She spins around.
“Kendra?” I ask.
Within a second, she recovers, and in the dark room I see her crossing her arms and straightening up.
“What do you want?” she asks.
I take a step into the room. “Are you okay?”
She shakes her head, which I know is supposed to be her clearing away the crying, but it looks like a no.
“You know, I was actually kind of impressed,” she says. “How you decided that jackass just wasn’t worth a response.”
I wobble in the space of the words.
I am officially drunk.
Well, check that off the list of Earth experiences.
I must be drunk.
Because it sounds like Kendra Kendall just complimented me.
Just in case I’m right, I say, “Thank you.”
“People are jerks,” she says, and even under her careless laugh I hear what’s left of her crying. “You know that.”
I can’t help laughing with her. “Yeah. I do.”
The laugh drains out of her. “Then why do you want Cole to be like you and Chicky?” she asks.
Her saying Chicky’s name the way she does, like a brand of clothing she would never be caught wearing, makes me want a throw a capful of detergent on Kendra’s dress. Sure, it wouldn’t do anything but pretreat any drink stains, but the thought of the sticky mess on that pretty patterned fabric is too satisfying not to revel in for a minute. For me. For Chicky. For everyone like us.
“Think about if you really want him to be the same kind of loser as you,” Kendra says.
I’m not drunk enough not to get it.
Hanging around with a girl like me makes things harder for a guy like Cole.
That word rings back through my head.
Alien. Alien. Alien . . .
Kendra eyes me in a way that makes me feel as small as a postage stamp. “Drink some water.” She pushes me out the laundry room door. “You look awful.”
The world is still blurry and shiny and wobbly as I wander back toward the living room.
“You seem . . . happy,” Royce Bradley’s voice says.
I turn around to find the rest of Royce Bradley.
Royce Bradley, who drove Chicky further into the closet, and me into curling up in a ball on a locker room floor.
And the guy who, at this moment, thinks I look . . . happy?
“So you and Kendall, huh?” Royce asks.
“Huh?” I ask. I don’t mean to echo his last word, but I do.
“I’m just saying,” Royce says. “If you ever want a real man.”
A beer bottle rolls across the floor. I try to kick it at Royce’s feet but end up stumbling over it.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“What, do I need to give you an anatomy lesson?” Royce says.
I know where this is going, and I hate it already. Royce Bradley may the last person on this planet I would ever want an anatomy lesson from.
Royce puts his hand on my arm. It’s the exact place Cole has touched me probably twenty times. It’s the spot on my arm Chicky grabbed when we were scrambling into the back seat of Junior’s car. I want her grasp, and Cole’s touch, on that spot, not Royce’s.
But Royce’s grip is hard enough to bury the feeling of their hands.
My stomach tightens.
Alien.
Alien.
Alien.
Royce Bradley has no business with my body, and no business commenting on anyone else’s.
This body I’m in, this short, brown-skinned body, is mine. It’s mine the same way Cole’s body is his.
I live here, on this planet. Maybe it’s just for now. And maybe I’m made of star-stuff that flew here from light-years away, but I am a girl who stands in this space.
I am a girl with a body of my own, and three friends who showed me their hearts in the hollow of a crater.
And I am not letting Royce Bradley talk about any of them like this.
Whatever I had left in me to withstand being close to Royce, it’s burning up with every second his hand stays on me. And in this moment, I am done. With Royce and his friends thinking they can push around Chicky and Junior and me and everyone like us. With them thinking they can make the kind of jokes they make about Cole and still say they’re his friends.
“Let go of me, Royce,” I say, my voice steadier than it’s ever been with him.
Royce gives a grinning nod. “You know I have equipment Kendall doesn’t have.”
I grab his arm for leverage, as hard as he once grabbed mine, and I knee him right in his equipment.
The sound Royce makes is the same sound Bruja Lupe’s vacuum cleaner makes when I accidentally trip over the cord and cut the power.
He stumbles into a side table, but I don’t stay around to watch.
When I look up, Cole’s in the hallway between the door and the kitchen. He looks like he got there a second earlier, a what-just-happened look on his face. I sink into the relief of knowing he didn’t hear Royce talking.
On the way to the doorway, I trip, because the world is still blurry and nothing quite stays where it is. I don’t so much fall as melt toward the ground. First I try to stay up and then I don’t; the carpet looks nice, and I think I’d like to lie down on it to see how it feels.
From here, the lights set into the ceiling look like tiny suns. My classmates stepping around me are giants, and I am a tiny mushroom person looking up at them. I laugh at all of it, light-bulb suns and giants and a mushroom girl growing out of the carpet, and Royce still doubled over, which right now feels like the funniest thing in the world.
Just as I’m considering whether to flail my limbs and make a carpet angel—I’ve always wanted to make a snow angel, but we don’t get any snow here—I feel Cole’s hand on my arm. The light way his grip lands, the warmth of it, blots out the memory of Royce grabbing onto me.
“Are you okay?” Cole crouches next to me. “I was looking around for you.”
“Just beauty queens and beauty shots,” I say. “Or something like that.”
He laughs, running a hand over his face like he’s trying to wake himself up. “Oh, they’re gonna kill me. They’re actually gonna kill me.”
“The beauty queens?” I ask.
“Chicky’s sisters.”
“No, they won’t, they’re nice,” I say. “They’re nicer than everyone thinks.”
“Nice goes out the window during pageant week.” Cole offers me his hand. “You know that by now.”
I’m not done with my carpet angel, but I let him help me up before my classmates trip over my wings.
I’m still stumbling, so Cole gets me to lean on him.
“We have got to stop meeting like this,” he says.
I may be blurry with those three shots, but I still laugh, catching the joke, the memory of me and Cereza pulling him up after I crashed into him.
Kendra pauses next to us. “Wow.”
Cole sighs. “Can we forgo your running commentary for once?”
“Just saying”—she raises her cup like she’s toasting us—“classy girl you’ve got there.”
Whatever moment of understanding we had a few minutes ago, apparently Kendra threw it down the laundry room sink.
“You know what?” Cole holds onto me tighter, but I don’t think he knows he’s doing it.