Miss Meteor

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  We all nod, because no one has a better idea, but faced with the actual Bradley Dealership even my fierce-as-hell sisters seem a little cowed.

  “Fresa and Cereza, set up camp by the table,” Lita goes on. “And Uva, you and Chicky go through the side door.”

  “Capisce?” she asks me, and I smile.

  “Capisce.”

  They’ve really gone all out, I think as I follow Uva around the front to the side door. Those jerks. Aside from the stupid cars, there are bunches of orange, blue, and silver balloons bracketing massive banners advertising the pageant.

  Well, they would be, if BRADLEY DEALERSHIP, HOST AND SPONSOR wasn’t printed bigger on every single banner than the name of the pageant.

  I think of Fresa’s sabotage idea and imagine one of them on fire.

  “No arson,” Uva says as we enter, trying to be incognito.

  “How did you—”

  “It’s just a look you get,” she says with a long-suffering eye roll. “It’s a Fresa look.”

  I don’t know whether to be offended or flattered.

  “I need to find Junior,” I say, when we’ve successfully found a corner where no one will hiss or boo at us. “His mom said he’s here, and I think he’s waiting for me.”

  “Oh,” Uva says, and her face turns a little plum colored right in the hollows of her cheeks. “I don’t think he’s here yet. Maybe we should get some food instead? You know, check out the competition.”

  “Why does your voice sound weird?” I ask her.

  “It always sounds like that when I’m hungry. Come on.”

  She takes my arm before I can argue anymore and drags me across the floor toward the food spread.

  It’s worse than I feared. The Bradleys have gone for the hometown comfort food angle. Barbecue, baked beans, potato salad, little handheld mac and cheese with breadcrumbs made in foil cupcake holders.

  Uva takes a mac and cheese cup, and I settle on a withering glare instead of an all-out wrist slap.

  “What?” she asks. “I’m hungry!”

  “You’re despicable.”

  “Look, there’s Lita!”

  I turn to look. She’s making her way across the super-shiny tile floor of the dealership with . . . determination, if not grace. We’ll take it for now. An old lady sucks her teeth at me as she goes by. I wait until she passes to stick my tongue out at her.

  From across the showroom, I see Cereza draw a finger across her neck, her eyes locked on mine. I roll my eyes and go back to watching Lita.

  Not many people stop her, and I wish I could hear what they say when they do. Whatever it is, she smiles that slightly too-wide smile (a little toned down, since Cereza finally gave up on the Vaseline) and shakes their hands.

  So far, so good, I think. But that’s where I’m wrong.

  Royce Bradley makes his grand entrance at that moment, coming down the massive, curving staircase in the middle of the room. He’s in jeans and a blazer, Kendra on his arm in a peachy-goldish sundress that catches every drop of light in the room and dazzles it right back out.

  The music changes, the Meteor school song playing over the loudspeakers, and even though donors and board members and judges aren’t supposed to play favorites, they literally give Royce and Kendra a round of applause.

  Daring Uva to say a word, I shove a whole mac and cheese cup in my mouth.

  I’m going to need fuel.

  Halfway through chewing the rubbery thing, though, I spot Lita, who’s clearly been thrown off by the appearance of Royce and Kendra. She looks uncertain now, and her clown smile has disappeared, and as I watch her she stumbles on the heels at last. That’s when everything shifts to slow motion.

  Behind her, someone is carrying a massive flower arrangement to the punch table. I see the heel reach the last moment it can mathematically remain stable, then pass it, taking Lita backward as it topples.

  She falls, of course, right into the flowers, which fly absurdly high into the air against the dramatic backdrop of the dark windows, raining down water droplets and foliage on everyone nearby.

  Someone actually screams.

  I hope whoever it is chokes on this awful mac and cheese. Just a little.

  Lita is on the ground. Everyone assembled is stunned. Someone very oblivious or very cruel has cut the music, so there’s utter silence in the room.

  Cereza and Fresa are already by her side, helping her up. Uva darts off, muttering something about the DJ. I’m about to do something—anything—to cause a distraction, when I see him across the room, his long, glossy hair twisted up into a knot on his head tonight, even though he’s told me a thousand times he’ll never stoop low enough to rock a man bun.

  Even if the girls like it.

  Even if I kind of like it.

  My heart inflates just a little and then seems to disappear altogether.

  Because Junior Cortes did not put his hair up.

  He tamed it for the petite blond girl with heels as high as her ponytail.

  The girl who is now hanging on his arm, looking incredibly smug.

  And even though Lita’s plan is falling to pieces around me, I can’t look away.

  Lita

  EVERYONE IS STARING at me.

  Not because I injured the star thrower of Meteor Central High’s cornhole team.

  Not because half of Meteor thinks I’m the sad fifth member of some Quintanilla-sister motorcycle gang.

  Not even because my boobs are held up with six strips of duct tape and my nipples are currently reinforced with two halves of a Hot Tamales candy (“Trust me,” Fresa said when she made me hoist up my breasts so she could cross the sticky silver under and between them. “Everyone does it, so you’ll just look the same as the other contestants.”)

  No.

  They’re all staring because I just knocked over an enormous flower arrangement, and between my heels and the wet floor, it takes two Quintanilla sisters to get me steady.

  Everyone is staring for a reason that has nothing to do with Cole or Selena’s.

  So I might as well make it count.

  Once Fresa has pushed me back onto my feet, and Cereza has dusted me off, I give a grand curtsy, sweeping my hand in front of me like a princess.

  An encouraging laugh rises from one side of the room, followed by the start of applause.

  Anyone else might ignore the fact that most of the brown citizens of Meteor in this room are the ones serving the food and the drinks, or staffing the car dealership. They’re restocking the buffet table, or circulating with trays, or polishing where oblivious guests leave fingerprints on the windows, because the Bradleys cannot stand a smudge on their establishment—not today, not even for a minute.

  These are the Meteor residents Bruja Lupe gives real cures to. Cures for fever, and susto, and the pain of old bone breaks.

  These are the Meteor residents who laugh first and applaud first.

  Then everyone from out of town, the ones who don’t know me as the girl who mowed down Cole Kendall with an antique bicycle, join in. Even the contestants.

  With each rise of the clapping, the Meteor residents who hate us, who whisper about us, look a little more uncomfortable. They realize, with each second, how unfeeling, how stodgy and humorless, they will look if they don’t participate.

  So, however begrudgingly, they join in.

  Even Kendra.

  Even Royce.

  Even his parents.

  They all have to applaud me, or look like spoilsports.

  It’s sweeter than the strawberry lip gloss Fresa put on top of my lipstick.

  It only lasts a few seconds, but that laugh—with me, for once, not at me—and their applause keep me on my feet. They keep me smiling my pageant smile as I shake hands with other contestants (though most of them are not actually shaking, just presenting the upturned backs of their hands like I’m supposed to kiss them). It keeps me standing up straight as Mayor Badii tells me what a nice shade of purple my top is and wishes me luck like sh
e thinks I might actually have a chance. It keeps me as gracious as Cereza when a woman stirring a tiny ramekin of potato salad looks me over and says, “Pants. What an interesting choice.”

  And it gives me the impulse to catch Junior Cortes topping off his soda, the first minute he’s been away from the girl with hair so fine and shiny it looks like she polishes it.

  He nods his thanks to Dolores Ramirez, who fills his glass all the way up to the brim. It’s the kind of perfect pour Bruja Lupe has been trying to teach me for years, catching it so the fizz just rounds over the top without bubbling over.

  Dolores gives me an encouraging smile that I swear looks laced with “get those putas” before she goes back to the caterers’ makeshift bar.

  “What are you doing?” I ask Junior.

  “Taking advantage of eating on the Bradleys’ tab.” He picks up a foil macaroni cup. “I hope by the time I’m done with them they have to stock their dealership fridge with”—he fake gasps—“generic bottled water.”

  I can’t help laughing. The Bradleys make a big show of their single-use plastic water bottles with their custom dealership labels. Royce even carries them around school, forgoing the reusable bottles Cole has been begging him to switch over to. (“You are single-handedly killing the Earth, man,” I have heard Cole lament more than once as they were heading to practice.)

  “I meant what are you doing with a girl who’s not Chicky?” I can’t help glancing over at the blond girl. But I try to give her a smile to show I’m harmless.

  Junior groans. “Not this again.”

  A contestant in a sweater set and flared skirt smiles and nods at me as she goes by. I do the same.

  I turn back to Junior. “Why do you want to be one of those guys?”

  I try to figure out how to explain, because the next question he’s going to ask will be “One of what guys?”

  But what he asks instead is, “Why wouldn’t I want to be?”

  I stick a lime wedge on the rim of his cup. “Because you’re not one of those guys.”

  He looks a little guilty, but more than that, he looks a little sad. He drops the first-date posture he’s been wearing since he walked in. His eyes are tracking around the room, and I realize he’s not looking where the blond girl just was standing.

  He’s looking for Chicky.

  And he’s opening his mouth and taking a breath in to say something, something true, when an almost-yelling voice startles us both.

  A member of the pageant board projects over the crowd that it’s time for the group photo.

  All the contestants shuffle toward the indoor fountain, its tidy shoots of water gurgling at evenly spaced intervals. Dresses rustle against each other. My pants whisk alongside skirts. Royal blue and deep magenta mix with pastels.

  Kendra, in her peach sundress that’s a perfect lightening of Meteor Central High’s orange, edges to the first row. She does it with a genial smile that almost hides how much she’s throwing her elbows.

  I understand immediately what this game is. We are all trying to seem generous and polite and compliant, unconcerned with our own position, while all wanting to be as front-and-center as possible.

  I step off to the side and back. I am too small, and too unsteady on my heels to fight for prime position. And I don’t need any more enemies anyway.

  A brown hand lands on my shoulder.

  “You’re in front, pequeña.” Another contestant, one of the few with brown skin like mine, shoves me forward. “They’re never gonna see you if you hide back here.”

  I am so shocked by another contestant willingly putting me in front of her that it takes me a second to realize I have landed next to Kendra Kendall.

  “Eww,” Kendra says, “can you lay off the perfume? I’m literally choking on how cheap you smell.”

  I sigh and straighten my shoulders as the photographer lines up her camera.

  “You might want to turn sideways,” Kendra says, preening in advance for the lens. “You’re taking up a lot of the frame.”

  “Say . . . PAGEANT QUEEN!” the photographer yells.

  We all obey.

  Except me. I just say the “queen” part. Fresa warned me about this. The word “pageant” contorts your mouth into positions unflattering for photography.

  “I hope you’re happy,” Kendra says through smiling teeth. “Cole didn’t even want to show up today.”

  “Say. . . . PAGEANT QUEEN!”

  We all adjust our postures. “PAGEANT QUEEN!”

  “Yes,” I say through equally smiling teeth. “I’m sure he couldn’t possibly have anything better to do than watch you pose.”

  “Say . . . PAGEANT QUEEN!”

  We put our hands on our hips, trying not to take each other out with our elbows. “PAGEANT QUEEN!”

  “He would be practicing,” Kendra says. “If you hadn’t broken his arm.”

  “NOW, A FUN ONE!” the photographer yells.

  We all drape ourselves into fun positions as forced as Mr. Hamilton’s enthusiasm on test days. We shuffle and reconfigure ourselves. Friends cluster even closer and throw their arms around each other. Nervous first-time entrants pull to the sides and stand together.

  Cereza’s words bite at me.

  Elegance and grace and poise.

  I remember everything Cereza told me, and I grit my teeth as I gently place an arm over Kendra’s shoulder.

  I am ready for her to recoil, for another “Eww.”

  Instead, she throws her arm around me.

  It’s so familiar, so friendly, my neck in the crook of her shoulder, that I wonder if we’re going to declare a ceasefire, even if it’s just for the length of this pageant.

  Then her arm tightens.

  Then it’s almost a chokehold.

  Kendra grins toward the photographer the whole time.

  I try not to squirm.

  “You like that?” Kendra asks. “I almost forgot about you and your little lesbo friend.”

  “Lesbo? Really?” I choke out from under her bony arm. “That’s what you do with anyone different from you? You just call them names?” I try to tilt one shoulder back like Uva taught me for posing, wondering if it might work to free myself from what feels like a skinny-girl wrestling grip. And wondering how Cole feels about having a sister who would probably make ruthless fun of him in the halls at school if he weren’t her own brother.

  Kendra shifts in a way that makes her elbowing me in the ribs seem accidental.

  “Get off me, Kendra.” I try to wriggle out of her hold.

  “But we’re smiling now,” she says.

  “Get off me.” I reach into my bra, rip out one of the Hot Tamale halves that is wedged onto the tip of my boob, and throw it at Kendra’s face.

  She reels back, enough that the other contestants reel back in response. “Did you just throw your nipple at me?”

  “Say . . . PAGEANT QUEEN!”

  The unison response of “Pageant Queen” is more tentative this time.

  Kendra lunges at me.

  I shift my weight to dodge.

  But on my borrowed high heels, I wobble.

  I wobble toward the fountain.

  And in that moment a familiar figure comes through the door of the Bradley Dealership.

  Bruja Lupe is beaming, looking flushed like she hurried here from her last appointment, glancing around for her little pageant contestant.

  Then she finds me, and her expression shifts to horror.

  The arc of Kendra’s lunge continues. And without the resistance of my standing body to take the force of hers, Kendra goes with me.

  Into the fountain.

  Chicky

  THE SILVER CORVETTE, loathsome as it is, is angled just right so that if I appear to be admiring it I can see the reflection of Junior Cortes and his date in one of the side mirrors.

  By my third root beer float, I’ve almost convinced myself this is all an elaborate setup, and the five thousand milligrams of sugar coursing through my bloodstr
eam agrees with me enthusiastically.

  See, it’s like this: the Hair Pony (as I’ve taken to calling her in my head) is one of Kendra’s friends trying to infiltrate our pageant camp and sabotage Lita’s chances by . . . seducing Junior to get to us. That makes sense, right? There’s no way he could actually like her.

  She giggles. He smiles. She reaches out and pushes a glossy strand of hair off his forehead where it’s escaped his bun. I can’t read lips from this far away, but I’m pretty sure he’s not telling her that touching a person of color’s hair without permission contributes to the idea that their bodies only exist for the entertainment and consumption of the oppressor.

  That consent is dignity, and dignity is humanity.

  Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

  Is it weird that I want to high-five this mirror for agreeing with me?

  He takes her empty soda, and before he heads back to fill it up she touches his arm too. Like it belongs to her. Suddenly, I feel like I might throw up.

  I have to switch to the other mirror, but when Junior approaches the beverage table I really almost do it. Go over there. Tell him that girl with her perky ponytail and her bright yellow strapless dress and her pink lip gloss might be shiny, but that I’m . . .

  And that’s where I get stuck. Because yes, seeing them together makes me want to paint the very shiny floor of the Bradley Dealership with a half-gallon of partially digested root beer float, but I don’t have an alternative. I can’t give him any more than I’ve already given him. I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.

  And I shouldn’t feel like I have to.

  So it’s a stalemate. I watch in the side mirror as he fills up her soda. And I watch as Lita walks by him on the way to greet another contestant and stops to squeeze a lime into it—which I hope the Hair Pony will hate, by the way—and I wish it were me squeezing that stupid lime. I wish I was still Junior’s best friend.

  Or Lita’s.

  Or anyone’s.

  “Places for photos, please! All contestants over here by the fountain!”