Miss Meteor

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  Fresa almost wrings her hands. “What have you done?”

  Uva studies me, concerned. “Has she ever had a drink before?”

  “Did you get enough water into her last night?” Cereza pulls on my eyelids to get a better look at my eyes.

  I whimper.

  “Both of you”—Fresa pulls us out of bed—“shower. Lita first. We need all the time with her we can get.”

  “It’s six in the morning.” Chicky double-checks the orange-and-yellow sunrise in the window. “Do you really need all day to get her ready?”

  “You tell me.” Fresa points at me, and I can feel in the roots of my hair how I must look. Hair fluffed out not from teasing but from being slept on. Lips and teeth that haven’t seen Vaseline in thirty-six hours (I think I even have a toothpaste smudge on my cheek from sloppily brushing my teeth last night). And wrinkled pajamas; even the shooting stars probably look a little sleepy.

  “Drink up.” Uva shoves cups of coffee at both me and Chicky. “Even stronger than we make it at Selena’s.”

  I locate one shoe (under Chicky’s bed) and then the other (next to Uva’s dresser).

  “I’m sorry, are you under the impression you’re leaving?” Fresa asks. “You need a lifetime of tweezing, curling, and highlighting. Not to mention some serious moisturizing to undo last night.”

  “I’ll be right back, I promise. And it’ll be worth it, I promise.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Uva mutters.

  I look at Chicky. “Could I borrow . . .”

  She’s already throwing a pair of jeans at me.

  I grab them out of the air. “Thanks.”

  She grins at me.

  She grins again when I notice they’re already cuffed up enough for me that they won’t drag.

  I wanna tell her that watching her declare who she is, as sure as if she was shouting her own name, made me prouder than when we ran through the desert making spaceship sounds.

  I wanna tell her that the reason Kendra calls her any name she can think of is the same reason she flinches when Cole makes jokes about what’s in his jeans. Their fierce pride, their fearlessness, the way they own everything they are, scares her. It’s true and frightening in its beauty, flaring bright as the sun over Meteor.

  If I have to leave this planet, I want to do it while being like my friends.

  I’m going to make everything I can of it.

  The jeans Chicky lends me are loose on me, and no doubt baggy on her. Probably the only ones she owns that fit the way I’m bigger in the hips and thighs and butt than she is. She knew, in the split-second before I even asked.

  I’m still buttoning the fly as I run out of the Quintanilla house.

  I run through town, catching little whispers. Even though my forehead feels both too heavy and too empty, and even though my body feels no more coordinated than the spinning stars on my mobile, I have to try not to smile. Meteor is already chattering about the mysterious appearing of otherworldly visitors and the rock formation they left behind as their coded message. (Score one for our rock formations and buzzing flying saucer sounds.) Any motel rooms that were open have booked up. The souvenir shops and the Meteor Meteorite Museum gift counter are scrambling to restock. Tourists are complaining about lack of parking because of a new crowd driving out here to see for themselves.

  And they’ll all have to eat somewhere tonight. Hopefully the chrome marvel that is Selena’s Diner.

  I keep running, knowing that Fresa is waiting with her tweezers. This morning, I may have new stardust climbing down my arms—I can feel it under my pajama shirt—but I’m finishing this pageant. That means getting the evening gown I borrowed from Bruja Lupe’s closet.

  Bruja Lupe doesn’t even know I took it, a long-sleeved, floor-length number that, yes, kinda drags on me, but that will hide my stardust. And it means I’ll have a little of Bruja Lupe with me up on that stage.

  Fresa is actually tapping her foot when I get back, out of breath, hair fluffed around my face.

  I present the dry-cleaning-bag-covered hanger. “Voilà!”

  Fresa shrieks like she’s seen a spider.

  “What”—Cereza is staring in horror—“is this?”

  I slump a little. “My evening gown. For tonight.”

  Chicky is trying not to laugh.

  Uva takes the bag. Through the clear plastic, the dress’s sateen flashes. Tone-on-tone embroidery thickens the deep olive, and thin, cylindrical gold beads speckle the skirt. The dress Bruja Lupe wore to officiate Clover Flores’s wedding ten years ago.

  “What?” I ask. “It tells the judges I’m sophisticated.”

  “It tells the judges you want to be the girlfriend of a lounge singer!” Fresa says.

  “Fresa!” Cereza says.

  “What I think Fresa means is”—Uva cuts Fresa a look of this better be what you mean—“it doesn’t exactly suit you. It doesn’t seem like something you’d really wear.”

  “Oh, come on,” I say. “It is not that bad.”

  “Yeah, if you’re forty-five,” Chicky says. “But on you?”

  My stomach sinks.

  I study the crisp line of the dress’s shoulders, the pencil skirt, the matching shrug jacket. It’s a piece Bruja Lupe made look as glamorous as an old magazine page. But Uva’s right. It would never have a home among my blue skirts and pink sneakers and cat-ear sweatshirt. It would never look at home on my soft, rounded body.

  I hadn’t thought of that until now. All I’d thought about is whether it might belong on a stage.

  I’d just considered the dress. I hadn’t so much thought of me in it.

  “You are not putting the miracle we’re about to work on you today”—Fresa gestures at my hair and face—“into that.” She points at the dress. “How are we gonna get her something else in an hour?”

  “Do you have anything that might work?” Uva asks Fresa and Cereza.

  “Do you think we have anything that’ll work? She’s like four feet tall but also almost as uncoordinated as Chicky! She’ll trip off the stage.”

  “Hey!” Chicky and I say in unison.

  “Is Goodwill even open?” Uva asks.

  “Do you think Mom has something she can borrow?” Cereza asks.

  “Mom’s taller than you,” Fresa says. “Good luck.”

  Uva picks up a phone.

  “Who are you calling?” Fresa almost shrieks it.

  “Our spy,” Uva says.

  “Who?” Fresa says.

  Cereza nods. “Put him on speaker.”

  “WHO?” Fresa asks.

  Uva doesn’t answer. She just lets the call go through.

  Chicky seems to be enjoying Fresa’s annoyance. I just watch them.

  “Hey, Cole,” she says. “It’s Uva.”

  “Oh, hell no,” Fresa says. “He’s a boy! He doesn’t know about this stuff!”

  “Fresa,” Cole’s voice says through the fuzzy speakerphone, in a voice that means business enough that Fresa goes quiet. “I once had to help my sister spray-glue her swimsuit to her ass.”

  All three remaining Quintanilla sisters tilt their faces to Fresa.

  Fresa purses her lips. “Yeah, he’s good.”

  Uva looks back at the phone. “Do you have anyone short in your family?” she asks.

  “Uh, why?” Cole asks.

  “Our girl is planning on wearing the worst evening dress to ever grace the Miss Meteor stage,” Uva says.

  “Hey!” I object. “Bruja Lupe wore it!”

  “Bruja Lupe is half a foot taller and decades older than you,” Cereza says.

  “We’d lend her something,” Uva goes on, “but she’d trip on it, and we can’t hem anything in time.”

  “Yeah, I can probably find something,” Cole says. “Mid-shin length was big in my grandmother’s time, that might work on her.”

  “You can’t ask him to do that,” I tell Uva.

  “Too late,” Cole says. “I’m already doing it.”

  Ch
icky

  DID YOU EVER hear the one about the girl who woke up after two hours of sleep, already surrounded by three angry, curling-iron-bearing harpies?

  Me either. But I hear it doesn’t end well.

  “Look,” I say, but Cereza holds up a hand.

  “Don’t even,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance she’s coming back?” Uva asks.

  “She’ll be back,” I say confidently. We’ve come this far, and after last night I know she wouldn’t abandon this. “Just . . . I’m not sure when . . . or in what state?” I try to smile. Fresa grabs my hand and pulls me, my boy boxers, and last night’s tank top to my feet.

  “Before we start torturing you,” Cereza says. “We heard about your performance at the party last night. What you said to Royce and Kendra and everyone.”

  I take a deep breath. “And?”

  “And we’re proud of you, hermanita.”

  “We hate you for this,” Fresa clarifies, gesturing around at the current state of things. “But that was pretty rad.”

  Uva steps forward and hugs me, and I honestly think this must be a dream until Mom and Dad walk in.

  “Oh, are we talking about your sister schooling the town bully and planting a rainbow flag in the nearly barren soil of rural New Mexico?”

  “Dad, don’t say ‘schooling’ please.” Fresa rolls her eyes. “But yes,” she adds.

  I look at my parents with something between terror and hopefulness, but the terror doesn’t turn out to be necessary. “We love you, Mija,” my mom says, pulling me into a hug. While I’m there, Dad ruffles my already-beyond-hope hair.

  “You guys aren’t, like, mad? You don’t think I’m a weirdo?”

  “Honey, we’re not even surprised,” Dad says, and Mom lets go of me to whack his arm. “I mean, at first I didn’t know what the word meant. I thought maybe we’d left you alone in the kitchen to wash the skillets too many times and . . .”

  “Dad!” Cereza yelps, horrified, but I’m laughing. One of those deep, belly things that starts low and builds and lasts for an hour. It’s relief and it’s love and it’s everything I couldn’t admit to myself I needed.

  “Chicky,” my mom is saying now, tears in her eyes, “you’ve never been one to truly hide how you feel, no matter how hard you try. You’ve just been getting braver, and you finally felt ready to trust yourself. That’s an important thing, and you should be so proud.”

  “Plus,” says Fresa, “being pan was never what made you a weirdo.”

  She smiles, though, and we’re all together, and they’re looking at me with all their different kinds of love, and I remember Lita shouting love is love is love out the window last night, and I think things probably couldn’t get any better.

  Except maybe if Cereza would wear less perfume, because the smell of it is making my head hurt.

  It’s a mark of our first family moment in ages that I don’t tell her this.

  “Anyway,” Mom says, wiping at her eyes. “No work today. Your father and I have some things to get ready for tonight, but here . . .” She pulls three twenty-dollar bills out of her wallet and hands them to me. “This is for you girls. Go down to the street fair and have some fun today, just be at the diner by six for the dinner rush. I think it’s gonna be a little hectic tonight . . .” She smiles in an enigmatic way before she and Dad leave the room together.

  “Oh, and stick together,” Dad clarifies. “Or we’re taking the money back.”

  We all pretend to be annoyed, but I know my sisters well enough to know they’re not dreading this. And surprisingly, neither am I.

  “Wait,” I say as we leave the house. “What did she mean it’s gonna be a little hectic tonight?”

  “Oh, you’ll see . . . ,” Cereza says, and her smile looks exactly like Mom’s.

  And I do.

  The streets of downtown Meteor are absolutely packed, like, way more than I would have expected even for the final day of the pageant. “What’s going on?” I ask, wide-eyed gawking at the news crews, and the crowds, and yes, all the tinfoil hats.

  “Oh right, you were sleeping it off,” Cereza says with a smirk.

  “Yes,” I interrupt. “Sleeping off my water. For two hours. Until six o’clock in the morning.”

  “Anyway,” she says, waving a hand to stop me. “A ridiculous rock formation showed up in the crater last night. They’re calling it the Second Miracle of Meteor.”

  Something jolts in my stomach as I remember the four of us, Junior’s design that we burned with a Bic lighter as soon as we finished it, Lita and I making otherworldly sounds until the tourists believed in the beyond and all its inhabitants.

  “What?” I say, hoping my fake surprise isn’t too overdone. “When?”

  “Probably around the time your best friend was getting drunk enough to ruin our pageant hopes, and you were playing beer pong with the cornhole champion,” Uva says. “Or thereabouts.”

  “Right,” I say, a little sheepish. “So, what’s up with all this?”

  “A local news station picked it up this morning when someone who lives out there called in a tip, and it’s just sort of snowballed from there,” Cereza says, shaking her head.

  “Probably just some bored idiots who weren’t invited to the party,” Fresa says, yawning.

  “But what if it wasn’t?” I ask. “What if it’s for real?”

  “What, like you think actual aliens showed up last night and gave us a little geological heads up that they were here?” Uva asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, shrugging. “Why not?”

  But regardless of what anyone believes or doesn’t, there’s one cold, hard fact that can’t be refuted: There are hundreds of new tourists in Meteor, and they’re all gonna need somewhere to eat tonight. And even though our parents gave us pageant award day off for the first time in history, after an hour of pretending otherwise we know there’s nowhere we’d rather be.

  A feeling that’s only magnified when we show up at Selena’s around lunchtime to see a line out the door.

  “We need to find Lita, get her dressed,” Cereza says. “But you guys stay?” She’s looking at me and Fresa. “Help Mom and Dad out?”

  “I’m her manager!” I say, indignant. “I should be there!”

  “You’re her best friend,” Uva says, smiling. “And I want you to be surprised. Trust us, just this once.”

  And that’s how I, Chicky Quintanilla, pageant manager, end up in an apron on the day of the evening gown competition.

  But just when I think the day can’t surprise me any more, I see a familiar tall, long-haired figure approaching the kitchen door just after the dinnertime rush.

  “Got a second?” Junior catches me leaning against the back dining room’s wall between tickets, things slowing down now that the evening gown competition is fast approaching.

  “Exactly one,” I say, smiling.

  He takes my hand, and it doesn’t even feel strange anymore, just good. Like coming home. A feeling that only intensifies when he stands me in front of the sheet-covered wall I gave him as a make-up present when I thought I had lost him for good.

  The sheet has been up for days, Junior refusing to let anyone near it. But apparently tonight, at last, is the night.

  “I wanted you to see it first,” he says, ducking his head and smiling.

  He’s nervous, I realize, and it makes my heart flutter. “What, no dish towel blindfold?”

  “Sorry, no time,” he says. “Are you ready?”

  I feel like I’m answering two questions when I say: “So ready.”

  He pulls a corner of the sheet, and it falls to the ground as if in slow motion, revealing Junior’s masterpiece inch by inch.

  This time, I can’t help it, my eyes fill with tears that spill over, and I’m sniffling into my apron. It’s Selena, of course, in her iconic purple, glittery jumpsuit. But in Junior’s rendition, she’s astride a rocket ship like it’s a bull. Above her hang planets c
lose enough to pluck from the sky, swirls of stars and galaxies that remind me of the rock pattern we left in the crater. Below is the New Mexico desert at sunset, almost just as it looks outside the window right now.

  Selena’s Diner, it says across the top, and along the bottom: Welcome Home.

  “So, you hate it, right? It’s too kitschy, too cheesy, too . . .”

  “Too perfect,” I interrupt, snaking an arm around his waist and pulling him into a half hug. “Junior. It’s . . . everything. Thank you.”

  “Chicky,” he says, turning me to face him. “You know what else would be perfect?”

  “What?” I ask, sniffing as the last of my summer storm of tears dry up.

  “If you’d let me take you to the post-pageant party tonight.” He clears his throat. “Like, as a date.”

  “I wish I could,” I say, that pang from earlier back with a vengeance. Because I do wish I could go with him. I honestly do. “But I should come back after the announcement. Help out. My family needs—”

  “Go,” says a voice from behind me, and Fresa is standing there with her order booklet, looking flushed but exhilarated, her familiar scowl missing for once.

  “I can’t,” I say. “There’s so much to do.”

  “I’ll cover for you,” Fresa says, and my jaw drops. “What, bitch?” she says. “Go before I change my mind.”

  “You heard the boss lady,” Dad says, and Mom smiles.

  “We’re doing this?” I ask Junior, and he smiles too. Brighter than every star that inspired his mural. His perfect, perfect mural.

  “We’re doing this.”

  I shrug off my apron but leave the hat to cover my sweaty hair.

  “Thanks, guys,” I say. “I guess we’re going.”

  “Wait, not like that you’re not!” Fresa says, horrified by my shorts and Converse without socks and the grease-splattered Selena’s cap.

  “It’s okay,” Junior says. “I took the liberty of bringing an accessory.”

  Jewelry? I wonder, my heart sinking just a little. I’m not really a jewelry kind of girl, and I thought he knew that. I thought he knew everything about me. I was kind of betting on it.

  What if I was wrong?

  But Junior’s eyes sparkle with mischief as he digs into his pocket to pull out a crinkling plastic wrapper, and I’m already laughing, my heart right back in my throat, all dipping forgotten.