Although she was already in fifth grade, Celeste still believed the Power Rangers were real. She begged the younger, nerdier girls — the ones who weren’t tetherball champs and hadn’t yet discovered boys or One Direction —– to play Power Rangers with her at recess.
If she couldn’t rope anyone into joining her, she would play alone, kicking and punching at invisible enemies, felling criminals across the playground. She would end recess sweaty and out of breath but victorious, having temporarily slain the demons only she could see.
Some days, instead of playing she would follow me around the playground as I conducted yard duty, reciting facts and figures about the Power Rangers, and asking questions to which I only knew the answers because she asked me them almost daily.
“Guess the name of the pink Power Ranger,” she demanded.
If I was in a good mood, I’d pretend to think, scratch my head quizzically, hemming and hawing audibly until I finally guessed, “Kimberly?” If it had been a long and difficult morning, if I had detention to supervise or fights to break up, I’d send her off.
“Go play, Celeste. Find someone to play with,” even knowing that I was asking the impossible of her. She’d pout and follow me quietly, only breaking out of her sullen silence occasionally to ask me, “Do remember the name of the red one? He’s Jason.”
Her dearest wish was to be the pink Power Ranger for Halloween. I knew the grandmother with whom she lived couldn’t afford costumes for the handful of children in her care; still Celeste spent at least a month before Halloween lobbying for us to dress as Power Rangers. She and I — student and teacher — would be the only two Power Rangers in the class.
Celeste loved the idea of us being a duo, fighting off bad guys and making the world safe for little girls who couldn’t read and didn’t have mommies, little girls who had had been bounced from home to home, little girls who had seen more at age 10 than they ought to have.
It was tempting to pretend for a moment that I was that person, a super-hero who could help create for Celeste the world she dreamed of. The price of a pair of Power Ranger costumes and the agony of wearing a skin-tight morph suit were deal breakers for me though.
Instead, I pulled together some forgettable outfit for myself, and rifled through my own children’s box of previous Halloween costumes to pick out the prettiest of my daughter’s cast-offs for Celeste.
Early Halloween morning, I stuffed pudgy Celeste into a Queen of Hearts costume that only closed tenuously with an abundance of safety pins. It was a gorgeous dress, red velveteen with crinolines and a hoop skirt, but it was a dress that didn’t match her vision, her personality or her body type. It did, however, save her from being the only girl in the class without a costume.
She was startling beautiful in her borrowed costume, masses of ash brown hair framing her pale face, her giant green eyes luminous behind thick glasses. The long full skirt and bodice tied with gold lacing were more elegant than the school uniform she wore daily, maybe more elegant than anything she had ever worn.
She was beautiful but she wasn’t a Power Ranger and she knew it. She didn’t sulk; a too-tight Queen of Hearts costume was better than nothing and Celeste was well acquainted with unfulfilled dreams. As I affixed a gold tiara to her head, she mumbled a thank you. She wasn’t rude or ungrateful; she was just sad.
A few minutes later, as the class filed in exclaiming over each other’s costumes, I watched Celeste. She scanned the room, ready to pounce on anyone who had on her coveted Power Ranger costume. Satisfied that no one had encroached on her territory, she flounced her skirt a few times to make sure her classmates noticed her.
Celeste was normally invisible to her classmates — too young, too awkward, too far behind academically, too odd; but today she captured their interest. Even the popular, socially mature girls — the ones whose costumes involved more heavy black eyeliner and black nail polish than imagination – were startled to see Celeste in her resplendent glory. Her hair, loosened from its habitual braid, flowed in waves under her tiara. I had dusted her pale cheeks with the tiniest shimmer of sparkly blush and lightly lined her eyes. As the girls gathered around her, running their fingers over the velvety fabric of her skirt, one exclaimed, “You look pretty! What are you supposed to be?”
Celeste stood as tall as her too-tight dress would let her and announced proudly, “I am the queen … of the Power Rangers.”
