I set a spoon into the filling bowl. I would usually just do it with clean hands, but a beauty queen never gets filling under her nails.
Probably.
It seems like something Fresa would tell me.
“And I also owe a big thank you to the Quintanilla sisters,” I say, “who prepared me for this pageant by giving me perfect posture, a high tolerance for swallowing Vaseline, and a deeper acquaintance with duct tape than I ever wanted.”
This laugh is more scattered, less even.
More real.
They did not expect me to make them laugh. I didn’t either.
This is it. I can feel it humming along my body, the opposite of the prickling feeling I get before more stardust appears.
This is it, the feeling of when I’m maybe winning. This is what I have to do to save myself.
I have to grab hold of this pageant.
I have to grab hold of this town and make them look at me.
“If I’m walking a little funny, that last part’s why,” I say.
The laugh this time is so loud I feel it echoing off the sky. I catch Cole laughing, the same kind of sudden, open-mouth surprised laugh as when I asked him what trip he was packing for.
I can’t believe it either.
I spoon the filling in. “If this seems hard when you start out, don’t worry, you’ll get it with enough practice.” I spread masa over the corn husk. “After the first five thousand or so, it’s a breeze.”
The laugh now is almost affectionate, like I’m a strange-but-still-loved daughter.
But out from the laughter, I hear a hard, shouted word.
It’s a word that lands me back on the floor of the boys’ locker room.
It’s the word Royce and his friends shouted at me the Halloween I dared to show up at school dressed up as Miss Meteor, with my cheap tiara and polyester sash and pageant smile, pretending I was a future beauty queen because back then, I still believed I could be.
It’s the word that feels like plastic teeth tangling in my hair, like the plastic headband Royce and his friends put in place of the tiara. It had two antennae, the glittery foam balls on the end bouncing in time with how I was shaking.
It’s a word Cole didn’t hear yelled at me, because he wasn’t allowed in the boys’ locker room. It’s a word I never got to tell Chicky about, because it happened around the time we stopped telling each other big things.
It’s a word that means both what everyone thinks of me as a brown-skinned girl, and what they would think of me if they knew how much I was made of the stars.
Alien.
The audience’s laughter fades, everyone looking around for the source of the word.
“They think they can come here, live here, take our jobs, and we’re just gonna let them?” a man from the back yells. “Go back home.”
Every friend I have in the audience rushes toward this man.
He is not a man with a hat made of aluminum foil, or a beard soaked in cheap whiskey from our liquor store.
He wears neat, nice clothes. He is neither young enough nor old enough for everyone to chalk his words up to age or lack of it. He has a head of hair as full and well-styled as the judges’.
But he does not wear the judges’ smiles.
I do not know this man. He is not from Meteor. But I can tell from looking at him that he is the kind of man everyone listens to.
He is a Jack Bradley kind of man, the kind of man Royce will probably grow up to be.
“She’s an alien,” he shouts as the town security volunteers escort him out of the pageant grounds, my friends following behind. “You’re an alien,” he shouts, looking right at me before they shove him toward the exit.
And because every friend I have in Meteor is out of their seat, moving to push him out of this event, there is no one I can look at.
Not Bruja Lupe. Not Chicky. Not the Quintanilla sisters. Not Junior. Not Cole.
The clouds have wisped away, and now the sun is as bright as a spotlight on the outdoor stage. It’s too bright to find any of them.
This man, the kind of man people listen to, has just called me an alien in front of the entire Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.
But I don’t yell after him.
Because he is right.
In the language of this world, I am an alien. The star-stuff in my body makes me not of this planet, even though this planet is where I have lived my whole life as a girl.
And in the language of men like this, I am an alien, his word for brown-skinned girls who may or may not have been born here.
Both ways, the meaning is the same. I am a girl who does not belong in Meteor, New Mexico. I am neither enough of Earth nor enough of this country. Alien. A girl as brown as the desert and as odd as fallen stardust.
I lift my hands away from the half-finished tamale.
I can feel new trails of stardust waiting under my skin.
If I stay, it will come to the surface, showing up on my bare legs.
I have already lost.
Spreading my fluffy skirt in both my hands, I curtsy. I curtsy, not for the man who called me an alien. Not for Royce Bradley and his friends, who first burned that word into my brain. Not for the gringos who hate us.
I curtsy for Bruja Lupe, and the Quintanillas, and the Corteses, and Cole, and Buzz and Edna, and Dolores, and everyone else who has ever been on my side.
The crowd stills.
I curtsy, deep as Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. Because losing Miss Meteor will probably be my last act on this planet, and I am at least going to make it a good exit.
I leave the little table and the corn husks behind, my petticoat fluffing up as I descend the steps from the stage.
When I get to the Meteor Meteorite Museum, Buzz is already there to let me in, like he knew I was coming. Like he knew where I’d go.
I stand in front of the rock that brought me and Bruja Lupe here in the first place.
Can I? I ask without speaking.
A vein of iron winks through the rock, its way of saying yes.
I put my arms around it, my cheek against its rough surface.
In the air-conditioned chill of the Meteor Meteorite Museum, the grain of the rock is almost warm. I close my eyes and understand that maybe this is how human beings feel when they greet old friends.
Maybe I have lost the Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.
Maybe I lost it the moment that man threw a word at me that will stick to my body.
But this—not that word, but this, my brown arms around this piece of the sky—is who I am.
This is mine.
A ribbon of light flashes bright enough that I can see it behind my eyelids.
I open my eyes to streams of silver and gold.
The light swirls and pulses within the rock, brightening and darkening like the rhythm of a heartbeat.
All the star-stuff held in this rock is coming to life, just for this one moment. Even as it dulls and fades, I hold on, because this rock is as much my family as Bruja Lupe.
It glows to tell me that I still have light in me.
It is reminding me of everything I am made of as I say goodbye.
Chicky
AT THE FIFTIETH-ANNUAL Cornhole Championship, the stands fill by noon. I’ve been here for two hours already, too restless and nervous to stay home, and too reviled by this town to wander its streets.
My sisters shove their way in beside me just as the church bells chime, to the spaces I saved for them with my bag and sweatshirt.