Page 38 of Spectacular Things
“If we lived somewhere warm, I’d be as good as Sloane,” Cricket argues, staring at the trees lining the highway, their bare branches shivering in the wind.
“How do you figure?”
Cricket holds up her hand to count off the reasons. “I’d be able to practice outside all the time, and the ground wouldn’t be frozen for half the year, which means fewer injuries.”
“But you’re not injured,” Mia points out, trying to disguise her fear. “Right?” She’s not totally clear on how their health insurance works, but she knows that physically, financially, and spiritually, they cannot afford Cricket getting hurt.
“I’m fine.” Cricket extracts a lock of hair from her high pouf and begins to weave a tiny braid in front of her nose.
“We just need to get to L.A.,” she says.
“I’m sick of winter and I’m done wearing this stupid junk just to go for a run.
” She holds up a tangle of rubber and metal in her hand—a mysterious accessory to warm-weather dwellers but a ubiquitous necessity to Northerners everywhere.
Indeed, one could measure a Mainer’s life in Yaktrax.
“Blasphemous!” Mia teases, reaching over to snatch her spikes from the ungrateful naysayer beside her. In a slippery, unpredictable world, Mia appreciates a bit of traction.
Cricket, however, says she’s going to throw out her Yaktrax the day she leaves for college. “Or maybe I’ll burn them, just for the drama.”
“But you’ll still need them when you come home,” Mia points out.
“Maybe I shouldn’t come home,” Cricket sasses. “Maybe we should sell the house and make a new home out there.”
“Maybe,” Mia says, humoring her sister for the ease of the moment although she can’t imagine ever selling the house.
It’s a direct portal to their mother—the closest thing they have to her hugs is the roof over their heads.
The spice drawer is still disorganized, but only because Mia now sees it as an homage, and Liz’s bed remains in the exact same state of unmade mess that it was the morning of November ninth.
“But still,” Mia insists, “you can’t underestimate Yaktrax—especially on black ice. ”
“Fuck black ice,” Cricket says defiantly, challenging the gods of winter.
And because Mia is her sister and not her mother, and therefore takes no issue with Cricket’s casual profanity, she bursts out laughing.
After everything they’ve been through, that they’re still going through, this is the hill Cricket will die on.
“I’m serious,” Cricket growls. “Fuck black ice, and fuck Sloane Jackson.”
What she really wants to say is, I can’t do this, I’m just going to let you down, but she can’t put that on Mia.
Even if they’ve never discussed it, Cricket knows—and has always known—that Mia has given up her life to support Cricket’s.
She’s given up soccer, Yale, and even her relationship with Ben all for Cricket’s potential career, and Cricket isn’t sure she even has a potential career after today’s piss-poor performance.
“I get you’re frustrated about Sloane,” Mia says, glancing over at her sister before turning on the windshield wipers to their maximum output. “But can we please not pick a fight with public enemy number one until we get home?”
When Liz taught Mia how to drive, she repeatedly told her to take her foot off the gas as soon as Mia felt the car begin to slide on ice.
“Jamming on the brakes is the most dangerous thing you can do,” Liz lectured.
“It’s better to just turn your wheel in the direction of the tread and hope for the best.”
“You mean give up control?” Mia had asked, clearly appalled.
“Mother Nature demands respect,” Liz explained. “So if the tires slide, or you feel yourself start to lose your grip, it’s safer to just go with it.”
But right now, Mia forgets her mother’s advice.
She forgets that sometimes black ice will undercut the most vigilant Mainer.
She forgets that sometimes the conditions make surrender necessary and that losing her grip can be inevitable.
And so when the front right tire slides on a patch of black ice, Mia slams on the brakes.
The car bucks under her foot as other drivers honk and swerve to avoid a collision.
It lasts seconds and it goes on forever and then Mia hears her mother’s advice in her head and she releases the brake and follows the tread and allows the car and nature and the forces beyond her hands to guide the momvan off the highway and into a divot piled so high in snow that it isn’t much of a divot at all.
The snowbank acts as a bumper, and the van comes to a complete stop in the middle of the highway.
Mia looks over at Cricket and recognizes that her own arm has become a guardrail between her sister and the windshield. “You okay?”
Cricket nods. “What do we do?”
“Call 911?” Mia wonders, stunned, looking out her window and rubbernecking the rubberneckers. “Or I could just try to drive?”
“Um no. Call 911,” Cricket insists. “What if something happened to the engine and it’s about to blow up?”
The girls look at each other and then wordlessly evacuate the van, hearts thumping as their feet slide in the gray slush of highway snow.
Mia calls the police from a safe distance away and within a few minutes, the girls hear sirens and see the emergency lights of a police car and an ambulance weaving through Sunday evening traffic.
“This is so embarrassing,” Mia says. “Everyone is staring at us.”
“Let them do their job,” Cricket says, typing on her phone.
“But we’re fine.”
“We think we’re fine but it might be the adrenaline rush,” Cricket says, looking over at the abandoned momvan. “I want them to make sure the car isn’t going to blow up.”
“Fair,” Mia admits.
“Coach is coming,” Cricket says. “I texted him.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I can’t call Mom.”
“But what can he do?” Mia asks, annoyed. “Yell from the sidelines?”
“What is your problem?” Cricket snaps, looking up from her phone. “He was ten miles behind us anyway.”
“But what do you expect him to do that we can’t do for ourselves?” Mia asks, not backing down. “He’s going to think we’re damsels, and we’re not damsels.”
“I know that,” Cricket says, raising her voice. “But if the van is busted, how do you plan on getting home?”
The police and the EMTs are shockingly jovial as they approach the car and assess the situation. “It’s always a relief to see something like this,” one EMT tells Mia after asking her to wiggle her fingers and toes. They are okay and the van is, too. “You got very lucky,” he says.
Mia looks over to check on her sister, who is talking to one of the EMTs with her hands about playing on the National Team.
At times, Cricket’s confidence embarrasses Mia, but right now she takes pride in it, grateful that whatever just happened didn’t compromise her sister’s future.
No shattered bones, no skull through the windshield, no reason to even go to the hospital.
They were lucky. And before she can stop herself, Mia imagines her mom in those final seconds and clings to what the officer said—that it happened too quickly for Liz to experience any pain, any fear.
Mia can only hope she was telling the truth.
The sun sinks lower. Mia finally relaxes just enough to experience the cold.
Shivering, she watches Oliver pull up. He parks his black SUV a respectful thirty feet behind the ambulance, and he sprints through the snow in sneakers made almost entirely of bright blue mesh.
Mia can practically feel his socks and toes getting wet, can imagine how miserable his drive home willbe.
As Oliver runs toward them, the look on his face sends up a flare in Mia’s chest. They stare at each other as the distance between them closes, both of them understanding something is happening, something is shifting with every step he takes.
Oliver brushes by one of the EMTs, then both police officers, and Mia notices the snow glittering all around him, and the highway on Oliver’s left takes on that shimmer she’s been trained to see as a warning, and no matter how much she wants to pump the brake, she can feel herself losing traction.
She hears her mother’s voice, encouraging her to surrender, so she goes with the tread and knows that what’s about to happen is far more dangerous than black ice but just as slick with inevitability.
“Are you okay?” Oliver asks, reaching Mia in the snow-covered median and scooping her into a hug without gravity’s permission.
Her feet dangle in the air. His cheek presses against hers.
When Oliver lowers Mia back down to the ground, he doesn’t let go, and his hug feels so warm and sturdy that Mia suddenly wants to fall asleep right there on the highway.
“Home,” she breathes into his neck, closing her eyes to shut out the rest of the world.
This deep-seeded attraction, like any natural disaster making landfall, feels sudden but has been a long time coming.
Mia’s just been too busy carpooling for the Stallions, too bundled up in grief and Smartwool, too busy meal-planning on a tight budget to notice what’s gradually taken hold.
“Home?” Oliver asks, his voice muffled against her snow hat. It sounds different, this close to the source. Intimate.
“I want to go home,” Mia improvises.
“Yeah, I bet.” Oliver swivels his head, looking for Cricket.
“She’s in the back of the ambulance, talking about the World Cup.”
Oliver laughs knowingly and takes Mia’s hand, guiding her back to her sister. Through her gloves, Mia feels his long fingers, his tight grip, and wants to wrap herself up in him. How had she not seen this before?
After the EMTs clear them for injuries and the police file their report, Oliver insists on escorting the Lowes back home, just in case the van starts actingup.
“I told you he was the right person to call,” Cricket says as the police direct them back onto the highway.
Looking in the rearview mirror to wave at Coach, Cricket grins, pleased with herself.
“Anyone else on the team would have made this about them and turned it into, like, content.” Mia musters a laugh.
An hour later, the momvan rolls along the plowed streets of Victory without a problem. But Mia’s heart flips over itself with the blind audacity of a kid practicing somersaults down a ski slope. Panicking, she loiters in front of her own driveway, engine running, window down.
“All good?” Oliver asks, pulling up next to them and offering a thumbs-up.
“Want stay for dinner?” Mia calls over, too loudly.
“Yes!” Cricket shouts from the passenger seat. “Do it!”
A pause. The van rattles, doubting itself. Oliver looks down at his lap, and Mia wonders if he’s checking the calendar on his phone.
“Maybe another time?” he says finally. It strikes Mia as excruciatingly awkward. “I’ve got plans tonight.”
“No, you don’t,” Cricket says. After the tournament, while peeling off her socks, Cricket had overheard Coach wondering aloud whether to order pad thai or pizza when he got home.
“I’m glad you’re safe,” he says, ignoring Cricket. Mia smiles mechanically before Coach drives off. At the end of the street, he turns right. She blinks and he’s gone.
Unlocking the front door, Mia bolts straight for the bathroom.
Staring down her reflection in the mirror, she berates herself for her impulsive invitation.
She’d misread Oliver’s chivalry for connection, and he’d flat-out rejected her, which is probably for the best because what was she thinking?
Oliver belongs to Cricket the same way blue prewrap and sweat-stained socks and peanut butter protein bars belong to Cricket. They are her soccer things.
That night, as her sister flips through shows to watch, Mia sits next to her on the pink floral couch and tries logging in to her old Yale account.
She needs to go back to school and be with people her own age, on a campus full of eligible men who will buy her shots on a Saturday night with one obvious goal in mind that has nothing to do with soccer.
Unfortunately, her password has expired.
When Cricket finally lands on Family Feud, Mia decides to hell with Yale. Cricket is right—they just need to get to California.
“I’m going to apply to UCLA with you,” Mia announces.
“HELL YES!” Cricket screams, jumping off the couch and dancing in front of the TV. The decision feels right. Obvious, even. Mia determines that UCLA is the best place for her next romantic relationship. And until then, she needs to save face by avoiding Oliver as much as humanly possible.