Home > Miss Meteor

Miss Meteor
Author: Tehlor Kay Mejia


Lita


THIS IS THE first thing anyone will tell you about Meteor, New Mexico: it was named for a piece of iron and nickel that fell from the sky and cratered into the earth a few miles outside town.

This is the last thing I’ll ever tell you about me: I came here with it.

I don’t remember the moment I turned from star-stuff thrown off a meteor into a girl. But I guess that part’s not so strange. No one really remembers being born.

Some days, Bruja Lupe will almost—almost—admit that we came from the same star-sprinkled patch of sky. That we came here with that small but very overheated rock that fell through the atmosphere more than fifty years ago.

To everyone around Meteor, Bruja Lupe and I are mother and daughter.

And I am enough of a daughter to her to know that, at this moment, she is seething.

Our last appointment of the day is twenty-three minutes late.

A gringa, no doubt. The gringos are always the latest, assuming we have all day to wait.

People can make any jokes they want about Mexicans being late, but anyone like us knows better than to show up late to see a curandera.

When the knock at the door does come, it comes forty-five minutes late.

Bruja Lupe will show the woman no mercy.

She huffs over the tablecloth and candles while I answer the front door.

The woman looks me up and down. She is so thin, her nails so neatly manicured, that I can’t help wondering if she’s looking at my soft arms and bitten-down cuticles.

“Are you the witch?” she asks.

I shake my head and lead her inside, where a glaring Bruja Lupe gestures for the woman to lie down on our repurposed dining room table.

“Yeah, I don’t have a lot of time,” the woman says, dropping her purse on the table, wrinkling the cloth I pressed this morning.

I try not to gasp. She’s using the table where Bruja Lupe does our remedios like a hat rack.

Bruja Lupe gives a placid smile.

No, no mercy at all.

“I just need to know what color to dye my hair for my reunion,” the woman says. “My ex is gonna be there, and I need him to suffer.”

Bruja Lupe looks at me, and I try not to sigh.

What a waste. Doesn’t this woman have a better question to spend her money on?

“Look into my daughter’s eyes.” Bruja Lupe pushes me forward. “And we will find the answers, for this child holds the heavens within her.”

Leave it to Bruja Lupe to use poetry to tell our secrets without telling our secrets.

By now, I’ve seen enough movies to understand I’m not what anyone would expect of a girl who shares blood with the stars. They’d expect thin, fragile, with hair of pale gold or silver and eyes as light as the Out of This World Motel pool. Not a rounded-out girl with skin the color of desert rock, my hair so brown that indoors it looks black, my eyes as dark as our deep-stained dresser.

I count this as a singular lack of imagination on the part of all those movies. Girls like me don’t all look the same, any more than stars do.

The woman gives a solemn nod.

She slouches to gaze into my eyes, as though they might swirl like pinwheels, or like I might shake my head like a Magic 8 Ball, a different answer showing up in each iris.

Bruja Lupe begins to hum.

And then screech, like she’s possessed by a spirit.

She grabs her prop scarves, the ones she never uses except for clients who have thoroughly pissed her off, and throws them in every direction.

The woman’s eyes widen at the flying cloth, while Bruja Lupe lets her own roll back into her head.

Then, finally, she wails, “Platinum blond!”

It’s an unfeeling choice. This woman’s eyes and skin are so pale that with such light hair she’ll have little color at all. When the woman pays and tips us, leaving with a teary “Thank you,” I almost consider following her into the parking lot and saying so.

But I let the woman leave.

We have to pay rent somehow.

Only, soon, Bruja Lupe’s going to have to do it without me.

The front door clicks shut.

“Was that really necessary?” I ask.

“Who’s the mother here?” Bruja Lupe asks, pulling the cloth off the table, blowing out each of the candles she lit for absolutely no reason. “You or me?”

Why Bruja Lupe got to be the older one, and thus in charge, I’ll never know. One theory is that I’m just slower at everything, including making a girl out of myself. Another is that the stuff I am made of spooled off a young star, while the star-stuff that became Bruja Lupe is steady as an iron core, molten and metal. Whatever the reason, it’s always struck me as highly unfair that she got to skip being my age entirely, and I have to spend four years at Meteor Central High.

To everyone here in Meteor, I am fifteen years old. And that’s just as well, because I may know I am made of star-stuff, but I don’t remember the way it feels to be anything but the girl I am.

Bruja Lupe glances my direction. “I only cheat those who ask for the wrong things. Lo sabes.”

It’s true. For those who want to know if they’ll become rich, she pretends to see the future between the coffee maker and the microwave. Last month, she gave a useless tincture to a woman who wanted her sister written out of their parents’ will. For the man who wanted a spell to keep his wife from noticing he was cheating, she kept screaming without warning and throwing hierbas in the man’s face.

Bruja Lupe puts some of the money in her purse, some in a drawer, and hands some to me.

Any further complaint disappears off my tongue.

I’ll add the little bit of money to the other little bits of money I keep under my bed. Bruja Lupe probably thinks I use it on soda or lipstick, but I’ve saved it all for her, a small offering left behind for when I’m gone.

After the woman drives away, I lie on my bed, clutching my stomach, trying to hold myself together. I don’t lift my shirt because I don’t want to see it, the strip of my stomach that looks like a little Milky Way, the first part of me that is turning back into stardust.

“Oh, Estrellita.” Bruja Lupe sighs from the door.

Her pity is never a good sign. Bruja Lupe doesn’t offer pity for fevers, stomach flu, or sprained ankles. The fact that she offers it now means I can’t ignore this.

I am turning back into the stardust I once was.

She knows it. And her knowing it means I have to know it.

I could feel sorry for myself. I could stay curled up on my bed and lament the ways in which the sky is taking me back, the ways in which I am losing myself. But the truth is, I started losing myself a while ago.

It happened around the same time my best friend stopped being my best friend.

Sometimes I wonder if Chicky and I stopped being friends because she saw it, the stardust under my skin. Maybe she realized that the name everyone calls me—Lita—is short for Estrellita. Little star. Maybe she began to think of me like a mermaid or a unicorn or something else she had to decide didn’t exist.

I doubt it though. I may be made out of the same dust and glow as the lights in the sky, but if you read any of the astronomy books in the library—you’ll realize, isn’t everyone?

 

 

Chicky


WHEN YOU LIVE in a three-bedroom house with five other people, you learn quickly how to minimize your time in the bathroom.

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