“Did you really just enter?” Kendra asks.
“Kendra,” Cole says. “We do not have time for pageant stuff right now.”
Kendra looks back at him. “This”—her eyes flash back at me, and I realize I’m the this—“is not pageant stuff.” She glances at Cole once more. Then her eyes cling to me. “You are not pageant stuff.”
“What’s the matter, Kendra, can’t take a little competition?” Cole asks.
“Yeah, real competition.” She looks at my chest, but not in an admiring way. I know what admiring looks like between girls from seeing the way Chicky sometimes notices other girls, that kind of light, glancing consideration.
This is not that.
This is evaluating, like the school nurse checking our spines for scoliosis.
“She doesn’t even have boobs,” Kendra says.
That makes something in me flare. Maybe I was flat all the way up until the fall of freshman year. Maybe even now I don’t have much compared to Kendra or Fresa. Maybe my boobs took their sweet time coming in, but they did get here. And the fact that Kendra doesn’t know it means she probably hasn’t taken a good look at me since I came to her house for Cole’s birthday party in eighth grade.
I am nothing to her but the chubby girl her brother talks to because no one else does.
“Yes, I do.” I draw down the V-neck of my shirt, just enough to show her the cleavage Fresa insists we’re going to show off during the swimsuit competition. I don’t just have boobs, I have a bra that fits them right, something Bruja Lupe is as proud of as she is of teaching me to make chiles rellenos. Your body is worth something that makes you feel good, she always tells me. Never forget it.
This is even one of my new bras, patterned with pink and yellow flower shapes. I’m almost glad to get to show it off. Maybe it’ll show Kendra I can be a little like her, wearing pretty clothes that fit me.
Cole, drinking from the water bottle the same moment I tug my shirt down, does a spit-take worthy of the best old comedies Bruja Lupe has ever shown me. He practically mists the back of his sister’s hair.
He puts a hand to his mouth, either to cover it or wipe it.
Kendra glares back at him. “Ew.”
“What, you think I meant to do that?”
“You’re a guy and so inherently gross, so yes, I do.”
“I’m gross? You’re dating Royce Bradley.”
“He’s your teammate.”
The second of them bickering gives me enough time to realize everyone is staring.
Everyone is staring at the bra I only meant to show Kendra Kendall.
Edna comes up behind me. “Let’s save those for the swimsuit competition, shall we, dear?” She urges my hands away from my neckline.
Kendra snaps her head back toward me. “Thank you for that demonstration, because you’ve just proved my point. Every girl from Meteor who enters is representing the whole town of Meteor.”
“Meteorite!” someone calls out from half a block away.
“Shut up, Alex!” Kendra calls back. She looks at me again. “You know you can’t win, so you just want to embarrass us all, right? Make fun of this whole thing? You’re just like your friend.”
I perk up. “I have a friend?”
“Your little lesbian friend. She’s always acting like she’s better than all this.”
Chicky.
I almost correct Kendra and tell her that Chicky isn’t a lesbian, that I’ve seen her crushes on girls and her crush on Junior, the boy who makes her laugh in the halls at school. But it wouldn’t matter. I’m not telling Kendra anything she hasn’t noticed herself. Besides, anyone who says lesbian like it’s a bad thing doesn’t care about getting words right.
It makes me wonder how she fits in her head the truth that Cole is a guy, and her sureness that anyone else’s truth isn’t worth considering.
“So think about what you’re doing.” Kendra pivots, shifting her weight. “Because you’re just gonna make our whole town look bad.”
She takes her first step away.
“You’re right,” I say.
She stops and looks back.
“Maybe I don’t have boobs compared to someone like you,” I say.
Kendra looks less satisfied than pitying, like she’s softening. “We don’t all store our fat the way we wish we did.”
“Can we leave already?” Cole says. “I’m not covering for you this time when Mom asks why we’re late.”
She ignores him. This time she looks at my stomach, at the softness Uva told me never to be ashamed of, and my hips, wide enough to match Fresa’s even though I’m shorter.
And I don’t know what I’m doing next, but it’s like Cereza and Uva and Fresa all have their hands at my back, urging me on as though teaching me good posture or the beauty queen stride.
The sky is going to take me back anyway.
Why do I have to let Kendra and Royce and everyone like them make me small anymore?
What do I have to lose?
“But at least I have an ass,” I say.
A satisfied ohhhh rises up from the crowd, like they’re watching a fight and I just got in a good shot. It comes with the stifled, sudden laugh of half a dozen people, and the unstifled, shocked smile on Cole Kendall’s face.
I stride away, feeling everyone’s eyes on my back, and for once, it makes me stand up straighter.
It also leaves a deeper, weirder fluttery feeling on my skin, like the time I got heat exhaustion.
As soon as I’m out of sight of the crowd, I duck behind the Space Bar and lift up my shirt.
The second I see my stomach, I am breathless, air shuddering in my throat.
The patch of stardust is smaller.
More of my skin is skin instead of glimmering light.
Maybe Miss Meteor isn’t just something I have to do before I turn back to stardust.
Maybe it’s something that can save me from turning back.
Chicky
I BARELY SLEEP at all, but I still manage to stay in bed too late.
“No, no, no, no!” comes Cereza’s voice through my open window, followed by a scream (Lita) and a metallic crash (Uva’s unicycle?). But I don’t actually throw off the blankets until the neighbors’ car alarm starts going off.
I can’t believe they started without me.
The scene in the yard is worse than I imagined it. I squint into the too-bright morning, my plaid boy’s pajama pants and black T-shirt the exact wrong uniform for the relentless desert heat.
Lita is disengaging herself from an upended, yes, unicycle, which has somehow made its way beneath Mr. Miller’s minivan. Uva hovers worriedly, although whether she’s more concerned for Lita or the precious one-wheeled death trap that won her crowd favorite four years ago is not immediately clear.
“Sorry, Mr. Miller!” Cereza calls, flashing the same grin she uses at the diner when Fresa burns someone’s grilled cheese con nopal.
“You girls practicing for the pageant?” he asks, his scowl gone in the face of Reza’s perfect-Mexican-daughter radiance. With the press of a button, the incessant honking of the alarm mercifully ceases.
“More like practicing for having wrinkles before I’m twenty,” Fresa mutters, stalking over to untangle a glittery purple ribbon from the van’s rearview mirror. Even angry, she wields it like the girl that, in an American flag swimsuit and white leather cowboy boots with fringe, won second runner-up in the Forty-Ninth-Annual Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.