Miss Meteor

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  The Quintanilla sisters all show up at the school track like I ask, and I’m ready. I don’t even care that the field on the slope next to it is all cornhole players and wooden practice boards and flying beanbags. I don’t care that they’re watching while I unfurl Fresa’s ribbon wand (I folded it the precise way she asked) or while I kickstand the decades-old bike I borrowed from Buzz (I’ll never manage the unicycle in time, and I’m pretty sure if Uva really thinks about it, she’ll realize that).

  I don’t even care that Royce and half the guys who shoved me into the locker room are here, because this time, I’m going to win.

  “Just wait there!” I call across the track. I want them to keep their distance, so they can see exactly what this will look like onstage. If it looks awful, they’ll tell me, just like they told me never to wear a lemon-yellow shirt or magenta lipstick again.

  I throw a leg over the bike, run through Juliet’s lines in my head, and poise the ribbon wand.

  All these talents will squish together into the best talent the Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase has ever seen.

  I push off and start pedaling, steering the bike with one hand and twirling the ribbon wand behind me with the other, and proclaiming lines about love and poison in the clear, loud voice Cereza coached me into.

  “Arm higher!” Fresa calls. “Imagine they’re taking your picture!”

  If she’s correcting me, she likes what she sees. Criticism, I’ve learned, is the way Fresa Quintanilla shows she cares.

  One sister on board, two to go.

  “Posture!” Uva calls. “Don’t slump.”

  Then I know Uva doesn’t hold it against me that I decided against the unicycle.

  But nothing from Cereza.

  She stands across the track, arms unfolding, eyes wide.

  “Please stop,” she calls.

  Maybe I’m not doing the voice right. I try to open up my lungs like she talks about, and project across the track. “I do remember well where I should be!”

  Chicky stands a step behind them, watching with horror I can’t quite place. Is she afraid I’m going to run myself off the track? (I might the first couple times. That’s why I picked somewhere with grass.) Does she think this is the worst talent idea ever dreamed up in this town? (She won’t once Fresa and Uva polish up my form.)

  Or does she regret agreeing to help me in the first place?

  “This is a bad idea,” Cereza shouts. “Please. You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

  “And there I am,” I call. “Where is my Romeo?”

  On the word “Romeo,” a beanbag grazes my arm, and a shock of laughter comes from the cornhole practice.

  The bike wobbles, but I right it.

  “Okay, not cool,” I hear Cole say.

  Another one strikes my ribbon wand, ruining the perfect spiral. But I snap it into a zigzag. Fresa has to be proud of that. It’s her first rule of ribboning. If the shape you’re in isn’t working, twirl the ribbon into another one.

  Cole objects again, and this time a couple other boys echo him with, “Yeah, come on.”

  I guess I’m too pathetic to throw at.

  I think of the guys in the locker room backing away when I curled up on the floor, crying into my knees, and the bike’s handlebars wobble.

  Another beanbag flies my way.

  I pretend I am Cereza and Uva and Fresa all at once. I am not the little girl Royce Bradley got to sob on the floor of the locker room because he wanted me to know how much I didn’t belong.

  I am three Quintanilla beauty queens put together.

  “Go, get thee hence”—I lift my chin at the cornhole practice—“for I will not away!”

  The next beanbag misses me by a bicycle’s length. It lands on the track in front of me and bursts, spilling its dried beans everywhere.

  I give a smug smile to the cornhole players.

  Until I feel my front bike wheel bump on a cluster of beans.

  “What the hell, Bradley?” I hear Cole call. “That’s not funny.”

  There’s a reason I usually ride a little girl’s bike even though I’m not a little girl anymore. God and all his stars in the sky did not bless me with long legs.

  So when the old bike Buzz let me borrow from the Meteor Meteorite Museum decides it wants to go its own way, I don’t have the muscle memory to argue.

  The ribbon falls, catching and tangling in the spokes, and now I’m skidding more than rolling.

  “There rust, and let me diiiiiiieeeeee!”

  The last line of Juliet’s death monologue turns into a shriek as I careen off the track.

  I debate whether abandoning the ribbon wand will make things worse (will the wand break in the gears?), or if I should just jump off the bike and into the grass.

  Until I see Cole in my path, braced to try to catch me.

  I try to stop the bike, but the ribbon balls up in the brakes.

  In the second of us both going down, I realize six things at once:

  1) I am headed straight for the boy who gave me my first bike nine years ago.

  2) Nine years later this is the way I’m managing to thank him.

  3) Chicky’s sisters are not three braided-together voices; they are each their own woman, and their ideas do not always go together, especially when their ideas involve ribbons and wheel spokes.

  4) My perfect talent idea for Miss Meteor is turning into a perfect disaster the cornhole players are first laughing and then gasping at.

  5) I hate this whole stupid little planet. I hate it, and if it wasn’t for everything I’d miss I’d say turn me back into stardust right now. I would welcome the second great meteor of this town’s history landing on me right now.

  6) Especially if it could show up before I run this old bike, which I cannot seem to stop, into Cole.

  It doesn’t.

  I end up on top of Cole, with the bike on top of me. When I shove it off of us, I realize Cole’s arm took the force of the back gears and wheel.

  His left arm.

  The one he throws with.

  And it’s worse than that. Cole’s eyes are shut, and I wonder what part of the bike cracked him in the head when we fell.

  I put my hands on the sides of his face and say his name, over and over, my words wobbling and panicked but still loud in my leftover Cereza-Shakespeare-recitation voice.

  “Cole,” I call his name again.

  He opens his eyes, which look clouded over, the pupils wide even with the sun behind me.

  “Cole.” Now the word sounds strangled. Nothing like how Cereza is teaching me to talk. “Say something.”

  He gives me a weak smile. “You’re so sparkly.” His voice is dry and soft, like he’s been asleep all day.

  My throat tightens. “What?”

  His eyes clear a little. “You’re all stardust.”

  I look around to see if anyone heard that, those few words that could make everyone look at me twice. Not like I’m a beauty queen.

  Like I’m something to be explained.

  “This man is severely concussed,” I project, exactly like Cereza taught me, like there’s a whole audience who needs to hear. “He’s making no sense at all. He needs immediate medical attention.”

  I look across the field to the cornhole team, waiting for them to do something, to show up and be at Cereza’s command so she won’t be the only one trying to help Cole.

  And some of them are running across the field or running for help.

  But Royce just stands where he is, grinning at me, like this is how he always saw it going the whole time, all the way back to elementary school.

  Chicky

  HERE LIES CHICKY Quintanilla. Worst pageant campaign manager in history.

  I can almost see the tombstone between where I’m still frozen and where everyone has rushed to help Lita and Cole. I don’t actually move until I see Royce and Kendra approaching, and then it’s pure rage at the controls.

  I’m storming across the field
before I can think better of it, nothing in my head but incoherent rage-sounds that will hopefully form themselves into words by the time I reach him.

  Except they don’t.

  Kendra is already at work by the time I reach them, unloading on Lita as she stares tremulously at Cole. “What is wrong with you?” Kendra asks in a deadly voice. “Being an utter failure wasn’t enough? You have to drag everyone else down with you? Look at my brother! How is he supposed to play cornhole? How—”

  “Lay off!” I shout, storming up to them without a single thought for self-preservation. “It’s his fault this happened, not Lita’s!”

  Royce steps between Kendra and I, six feet, four inches of pissed-off jock.

  “What did you say, dyke?”

  Really? I imagine saying, my voice calm and level and devastating. Your teammate is down because of your stupidity, and your first order of business is to get a homophobic insult in. What team spirit, Bradley. What fucking solidarity.

  The words are there, but my mouth won’t move, because his word, his one little word, is big enough to swallow them all.

  Dyke.

  “I asked you a question, you little psycho. What did you say?”

  All I can say is “Nothing” in a pathetic voice that doesn’t even sound like mine.

  “That’s what I thought,” he says, and he looks so tall, so impossibly square-jawed, and his teeth are white and straight, and even his little, mean, beady eyes are terrifying somehow, and I feel like a slug at his feet because he has all the power.

  And then Kendra steps up beside him, furious and shining like a golden statue, beautiful and terrible and cruel, and I wonder how I ever thought I could destroy them. How could I even make a dent? Even before this horrible disaster it was a stupid, childish plan.

  “Chicky!” Fresa is coming toward me, eyes narrowed at my tormenters as Cereza kneels beside Cole, and I can tell she wants to tell Royce and Kendra off, protect me like the pathetic little sister I am, but if she gets too close she might find out what they have on me. Ring Pop and Allison and everything that came after, and I just can’t.

  Not in front of Fresa.

  Not now.

  “Forget it,” I say, walking past her, deactivating her seek-and-destroy eyes. “It’s nothing.”

  “Chicky, I need some help over here,” Reza is saying from behind me. But look at me. I’m nothing. How can I help anyone?

  I glance once more at Lita, who looks shaken but not hurt. Cole is beneath her, clutching his arm while she shouts his name again and again.

  “Chicky! Now!” But she’s all focused fire and I’m water vapor, scattering into the air. I can’t do it. I can’t face them. Not like this.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper to my sister, but maybe it’s really to Lita, for being too much of a coward to help her. Or to stay and be her friend.

  I’m backing away before Cereza realizes what I’m doing. “Don’t,” she says. “They need you.” But she’s wrong. No one needs me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, a little louder, and then I walk away. Not just to the sidelines to wait, or to be there for Lita. Not just to the park where we used to trace planetary orbits, or where Lita made us light a candle for poor Pluto in its time of need.

  I keep walking until walking is running. Until the sounds of the crowd and Cole’s moans of pain and Lita’s panicked shouting have faded, and it’s just me and the beating sun in the streets.

  I’m already almost back downtown when it hits me:

  Lita Perez, the Cinderella story of the Fiftieth Miss Meteor Pageant has just done the unthinkable. The unforgiveable. She injured the throwing arm of the cornhole team’s second-best player less than a week before the match of the half-century.

  Even if we give up, it won’t be enough for the town we needed to love us.

  Forget loving us, I think. They’re going to hate us.

  Forget hating us. They’re going to destroy us.

  Lita

  IN A VOICE that sounds half-asleep, Cole insists he’s fine, he’s absolutely fine, that it’s nothing some ice and Advil won’t fix.

  Cereza wants to take him to the hospital. But I can think of a hundred reasons we’re not doing that unless Cole says we can.

  We compromise. Cereza puts Cole’s arm in a makeshift sling with the wand’s stick and the cloth from the ribbon, and we take him to Bruja Lupe. Not through the front door with the dimmer lighting and the globes of polished gemstone, but the back way, into our apartment.

  Cole looks both in pain and nervous all the way there. Bruja Lupe can feel it on him. She puts her hand under his chin and makes him look at her.

  “No te preocupes,” she says. “I’m not gonna give you the tourist treatment. You’re one of our own, and we take care of our own.”

  His expression clears, just for that second, and I think maybe he understands.

  “It’s not a break,” Bruja Lupe says once she gets to checking him. “At least I don’t think so. What do you think?” she asks Cereza.

  “That’s what I thought. But it’s a sprain. He’s still out until it heals.” Now Cereza talks to Cole. “No cornhole practice, young man, entiendes?”

  He’s still a little foggy, but he understands enough to deflate at the news.

  I want to sink into the textured carpet our landlord keeps promising to replace.

  Cereza and Bruja Lupe set his arm, and I talk to him to distract him, so it’ll hurt less.

  “You can sprain my arm back if you want,” I say.

  “Lita,” Cole says, like me suggesting this is the worst thing I’ve done all day, not the thing that got us here.

  “Fine, then Kendra can if she wants.”

  “Don’t offer. She might take you up on it.”

  “It’d be fair. I broke you.”

  “You didn’t break me.” He grinds his teeth as Cereza and Bruja Lupe finish, so the words come out flat and coarse. They tighten the sling into place, and he swears under his breath. “I’m gonna break Royce, though.”

  We put ice on where they think he hit his head, me holding it in place and him staying so still I wonder how often he’s had to take the chill of cold packs against his skin after practice. Drops fall onto the back of his neck and snake into his collarbone. He doesn’t flinch.

  I set the pads of my fingers against the fallen drops, soaking them up with my fingerprints.

  He looks between my hand and my face. “You’re never gonna answer my question, are you?”

  I pat my forefinger against another drop. Underneath I can feel how warm his skin is. “What question?”

  “Okay.” His smile is pained but patient. “You can play it that way if you want.”

  The way he looks at me, it’s like he can see the star-stuff in me.

  It’s a fizzy feeling I would’ve loved before I started turning back into stardust.

  I only have a second to think about it before I hear Cereza and Bruja Lupe in the kitchen.

  They’re shaking out doses of painkillers. Prepping the hierbas that will bring the swelling down and let Cole sleep tonight and the next few nights. And in that moment, it’s a kind of beautiful that makes me glad the world will have Cereza Quintanilla as a nurse as soon as she graduates, a woman who believes in both penicillin and cures for susto.

  Cole’s first dose works a little too well. He falls asleep on our so-ugly-it’s-perfect plaid sofa. Midnight is on TV. It’s another one of Bruja Lupe’s favorites. Sometimes she puts a movie like this on in the background when she’s giving a real cura, like the sound might distract from pain or worry. And they’re always on when she needs them. She gets old episodes of The Twilight Zone on channels I can never quite find.

  I sit at the other end of the sofa, leaving space between Cole and me in case I might find another way to accidentally break him.

  Cole Kendall, the one guy on the cornhole team who bothers trying to stand up for those of us Royce Bradley sees as nothing but living, breathing targets, and I br
oke him.

  I can feel a new shimmer of stardust inside me. Whatever patch of my skin I reclaimed after I told off Kendra, it’ll be stardust again by morning. I know it. Stardust is already creeping over my hips and stomach, and considering today, where will it show up next? My ankle? My forehead? Somewhere I can’t hide without a floppy hat or a turtleneck or my hair in my face? Do they even make turtleneck evening gowns?

  Cereza perches on the arm of the sofa.

  “I ruined everything,” I say.

  “Oh, honey, it’s not like that.”

  Honey. Cereza says it the same way her mother does.

  “Yeah, it is like that,” I say. “What happened to Cole. Giving Royce a chance to go at Chicky like that.”

  Cereza’s face hardens. “You did not give Royce a chance, he took it himself. Do you understand?”

  I slump back into the sofa.

  “Don’t give up so easily.” Cereza crosses one leg over the other.

  The Quintanilla sisters are so beautiful, all four of them. If Fresa, beautiful, fearless Fresa, got as far as second runner-up, why did I think I had any chance at winning this? Why did I think I could do any better than embarrassing myself and Bruja Lupe and the Quintanillas?

  “Didn’t my sister ever tell you about her first ribbon practices?” Cereza asks.

  I shake my head.

  Cereza laughs slightly, and I can tell she’s keeping herself quiet so she won’t wake Cole.

  I almost tell her that thanks to Bruja Lupe’s hierbas, nothing short of that meteor I wished for is gonna wake Cole Kendall, at least not for the next couple hours.

  “Fresa accidentally lassoed my mother’s favorite glass bowl.” Cereza giggles. This most serious and poised Quintanilla sister giggles. “She smashed it to pieces. My mother didn’t talk to her for a week.”

  I try not to laugh, but I do. “Really?”

  “Really.” She watches the screen. “I’ll kill you if you ever tell her this, but sometimes I’m sure she would’ve won if she were white.”

  Cereza’s words seep into me. I’m not just a girl made of star-stuff. I’m a brown-skinned girl in a town that’s chosen fifty years of blond, milk-faced beauty queens.