The words flood into me, almost as warm as Sara’s perfume, or sitting on couch cushions with the other first-time girls.
I am not like the Kendall women. I am not cream or snow in this dress. In this dress, I am desert rock against the sky.
But I guess I wear it well enough for Kendra to look at me without shuddering.
With a little help from Uva and the corselette she pulled me into.
“Thanks,” I say.
Kendra tugs up the strapless top of the dress. “Just try not to show everyone your boobs again.”
She pulls me into a hug.
Why is Kendra Kendall hugging me?
She pats my back, smiling so that, to anyone else, she looks like she’s congratulating me. “If you break my brother’s heart, I will make sure they never find your short-ass little body, okay?”
Then she’s gone.
I turn back to Cole, breathing in the smell of the stars.
This night is the best kind of strange and wondrous, and I want to remember how it tastes.
I hold out my hand to Cole. “Where were we?”
It’s nothing particularly graceful, a girl in borrowed high heels dancing with a boy who can’t use one arm. But it’s us. And we are in front of this whole town and so many people from outside it, that it’s proof Cole has no fear of being seen with me.
Or close to me.
I slide my arm across his back, easing us a little closer. I wonder if I can get away with it without him noticing.
The same bubbly feeling I get about how beautiful polar equations are floods into me.
I feel my lips part, and I am too surprised to press them back together.
If you break my brother’s heart . . .
Even Kendra saw it before I did.
A boy giving me a bike meant for the girl he never was.
Me bringing him the only kind of galleta I knew how to bake right every time, because I wanted to say thank you for the bike that brought me to school each day.
Me kissing him on the cheek.
Him wiping it off with the back of his hand and then, one day, not.
Me climbing in the window of the Kendalls’ kitchen.
Cole coming in my bedroom window.
Him holding me against him with one arm and telling me I have friends on this planet.
Him holding me against him now.
“Oh.” I hear the sound in my own voice, more realizing than surprised.
I look up at Cole, who’s studying my face like he’s trying to follow what I’m thinking.
I will marry this boy one day. It’s not a wish. It’s something I know, the same way I know that, no matter how far I ever go from Meteor, New Mexico, I will carry around a heart made of stardust.
The way I know that I now have enough people who care about me and let me care about them to hold me to this planet.
“I love you too,” I say, the words filled with my own surprise. Not because I realize they’re true. But because I realize I’ve always known them.
Cole’s shock makes him completely still for a second.
But then the smile that comes is the bright, glowing rain of every meteor shower.
“Yeah?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, laughing as I repeat his word.
And I kiss him on the cheek, closer to his mouth than I’ve ever done it.
But this time I pull away slowly enough to let him stop me.
This time, he catches my mouth with his, and I am every shower of light that has rained through the night sky.
My mouth against Cole’s is a soft brush of light across the sky. It’s a meteor blazing through the night.
And when we pull away, when we look at each other in that way that is both stillness and wonder, we are still lit up. We are light against the sky.
The first sound between us is the faint start of my laugh.
I’ve left a rose-gold lipstick mark on him.
He ducks his head a little.
“I’ve never seen you blush before,” I say.
“Then you haven’t been paying very close attention.”
I settle into the feeling of him holding me, of everyone who loves me holding on to me, keeping me here, giving me the space on this planet I never thought I was allowed.
And with that last thought, I have an idea.
Chicky
I LEARN, IN the next fifteen minutes, how much two people can say without words.
Junior and I don’t talk much, but that’s because the rest of our bodies are busy. Arms learning the weight of arms, feet learning the rhythm of stepping together, faces learning how little space can be between them before both people combust.
I know what I want, but knowing isn’t the same as doing, and I’m a little afraid I won’t be able to. That maybe the scared feeling I used to have will come back when I least expect it and ruin everything.
But what I find in my heart, as he casually brushes a tiny desert beetle off the back of my shirt, isn’t something new and uncertain. It isn’t something that makes me afraid. It’s like all the while our friendship has been this plant in full leaf, green and vibrant and special on its own, but in the last few days it’s burst into dazzling bloom.
The roots are still there, and the sturdy stalk, the leaves that unfurled as we grew up together. But these blossoms are here now, too, bright and full and absolutely gorgeous. Maybe I needed them all together before I could be ready.
It’s with this feeling, this certainty, that I step closer, pressing myself against Junior, fitting my chin right into the space between his neck and shoulder as we sway inexpertly back and forth.
He lets out this little contented sound, and then coughs like he didn’t mean to do it out loud. I hide my smile in his shoulder, not teasing for once, because I feel just the same way.
Over his shoulder I can see the rest of the dance floor, and something catches in my heart when I see Lita, looking at Cole like he’s a field of fireflies lighting up just as dusk falls. How did it take her so long to see what was right in front of her?
As Junior clears his throat, I realize maybe I don’t really have a leg to stand on in that department.
I pull back a little, wanting to tell him about Lita and Cole, but there’s a look in his eyes that keeps me quiet.
“Chicky,” he says, his voice the kind of formal that tells me he’s nervous again.
“Junior,” I reply, equally formal. But he doesn’t smile.
“Remember when you asked me who I’d be if I could be anyone?”
“Yeah, you mean right before Cole punched Royce and I came out to the whole school?”
“Ha-ha, right,” he says haltingly, and it occurs to me that he’s practiced what he’s about to say, to the point where improvisation isn’t really an option.
My heart squeezes in my chest, and I just listen, maintaining eye contact even as his eyes dart everywhere, from the trees to the lights to the people around us, but always coming back to rest on mine.
“Well, I think I know now, if you still want to hear it.”
“Of course I do,” I say, though this once all-important question isn’t really that important to me anymore. Maybe it was always more about our hearts getting to know each other’s than a list of answers to a list of questions.
But what do I know? I’m sixteen years old, and until two weeks ago I didn’t even have a real friend.
Or at least, I thought I didn’t.
“Okay,” he says, laughing at his own nerves. “Well, I don’t think I want to be anyone else. I like being me. But I think . . . maybe . . . if I could be anyone? I’d like to be me-with-you.”
There it is again, the Coca-Cola fizz, but this time it’s all over.
“I’m better with you, Chicky. You’re my best friend. You make me laugh, and you make me brave, and you make me think I might be headed for more . . .” He smiles again, that same, nervous smile I saw for the first time when he asked if I wanted to be partners for ring toss in six
th-grade gym class and I said yes just because I was so surprised.
“And I know you’re not sure about me, or about us, but I’ve always . . .”
He pauses. And it’s not the perfect moment. It’s not even one of the six movie moments we’ve had in the past week. But it’s the moment. It’s our moment. Something in me just knows.
So I don’t wait for him to find a way to finish telling me how I wasn’t sure, because it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m sure now. I’ve never been so sure of anything.
And in the eye of this halting, stuttering, over-rehearsed, cute-as-hell storm, I cross the last few inches of distance between Junior Cortes and me, and I do my best to kiss him right.
It’s probably not the most cinematic kiss in the world. We bump noses, and our lips seem confused about what goes where, and we’re smiling too much to really get traction—but we’re certainly not lacking for enthusiasm, and that’s what makes it perfect.
“Wow,” he says again, when we pull apart. “I am great at that.”
And I swat his arm, and I’m laughing so much, and he’s laughing, and he doesn’t even wait until we stop before pulling me in again, so we’re half kissing and half just giggling against each other’s lips. I think another meteor (meteorite?) could hit right now and I’d go out happy, because no one has ever been happier than this.
Something surprising about Junior Cortes: his lips are the softest thing in the world. And look, I don’t know much about kissing, and I would never admit this to him, but I think maybe he is good at this—even though I know he’s never done it before.
The way he knows just when to switch angles. The way he slides a hand to the small of my back and pulls me in closer until my breath catches in my throat.
He smiles when he feels it. That breath catching, right against his teeth. And that’s the moment I realize there aren’t any secrets between us anymore. That he even knows how I breathe when someone’s kissing me. That he’s the only one who knows.
Around us, I’m aware that people are still dancing. Swaying. Laughing. Celebrating and mourning and living. And maybe we are too. Maybe a kiss, after waiting this long, is all of those things wrapped into one.
I slide my hands up his chest, up his neck, until they’re pressed against the sides of his face. One continuous kiss becomes a hundred smaller ones. My top lip between his, his bottom lip between mine. We’re learning. We’re not laughing anymore. And like the clouds are parting in front of me, some unknown future spooling out between our small hiccups of breath, I know this is going to be the first of many, many kisses between Junior and me. And I’m glad. I’m so, so glad.
“Okay,” comes a high, breathless voice from behind us, and we pull apart reluctantly, staying attached everywhere but the lips.
Lita and Cole are standing in front of us, and they’re not touching, but the space between them seems lit up somehow, and I’m already looking forward to later when Lita and I lie across my bed and dissect every last moment of this night.
Like friends.
Like best friends.
“First of all, I’m so glad you guys are finally doing that, trust me,” Lita says, gesturing to the way Junior and I are intertwined. “And you know I wouldn’t interrupt it lightly. But I just had the most amazing idea, and I’m going to need your help.”
And I know from the way Cole’s eyes are all the way open, and Lita’s joy seems to be vibrating from her very core, that things are somehow about to get even better.
Probably stranger, too, but we’re used to that by now.
Lita
BRUJA LUPE IS lighting a few more overly perfumed candles.
I hesitate on my way out the door. It’s been a few days since the pageant, a few days since my body turned back to the brown that makes up Lita Perez. But I can tell Bruja Lupe is still getting used to the idea of not losing me, something wonderful but strange, unsettling, like the cactuses blooming all at once.
“Go,” she says, blowing out the match.
“But . . .” I pause at the threshold.
I have been Bruja Lupe’s prop, her girl from the stars, for so long. My eyes are the oracles her customers gaze into.
“My first appointment of the day wants a spell to make sure she looks better than her bridesmaids at her wedding,” Bruja Lupe says. “I think I can manage.”
Bruja Lupe is not a hugger. But she is my mom, and I am her daughter. That means sometimes she’ll have to put up with it.
“Thanks,” I say, letting go of her and dashing out the door.
I take my bike, streamers flipping and sparkling in the sun as I speed toward the center of town.
I can’t be late today.
“Lovely day, isn’t it, Señora Barrel Cactus?” I call out to the side of the road. “Top of the morning to you, Sir Purple Prickly Pear!” I yell as I speed past. “Give my best to the wife, Mr. Mountain Ball! Looking good, Mademoiselle Claret-Cup!” And then, as I pass the first one I ever made my acquaintance, “Wish me luck, Señora Strawberry!”
A half hour later, a crowd of visitors is following me out the doors of city hall.
I know very well that the city council only let me start these tours because they thought no one would come.
Now that they’re one of the biggest attractions in Meteor, they can’t stop me. And considering I bring more traffic not just to Bruja Lupe and Selena’s and the Meteor Meteorite Museum, but to the whole town, I don’t think they would even if they could.
“And that’s the curb that Vice President Hubert Humphrey tripped on right after giving his address to the newly founded town,” I tell the tour group. “We’re in the process of designating this curb a local landmark.”
(Buzz has been quizzing me on local history.)
I give the tour group time to take pictures with the Humphrey statue, still sporting my gold antennae. I stop in front of city hall, waiting until everyone has gotten photos of the rocket clock.
“You’ve probably noticed by now that I haven’t been saying the name of this town you’ve all come to visit,” I tell them. “And that’s because, as you might know, there is some small debate about this town’s name.”
The debate over the name is probably why at least a few of them are here, the ones drawn by wanting to see a town that’s two towns on paper.
“The two sides of the debate are those who call this town Meteor, and those who call this town Meteorite. By a show of hands . . .” I ask them to vote first for one, then the other. It’s about an even split.
“Now you see the problem,” I say.
They laugh again, more at ease this time.
“As the official town tour guide,” I say, not bothering to tell them I appointed myself, “I must remain impartial. But as a lover of astronomy, I also must tell you that I think there’s an easy way to solve this, because the two names mean two different things. A meteor is an object flying through the atmosphere, that, through friction and heat, becomes a streak of light.”
Thank you to Cole and his dictionary for helping me prepare the wording.
“You’ve probably seen them during meteor showers,” I say. “A meteorite, on the other hand, is debris that has survived that trip through the atmosphere enough to land on Earth, like our beautiful space rock, which you can view in the Meteor Meteorite Museum. Mention this tour for a discount at the gift shop.”
The Meteor Meteorite Museum now has a dazzling new midnight-blue velvet rope in front of the space rock and new bulbs in its roadside sign. Part of my first runner-up prize money well spent.
“So as you can see, what appears to be a matter of politics is simply an astronomical discrepancy,” I say. “Do we mean the rock as it streaked through the atmosphere, or as it is now? One town meeting about what we wanna name this place after and we’d have it solved. I’m gonna do what I can, but you know civic bureaucracy, so check back in about another fifty years and we’ll see if we’ve settled it.”
I can tell who’s a city worker in their o
wn towns by who laughs hardest.
“If you look around”—I lead them down the main street, gesturing to the town and the desert beyond—“you’ll see that this is a place surrounded by beauty. Our desert sky. The rock formations rumored to have been left by the very same visitors who brought our cherished space rock. The majestic crater where our town would have been founded if surveyors hadn’t declared it geologically unsound for the weight of major structures.”
I lead them to Selena’s, which has a newly refurbished neon moon in the window, so bright it glows in daylight.
More prize money I can’t imagine doing something better with.
What’s left might have to go toward surprising Bruja Lupe with a new upholstered chair in the living room. Hers has been due for replacement for a while, and she’s had so much new business lately, I might have time to get it inside without her even noticing.
“And speaking of beauty,” I say as the last of the group comes into the diner, “let me momentarily direct your attention to Fresa Quintanilla, former Miss Meteor Second Runner-Up.”
Fresa gives a beauty queen wave.
Uva and Cereza trade wary smiles.
“She’s going to be insufferable now,” Cereza whispers.
Then they’re back to their tasks, Cereza to her nursing school textbooks, Uva to taking orders. Selena’s is as busy as the last pageant night.
“We couldn’t be prouder of the talent in our town,” I say. “A perfect example is the spectacular mural you’re standing in front of, painted by local artist Junior Cortes.”
Junior’s here with Chicky on one of their sort-of-dates where she’s both working and flirting without knowing it.
He greets the group. With a quick, embarrassed wave, but he does do it.
Good. The more people see the new mural, the more he’s going to have to get used to this.
“As you probably noted from the sign, you’re currently in Selena’s, a longtime anchor of this town’s business community,” I say. “There is a rumor that almost every landmark astronomical discovery in the last ten years started with an idea a scholar had in this very restaurant.” I lean in to the group and lower my voice. “And as much as I’d like to tell you names, the International Astronomical Union forbids it.”
Miss Meteor Page 26