“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 broke 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.
I’m quiet long enough that Cereza flashes me a look.
“I mean it,” she says. “You breathe a word to her, I’ll deny this whole conversation.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not that.”
“Then why do you look even more worried than you did a minute ago?”
Because I dragged so many people into what was just a stupid dream I had to try for.
Because, for a minute, it seemed like that stupid dream might save me.
Because whatever patch of my skin I got back, I can already feel stardust closing over it.
“Because if girls like us can’t even win when they’re as good as Fresa,” I say, “I have no chance.”
“Don’t throw in your contestant number yet.” Cereza settles back into watching the movie. “You shouldn’t give up, because we’re not giving up on you.”
Chicky
THE STREETS OF Meteor look different when you’re a coward and a traitor.
I walk them anyway, the pavement unfriendly beneath my sneakers. I can’t go home. I can’t go to the diner. I can’t go to Lita’s—not that I ever could. I can’t go anywhere I’ll have to look into the eyes of someone who knows me.
Not after shrinking down into nothing in front of Royce and Kendra again.
As I walk aimlessly, the tin siding of mobile homes catching the afternoon sun, I can practically hear the gossip spreading from the telltale heart of town—the cornhole practice field. They’ll talk about how Loca Lita Perez took out Cole Kendall doing something totally batty and weird.
They’ll say what a shame it is, that the Meteor cornhole winning streak is over after just one year thanks to Lita and those Quintanilla girls.
They’ll talk about boys being boys whenever anyone mentions Royce’s wayward beanbag, just like they do every time. The blatant bullying. The complete refusal to acknowledge the humanity of anyone not like him. The joy he seems to get from making people feel small and weak and bad.
There are never consequences for him, so why would he stop? It occurs to me as I mourn the dying possibility of taking him down for good that Royce wouldn’t be so scary if everyone in this town wasn’t so predisposed to congratulate him.