Page 43 of Spectacular Things
Game Change
“How is homecoming still a thing?” the boy next to Cricket asks her as morning announcements play over the loudspeaker.
Cricket shrugs as she continues a frantic search for her Spanish take-home test. At the bottom of her backpack, thousands of tiny black rubber pellets from the high school’s turf field cluster together—enough to bury her house keys—but the test isn’t in there.
Cricket doesn’t care about homecoming for multiple reasons, not least because she has the New England Club Soccer League championship in Boston the same weekend. She won’t be around for the dance, which she wouldn’t necessarily attend anyway. But then she hears her name announced.
“Ah, Cristina!” Senora Vazquez says, clapping her hands. “Homecoming Court! ?Muchas felicidades!”
Following their teacher’s lead, the class applauds politely, so Cricket gives up her backpack probe and offers a campaign smile.
She didn’t see this coming, but a win is a win.
As Cricket’s competitive spirit embraces the fresh challenge, she remembers all too late that she left her take-home test on the kitchen table.
That afternoon, a coastal storm rolls in and lightning strikes halfway through soccer practice.
Lucy, Cricket’s co-captain for Victory High’s varsity team, drops her off at home an hour earlier than usual.
As they approach 125 Knickerbocker, Cricket mulls over her homecoming nomination.
Her high school team—the Black Bears—will probably win another conference championship this year because no one seems able to score on Cricket.
Everyone at school knows about Cricket’s outsize talent, but it doesn’t make her popular. Or at least, she hadn’t thoughtso.
“I bet you win,” Lucy says, pressing down on the brake outside Cricket’s house. “Homecoming queen this year, and then Ballon d’Or down the road.”
Cricket shakes her head in a show of modesty while imagining the homecoming crown on her head next month. She is surprised by her own excitement, the fact that her classmates have not only watched her but also seen her.
Cricket hops out of Lucy’s car and notices Coach’s black SUV in the driveway, with the royal blue Stallion sticker on the bumper.
She takes the stairs up the porch two at a time, not bothering to wonder what’s brought him to Knickerbocker on a Monday afternoon.
Instead, Cricket finds herself delighted by the larger audience for her big news.
Floating in the haze of her own future celebrity, Cricket lets herself in, drops her bag, kicks off her slides. She follows the sound of Mia’s voice in the kitchen. And there they are.
Leaning over the kitchen sink, Mia disembowels a chicken while Coach stands several feet away, chopping brussels sprouts into quarters.
They aren’t even speaking, but it’s a depiction of domesticity so wholesome that it strikes Cricket as obscene.
The familiarity between them fills in enough blanks for Cricket to understand what has happened, even if she doesn’t know how, or when, or for how long.
“You’re early!” Mia says, recovering from a double take, and Cricket catches the falter in her cheer, a nervous gleam of artifice behind her eyes. “Coach finally took me up on dinner.”
“Hey, Cricket.” Coach waves to her with the knife her mother used every Saturday morning to slice halftime oranges.
Cricket keeps her eyes on the knife as she forces a smile.
She would almost rather she’d walked in on them naked because then she could storm out of the room, justified in her disgust. This is worse.
“I’m on the homecoming court,” she announces. But even as she says it, Cricket deflates, suddenly aware of how ridiculous she sounds. “I didn’t, like try to—everyone just votes.”
“Oh my God!” Mia abandons the chicken and rushes toward Cricket for a hug. “Careful of my salmonella hands, but oh my God! Cricket! Congratulations!”
“That’s exciting,” Coach says, although he doesn’t sound particularly excited. Upon closer inspection, Cricket sees the knife wobbling over the cutting board. He’s nervous, and this fact infuriates her, but if he and Mia are going to play it cool, then she will, too. She will play it the coolest.
“Yeah,” Cricket says, a menacing heat growing in her core as she watches Coach continue to chop the brussels sprouts that her sister bought for them, not him.
Or maybe Mia bought them for him and not Cricket.
Maybe Cricket has no idea what’s real if this has been happening behind her back.
“But homecoming is the same weekend as New Englands,” Cricket says, finding the hole in the defense and going on the attack. “So I’m gonna need to skip that.”
Coach’s knife hovers in midair.
Now she has his attention.
Cricket knows how important the New England championship is to Coach—he’s already told the team that he plans to graduate from Stallions Soccer Club after this season; that he’s reaching out to colleges and universities, and even some National Women Soccer League teams. Another win at New Englands won’t make or break Coach’s career, but it is one more feather in his cleat, and he won’t get it without her in goal.
“You can’t be serious,” Mia says, letting go of Cricket and stepping back, hands glistening with raw chicken slime. “You can’t just blow off the championship.”
“Are you telling me to skip my own homecoming?”
Mia looks over her shoulder at Oliver, who continues to stare down at the quartered brussels sprouts as he calculates his words. This is some serious backspin on the evening he and Mia have been planning—the night they would finally come clean to Cricket.
“I think it’s normal to want to go,” Cricket says. “Even if it means skipping Boston.”
“Of course it’s normal,” Mia agrees. “But I thought we decided that soccer comes first?”
“Who’s we?”
Oliver puts down the knife, and both Lowes watch as he walks over to the sink, rinses his hands, and dries them on their mother’s favorite purple dish towel. “I think I’m going to take a rain check,” he says. On the stove behind him, the onions and garlic begin to burn.
“Why are you here?” Cricket asks, standing in the doorframe and blocking Coach’s exit. She knows he is just barely keeping his cool, and her skin itches to prod the fever out of him, to get him to yell the way he yells during games when he disagrees with the ref.
“Because we have something to tell you!” Mia chirps.
Oliver shoots her a surprised look because timing is everything and now is obviously not the right time.
Mia responds to his scrunched nose with two raised, Hail Mary eyebrows because it will never be a good time to tell Cricket, who will see it as a betrayal, who will want to know all the details without wanting to know any of the details.
“We’re dating,” Mia says.
“Not funny,” Cricket replies.
“It’s not a joke,” Oliver says, lifting his eyes to meet Cricket’s glare. She grasps for words, reaches for something, anything.
Not this.
Not Coach.
“You can’t be serious.”
“We are,” Oliver says, walking over and kissing Mia’s cheek. “And you two should talk without me.” He pushes past Cricket and, in a flash of Stallion blue, he’s gone.
For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen is of the onions sizzling. Over the high heat, they scream frantically, just like Mia wishes she could right now.
“Okay, let’s talk.” Mia takes a deep inhale, walks over to the stove, turns off the flame, removes the pan, scrapes the charred onions and garlic into the trash.
“I can’t believe you’d go behind my back—” Cricket begins.
“I never lied to you,” Mia interrupts. This is true in a delicately threaded, defense-attorney’s-opening-argument kind of way.
There hasn’t been any explicit lying, per se, but there’s been a quiet, ongoing deception since Cricket returned from soccer camp more than a month ago.
Pockets of time that Mia has failed to disclose to Cricket who, for the record, never asks Mia about her day as they sit side by side on the pink floral couch each night, sort of watching TV, sort of puttering around on their phones, comfortably spending their nights together.
Or at least, Cricket has been comfortably spending her nights with Mia while Mia has spent each evening pining for more time with Oliver.
She hasn’t lied to Cricket outright, but she’s coordinated and executed a series of movements without her sister’s knowledge, despite sharing a house, a car, a Google calendar.
Mia and Oliver haven’t gone ice-skating, or taken a sunset cruise around Casco Bay, or gone out to a movie at the old Nickelodeon in Portland—nothing montage-worthy.
Instead, they have maneuvered around Cricket’s schedule to avoid getting caught and allowed Mia’s mundane needs to dictate the nature of their dates.
So for six weeks, they’ve been running errands.
Every Monday at seven a.m., Oliver and Mia meet on the curb outside Hannaford to grocery shop.
On Thursdays at three p.m., during Mia’s afternoon break, they convene at Cumberland Farms to fill up the momvan with gas.
They have mosied through every aisle of Hammer It Home and stood in line at the post office more than once.
They are regulars at the fish market just off Commercial Street and the bottle redemption center on Broadway, and the Victory swap shop adjacent to the town dump.
Although they don’t plan on flying anytime soon, Oliver and Mia spent one afternoon at Staples applying for TSA PreCheck, and, despite the banality of all these excursions, they have nevertheless been tripping off their faces on the one illicit drug even TSA can’t detect.
Looking at Mia from across the kitchen, Cricket reads her sister like a playback tape. She sees the evolution, frame by frame. It seems obvious now, checking the VAR, but she had not suspected that such a game was even being considered, let alone played behind her back.