In Fresa’s no-nonsense tone, it almost sounds like it makes sense.
“But if you think I’m getting Lita onto that stage by myself you’re—and I never say this—overestimating me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you have three sisters. Go get the rest of them on board. We’re going to need them.”
Lita
“YOU WANT TO what?” Bruja Lupe asks.
I can almost feel the sky vibrating above us, even through the popcorn ceiling.
I weight my feet into the worn-down carpet. “I’m going to enter Miss Meteor.”
“Do you have a fever?” Bruja Lupe reaches for my forehead.
“No,” I answer slowly, because this sounds like a trick question.
“So this is a decision you made in your right mind?” she asks. “This is what you want? Spending your precious hours fluttering your eyelashes?”
“It’s my choice what I do with . . . ,” I can’t say it.
The time I still have.
Bruja Lupe sighs. “And the choice you want to make is to invite the whole town to make fun of you?”
Now I don’t have to try to plant my weight. I feel like I’m going to sink into the carpet.
“That’s what you think?” I ask. “That I’ll just fail completely?”
“Towns like this don’t want girls like us to succeed. You know that.”
My brain slips down a familiar path. I want to pull it back, but it keeps going. It slides into an old memory that still stings no matter how many times it’s played in my head. How I was stupid enough to come to school in a rhinestone tiara and polyester sash on Halloween, playing at being the beauty queen I thought I could one day become. How ridiculous Royce and his friends thought I was.
Worse than ridiculous.
Something they had to crush.
They weren’t happy until they’d scared me down onto the locker room floor, gotten me small and crying and hating that I ever thought I could be anything but what they decided. They weren’t happy until they ripped the tiara off my head, its plastic teeth taking pieces of my hair, and put something else, something they considered more appropriate, in its place.
Maybe I’m not much bigger now than I was back then. But I have something I didn’t have then, the recklessness of having so little left to lose.
“Chicky’s going to help me,” I say.
“Chicky Quintanilla?” A laugh rattles through Bruja Lupe’s throat. “You chose the one Quintanilla girl who’s never been on that stage?”
I almost say how she used to be my coach in our fake Miss Meteor pageants, but now all that feels so small and babyish.
A knock comes at the door. The back one, the one we go through, not the one Bruja Lupe lets tourists in through.
Bruja Lupe gives the biggest sigh of this whole conversation. “What now?”
“I’ll get it,” I say before she can stomp toward the door.
I open the door, and a whirl of styled hair and fruit-bright color rushes at me. Six eyelinered eyes all fall on me. Six manicured hands grab me and pull me into the center of the three oldest Quintanilla girls.
“Thank goodness we got here in time!” Fresa rushes toward me and takes my face in her hands. “Well, she’s pretty, or at least she will be when we’re done with her.” She says it less like she’s paying me a compliment and more like she’s identifying a type of duck. She looks at her sister Cereza. “Some highlighter would make her drop-dead perfect, no?”
“You don’t heat-style, do you?” Cereza asks. “Don’t worry, we’ll teach you.”
Fresa taps my upper lip and glances at Uva Quintanilla. “Depilatory or cream bleach?”
“Fresa!” Cereza shouts.
“What?” Uva says.
Cereza steps back to consider me. “If we start now, we might just be able to find her perfect lip color in time,” she says. “Do you see yourself as more of as a red girl, a plum girl, a coral girl?”
I look down at my arms. “I see myself as the color I am?”
“Stand up straight, lovely”—Uva pokes me between the shoulder blades—“you need every inch you’ve got.”
Cereza taps my ankle. “If we find her a pair of heels that match her skintone, her legs’ll look longer than you think.”
“Love these big eyes,” Fresa says. “She looks like a cartoon cow.”
“Fresa!” Uva says.
“I meant in a cute way.” Fresa rolls her eyes at Uva and then brushes her fingers along my temples. “But we have to do something about those brows. Have you ever tweezed?”
Uva steps back, considering. “I wanna see her dressed in blue.”
“Blue?” Cereza asks. “A girl with coloring like this and you’re gonna count out red and purple?”
“Just trust me on this one,” Uva says. “We’ll try a few different shades. We don’t like it, we go with red.”
“Conditioner.” Fresa takes a lock of my hair between her fingers. “Say it with me. Lots of conditioner. Sleep with it in every night. I always did it the week before a dance. You’ll thank me later.”
Fresa moves just enough to let me see into the kitchen.
Bruja Lupe rushes around the stove. She’s probably making tlayudas, her standard people-coming-over-unannounced dinner (her secret ingredient: ground jalapeño. They’re good not just in whole pepper form, and not just on top of cupcakes).
I can tell from the size of the pan that she’s cooking for all five of us.
Six of us.
Chicky leans against the counter and crosses her arms. She gives me a smile that’s half weary, half smirking, a look of “careful what you wish for.”
“Thank you,” I mouth.
Miss Meteor, here we come.
Chicky
YOU HAVEN’T DIED of boredom until you’ve watched three former beauty queens teach their new protégé how to smile.
Yeah, I thought it was a natural reflex too. Apparently, there’s a lot more Vaseline involved than I ever knew.
“Did you put it on?”
“Pendeja, I’m holding the damn tub in my hand, aren’t I? My finger all smeared with the stuff? What do you think I’m doing?”
“Well it’s not enough! I can’t see her canines!”
“It’s because she keeps licking it off!”
“Lita bonita, it’s supposed to stay on, okay? Just try to forget it’s there.”
They’re gathered around her like vultures on a carcass. My sisters couldn’t be more different from each other, but with a common goal they become a three-headed beast, dangerous to all who cross its path.
“Chicky! How do I look?” Lita calls, as Uva balances a book on her head to “promote good posture.” It falls to the ground, pages splayed, when she does a ridiculous twirl to face me, her teeth bared in what I can only describe as a rabid Barbie smile.
“Sorry, is there a scaring-neighborhood-children event I’m not aware of?” I ask before I can think twice. Honestly, I haven’t flexed my friend muscles in a while, especially not with Lita, and when her face falls I know I messed up.