Page 39 of Spectacular Things

All That Nothing

Carl is urinating in the middle of the waiting room.

“Our big boy is so nervous,” his owner says, massaging the two-hundred-pound mastiff behind the ears.

It’s hardly the first time such disorderly conduct has occurred at Oceanside Animal Hospital—it’s not even the first time this week—so Mia abandons the front desk and, wielding an industrial-size bottle of Urine Destroyer, gets down on her knees in front of several panting dogs and wonders how her life came to this.

When Mia finally returns to her seat, she does a double take when she sees a missed call from Oliver. It’s been forty-eight hours since she made an ass of herself by inviting him to dinner. Forty-eight hours since she vowed to steer clear of him.

“Sorry to bother you at work,” he says when she calls him back. “I was just thinking about you and wanted to see how you’re doing.” His voice on the line makes Mia instantly dizzy—unless that’s just the residual fumes of the concentrated cleaning solution affecting her brain.

“I’m good,” Mia says, not trusting herself to elaborate. He was thinking about her?

“Well, that’s great to hear.” A beat. And then another. “I guess I’m really calling because I was rude on Sunday,” Oliver says, and here he takes a deep breath. “It’s just—I didn’t think it would have been a good idea to have dinner with you and Cricket.”

“Oh,” Mia manages, looking around for her water bottle. All at once she is desperately thirsty. “Why?”

“So I’ve—” Oliver starts, and then cuts himself off. “Sorry, let me think of a good way to say this.” He clears his throat and then, instead of speaking, he clears it a second time. Finally, he says, “I didn’t think it would be appropriate with everything going on right now.”

“Yeah, of course.” Mia flips through world events and Stallions gossip but comes up empty. “Wait, sorry, what’s going on right now?”

“With the National Women’s Soccer League—my bad, I assumed—it’s just out of respect for—” Oliver interrupts himself several times before finding a way in. “A bunch of coaches, at every level of women’s soccer, have been accused of misconduct by their players.”

“Someone’s accused you?” Mia asks, her stomach knotting. She almost hangsup.

“No. God no,” Oliver says. “Definitely not, but I—this is what I didn’t want to say, except now you’re thinking—”

“What didn’t you want to say?” Mia interrupts.

“Clear boundaries are the smartest course of action,” Oliver states. He sounds like a lawyer reading out the terms of a restraining order.

“That’s what you wanted to say?” Her heart plummets through her stomach and lands with a splat on Oceanside’s laminate floors.

“No.” Another long pause. “It’s just—running into you—”

“I like running into you,” Mia argues, emboldened by his incoherence. She is supposed to be avoiding this man, but he is not as grown up as she once thought, and he’s so nervous right now, she can feel it through the phone. And it’s because of her. She has the power to make him nervous.

In the silence that follows, Mia imagines Oliver running a hand through his dirty blond hair that curls when he goes too long without a haircut. All the Stallions mothers openly swoon over those curls, and according to Cricket, most of her teammates do, too.

“That’s the thing,” Oliver eventually says. “I like running into you, too.”

Mia wills herself to stay quiet, to bait him into elaborating.

“See, this is where it gets tricky,” Oliver admits. “Because it’s—you probably—oh man, okay, so the truth is that I’m very attracted to you,” he says, his voice dropping as he finds his footing. “And if Cricket weren’t my player, I would have asked you out on a proper date months ago—”

“Well, I’m not your player,” Mia says. Because she has already done this math, and her head is buzzing, her skin prickling, her entire body hot. Did he really just say he’s very attracted to her?

“Right, but Cricket is,” Oliver asserts, and the words land like cinder blocks hurled down a staircase. “And I can’t pursue a relationship with you without it changing my relationship to her, which alters the dynamics on the team.”

“Oh.”

“Circumstances don’t allow it, but in a perfect world, I would like to take you out,” Oliver clarifies. “And not just because I know you’ve invested in a brand-new toilet seat.”

Mia laughs. “You won’t be her coach forever,” she points out. “Right?”

“Through her senior fall,” he says with a loud exhale, like senior fall is the new life sentence. “The championship is in November.”

All the soccer talk makes Mia think of her parents, but Oliver is not Q and she is not her mother. For one, Mia is an adult with more life experience than most people her age. And while her father took advantage of her mother’s na?veté, Oliver has gone out of his way to show Mia his hand.

He interrupts her thoughts. “Cricket said the two of you plan to go to UCLA after she graduates?”

“Yeah,” Mia manages. “That’s the plan.” She holds up a finger to a woman trying to check in her rabbit, but Mia needs another minute to know where this is going, if anywhere at all.

“So given that timeline,” Oliver says slowly, “coaching through November, you leaving the following August—I guess what I’m saying is, it’s hard to justify the risk, you know?”

Mia does know. The cracked door of possibility slams shut with a bang. It’s going nowhere because Cricket is going to the championships in November, and college in California, and Mia’s life is in service to her sister. Once again, she will sacrifice her own desire for Cricket’s destiny.

With Oliver still in her ear, Mia thinks of being fourteen and walking away from her own soccer team.

She sees the stained glass windows of Yale’s archival library, Ben’s face on her pillow, Dr. Peters and Nell and Landon.

All those well-rooted connections she let wither on the vine.

Coach will join them as just another doomed husk of potential, a once-supple what-if —

“So I guess that’s it,” Oliver says, clearing his throat and summoning his professional signing-off cadence. “Cricket is lucky to have you.”

“I could say the same thing about you,” Mia says. “See you on the sidelines.”

And that’sit.

They hangup.

While checking in the rabbit, Mia rationalizes not telling Cricket about Oliver.

Nothing good can come from it, Mia reasons.

Cricket will call the situation all too quickly like she is defending a penalty kick instead of supporting her sister.

She will judge Mia harshly and boldly draw the inaccurate parallel to their parents.

Even worse, if Cricket told her teammates, Oliver could face the exact consequences he’s trying to avoid by not taking her out on a date, even though he said he’d “really like to.” Just remembering his voice makes Mia blush as she answers an email inquiring about microdosing THC for an anxious parakeet.

She will not tell Cricket. Instead, Mia decides to keep this secret to herself because nothing happened.

And nothing ever will happen. It’s a mutual crush that can’t go anywhere.

She replays the moment when Oliver said, “I’m very attracted to you,” and then reminds herself that it’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to counteract the levitating high of such an admission.

But it’s nothing the way an empty soccer field is nothing.

The way potential energy is nothing. It is white lines painted across a green rectangle and a ball suspended in midair.

It is dirt and grass and sky and crisp air and low humidity with a 10 percent chance of rain.

The field conditions are irrelevant until it’s time to play, and then all that nothing becomes a match.

Mia can’t unsee the possibility, just like she can’t wait to be in Oliver’s presence again, because all that nothing has to add up.

Even if she can’t win the game, it’s got to count for something.