“Girls, your sister is right,” he says. “You’ve all been working hard. Have a little fun.”
I don’t bother telling him you can’t do anything fun with five dollars anymore. Not even in Meteor. Not even if I had anyone to do fun things with instead of just sisters who look at me like I’m a bug and classmates who have pretty much stopped looking at me at all.
“Thanks, Dad,” I mutter, shoving more food in my mouth so I won’t have to come up with anything else to say. Fresa is still staring moodily into her bowl. She doesn’t say thank you. She doesn’t even acknowledge him.
An awkward silence falls, and suddenly I wish Cereza was here, instead of working the lunch shift at the diner with Mom. She would know exactly what to say to get us all laughing again.
“Hey, Fresa,” I say, taking the number one play out of Cereza’s well-worn oldest-daughter handbook: Make fun of Fresa. “Is that another grapefruit? No wonder your face looks all pinched up like that all the time.”
Uva looks at me gratefully, then back at Fresa. “Her face is kind of pinched up,” she says, picking up a fresh tlacoyo from the plate. “Here, Fres, have some caaaarbs.” She says it in a spooky Halloween voice, and I snort into my horchata.
“Girls, be nice,” Dad says, but there’s a glimmer of mischief in his eye. Sometimes Dad is a bigger kid than any of us. “I hear grapefruit is good for skin rashes. Maybe your sister has a rash.”
This time, I almost choke. Fresa’s skin care regimen is more detailed than some astronaut training programs. The word “rash” is the stuff of her nightmares, and it shows in her eyes, which have narrowed to angry slits.
“Oh, maybe you’re right, Dad,” Uva says. “Fresa, if you have a rash, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I hope the grapefruit helps.”
“I do not have a rash!” she shouts.
I would almost feel bad, except Fresa gives five times as good as she gets, so anytime you can best her, it’s a victory.
“It’s called. A cleanse.” She stands up, stomping to the sink and dumping the bowl too loudly.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “There’s a little redness there, on the back of her neck. Maybe that’s where it starts.”
“I hate all of you!” she shrieks, taking the stairs two at a time, but I hear the bathroom door slam, and I would bet this five dollars in my pocket she’s checking the back of her neck.
Dad is laughing as he sets my school bag on my shoulder, but as he returns to the kitchen he bumps into Fresa’s abandoned chair, which wobbles with a loud, wooden thunk that echoes down the hall.
Lita
TODAY IS SEÑORA Strawberry’s birthday.
Like always, I bring aguas frescas to pour over the cactuses, and streamers in the same pastels as their spines, and party horns.
I would never tell the other cactuses—I give birthday parties to all of them who’ve told me their names—but she’s one of my favorites. She cheered up her neighbor, Herr Rainbow Hedgehog, enough to bring him back to life. Herr Rainbow was drooping like an overwatered daisy until Señora Strawberry burst into magenta bloom right next to him. Then his base filled out green, and he grew a fine coating of pink and yellow spines.
Now I think they’re a little bit in love. I swear his spines blush a deeper pink as I sing “Happy Birthday” to Señora Strawberry.
“Señora Strawberry,” I say, holding her birthday candle in front of her. “I wouldn’t ask you this unless I absolutely had to. But I need you to make a birthday wish for me.”
I’ve asked other cactuses to wish that I wouldn’t turn back to stardust. They have, every time. Monsieur Cereus even wished it so hard I felt it in the air.
A dust-covered pink wrapper blows across the ground. It’s about to blow right through Señora Strawberry’s birthday party. I stomp over to it. If I catch the tourists littering as much as they did last year, they are going to see me throw a fit bigger than they thought possible from a girl this short.
I pluck it from the dirt.
It’s not a wrapper.
It’s a flyer.
I unfold it and find the same words from the banner. The Fiftieth-Annual Meteor Regional Pageant and Talent Competition Showcase.
Something about those letters traces down my spine.
Señora Strawberry’s birthday candle still flickers in my hand.
Once, being Miss Meteor was my dream, as big as the whole desert sky. I wanted to earn that crown for Bruja Lupe and me and the stardust under our skin. I wanted to wear the name of this town I love and the rock they named it after.
But then Royce Bradley and his friends taught me, in ways that feel as hot on my skin now as my tears felt on my cheeks then, that girls like me are never Miss Meteor.
The Miss Meteor judges pick the same girl every year, like blond and blue-eyed and size-nothing is the best thing in the whole universe.
I am nothing like those girls, like Kendra Kendall. And I’m two years younger than almost every other girl who enters.
But the sky is going to take me back anyway. So what if I went for what I wanted all those years ago?
I hold the candle to Señora Strawberry, and I swear I can feel her waiting for the wind to blow it out for her. Then I leave the cactuses to their celebration. Because before lunch period is over, I have another stop.
I take the second bag of galletas dulces I brought with me today, and I go visit the rock.
Well, it’s not the whole rock. Most of the rock turned to dust and fire as it streaked through the atmosphere all those years ago.
But a piece did survive, so big that there’s not enough of me to give it a full hug. A few men and one woman (the history books usually forget her) claimed the meteorite as property of the town they just then decided to establish.
“About time,” Buzz says when he lets me into the Meteor Meteorite Museum. “It’s been waiting.”
I haven’t figured out if the museum is called this because Meteor is the town name and the museum houses the meteorite, or because no one can agree on whether this town is actually called Meteor or Meteorite.
Except for the poor clerks in the town hall, this is less of a problem than you’d expect. Until festival season, when it’s time to make banners. A tourist has an equal chance of seeing either name proclaimed in a window or draped above the main street. Celebrating Meteor flutters alongside Meteorite: The Pride of New Mexico.
I hand Buzz the other bag of galletas dulces, my thank-you for letting me in when the Meteor Meteorite Museum isn’t technically open.
From the outside, the museum looks like a weather-beaten house with a lit sign above it. But here, under Buzz’s care, is my favorite rock in the whole world, with a bulb-lighted billboard and even a velvet rope that keeps tourists from trying to chip off pieces of it.
This is probably the quietest moment I will get with the rock until the end of next week, when the tourists leave.
“Buzz?” I ask.
Buzz uncoils the twist-tie from the galleta bag. “Hmm?”
“Could we have a minute?”
He combs down a few stray pieces of his white hair, nods, and leaves me to it.
I ease into setting both hands on the rock; lightly, so I don’t startle it.
“So, what do you think?” I ask.