Page 36 of Spectacular Things

Heart Stamp

Mia forgets about running into Cricket’s coach outside of his soccer-field context until it happens again in the last week of December.

This time, she sees Oliver inside the post office.

He is two people ahead of her in what quickly proves to be an exceptionally slow-moving line.

When Oliver gives up his place to join her, Mia balks.

“It’ll go faster talking to you,” he says. “And if I stayed up there, I’d have to keep wondering if you think the back of my head looks too big for my body.”

Mia laughs and it rings out in the contentiously hushed post office, everyone barely keeping it together as their lunch hour ticks down to nothing.

“What are you in for?” Oliver asks.

“Stamps,” Mia says.

“Same.” He smiles and holds up a pink envelope. “My mom’s birthday.” The address reads South Carolina and is printed in clear, clean capital letters. “As the prodigal son with no plans of returning, I figure this is the least I can do.”

“Do they ever visit?” Mia imagines Oliver’s parents with his same green eyes. She wonders if he’s the carbon copy of his father, the same dirty blond hair and blocky head, or if he inherited his high cheekbones from his mother. “Do they ever come up for games?”

“No way,” Oliver says without hesitation. “That would require missing Bible study, or a fellowship meeting, or a pancake breakfast in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.”

Mia rocks up on her toes, uncertain how to respond. Religion was never a thing in the Lowe household, unless she were to count their weekend lip syncs to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” or their annual Christmas viewing of Sister Act .

“I think everyone is entitled to their faith, obviously,” Coach volunteers. “But I wish they’d said something other than to ‘pray on it’ when I was diagnosed with diabetes.”

Mia does a double take. “You have diabetes?” she asks, unable to hide her shock.

“But you’re so”—she almost says “fit,” but it seems borderline inappropriate that she’s noticed his physique.

Then again, how could she not have when at least one mom makes note of it during every Stallions game?

Mia mentally scrambles as they move up another person in line and ultimately lands on “active” rather than “fit.”

Oliver holds her gaze and Mia worries he can read her mind.

“Yeah, this is Type 1, so it doesn’t matter how active I am.

It’s why I wear this.” He lifts his shirt ever so slightly.

Mia barely trusts herself to glance down, but he’s waiting for her to look, so she does and sees a black insulin pump clipped to the waistband of his khakis. She also sees a flash of flat stomach.

“Anyway, we get along great,” Oliver says, looking down at his pink envelope.

“As long as we don’t speak.” It seems like a far too personal conversation to have while waiting in the post office line, but here they are, still four people away from being able to purchase stamps.

Mia asks Oliver what he does for the holidays.

Oliver shrugs. “Play it by ear,” he says. “I probably don’t buy into the holidays as much as other people.”

Mia thinks of her mom, and their New Year’s Eves that rarely happened in December. “I get that,” she says.

“I thought you might,” Oliver says, nudging her with a conspiratorial elbow.

Mia has seen him do this with Cricket and the rest of the Stallions.

It’s just a show of camaraderie, Mia knows this, so why is the spot on her arm where he touched her now tingling like she rubbed a whole jar of Cricket’s Tiger Balm onit?

“After you,” Oliver says, motioning for Mia to approach the available clerk’s window.

Because stamps.

She is here for stamps so she needs to move her feet, but she is also a little lightheaded.

The postal worker gives her a choice between a book of hearts or the two hundredth anniversary of Maine statehood. Mia chooses the sheet of familiar rocky coastline and glances left to see Coach adhere his single heart stamp to the pink envelope. He meets her eye.

“I’m sorry to complain about my parents,” he says. “I just realized how insensitive—”

“No, it’s okay,” Mia insists. “All good.”

“See you on Saturday?” Oliver asks, holding open the door for her. For a moment, she wonders what he might mean.

“Saturday,” she repeats. Is he asking her out? No, the Stallions have a game on Saturday, and he is her sister’s coach.

He is her sister’s coach.

On the sidewalk, Mia’s mind reels.

Oliver is her sister’s coach, just as her father was her mother’s coach.

Feeling suddenly ill, Mia tries to calm herself down by calculating the bivariate data because math always makes sense.

Unlike her mother and father, there is no imbalance of power between Mia and Oliver. But there is an undeniable correlation. Two sets of values, different but related. A pattern on a slant.

Mia remembers the flight home from the World Cup in Paris and vowing she would never date a coach.

She puts herself back at Yale, promising herself not to repeat her mother’s mistakes.

And then she thinks of that heart stamp on the pink envelope, those green eyes finding her at the back of the line, the flash of stomach behind the black insulin pump, her elbow, still tingling. This is why surprises are upsets.

As Oliver walks Mia to her van, his hands in his pockets, poised for more conversation, Mia abruptly steps off the curb. “I have to work this weekend,” she says. “But good luck!”

For an instant, his face falls, but he collects himself quickly and offers a bright grin that stretches beyond the edges of his face mask.

“I’ll take all the luck we can get against those New Hampshire girls,” he says.

“Have a great day, Mia.” Before she can respond, Oliver is halfway down the block, heading to his own car.

Watching him walk away in her rearview mirror, Mia thinks of Cricket’s evolution as a goalkeeper since joining the Stallions.

She no longer pouts when a ball gets past her in a game but instead hustles to retrieve it from the back of the net, and once she passes it up to center field, she pulls up her socks and claps three times as a physical and emotional reset.

Coach says it’s about using your body to trick your mind, Cricket has explained to her more than once.

At a red light, Mia rubs the heat of Oliver’s touch out of her arm.

As ridiculous as it may look, she claps three times, right there in the driver’s seat.

Because he is her sister’s soccer coach.

Because he is off-limits. Because whether or not he is aware of his effect on her, or how twenty-nine in man years compares to twenty-one in woman years, none of it matters, because Oliver represents a very specific history threatening to repeat itself if she isn’t careful.

But she is Mia Lowe.

She is always careful.