“What if I have a proposition for you?” he asks in a voice of a 1950s private investigator.
Not fair. He’s speaking the language he knows gets to me, the language of Bruja Lupe’s old movies.
“What kind of proposition?” I ask. I can’t not ask.
“You get back in the pageant”—he pauses, like he’s still considering—“I’ll try out for the cornhole team.”
“What?” I ask. “Why would you do that to yourself? Those guys are jerks. They call you Picasso behind your back.”
“I know that. I also know they’re too stupid to realize I take it as a compliment.”
I appreciate what he’s trying to do. Chicky’s told me how good he is, from all those bored hours throwing beanbags into his stunningly painted cornhole boards. If he makes the team, Meteor Central High has a shot at the championship again. It might make everyone hate me and the Quintanillas a little less.
But it’s not worth Junior having to deal with Royce and the whole team.
“To my knowledge, there’s only one guy on the team you can stand, and he’s out for the season,” I say. “So why would you subject yourself to the rest of them?”
“Why are you subjecting yourself to this pageant?” Junior asks.
“Because I wanted it a long time ago, and I thought I could never have it. Don’t try to pretend your dream is sinking a trampoline shot through a bunched target.”
“Wow.” He laughs. “Somebody’s been getting Kendall to school her.”
“Honestly, I didn’t even try,” I say. “You’re around him long enough, you just start picking it up. You can’t help it.”
Junior stands near the tiny gift shop (two postcard racks, plaster models of the rock, a shelf of T-shirts, a few little-green-men stuffed animals).
“Come on,” he says. “There’s not a little part of you that likes the idea of shaking things up? That’s not even a tiny piece of you entering?”
I try not to smile.
I try not to notice the vein of silver winking through the space rock, telling me that yes, of course it is. Of course, even years ago, I loved the thought of being a brown girl with baby fat, taking a crown that almost always goes to thin-limbed blondes with perfect, printer-paper-white teeth.
“If you’re back in,” Junior says, “then I’m in.”
Junior doesn’t even know about the stardust. But I do. And I know he’s right. If I drop out now, that’s how I’ll leave this planet, as a girl who got scared off.
“I’m in,” I say.
Chicky
“SELENA’S DINER SHUTDOWN: Day Three.” Uva has taken to narrating our lives. It would be so much more irritating if Fresa didn’t hate it so much.
“Tense, hopeful, the Quintanilla sisters make their way across town to the Meteor Central High field—the site of the recent town incident between a coven of teen witches and a sad-eyed teen athlete with a heart of gold . . .”
Fresa groans, right on time.
“Is it a paranormal story or a newscast?” Cereza snaps. “Make up your mind!”
“Or, and this is a really out there suggestion: Just stop it. Forever.”
“Can we focus, please?” I ask, butterflies in my stomach. Lita wouldn’t tell me how she got Junior to agree to try out, just that we all needed to be there. At this point, what could I do but show up? It’s not like things can get worse.
Right?
“The field looms in the distance,” Uva says, ignoring all of us, her eyes a little manic after an unprecedented three days without cleaning the fryer. “The intrepid young women make their way through the fog. Hopeful . . .”
“You already said hopeful,” Cereza cuts in.
“Shut up, all of you,” I say. “We’re here.”
But we do feel a little like an intrepid coven as we approach.
“Well look who it is,” says Kendra Kendall as we draw closer to the center of the field. “The misfit squad, here to join the assassin who cut my brother down in his prime.” Her ire is directed at Lita, who shrinks a little beneath the weight of her disapproval, but she makes her way over to us nonetheless.
“We’re here to . . . ,” Lita says, quietly at first, but Junior elbows her and she stands up a little straighter. “I’m here to propose a covenant.”
“Which one?” Royce asks with a smirk. “Africa? Antarctica? Europe?” His buddies chuckle, and Kendra tosses her hair.
It takes me a while to understand, but when it clicks I forget to be nervous. Just for a second. “Not continent, are you serious? A covenant.”
“That’s, like, when a relationship is unhealthy because the people can’t do things apart,” says one of Kendra’s sycophants. “I heard about it on Dr. Phil.”
The only person who laughs is Cole, sitting on the sidelines in his sling. “Co-ve-nant,” he recites, like he’s reading from the dictionary. “An agreement. To agree, especially by lease, deed, or other legal contract.” He has to be here, it’s part of his Advanced Gym grade, but he doesn’t seem to fit in quite as well as he did before he started hanging out with us.
And he doesn’t look at Kendra once.
Royce blinks at him, the rest of his face still troublingly blank.
“It means she has a deal to offer you, Royce,” Cole says, humor and derision fighting for dominance in his tone. When he thinks no one’s looking, he winks at Lita.
“Well, fuck,” says Royce. “Why didn’t you just say that?”
“The deal is this,” Lita says, gesturing Junior forward. “If he can shoot as well as Cole, you guys quit telling people to avoid the diner and let him play with you in the final match.”
It’s my turn to stand up straighter. We can’t go back in time and get my family the meet and greet back, but we can get the social boycott lifted, and that’ll be a start.
This time, it’s the whole team that laughs.
“What, Picasso over here?” Royce asks. “Sorry, but there are no points awarded for coloring inside the lines in this sport.”
My vision goes slightly red, and I object so strongly to the description of cornhole as a sport that my knees almost stop shaking, but Junior steps in front of me, which is probably good.
“Laugh all you want,” he says. “But I’ll be the one laughing when I beat you out for MVP.”
Something about a broad-shouldered, traditionally handsome male does what all the reasoning in the world couldn’t do coming from Lita. The team stands up, shoulder to shoulder, and honestly, they look way more intimidating than I’d like them to.
“Fine,” Royce says, the spokesperson for everyone but Cole, who remains seated. “If you can sink twenty bags without missing, you’re in.”
It’s an absurd number, way more than they’d ever ask during an actual tryout, but Junior clenches his jaw. For the five-hundredth time since they showed up at my door, I wonder how Lita convinced him to participate.
“Why not make it thirty,” he says, like he’s not worried at all, and I want to dig a hole in the field and climb inside, come out when this has all been over for fifty years.