Even Lita Perez, the strangest girl in Meteor by a landslide, looks at me like she’s worried maybe I have a concussion.
I sigh. “Sorry, can I get you something?”
She pretends to look over the menu, even though we both know she doesn’t need to, and I try to remember the last time we actually spoke. We see each other constantly, it’s the curse of the small town. But I avoid Bruja Lupe’s neighborhood, even though it means riding my bike the long way to school, and Lita avoids the diner.
At least, she used to.
“I’ll take a cupcake with . . .”
“Jalapeños?” I can’t help finishing for her.
“Jalapeños,” she confirms, and we both smile.
“Chicky,” Lita says as I pull a red velvet cupcake from the glass pastry display (she was never picky about the flavor) and a jar of pickled jalapeños from below the counter. I arrange five of the green discs on top of the frosting and push it across the counter on a plate.
“Lita?”
“Do you remember when we used to play Miss Meteor?”
It’s the absolute last question I expected her to ask, and my first reaction is to curl up like a porcupine against the memories. All the togetherness that I distanced myself from because I couldn’t tell her the truth.
But before I can, her words start to stir something in me. Something as old as paper dolls and cactus-flower crowns. Something that makes itching powder seem like child’s play.
“I do,” I say cautiously, because with Lita you never know what’s coming next.
“Remember how you used to be my manager?” Her voice is high and breathless, her eyes sparkling.
I can’t help it, I sparkle back. “I do.”
“We always won,” she says. “Every pageant.”
“The other contestants were Señora Strawberry and three of Cereza’s old dolls,” I reply, trying not to smile too much. It’s just going to hurt when I have to put it away again later.
“Señora Strawberry was always our stiffest competition,” she reminisces, smiling, but then she pauses, a long thing with plenty of space for imagining inside it.
“What if it wasn’t pretend?” she says when the silence has run its course. “No cactuses, no bent-spoon tiaras. The real deal.”
“You’re not thinking of entering . . . ,” I say, because I can’t picture it, even though I remember the way she daydreamed about it back then. But then, just as suddenly, I can picture it. Kendra Kendall, losing Miss Meteor. But not just losing. Losing to Lita Perez . . .
“Not without your help,” she says in a wheedling tone. “I mean, you know I never could have beat Señora Strawberry if you hadn’t coached me through the Q&A.”
She’s steeled herself, I can see it on her face. Despite her jokes, this is what she walked through those doors to ask me.
It breaks my heart and makes me hopeful all at once, that even after years of distance and avoiding and the terrible sadness of growing apart, we’re still scheming in tandem.
Lita’s still watching me, her brave face faltering a little as I think it over.
It’s a crazy idea. Worse than crazy. Lita and I barely know each other anymore, and honestly the itching powder probably has a higher probability of success than the two weirdest girls in Meteor staging the biggest pageant upset in the event’s fifty-year history.
And so I’m about to say no. Ask Bruja Lupe for something itchy from her hierba drawer when Lita’s out and go the easy route. But then I remember the end of our pretend pageants, where we’d crack open the shoebox full of chocolate coins and split our winnings.
Ten thousand dollars. Even a portion of it would keep the lights on a little while longer around here. Maybe fix some cracking paint or replace the chairs with the wobbly legs.
“Never mind,” Lita says, her voice small. “I shouldn’t have—”
“I’ll do it,” I say, my voice clear and decisive even though alarm bells are ringing louder than the ancient fire bell in the town square and every cell in my body is demanding an explanation. “I’ll help you become Miss Meteor.”
Lita’s jaw drops. “You . . . I . . . What?”
“I’ll help you. But we’re not competing against dolls and cactuses anymore. You’re gonna need more help.”
Luckily, I know exactly who to ask.
Lita
I WOULD HAVE been less surprised to see Hubert Humphrey, vice president of the United States when Meteor was incorporated, waltz into Selena’s than I am at this moment.
Because Chicky saying yes—so quickly and so surely—is as odd as having a politician who died in 1978 sit down and order onion rings.
“Really?” I ask. I was ready to offer her the prize money I may or may not win. I was ready to learn to play mariachi for the Chicky-Junior first date. I was ready to scrub plates the next time the dishwasher in the diner kitchen breaks down.
“To be clear,” Chicky says. “I’m not entering with you. It’d be you up there in sequins and fake eyelashes, not me.”
I can’t help laughing. Not because Chicky couldn’t rock an evening gown (probably with combat boots), but because she would be stomping across the stage and rolling her eyes through the entire promenade.
“I know,” I say.
A memory hangs between us, of when we used to play dress up, pretending to be actors in Bruja Lupe’s favorite movies that no one our age had ever heard of but us. I’d borrow one of Bruja Lupe’s dresses and pretend I was Rita Hayworth, and she’d borrow one of her dad’s old suits and strut around with the style of Marlene Dietrich and the suaveness of Humphrey Bogart.
It brings the familiar ache of something that faded and just got lost.
Friendships don’t always end with a big fight, a sudden silence. Sometimes it’s a sad, slow drifting apart. Sometimes it’s one of you getting the flu so bad you’re out of school for two weeks, and then when you come back you just don’t sit together at lunch anymore. Sometimes it’s realizing there’s something big you’re not saying and something big she’s not saying, and that you’re both not telling each other the big things anymore.
This is how you stop being friends, a little at a time.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
She nods.
“What made you say yes?” I ask.
I’m ready for her to say, “Do you want my help or not?” Or something about a gifted horse—a phrase people on this planet seem to really like when it comes to questioning favors, but that I’ve never gotten up the nerve to ask the meaning of.
But Chicky shakes her head at the glitter-flecked Formica tabletop. “You ever just wake up one day and realize you’ve taken something for years and you can’t do it for another day? Like, literally can’t do it anymore?”
Mr. Hamilton might pick on her use of the word “literally,” but from the look in her eyes, I get the feeling she means it.
I think of the skin on my stomach turning to stardust, my desperate wish to hold on to my body and my life on Earth.
I think of how I can’t leave this town, this planet, without trying for the dream I had all those years ago. Because then I would have stayed small and afraid forever, right up until the sky takes me back.