I breathe in the almost-midnight chill of the desert. We all do. We run down into the bowl of the crater, laughing and clutching at each other to keep one another from sliding down the dirt slope.
And we do it, that caper Chicky has us all out on. We throw a flashlight onto Junior’s drawing, and we pull small rocks from the edges of the crater.
When Cole reaches for a bigger one, I reach out to stop him. “You can’t do that. You’re hurt.”
“They’re rocks, not boulders,” he says. “And you really think I’m gonna miss this?”
So we all do it.
We move rocks, a few at a time, into arcing paths that reach out from the crater’s center. I thought it would look like petals, that everyone would recognize it as a flower pattern. But as we add more stones, it starts to look like a galaxy made of rocks.
That’s when I realize how much genius is in this caper.
The stones look like the whirls of galaxy arms.
Exactly the kind of sign that people on this planet would expect from otherworldly visitors.
After we set down the last handfuls of rock, Chicky and Junior flop down on the slope of the crater. They laugh and shove each other’s shoulders in a way that would look brotherly and sisterly if I didn’t know better.
I settle onto the ground a little ways away, far enough to let them feel alone, close enough that I can still wave to them like I’m sending greetings across a lake.
Cole stands over me. “Mind if I join you?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”
I am still getting used to having friends beyond cactuses and neighborhood pets.
Cole looks toward Chicky and Junior, who are nudging sand onto each other’s shoes.
“Giving them a minute alone?” he asks.
“That obvious?”
“To me, maybe. But not to them. I don’t think anything’s obvious to them at the moment.”
“Not even how they feel?”
“People are slow about that sometimes, even when they’re quick about everything else.”
He sits down next to me. I can feel the warmth of him on my left side, a break in the night air’s chill.
Cole looks out into the crater opening in front of us. “Don’t give up yet, okay?”
I try to place what he’s saying.
“The pageant,” he says.
After the swimsuit competition, I had a shot. But I ran out of the talent portion.
Now I have no chance.
“It’s gonna be Kendra or it’s gonna be that girl from Quemado,” I say.
“The blond chick in the American flag bikini?” Cole draws back. “No way. Fresa wore that exact same one, and better if you ask me.” He traces his hand through the fine dirt between us. “No, I think we really need to worry about”—he considers it—“tasteful green one-piece, Lady Macbeth monologue.”
“Oh please don’t tell Cereza that,” I say. “She was set on me doing Shakespeare.”
“Well, you kinda did.”
“You mean while hurtling toward you on a bike I could barely ride?”
“Most original staging of the death of Juliet in the history of New Mexico.” He puts his right hand to his chest. “It brought tears to my eyes.”
“It brought tears to your eyes because I gave you a concussion,” I say. “Okay, fine. What about the girl with the really bright-blue eyes?”
“Eh.” He shrugs. “She’s okay.”
“Okay? Her skin looks like it was poured out of the full-fat cream Mrs. Quintanilla stocks at the diner. Except she doesn’t have any fat on her.”
He looks at me. “Overrated.”
Overrated?
A blond white boy with this much height on me is calling a milk-skinned girl with that kind of body overrated?
“You know who I think has gotta be on the judges’ radar?” Cole asks. “Vintage two-piece with matching swim skirt.”
“The girl from Magdalena?” I ask. “Oh yeah, she’s good.”
“She could win this.”
“I hope so.” I’d like to see her win. Especially after hearing she borrowed the swimsuit from her aunt, who she calls her favorite person in the world. “But do girls that nice ever win?”
“Lita. She was dancing on pointe shoes while playing the violin. If she doesn’t place in the top five, the taste of the judges is beyond hope.” He picks up a handful of fine dirt and slowly lets the wind take it, like gravity stripping away stardust. “Don’t count yourself out either. The rhinestone Space Rock? I’ve got to hand it to Chicky’s sisters. Genius.”
“Girls like me don’t win.”
He brushes his hand on his jeans. “Girls like you?”
It’s not even just my height, or my baby fat, or my mediocre posture.
“Girls who don’t even call their mothers ‘mom,’” I say. “You and Kendra and your mom and your dad, you’re the kind of family this town wants. Not me and Bruja Lupe.”
Cole looks out onto the crater. He’s not watching Chicky and Junior try to stick little bits of sagebrush under each other’s shoelaces.
He’s looking into the dark in front of us.
His laugh is as light as the whisper of the stars, and almost as sad.
“My dad’s gone, Lita,” he says.
I stare at him, trying to get him to turn his head.
“What?”
“He left,” Cole says. “He’s not traveling for work in Helena or Phoenix or Albany. He left.”
The words drop and pull me down, like I’m falling into the crater.
It all falls together.
How Cole’s father can never seem to make his games.
How Cole sometimes mixes up what city his father is in on any given business trip.
The overdue bills stuffed into a drawer.
“So there’s your perfect family,” Cole says. “No one else in this town knows that except you, me, my sister, and my mom. And probably our pastor, but I don’t know. So in case you were still wondering if we were friends.”
“You didn’t have to tell me that for me to know we’re friends.”
“I know,” he says. “But I really had to tell someone, and I wanted it to be you.”
Friends. The word is still its own kind of music, and I let it cycle through my head until it makes a song.
I will miss this boy in a way that’s breaking through me, fast as a shooting star.
So I decide to say it, because why hold back now, when I don’t know how much more time I get on this tiny little planet?
“I’m gonna miss you, Cole,” I say.
He gives me a weird look, part question, part smile. “You’re not getting rid of me after graduation. You know that.”
I change the subject before I start thinking about it too hard.
“I see what you’re doing, by the way,” I say, and then nod toward Chicky and Junior. “So do they.”
“What am I doing?” he asks.
“Not letting your sister get away with it anymore.”
He doesn’t ask what it is. He knows. Everything he’s tried to give Kendra a pass for. Everything he’s let slide because she’s his sister. But he’s been slowly calling her on it, the way he’s been trying to with Royce for years.