I can only get so far in my imagining, though, even now, because I can’t picture telling her. I’m still not ready. And if I can’t tell her, I already know how this ends.
“It’s not gonna be a thing,” I say, looking him in the eye this time so he knows I mean it. “We’re just working together. We have a mutual goal. And I should probably be getting back to it.”
“World domination to follow,” Junior says, but he looks kind of bummed.
And I’m kind of bummed, too, so I just bump his shoulder with mine and say, “I know being my only friend is a big burden to carry, but you’re not getting rid of me that easily, Cortes.”
He looks at me with those big question eyes again, the sadness all but gone.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says, and hands me my fork. “Maybe you better fuel up, just in case things get ugly out there.”
I strain my ear toward the open kitchen window.
“No screaming, maybe I can steal another minute?”
He smiles.
When the plate is empty, I realize maybe I was too hard on the mac and cheese. It really isn’t bad.
Lita
“EVERY TIME I think we’ve found the basement, they start digging,” Bruja Lupe whispers to me.
She’s referring to her latest customer, a man asking if we can make him a potion that will render him irresistible to women.
“If you have any essence of musk-ox,” he says.
Bruja Lupe has promised to stop trying to talk me out of Miss Meteor if I let this man stare into my eyes.
“Gaze into them as you might gaze into the firmament,” she urges, her voice dreamy and light as she flicks her wrist, “and therein you shall discover all the secrets of love held in the universe.”
At first, he seems ill at ease. But then his look shifts, as all their looks do.
“Do you understand?” Bruja Lupe breathes.
“Yes,” the man answers in a hypnotized voice. “I understand it all.”
Because would a man like this ever really admit otherwise?
She sells him a few overpriced sachets.
“Steep in hot water and drink a half hour before going out,” she tells him. “It will give you the confidence of a hundred kings and the charm of a hundred gentlemen.”
The mesh bags are probably full of lemon balm. The only thing it will give him is a desire to take a nap. But he nods with the solemn look that tells us he intends to follow her directions precisely.
After he leaves, I hand Bruja Lupe the parent permission form for the pageant, and she pretends to have to look around for a pen. “You sure this is what you want?”
“I have to do this,” I say.
“Okay.” She scrawls off her signature. “Just don’t expect me to put in hair pins or fix your lipstick.”
“Don’t worry.” I beam at her. “I have four whole coaches.”
I will not let this be sadder than it has to be, the sky taking me back. Instead, I will show Bruja Lupe that I am not just turning to stardust.
I am leaving a streak of light across this town.
I grab a sweater off the wooden hooks near the front door. Bruja Lupe never lets me go out without one, afraid I’ll catch cold even when it’s ninety degrees. That’s another way I know she’s made of the same star-stuff as me. Something in her remembers the blaze of burning through the atmosphere with the meteor that brought us here. In comparison, New Mexico heat is like the ice tail off a comet.
“Wanna come with me?” I ask.
“What, you want a fifth opinion about lipstick?” She ropes her hair into a bun. Her hair goes halfway down her back, but it never takes her more than three pins. Threads of gray glint among the coiled black.
“Don’t even pretend you don’t want to see Cereza and Fresa claw each other’s eyes out over types of hairspray.”
“I do, realmente.” Bruja Lupe grins. “But I’m meeting the girls.”
“The girls” usually means the Meteorite Birding Club. Leanne Cortes has gotten Bruja Lupe to care deeply about the number of cactus wrens and Costa’s hummingbirds in the desert around town. She’s had that effect on enough Meteor residents to double the membership.
“Lita?” Bruja Lupe says.
I stop just before the door. “I’m glad you and Chicky are partners-in-crime again.”
If she’d said friends, I would have felt the wavering guilt of having to lie to her. But she said it right. Partners-in-crime. We are doing this one thing together.
On my way out, I stand on tiptoes enough to kiss Bruja Lupe on her hair. She rolls her eyes, and I know she’ll get me back, leaving a plum-red lipstick print on my cheek when I’m not expecting it. But it’s worth it.
The neatest handwriting of my life on Earth goes on this registration form for Miss Meteor. Or—it occurs to me that I better learn the whole name—the Fiftieth-Annual Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.
Because I won’t just be competing against the prettiest and most talented girls in Meteor. I’ll be competing against girls from every town around that’s too small to have a pageant of its own.
Buzz’s wife, Edna, sits at the registration table, the street and sidewalk around her humming with all the festival preparation. I present the form like Elizabeth Taylor showing off her latest engagement ring, and I give Edna the smile the Quintanilla sisters have spent hours teaching me.
Edna looks frightened more than delighted.
Maybe the smile reads better from the stage?
Edna stamps the form and hands me back a registration number. “And that’s for you, sweetheart. Best of luck to you. And don’t forget, show up early to the question and answer so we can check you in.”
The fluttery feeling in my stomach settles partway between excitement and nausea from all the Vaseline I’ve swallowed. I’ll be up against the Kendra Kendalls of the whole region, girls whose families are legends in the Miss Meteor pageant.
But I can do this. The Quintanilla sisters will make sure I can do this.
And I’ve already done the first part. I have an official contestant number and a place in the Fiftieth-Annual Meteor Regional . . . I mess it up in my head the first time I try to say it back to myself.
I turn around to step out of line, reading the top of my contestant badge over again.
The Fiftieth-Annual Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.
I read it again and again, trying to stick it in my brain.
Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.
Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.
When I look up, there’s Kendra Kendall, looking more polished and with better posture than I’ll probably look on my best day of the pageant. She wears a sundress that seems both like she bought it new from a store yesterday and like it came from some boutique half a century ago, the first dress store that ever existed in Meteor.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she says with more disdain, more pity, than anger, like the way Bruja Lupe sounds when she gets yet another request for her to fortune-tell winning lottery ticket numbers.
Cole stands behind her, drinking from a green water bottle that he will carry with him from now until the championship later in the week. Every cornhole player has their rituals. Some eat bowls of spaghetti the size of their heads. Cole drinks the most disgusting flavor of Powerade there is (the green kind).