The sheet has been up for days, Junior refusing to let anyone near it. But apparently tonight, at last, is the night.
“I wanted you to see it first,” he says, ducking his head and smiling.
He’s nervous, I realize, and it makes my heart flutter. “What, no dish towel blindfold?”
“Sorry, no time,” he says. “Are you ready?”
I feel like I’m answering two questions when I say: “So ready.”
He pulls a corner of the sheet, and it falls to the ground as if in slow motion, revealing Junior’s masterpiece inch by inch.
This time, I can’t help it, my eyes fill with tears that spill over, and I’m sniffling into my apron. It’s Selena, of course, in her iconic purple, glittery jumpsuit. But in Junior’s rendition, she’s astride a rocket ship like it’s a bull. Above her hang planets close enough to pluck from the sky, swirls of stars and galaxies that remind me of the rock pattern we left in the crater. Below is the New Mexico desert at sunset, almost just as it looks outside the window right now.
Selena’s Diner, it says across the top, and along the bottom: Welcome Home.
“So, you hate it, right? It’s too kitschy, too cheesy, too . . .”
“Too perfect,” I interrupt, snaking an arm around his waist and pulling him into a half hug. “Junior. It’s . . . everything. Thank you.”
“Chicky,” he says, turning me to face him. “You know what else would be perfect?”
“What?” I ask, sniffing as the last of my summer storm of tears dry up.
“If you’d let me take you to the post-pageant party tonight.” He clears his throat. “Like, as a date.”
“I wish I could,” I say, that pang from earlier back with a vengeance. Because I do wish I could go with him. I honestly do. “But I should come back after the announcement. Help out. My family needs—”
“Go,” says a voice from behind me, and Fresa is standing there with her order booklet, looking flushed but exhilarated, her familiar scowl missing for once.
“I can’t,” I say. “There’s so much to do.”
“I’ll cover for you,” Fresa says, and my jaw drops. “What, bitch?” she says. “Go before I change my mind.”
“You heard the boss lady,” Dad says, and Mom smiles.
“We’re doing this?” I ask Junior, and he smiles too. Brighter than every star that inspired his mural. His perfect, perfect mural.
“We’re doing this.”
I shrug off my apron but leave the hat to cover my sweaty hair.
“Thanks, guys,” I say. “I guess we’re going.”
“Wait, not like that you’re not!” Fresa says, horrified by my shorts and Converse without socks and the grease-splattered Selena’s cap.
“It’s okay,” Junior says. “I took the liberty of bringing an accessory.”
Jewelry? I wonder, my heart sinking just a little. I’m not really a jewelry kind of girl, and I thought he knew that. I thought he knew everything about me. I was kind of betting on it.
What if I was wrong?
But Junior’s eyes sparkle with mischief as he digs into his pocket to pull out a crinkling plastic wrapper, and I’m already laughing, my heart right back in my throat, all dipping forgotten.
“I figured it was about time to take back the Ring Pop,” he says, opening the package to reveal the biggest one I’ve ever seen, in every color of the rainbow. “We’ve deprived ourselves long enough.”
My family clearly doesn’t know what’s going on, but they can tell it’s a moment, because they’re as quiet as they’ve ever been while Junior slides the plastic ring onto my middle finger. “There,” he says, surveying my outfit with satisfaction. “Perfect.”
“That’s adorable,” Fresa says, like it’s anything but. “And you’re still not going to the evening gown competition like . . .”
Mom and Dad clap their hands over her mouth at the same time, smiling at me as she flails between them.
Junior takes my hand, and I’ve never cared less about what I’m wearing. I’m Chicky Quintanilla, reigning beer pong queen, the first openly pansexual girl in Meteor’s history. So what if I’m not wearing the right costume? I’m dressed as myself.
The boy with his hand in mine thinks that girl is pretty great, and better than that, so do I.
“Watch me,” I say to my silenced sister, throwing a wink at the lot of them before pulling Junior out the door into the purple dusk.
Lita
I DON’T HAVE the nerve to ask if Cole is actually doing what I think he’s doing, if he’s really considering raiding his family’s old dresses.
If Kendra catches him, I’ll be lucky if I ever see him again, because Kendra might actually kill him.
And then me.
“Maybe we should have gone over there?” I ask Uva.
“Behind enemy lines?” Uva says. “Have you no self-preservation instinct?”
Like with all the Quintanilla sisters, there’s more warmth behind the words than the words themselves suggest.
They talk to me a little like they talk to each other.
“Uva?” I ask as we walk to the pageant grounds.
“Lita?”
I think about the things Cole was trying to tell me the night he held me in the middle of the road.
“Are we friends?” I ask Uva.
She laughs. “Honey, I have helped in a plot to rhinestone-adorn your ass. I think we can safely say yes, we are friends.”
It’s a feeling like drinking Bruja Lupe’s manzanilla tea on the coldest nights in Meteor.
Cole was right.
I have him.
I have Junior.
I have Uva and Cereza and Fresa.
I have Chicky.
Chicky and I have each other, in a way we maybe never did before.
I will have them, a little bit, even when the sky takes me. I will take a little of them with me.
No matter what happens tonight, there’s still a chance for me to walk off that stage less lonely than when I first walked onto it.
Cole is waiting for us at the outer edge of the curtain.
“I’m gonna keep watch.” Uva looks around, ready to guard us from prying contestants, especially the one contestant who would probably get me out there in the Meteor Central High mascot suit if she could. (The Fighting Space Rocks, an inexplicable mascot considering there is only one Space Rock, and that rock wouldn’t fight anyone.)
Cole crouches, setting down an old dress box, the kind lined with tissue paper. I kneel across from him.
“It’ll probably go down to your shoes, but I think it’ll work.” He opens the lid and pulls out the dress.
Strapless. Blue. A fabric that’s the thinnest velvet I could ever imagine.
“First question,” Cole asks. “Do you like it? Or at least like it enough to wear it for the next few hours?”
I can’t answer him. This dress is spinning its own spell, even deeper than the ring of fellow contestants in that borrowed bedroom.
Because this dress looks like the sky. The bodice is the blue of almost-night over Meteor. The color darkens as it runs down the skirt, to the deep blue of the midnight sky above the crater.