Miss Meteor

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  “You don’t have to do this,” Kendra says, still flinching. “No one would know. You look normal.”

  Cole tenses. “Normal.”

  “It’s like you want everyone to know.”

  “Maybe I do!” He’s almost yelling now. If it weren’t for the fact that everyone has to yell their conversations at a party this loud, everyone would be staring. “Maybe I’m sick of trying to be exactly what this town wants me to be.” Then he sighs, and his voice gets softer. “Maybe I even want to help make it easier for someone else to be who they are too.”

  Kendra’s mouth pauses half open, not shocked, but thinking, like she hasn’t decided whether she’s gonna say anything back.

  Then she does, her voice a whisper. “But why do you want to throw it in everyone’s face?”

  “Why do you care if I do?” Cole asks, matching her whisper.

  “Because you’re my brother, and I don’t want the world messing with you, okay?” Kendra says.

  Not whispering. Like the words got loose and broke out of her.

  “And your new friends aren’t helping.” Kendra’s eyes flash to mine, just for a second, before going back to her brother. “Is this what you want? For people to think you’re nothing? Because that’s what they will think if you spend all your time with the rejects.”

  Even in the noise of the party, the silence between Cole and Kendra is so sharp I feel like if I reached between them I’d cut my hand on it.

  “My friends are only rejects because people like you and your friends decided you get to do the rejecting,” Cole says.

  In the second stretch of silence I see a glint of something in Kendra’s meanness. What I saw a little of in the laundry room gets clearer.

  Kendra was never as awful to me as she was to Chicky, not before this week. And it’s not because I am one more pageant contestant she has to step over to claim her title.

  Kendra Kendall hates me because she thinks I am dragging her brother down. And now that I’ve been putting all my strangeness and otherness on display, now that Cole has become just as much Team Quintanilla-Perez as he is Team Kendall, she’s afraid it will come off on him like glitter.

  Royce’s voice breaks in.

  “Kendall,” he calls after Cole. The vacuum-cleaner undertone is mostly but not all gone.

  Cole tips his head back and groans, like you do when the bell at the end of the day rings but the teacher wants you to stay put for just a few minutes until you get through this section.

  “You’re really gonna blow us all off?” Royce catches up, and I realize it’s not just me and Cole. Chicky and Junior are here now too. Royce looks at them. “For Picasso and Ring Pop”—then at me—“and this bitch?”

  “I’m not a bitch,” I say.

  Everyone looks at me.

  Cole pauses, mouth open, like he was about to say something before I did.

  The words I couldn’t say on the floor of the locker room are stuck in my throat.

  Royce and his friends ripped my fake crown off my head, some of my hair coming with it.

  They put those stupid antennae on me.

  They yelled “Alien, alien, alien” at me because of how weird, how brown, how other, I was to them. Because they thought it was funny, and because they thought it would break me down.

  But I won’t wear any of it tonight.

  Maybe Cole and Chicky and Junior weren’t there the day it happened. But they’re here now, and having them here means that whatever words I say now, I’m not saying them alone on a locker room floor.

  I look right at Royce. “I’m not an alien either,” I say. “Or whatever you wanna call me. And my friends are not whatever you wanna call them.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot your full title, didn’t I?” Royce fake bows, stumbling from all the beer. “Forgive me. Queen Alien Bitch.”

  Cole shakes his head, almost smiling down at the carpet. And that look tells me he’s had it. He’s done. I don’t know if that just happened or he just now realized it, but he’s had enough.

  I understand this about a half second before Cole throws a punch into Royce Bradley’s face.

  Chicky

  I DON’T GET the chance to tell Junior the sort of embarrassing truth: that if I could be anyone, I’d be the real Selena Quintanilla.

  Not the part where she was tragically murdered before her time, obviously, but the talent, and the true love, and the adoration, and the perfect, shiny confidence.

  I don’t get the chance to tell him, because at that moment two jocks push through the doorway talking loudly to each other like we’re not even here.

  “Did you see that? That spacey scuba suit girl kneed Royce in the balls!”

  “I know! She is so wasted!”

  “It looked like Cole and Royce were about to get into it too. What, is Kendall dating that freak?”

  “I don’t know, man, but we better get outta here before the cops show up. What a party!” They literally high-five.

  “Excuse me?” I say, my voice sliding up about four octaves over those two words alone. There’s no way I’m letting these idiots leave without an explanation.

  “Oh, hey, Beer Pong,” says the other one.

  “Shut up, ugh. Lita’s drunk? What’s going on?” Even as I’m brushing off the new nickname, I can’t deny it’s a hell of a lot better than Ring Pop.

  “Go see for yourself,” the guy says with a laugh, gesturing through the screen door at a writhing mass of bodies gathering around the violence like vultures.

  “Oh my God,” I groan as they walk away, still laughing. “My sisters are going to kill me.”

  We barely make it inside in time to hear Royce use our charming nicknames in the same sentence. Lita is clearly drunk, giggling and swaying a little in my peripheral vision as we all watch Cole’s good fist meet Royce’s face. From beside them, Kendra screams, exposing the electric Jell-O blue of the inside of her mouth.

  “Lita!” I yell, worried she’s gonna fall and get trampled, but unable to look away from Royce, who’s clutching his rapidly purpling face.

  I have the immediate and intense desire to high-five Cole—a desire only made stronger when he gets to Lita, steadying her on her feet.

  “I’ll help him,” Junior says before I ask, smiling and shaking his head as he runs up to take Lita’s other arm.

  I mean to follow, but Royce is clutching his face, and I’m so annoyed that I can’t enjoy this moment. How long have I been wanting someone to punch Royce in the face?

  “Dude!” he calls after Cole. “You don’t have to slum it like this! You’re not a freak!”

  But Cole doesn’t even turn. Clearly Royce’s bruising jaw was the last remark he had to make on the subject. He and Junior are helping Lita toward the door, and I should follow them. I should. But there’s something swelling in my chest, and I’ve never felt more like a Quintanilla than I do when I get between Royce and my friends, blocking his way.

  “Fuck you, Royce,” I say, too quietly, and to his shoes instead of his face, but still, people around us go quiet to listen.

  “Oh good, Ring Pop, here to avenge her girlfriend the crazy alien. What do you want, loser? Because I know it ain’t this.” He reaches for his junk in a familiar gesture, and when he winces from the pain I let myself laugh.

  On their way to the door, Junior, Cole, and Lita pause, watching.

  “You’re pathetic, you know that, right?” I ask him, my voice a little louder now, trying to channel Fresa during her marathon porch fights with Berto. “High school is gonna be over in a year for you, Royce, and then what? No one to pick on, no one to humiliate. How are you gonna make yourself feel better about being a jerk who thinks a covenant is a land mass?”

  “Oh, so you’re a dyke and a bitch!” he says, looking around for the high fives that usually materialize every time he speaks.

  This time though, they don’t come. Everyone’s looking at me, but I’m finally—finally—looking at Royce. Not his shoes, or his
left knee, or the space over his right shoulder, but right square in his mean little eyes.

  “Bashing people for who they like is so sad it’s barely even insulting,” I say, every time I didn’t say these words adding up, giving weight to what I’m saying now.

  “Oh! So you admit it, huh? Lesbo?”

  He’s drunk, and his face is sweaty and shiny. His breath is bad, I can smell it from here. Beer and something sour. The look in his eyes is desperate, and I wish I would have looked into them like this a long time ago. Maybe then I would have known there was nothing to be afraid of.

  It’s so obvious now, with everything that’s happened. Royce and Kendra were never the real obstacle. They’re jerks, but they never had that power. It was always me. Me, figuring out who I am, and how not to be afraid to let them, or anyone else, see it.

  But I don’t feel afraid now.

  Everyone is still staring at me, waiting for me to answer. It’s like an out-of-body experience. My realization prickles on my skin, and I glance over to meet Lita’s eyes. They’re a little blurry and unfocused, but she smiles at me from between Junior and Cole. No matter what happens tonight, I have my best friend back, and a boy who might be more, and another boy who really gets it.

  I’m a Quintanilla, and my friends are here. I can do anything.

  And so, I do.

  “Yeah, Royce, when we were in fourth grade I gave Allison Davis a Ring Pop. That’s not the weird part, though. What’s weird is how long you guys have been obsessing over it. Maybe you’re jealous, is that it? That I had game when I was nine and you still don’t?”

  “She fucking admitted it!” he says, spit flying from his mouth as he laughs like a braying donkey. “Ring Pop the dyke and her lesbo lover the alien bit—”

  “Lita isn’t a lesbian,” I say, finally facing my fear head on, once and for all. “And I’m not a dyke.” I pause, taking a steadying breath. Am I really gonna do this?

  Hell yeah I am. But first, I turn to look Kendra in the eye.

  “I’m pansexual, okay? And I don’t care who knows, so both of you, get some new material.”

  The room is silent, like the entire sophomore and junior classes—most of whom were there on the bus in fourth grade—have turned briefly to stone. Which makes me the snake-haired, coming-out Medusa. And I’ve never been so happy to be anything.

  I did it, I think over and over. I did it, I did it, I did it.

  “You’re what?” Royce asks, with that look on his face that says he’s confused and pissed off about it. “What kind of freak-ass thing . . .”

  Around him, most of the rest of them seem equally confused, but more curious than angry. I’m trying to figure out how to explain it through my haze of relief, but Cole is calling out from across the room, a proud smile playing around the corners of his mouth even as he hangs on to Lita for dear life.

  “Pansexual,” he recites. “Of, relating to, or characterized by sexual desire or attraction that is not limited to people of a particular gender identity or sexual orientation.”

  I just shrug, my own smile spreading slow like honey as I turn back to Royce. “You heard him.”

  Royce seems to have been robbed of words, and beside him Kendra is slack-jawed, equally mute. By my reveal, or by her brother sticking up for me, I don’t know. And I don’t really care. Because for the first time ever, I realize: My secret was always their strength. Now that I have nothing to hide, they have no power. And so I don’t have to wait for the rest of them to react. For the first time, I don’t care what they think.

  “I’d kick you in the balls right now, or punch you,” I say. “But my friends already took care of that.”

  With a hair flip that would make Cereza proud, I cross the room to join said friends, who look more than ready to leave this alien landscape and head for home.

  “Come on, babe,” Royce says to Kendra, who’s perched on the counter, her eyes darting from Cole to Royce and back again. “We’re champions. We don’t need this shit.”

  I want to say Royce isn’t the real champion, but enough people’s eyes slide Junior’s way that I realize I don’t have to. That legend is already making itself.

  And Kendra still hasn’t moved.

  “Babe, come on,” Royce says, louder now, his face going purple and splotchy.

  But Kendra doesn’t obey the command. She sets down her red cup on the counter and pushes past us into the night alone, without even looking at him.

  “You okay?” Cole asks her back, and she waves a hand. One of her girlfriends—the one who inadvertently told me about Lita’s scuba suit, I think—follows her out, and Cole grabs her arm.

  “She doesn’t drive, got it?”

  “Duh,” the girl says with an eye roll, and disappears after Kendra yelling, “Bitch, wait up!” as her heels sink into the Bradley lawn.

  We all laugh, even Cole, as we turn the other way, supporting Lita as we head for our space shuttle, and home.

  When we get there, Lita is still giggling, but she reaches for my hand and squeezes, letting Junior’s arm fall. “You okay?” she asks, and it’s so cute that she sounds just like Cole.

  “Actually, yeah.” I smile and squeeze her hand back.

  When she lets go, Cole nods in that calm way of his, extending his bruised fist, which I bump lightly with my own.

  I take a breath before turning to Junior, whose eyes are wide, and I wonder for half a second if this changes anything for him, if it’ll make him feel differently about me.

  About us.

  But before the feeling can even take root, he grabs me in a hug so tight my feet actually come off the ground.

  “I am so proud of you,” he says into my hair. I’m glad no one can see my face, because I honestly tear up a little.

  When we break apart, Lita is unbuttoning the rainbow buttons of her pajama top to reveal a matching tank top, and bands of shifting, shining sparkle wrapping around her arms.

  It looks like part of her, otherworldly and somehow still grounded to Earth. They look like her eyes when a comet streaks by, or the rock when it reflects her rainbow shoelaces. And I’m remembering so many things, so many little things adding up over a lifetime. Things I didn’t look too closely at because I was afraid to make us bigger freaks than this town already thought we were.

  But maybe I’ve known for a long time that there was more to that story of a meteor hitting the Earth fifty years ago than just history. That Lita wasn’t just a prop in Bruja Lupe’s curas. Maybe if I’d let myself understand us sooner, let myself believe in us, we could have had one less secret between us.

  Tonight, though, we’re done with secrets. Lita isn’t hiding any more than I am. She’s trusting us with this. With her. With all of her.

  “Does anyone actually know how she got drunk?” I ask, coming back to earth.

  Because tomorrow is the biggest day of this pageant—maybe of our lives—and Lita is going to be as hungover as Uva after Fresa gave her strawberry wine on a camping trip last year. We’re not all triumph and starshine. We’re also in very big trouble.

  And even though Royce and Kendra are (figuratively and literally) in the rearview mirror, I have never wanted to win this pageant more. It’s time to move past the secrets and the fear. It’s time to let this town see who we really are.

  Cole sticks his head out the window from where he’s climbed in beside Lita and is carefully brushing her disheveled hair off her face. “All she’ll say is that telling me would be betraying a sacred covenant.”

  “Of course,” I mumble, wondering if we’ll ever get the real story. “Covenants seem to be a theme of the evening.”

  I wonder if we should get her coffee, or water, or one of the greasy things Cereza eats with her sunglasses on after a night out with her nursing school friends, but it’s no use. What she really needs is about twenty-four straight hours of water and sleep—which, considering she needs to be in an evening gown on a stage in about fifteen hours from right now, doesn’t seem likely.


  “Take us to my house,” I say, smiling at her. “Bruja Lupe’s probably still awake, and if you think my sisters are scary . . .”

  Sitting shotgun as Junior starts the car, I feel different. Lita is my friend again, my real friend. The kind we should have been to each other all along. Junior is smiling at me, his hand inches away from mine, and even though I don’t grab it, I could. And I think I’ll be ready to soon.

  More than that, this town knows who the real Chicky Quintanilla is at last, and my friends know, and I’m okay with whatever comes next.

  Lita sticks her rainbow pajama top out the window as we drive away, past the party and all the kids still drinking on the lawn. As it catches the wind, she waves it like a flag, the orange streetlights of South Meteor reflecting and refracting off her star-stuff as she shouts love is love is love is love over and over until it starts to sound like a song.

  I’m not sure, because I don’t have a ton of experience with protracted bouts of smiling, but I think my smile is actually big enough to get stuck like this.

  Lita

  MY EYELASHES HURT.

  I feel it before I open my eyes, like a thousand tiny lightning strikes stabbing into my brain. But it’s an ache I can revel in, because it means I’m still here, a girl on this planet.

  And it means last night happened. Even if the sky takes me back, last night happened.

  I shift my weight and feel the poke of Chicky’s knee. We’re in her and Uva’s bedroom, sharing her bed like we used to during sleepovers. She’d show me Junior’s latest drawings. We’d make microwave popcorn, then make it better with chili powder and garlic. We’d eat too much of the Halloween candy we stockpiled each October.

  But the sugar headaches Chicky and I got after eating too much sour candy didn’t even come close to this.

  My whole forehead throbs as I open my eyes.

  It throbs worse when I realize all three of Chicky’s sisters are standing over us.

  I gently elbow Chicky. She groans halfway awake.

  She opens her eyes, sees Cereza, Uva, and Fresa craned over us with their hands on their hips, and she startles the rest of the way awake.