And he knows it.
I call out to Bruja Lupe in the living room.
“Yes?” she answers back.
“Cole Kendall’s in my room, and I’m gonna go out the window with him.”
“Why don’t you both just use the door?”
When we get outside, Junior is standing in front of his mother’s car.
I can tell how everything turned out from the look on his face.
“You won?” I ask.
Junior doesn’t bother to answer; his proud smile says everything. And I don’t wait for an answer before I jump up and down shrieking, because this, at least this, has gone right.
Chicky steps out from the other side of the car.
The sight of her stops me cold.
Chicky, the friend who became a not-friend, is here at my house. In front of Cole Kendall, the boy this town loves so much I cannot believe he’ll even be seen with me. In front of Junior, Meteor town hero of tonight and probably forever. There will be years of stories about the brilliant artist whose long-secret talent for cornhole saved Meteor’s chance at the championship title.
“We are going on a caper,” Chicky says, a note of intrigue in her voice.
I bristle at the word. This is not us.
We don’t do this anymore.
“I’m not in the mood,” I say.
“You haven’t even heard about the caper.”
“I don’t want to go on a caper.”
“Will you let me at least describe the caper?”
“Stop saying caper!”
“You just said it too!”
The sound of our bickering, how ridiculous we are, makes us both crack a smile.
I can’t help it.
She can’t help it.
If the amount of unstardusted skin I have left is any indication, if how it’s speeding down my legs is any indication, I probably only have a handful of nights left in my girl body.
I don’t want to spend this one putting distance between me and Chicky Quintanilla.
“Fine.” I cross my arms. “What kind of caper?”
Chicky looks at the three of us. “We’re gonna make sure all those tourists and conspiracy theorists really have something to talk about.”
Junior pulls a yellow legal pad out of the front seat. “I’ve already drawn up a design.”
He shows me a page of intricate flower-like arcs and curves.
It’s a pattern I recognize.
It’s one I flashed at Kendra Kendall and half the town.
“Is that . . . from my bra?” I ask.
Junior points a thumb at Cole. “He remembered it perfectly. He described it in detail.”
Cole looks down at his shoes. “Thanks for that.”
“Anytime,” Junior says.
“We’ve decided to give everyone definitive proof of life elsewhere in the universe,” Chicky says. “For once, we decide what the rumor mill says.”
I look at Chicky, searching for some sign that she feels obligated to be nice to me. I search her face for some pinch in her smile that tells me she wishes she weren’t with me in front of two of the boys who matter most in this town.
“So what’s it gonna be?” Chicky asks in her best mafia don voice. “You in or out?”
The impression is so perfect, such a precise copy of a fine-suited man in a 1940s restaurant corner booth, that I say, “I’m in,” before I can think about it.
All of us climb into the car, and Junior drives away from the lights of Meteor, New Mexico.
I’m glad I’m in the back seat. It gives me a better view of Junior as he drives and Chicky as she sits in the front passenger seat next to him, both of them laughing as they argue about which static-fuzzed radio station to tune into.
They’re both realizing something their hearts have known for a long time.
I’m still thinking about them, what it must feel like to discover that feeling between you and someone else. Which is why I’m not expecting it when Junior glances in the rearview, catches my eye, and says, “So what’s with all the glitter?”
“Junior!” Chicky and Cole both say at the same time.
“What?” He shrugs at them both, without apology. “Like you both weren’t wondering too.”
I sink down in the seat thinking about how often they’ve noticed bands of stardust winking between my shirt and my jeans. Or if they can see it now, through my pajamas.
Chicky and Cole are actively trying not to look at me. So actively that it somehow feels more intense than if they were staring.
Junior keeps driving, patient that I’ll answer eventually.
So I do the only kind of lying I know how to do.
Lying without really lying.
“It’s been in me forever,” I say. “I just used to be better at hiding it.”
“Does it mean something bad?” Chicky asks.
Junior glances over at her. “Can we rephrase that to sound less judgmental?”
“Can you forget your mom’s articles about communication for one minute?” Even saying this, she sounds like she’s flirting with him. For a second, it lets me think about them again instead of the stardust.
But only for a second.
Now Cole looks at me. “Are you okay?”
My heart contracts. My skin feels hot, like the stardust on me wants me to explain it. But I can’t. Not right now. Because Junior has just won the Cornhole Championship for Meteor. Because Chicky and I are almost friends. Because whenever Chicky looks at Junior she can’t help smiling. Because Cole seems like he can actually be himself around the three of us, instead of whoever Royce and his friends and this whole town decide he has to be.
There is something perfect about the four of us in this car together, right now, on this night. And maybe it’s selfish, but I want to take it with me, exactly like it is. I don’t want to ruin it with explaining.
I look at Cole, knowing I have to tell the biggest lie I’ll ever tell this boy.
And I have to say it in front of my once best friend and the boy she’s just figuring out has her heart.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m okay. Just weird.”
I don’t know if I’m talking about me or the stardust, but before I can figure it out, Junior says, “We like you weird.”
“And you’re in a car with some of the weirdest residents of Meteor,” Chicky says. “Except maybe Cole.”
“Yeah,” Cole says, “picture of Meteor normalcy, right here.”
Junior merges onto the highway.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“To where Meteor would’ve been founded if it weren’t for uncertainty about geological integrity,” Cole says.
“And if the government hadn’t cordoned it off for a decade of investigation,” Junior says.
I lean forward to Chicky in the front seat. “We’re going to the crater?”
The crater. The place where the stuff I’m made of first touched this planet.
Junior turns off the highway onto a dark dirt road and parks the car as close as he can get it to that hollow the meteor left in the Earth.
Then we’re off in the night air, the stars thick above us. They’re distant as dreams and close as relatives. They’re as much mine as I am theirs. They’re mirrors of my body and heart.