Not everyone laughs, but enough people do, and the flame of my anger withers and dies as the panic sets in. Please no, I think. Not here, not today.
The shape of the word has occurred to me, peeking up and out no matter how invisible I stay.
Pansexual. I didn’t know the word when I needed it, but I know it now. It’s a word that means it’s okay if I don’t notice “boy” or “girl” or any other gender first. It’s a word that means it’s okay the way I notice the spark of a person, and that what’s on the outside doesn’t change the way I’m drawn to it like a moth.
And it’s a beautiful word. I loved it the moment I overheard one of Cereza’s friends say it through the thin wall separating our bedrooms. But as beautiful as it is, it doesn’t belong in this hallway. It belongs in a someday future maybe, far from here when I don’t have to hide. Today, being pansexual, being anything outside the norm, is a liability. A disaster waiting to happen.
See, Meteor prides itself on being a place where you “look out for your fellow man” (I actually think I lifted that straight from the town brochure). But it’s also the kind of place where you’re expected to fit in, to earn that down-home courtesy. To be one of the smiling faces on the brochure. To let the town pretend it’s tolerant by not making them reach too far to prove it.
For instance, probably a third of our town’s five-thousand residents are Latinx—but Meteor “doesn’t care if we’re purple,” so long as we’re not too loud about it.
Ms. Jacobs and Ms. McNeil have been “roommates” for twenty years in a one-bedroom house on Spruce Street, and no one bats an eye because they don’t make a spectacle of themselves in public.
And then there’s Cole Kendall, who’s treated like one of the golden boys as long as he’s calling little old ladies ma’am, keeping his hair neat, and scoring half the soccer team’s goals all season.
But here, in the hallway, with Royce sneering at me, it’s all too obvious that this town has already given me my maximum allowance for weird. I’m already the black sheep Quintanilla sister with the bad haircut and the weird clothes. I’m already a different color than the families with money and clout.
My answer is all over Royce’s face right now, and he’s right. Meteor isn’t going to let me be any more different. Not unless I give something up first.
Junior steps forward, toward Royce, but I shake my head. Fighting back here, on their turf, will only make things worse. Even he should know that by now.
Royce waits, his chest puffed out, his arms at his sides. Cole won’t meet my eyes this time, and I can tell whatever moment we almost had is over. Kendra has reminded us all of her power, her boyfriend like some mythical amplifying staff on her arm, the Miss Meteor crown in her hot-pink-taloned grasp. The darkness of all my secrets is folding in on itself again, willing to do whatever it takes to stay hidden.
The show over, the members of the crowd seem to remember they don’t have to be here anymore and scatter.
“Tell me what’s going on in there,” Junior asks when we’re the only ones left in the hallway. For a moment I wonder: Should I tell him? Make myself a little less invisible just for a minute? Paint a Chicky-sized outline in this hallway even though it will fade away?
I know he wouldn’t judge me, but can I really do it? Say: What’s going on, Junior, is that I’m different and I’m afraid?
But that’s when I see Lita, peeking around a doorway down the hallway, her eyes round and shiny as quarters in the road. I don’t let myself smile when I see what she’s wearing, but it’s hard not to. It’s one of her cactus birthday party outfits. A yellow sweater covered in little, fuzzy pom-poms, and a shiny skirt over hot-pink tights. There’s even a tiny, matching mylar balloon stuck behind her ear like a pencil.
Feliz cumpleaños, Señora Strawberry, I think sadly, but then it hits me, and the sight of Lita is all it takes to force me back into sixth-grade Chicky’s shell. I remember what it felt like, to be on the verge of telling, to not be able to. How much it hurt. How it made me pull back into a cocoon of my own making and push everyone around me away to keep the secret safe.
Since then, I’ve kept everyone at arm’s distance. Even when Lita looked hurt and confused in the hallways and eventually started sitting somewhere else at lunch. Even when Junior tries to get closer.
I can’t risk it. Telling Junior. Because I couldn’t even tell my best friend. The girl closer to me than a sister. The truth was too big to confront, sharing it too big a risk to take.
The truth that I might not be like everyone else.
That I might be worthy of the nasty names that flew around behind me at school.
I couldn’t tell her. And it destroyed us. But telling her would have destroyed me.
In the hallway now, Junior looks at me quizzically, waiting for an answer I still can’t give, because some stupid flouncing princess and her rock-headed prince made it their mission to make me feel unworthy. Small. Cornered and alone.
They’re still just as smug, as self-important and drunk on their own power as they were then, and in my building anger I realize:
Maybe I couldn’t tell Lita then. Maybe I can’t tell Junior now. But there’s one thing I can do. Something I should have done a long time ago.
I can take something from that girl, who took so much from me with just a sneer and a nickname, and the thing she cares about most is all around us.
Miss Meteor. Kendra expects to win. Everyone expects her to win. But you can only enter Miss Meteor once. If I can find a way to stop her, she’ll never get another chance.
Her family legacy broken, humiliated in front of the school and the town and the tourists? It would be a start.
Leaving Junior shaking his head in the hallway, I walk as fast as my baby-horse legs can carry me to the bike rack outside school. Because there’s only one place to go when you need a secret, insidious plan, and that’s straight to my older sisters.
Lita
ALL THROUGH AFTERNOON classes I think about it. It distracts me when we talk about phytoplankton in biology. It makes my mind wander away from a lecture on the ancient Romans. It even draws my attention away from the flowery graphs we make of polar equations in Mrs. LaRoux’s class.
But my thoughts keep circling around Miss Meteor.
Am I really thinking of doing this? Am I really considering making what might be my last big act on Planet Earth this, something that might end in my complete humiliation?
And if I am, how am I even gonna do it?
I want to tell Bruja Lupe.
Except I can’t tell Bruja Lupe anything until I have the plan of all plans. Because I know exactly how she’s going to react to “I know you’re losing me, how about in the little time we have together, I parade around a stage for everyone in town to laugh at?”
“Lita,” Mrs. LaRoux says as I leave class. “Are you feeling all right?”
Mrs. LaRoux knows math is my favorite subject. I listen to my math teachers with the attention Bruja Lupe gives old Grace Kelly movies. Last time I seemed distracted, it was an hour before I got sent home with walking pneumonia. Nothing takes me out of math class.
Except this.
“Yeah,” I say. “All vital signs normal.”