENDALL!” Royce screams in a beer-soaked voice from the doorway. “GET YOUR ASS IN HERE. MISTY’S ABOUT TO DO A KEG STAND!”

  “Wait,” I say. Maybe it’s the stardust. Or how worried I was until she said she was okay. Maybe it’s everything about this night, and everything that will happen tomorrow. But whatever it is, I’m ready. Now. Finally. “You guys go.” I take a deep breath. “I need to talk to Lita alone for a minute.”

  I’m not sure which set of eyebrows goes up higher, but Cole is the first to respectfully leave the car. Lita looks at him like she wishes he wouldn’t.

  “Don’t take too long,” Junior whispers, hugging me in that awkward side-by-side seats way. “I’m in enemy territory here.”

  “Offended!” Cole calls from just outside the door.