It feels good for him to hold me that tight. Or it would feel good if I wasn’t so worried about how Kendra is still a giant like everyone else and I’m still a mushroom.
“You lost your right to review my life a long time ago,” Cole says. “But if you had it, you gave it up the minute you messed with a family’s business. That’s how they make a living, Kendra. I’d think you of all people . . .”
He stops. Another slow breath. And even though I don’t know what words he almost just said, I think of the red-lettered bills in the Kendalls’ kitchen drawer.
Kendra should know better.
“Small towns talk.” Kendra gives a delicate shrug. “I might have said a few things. What everyone did with them isn’t my fault.”
“You got in everyone’s head. It’s what you do.”
Kendra tosses her curling-iron curls, and I can see the gesture covering up a flinch.
A flinch that makes her and Cole into a sister and brother who look more alike than I’ve ever noticed.
“I have done nothing but support you, Cole,” she says.
“Your medal’s in the mail,” Cole says. “You don’t get a free pass on all the other shit you do to try to make everyone around you smaller than you.”
Smaller than you.
I wonder if he’s ever been on the floor, too, feeling as small as a mushroom.
“You can’t keep using me, Kendra,” Cole says. “I’m not some prop to make your point. I’m not here to make your life a better story.”
The feeling of Cole’s arm around my waist drifts, like we are touching each other underwater.
“You have no idea what I do for you,” Kendra says. “Do you know how many times I’ve explained who you are to anyone who asks? For like three years I was the Cole encyclopedia. And any time anyone asked, I always answered so you didn’t have to.”
“Yeah, you answered in the same breath you were calling someone else a dyke,” Cole said. “Why am I the exception, Kendra? How the hell would you treat me if I wasn’t your brother?”
I couldn’t talk right now if I wanted to.
He just said it. He actually said the thing I’ve been wondering about Kendra and Cole for years.
How would you treat me if I wasn’t your brother?
Kendra looks away, pursing her lips. I wish I didn’t see the shininess in her eyes, but I do.
“You wanna talk to everyone about me so I won’t,” Cole says.
“Because every time you make a joke about the kind of stuff you do, it just makes people uncomfortable,” Kendra says.
“The kind of stuff I do?” he asks. “You mean like packing?” He hits the last word as loudly as if he were making an announcement to the room. “Everybody hear that?” Now he really is. “Packing. We’re talking about packing.”
He almost sings out the word, and I try not to laugh. Especially not now that I know what it means.
It has nothing to do with going on a trip.
Looking it up left my cheeks flushed enough that Bruja Lupe asked what I was doing. I made something up about a school project on desert moths and then went to take a shower.
“You don’t have to do this,” Kendra says, still flinching. “No one would know. You look normal.”
Cole tenses. “Normal.”
“It’s like you want everyone to know.”
“Maybe I do!” He’s almost yelling now. If it weren’t for the fact that everyone has to yell their conversations at a party this loud, everyone would be staring. “Maybe I’m sick of trying to be exactly what this town wants me to be.” Then he sighs, and his voice gets softer. “Maybe I even want to help make it easier for someone else to be who they are too.”
Kendra’s mouth pauses half open, not shocked, but thinking, like she hasn’t decided whether she’s gonna say anything back.
Then she does, her voice a whisper. “But why do you want to throw it in everyone’s face?”
“Why do you care if I do?” Cole asks, matching her whisper.
“Because you’re my brother, and I don’t want the world messing with you, okay?” Kendra says.
Not whispering. Like the words got loose and broke out of her.
“And your new friends aren’t helping.” Kendra’s eyes flash to mine, just for a second, before going back to her brother. “Is this what you want? For people to think you’re nothing? Because that’s what they will think if you spend all your time with the rejects.”
Even in the noise of the party, the silence between Cole and Kendra is so sharp I feel like if I reached between them I’d cut my hand on it.
“My friends are only rejects because people like you and your friends decided you get to do the rejecting,” Cole says.
In the second stretch of silence I see a glint of something in Kendra’s meanness. What I saw a little of in the laundry room gets clearer.
Kendra was never as awful to me as she was to Chicky, not before this week. And it’s not because I am one more pageant contestant she has to step over to claim her title.
Kendra Kendall hates me because she thinks I am dragging her brother down. And now that I’ve been putting all my strangeness and otherness on display, now that Cole has become just as much Team Quintanilla-Perez as he is Team Kendall, she’s afraid it will come off on him like glitter.
Royce’s voice breaks in.
“Kendall,” he calls after Cole. The vacuum-cleaner undertone is mostly but not all gone.
Cole tips his head back and groans, like you do when the bell at the end of the day rings but the teacher wants you to stay put for just a few minutes until you get through this section.
“You’re really gonna blow us all off?” Royce catches up, and I realize it’s not just me and Cole. Chicky and Junior are here now too. Royce looks at them. “For Picasso and Ring Pop”—then at me—“and this bitch?”
“I’m not a bitch,” I say.
Everyone looks at me.
Cole pauses, mouth open, like he was about to say something before I did.
The words I couldn’t say on the floor of the locker room are stuck in my throat.
Royce and his friends ripped my fake crown off my head, some of my hair coming with it.
They put those stupid antennae on me.
They yelled “Alien, alien, alien” at me because of how weird, how brown, how other, I was to them. Because they thought it was funny, and because they thought it would break me down.
But I won’t wear any of it tonight.
Maybe Cole and Chicky and Junior weren’t there the day it happened. But they’re here now, and having them here means that whatever words I say now, I’m not saying them alone on a locker room floor.
I look right at Royce. “I’m not an alien either,” I say. “Or whatever you wanna call me. And my friends are not whatever you wanna call them.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot your full title, didn’t I?” Royce fake bows, stumbling from all the beer. “Forgive me. Queen Alien Bitch.”
Cole shakes his head, almost smiling down at the carpet. And that look tells me he’s had it. He’s done. I don’t know if that just happened or he just now realized it, but he’s had enough.