“I accept your challenge,” he says formally, reaching up to help me down off the chair. I ignore his hand, hopping down to land hard on both feet in front of him.
“Fill ’em up.”
Lita
IT IS THE happiest and saddest thing all at once, Chicky and I having each other back. It’s like the perfect fall weather day in Meteor, the one we only get once or twice in October, the one you have to make the most of because it never lasts before it gets hot again or cold for the winter.
Only worse. About one-thousand, eight-hundred, twenty-five times worse.
Because I’ve missed her in a way I had to ignore for every cactus birthday party, every time I’ve avoided Selena’s when she was on shift, every time I saw her in the hallways, towering over me and half the girls in our grade.
I’ve missed her, and she’s missed me, and we have each other back just in time for me to turn back into the stardust I used to be.
I push away the thought of my glimmering stomach and back. Tonight we are friends, and tonight I am on this Earth, and tonight Chicky told me something she’s been working up to for so long. Something that’s part of her, something that’s hers.
Everything I noticed but didn’t ask her about when we were younger. Her checking out a girl’s jean skirt or a guy’s hair. She’s claimed it. Even if people like Kendra have made it unsafe to declare it, she has claimed it.
It dulls the places in me that ache when I think about the years we lost.
So does seeing Chicky with Junior, pretending to focus on throwing a ball into red plastic cups.
Even when Meteor lets me go, she will have Junior. She will have the friendship that’s held between them for years, and the new thing growing out of it.
And she’ll have Cole, who will probably understand the things she just told me better than any other straight guy in Meteor.
My eyelids feel damp and scratchy thinking about asking him to do this for me, to be a brother to Chicky, because I won’t be here to be her fourth sister.
I should tell him about the stardust, about the sky taking me back. About how I had a chance if I had really done Miss Meteor right, but I lost it.
But as soon as I think of telling him about me vanishing into the night sky, my heart deflates, like the sad foil balloons they keep replacing around town, stars and Saturns and comets losing their helium and slumping toward the dirt.
I can feel him behind me, and I reach back for his hand. This feels like a world I will get lost in if I don’t hold onto him.
Then a breath of flowery perfume hits me at the same time a French-manicured hand grabs my arm.
Sara, the pageant contestant who wore her aunt’s vintage swimsuit.
She greets me with, “There you are!”
“Why are you talking to me?” I ask. “I’m the embarrassment of the Fiftieth-Anniversary Pageant.”
“What are you talking about?” she asks.
“Did you not hear about my talent?”
She blows air through her lips, a pfft sound. “I would watch that ten more times over bleach-blond Dorothy Gale over there.”
Her making fun of Kendra is so unexpected that I let her pull me out of the crowd in the living room and toward the hall.
We pass two boys from school yelling into each other’s faces.
“It’s Meteorite,” one says. “Just ask my dad.”
Even the festival signs don’t agree. Half say Meteor, half Meteorite. And nobody but me ever wants to talk about the science behind the debate. No one can agree whether the town is named for the meteor as it streaked through the sky, or the meteorite it became when it struck the Earth.
Even the census paperwork here is inconsistent; we have to combine the recorded populations of “Meteor, New Mexico” and “Meteorite, New Mexico” to figure out how many people actually live here.
Should I bring up the science with these two? Break up a fight, make conversation, and maybe even impress a fellow contestant all at once?
“Your dad just wants a run at mayor,” the second one says. “He’d call the town Hershey Bar if it helped him suck up to the city council.”
“There’s already a town called Hershey Bar, you dolt.”
“Dolt? Did you get that one from your dad too?”
Yeah, the science may be beyond these two and their blood alcohol levels. They look like they’re about to throw pretzel sticks at each other.
“Come on.” Sara pulls me along. “We’re late.”
“Late to what?” I ask.
She opens the second door on the left. “Nobody told you?” She leads me into a bedroom that smells like perfume and Aqua Net and newly varnished nails.
Seven or eight pageant girls sit on the jacket-covered bed and sofa cushions thrown on the floor. The light from the bedside lamp shows the glitter in their hair and on their eyelids.
“Is this some kind of a secret pageant event?” I ask.
“You could say that,” a girl with her hair in a messy bun says. She’s pouring from dark-glass bottles into shot glasses, so slowly that the different-color layers stay separate.
“Secret from the ringers, anyway,” another girl says, this one with nails painted like the night sky, silver glitter on deep-blue polish.
“What are you wearing?” a girl with hair bright as pennies asks. “Did someone bring you here against your will?”
“No, I wanted to.” I pull my pajama top closed over my tank top. “He just came in my bedroom window.”
“He?” Sara nudges my shoulder.
“You have a he?” another girl asks.
“The guy with the broken arm,” the one with the outer-space fingernails asks. “You all need to pay attention.”
“Wait,” I say. “After the talent competition, you all don’t think I’m . . .”
They blink at me.
“A loser?” I ask.
They chime in with a chorus of hell no and so you had stage fright, it happens to all of us and I bet the judges thought you were adorable.
“And now,” the redhead says, “we have a quorum.”
“A quorum for what?” I ask as she pulls me down onto a sofa cushion next to her.
“Ladies”—the redhead hands us each a shot—“I call to order this year’s gathering of the First Timers’ Club!”
“What?” I look at Sara.
“We’re making a new Miss Meteor tradition,” she says. “This pageant is so crowded with girls whose mothers or sisters or aunts ruled the competition that those of us who are the first in our families to enter are gathering together for a little liquid courage.”
“Now, you do not have to drink.” The girl with outer-space nails holds up an outer-space-polished finger. “Your participation is not mandatory. But your presence here is. You are hereby part of the sisterhood of unlikelies.”
A flutter inside me tells me that beauty queens doing shots in a borrowed bedroom is something forbidden, against the rules, like sneaking off school grounds at lunchtime to visit the rock.
But like sneaking off school grounds at lunchtime, it feels like a rule worth breaking. Between all of us contestants, this is so much like a spell that it lures me. It’s as magic as the sound of the few falling-leaf trees each November.