Page 50 of Spectacular Things
Love Walks Backward
A week later, Cricket calls her sister after class. This has proven to be their best window to catch up: As Cricket sunbathes outside of Haines Hall at three p.m., Mia sets up her phone in the kitchen and talks while preparing dinner.
“You know we wish we could be there for the game, right?” Mia asks over FaceTime, eyes pleading from three thousand miles away.
Cricket does understand: Flights are expensive and this is just the beginning of her time in California.
From here, her career is only going to get bigger and grow more global.
Cricket reassures herself that in just a few years, she’ll be able to pay for Mia and Oliver’s tickets to follow her all over the world.
Soon enough, she’ll be a professional athlete with a dozen endorsement deals.
But for now, or at least for this weekend, Mia and Oliver will watch the live stream of UCLA’s home opener from their own home on Knickerbocker Avenue.
“We’ll be cheering for you,” Mia says. “Last night we taught ourselves the Eight-Clap!”
“You didn’t.”
“We sure did!” Mia insists, raising both arms and wiggling her fingers to demonstrate just as the smoke alarm goes off. “Oh no! My broccoli!”
They hang up and, still laughing at the expense of her sister’s charred broccoli, Cricket applies sunscreen and visualizes her performance at practice, which starts in an hour.
She is too focused on her upcoming training session to notice the gossamer strings that tug at her as she stands up and heads toward the athletic center.
Cricket doesn’t sense the sudden pull or question the inexplicable gravitational force yanking her in the opposite direction.
Instead, she simply looks right, indulging what feels like a random urge, an innocuous itch, that proves to be anything but.
Because there she is, smiling broadly from across the green.
The world moves backward.
Or rather, just the girl—the girl is moving backward.
Cricket blinks once, then twice, but the girl is definitely moving backward, at a clip, parting the crowded sidewalk behind her like a backpedaling Moses.
She strides in rewind while addressing a gaggle of overattentive parents and prospective students.
Her long dark hair is pulled up into a high ponytail, with a thick strip of neon pink streaking down the middle like the tail of a punk-rock skunk.
The girl tilts her chin up to better project her voice to her captivated audience.
Before she can stop herself, Cricket moves across the green at what she hopes looks like a casual pace and not the emergency that it is. But after just a few steps, she realizes she’s doing that nervous, stiff-legged walk-jog of the lady in that commercial about bladder control.
“Hey there, interloper,” the young woman says, giving Cricket a friendly wave like they know each other.
Cricket catches her glance like a boot in the chest. The yards and milliseconds close between them, even as the tour guide continues to walk backward.
Behind her, the skunk tail swishes left to right.
“Glad you could make it,” the girl says.
Her voice is deeper and richer than Cricket would have anticipated, like the woods after a summer rainstorm, a verdant lush.
Cricket just nods, as if she’s trying to respect the flow of the tour, and not because she’s violently choking on her own tongue.
The dozen people in the group turn to look at Cricket, who at five foot eleven sticks out even when she doesn’t impulsively hop on a college tour halfway through touring a college at which she’s already enrolled.
Pulling out her phone and miming a reaction of shock, Cricket turns and runs away, fleeing the group.
Even when she’s well out of view, Cricket continues to sprint, keeping up the charade of an emergency.
She has no idea what just happened, what’s still happening now inside of her, so she runs to the safest place on campus.
When she pushes open the door to the athletic center, Cricket remembers to breathe.
In the foyer, her hands shake as she refills her Bruins CamelBak at the water fountain and watches the growing number of plastic bottles she’s apparently saving from a landfill slowly tick up.
She times her inhales to each hypothetical bottle saved, but her heart continues to thump so violently that she lurches forward.
This might be her first California earthquake, but Cricket is pretty sure it’s only happening to her.
She snaps the hair tie on her wrist, but it does nothing. This is not a championship game. This is not a National Team camp, or a beep test, or a timed mile. She can’t reset from that woman walking backward across the green.
“Cricky, baby!” a teammate announces, entering the locker room.
“You’re here so early!” Cricket smiles and resists the urge to tell Ellie what’s just transpired.
Instead, she reaches up and touches the top of her head as if a hot pink stripe might have appeared there, branding her and simultaneously splitting her heart in half between who she has always been and who she’s about to become.
Cricket begins to dress her left leg and realizes she’s been wrong.
All this time, she has been so wrong, and Mia has always been so right, because a sudden change in expectations is indeed upsetting.
Love isn’t a decision or a game one willingly plays; it’s a straight-up ambush, and Cricket already knows she’s too late to be saved.