Page 15 of Spectacular Things
Queen of Caps
“She became my hero in that moment,” Liz explains to Mia as they sleepwalk on the beach in the middle of the day. The baby kept them up all night, again. “And why wouldn’t I name both my girls after my heroes? Especially when my heroes are lifelong friends and teammates, just as you two will be?”
Mia looks at the newborn nestled against her mother’s chest and then stares up to the cloudless summer sky with a million questions because why is the baby here?
The beach is where she and her mother go to be together, to contemplate life and listen to the lapping of the waves.
This is their place, away from it all, but now the baby is here, and even in this Atlantic sanctuary, the baby is as loud, irreverent, rude, and flatulent as she is at home.
She hardly seems like the “built-in friend” Mia’s teachers promised she would be.
Rather, Kristine is a perpetual mess of liquids going in and coming out, a parasite who shamelessly gloms to their mother with a squid-like death grip.
Worst of all, the baby looks just like Liz.
Everyone says so—even the women at the beach tip their sunglasses forward to coo that the baby is Liz’s blond-and-blue-eyed clone, rather than the shrieking, leaking leech Mia knows her to be.
And yet, Liz insists this midnight monster is a gift for Mia: “Q and I made you for us, but we made Kristine for you, because you deserve a sibling.”
“I deserve better, ” Mia argues, but Liz doesn’t hear her over the baby’s hungry squawks.
They stop near the jetty for Liz to feed Kristine and Mia checks her watch because this unscheduled break is going to make them late for Mia’s playdate.
Her mom never seems to even notice that they are always late for everything.
When two teenage boys jog past just as Liz is tickling the baby’s lips with her nipple, Mia considers joining them and running away from this hamster wheel of exhausting humiliation.
At Kristine’s one-month checkup, the pediatrician stretches her long and says, “This is what I call a cricket baby—she’s got legs up to her shoulders.” And that’s all it takes to rebrand a newborn. Kristine forever becomes Cricket, and Cricket is quickly deemed a physical phenomenon.
Breezing past milestones at such a clip that even the pediatrician appears stunned during their appointments, Cricket casually holds up her gigantic head at six weeks old.
A month later, she rolls over with the ambitious control of a gymnast performing her floor routine.
Cricket crawls at five months. She walks herself into the pediatrician’s office for her nine-month checkup with such sure-footed confidence that the other parents in the waiting room openly gawk.
On the playground, Cricket’s peers drool over their unsanctioned snack of leaves and woodchips as they watch Cricket hoist herself up and complete the monkey bars.
“What a weirdo,” Liz whispers to Mia from the green metal bench where they sit close together.
“I could never do the monkey bars that well.” They do not need to supervise Cricket, who is preternaturally aware of her gross-motor limitations, but rather they serve as her audience and two-person panel of judges.
“Seven!” Liz calls out after Cricket flies down the big slide that most kids are too scared to climb up—including Mia. “Stick the landing next time!”
The only thing Cricket fails to do as a toddler is actually toddle—she goes from walking to running in a day, a pint-size gazelle moving in one fluid motion.
She follows Mia everywhere, tracks her, and anticipates where she’s going.
More than once, Mia will reach for a book and all of a sudden it’s in Cricket’s hand, her little sister beaming as she gives it to Mia and asks her to read it to her.
It would be impressive if it weren’t so annoying.
Things change—and not for the better—when Cricket is four years old. It’s the summer, and that bleary gray before sunrise when Cricket takes the last thing Mia has been able to keep for herself.
“I want to train today,” Cricket says, rubbing her eyes while looking for her shoes.
Standing by the front door, dressed and ready to go, Mia, now nine, cannot believe her ears. Cricket is not a morning person. In fact, Liz usually pushes Cricket in a stroller to the beach, where Cricket sleeps through the entirety of their practice.
Not today. On their six-block commute, the sidewalk is barely wide enough for a pair, and so Mia trails behind Cricket and their mother, confused as to why she feels like she’s eavesdropping on their conversation when this is supposed to be her time to talk.
Cricket barely notices when Mia steps on the back of her sneaker because she is too focused on practicing tight possession.
Mia always carries the soccer ball under one arm on the walk to the beach, but Cricket has insisted on dribblingit.
“Nice control there,” Liz says after Cricket expertly navigates her way around a broad-backed dog who pulls hard on the leash, desperate to sink her teeth into the synthetic leather. “For the next block, only use your left foot,” Liz challenges.
During beach warm-ups, Mia tries not to notice how Cricket moves with notable quickness.
At the house, she was barely awake, but now Cricket devotes her full attention to each stretch and every drill with a predatorial sharpness.
Meanwhile, Mia asserts her dominance by juggling the way her mother has taught her.
As the sun rises above the water, Mia demonstrates all the things she’s already learned from years of beach sessions.
She can feel Cricket watching her, so she lets the ball drop from her quad down to the top of her foot and flicks it over to Cricket under the guise of a friendly volley.
To Mia’s shock, Cricket receives the ball with the inside of her left foot before bopping it back into the air with control.
“Like this?” Cricket asks as the ball obeys her for nine consecutive touches, now ten, eleven.
Leaving the beach and turning onto their street, Liz gives the command: “Ready, set, go!” Mother and daughters sprint past eight houses, Liz several paces ahead until she slaps the white mailbox standing guard outside 125 Knickerbocker Avenue and declares herself the winner.
“I respect you too much not to try my hardest,” she explains to them. “So when you do beat me, you’ll know you really beat me.” Once Mia and Cricket catch their breath, the three Lowes step onto the front porch together, careful to avoid the weak spots in the floorboards.
“I’m going to beat you both,” Cricket says. “Not yet, but soon.”
Weeks pass, then months, and each morning on the beach, exhausted mothers look up from their phones and angle their heads down to peer over their sunglasses.
Among them, there is a consensus that the older girl, Mia, is a gifted soccer player.
They’ve watched her for years, and she’s no doubt growing into a local talent with a splashy high school career ahead of her.
But the little sister—who really isn’t so little, not with those ski poles for legs—she’s something else.
Maybe it’s the girl’s uncanny speed, or the way she just always seems to get there .
It’s like she can manipulate space and time to accommodate her plan with the ball.
“The older girl, the pale brunette, she’s very good,” one local mother in a navy one-piece tells her friend, who is visiting from Massachusetts. “But the blonde—just watch her—that girl is a total freak of nature.”