Page 51 of Spectacular Things
Punk Rock Skunk
Scrolling down the page, Cricket vows to search the admissions website from top to bottom, even email the office from a burner account if it comes to that.
But there she is. Sitting pretty under the banner: Meet Our Tour Guides .
For Cricket, however, the banner may as well read, Stalk the Love of Your Life .
Name: Yasmine Frankel
Nickname: Yaz
Pronouns: She/her
Hometown: Seattle, Washington
High School: Choate Rosemary Hall
Major(s): Public Policy and Studio Art double major
Fun Fact: I’m fluent in Arabic, French, and Italian.
Favorite Place on Campus: Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden
Beneath a flattering photograph, Yasmine’s profile is meant to impress prospective students and their parents, not enchant a first year or single-handedly awaken her heretofore dormant sexuality, but this is exactly what happens.
And oddly enough, Oliver’s MAP to goalkeeping springs into Cricket’s mind— Mentality, Adaptability, Patience .
Success relies on executing a winning strategy, and so Cricket commits to spending every free moment she doesn’t have in the Franklin D.
Murphy Sculpture Garden. Destiny will meet her there, Cricket determines, knocking on the wood of her bed frame.
The next morning, egg sandwich in hand, Cricket spreads a blanket next to Gerhard Marcks’s seven-foot-tall bronze statue.
“Good morning, Maja,” she says to the imposing sculpture.
Over the next six weeks, Cricket becomes a loyal and knowledgeable devotee of Hans Arp, Barbara Hepworth, and Deborah Butterfield—artists whose works keep her company as she becomes a sculpture garden regular between classes, meals, and practice.
Cricket waves to the grounds crew each morning, and a sophomore named Cliff who arrives every Friday afternoon to meditate.
The only people who know what Cricket is truly up to are Gus and Judy, a retired couple from the neighborhood, who give her an encouraging thumbs-up as they stroll through on their daily constitutional.
A month goes by and Cricket still hasn’t seen Yasmine.
She begins to grow impatient in her wait, and with the students who skulk through the sculpture garden, oblivious to the art with their hoodies up because sixty-three degrees is so fuckin’ frigid, man .
If not for Yasmine’s profile on the admissions website, Cricket would wonder if that afternoon back in September was an extended daydream, a visualization gone rogue.
How has she not spotted the beautiful sophomore with a hot pink stripe of hair, who could do the Eight-Clap in Arabic or lead a campus tour in Italian?
In late October, they do not bump into each other near Maja or Rodin’s The Walking Man as Cricket envisions.
Instead, destiny finds them at an on-campus coffee shop, during midterms, on the one day Cricket is too stressed about her upcoming exam to shower or even change out of her mustard-stained sweatpants.
An angry cluster of pimples conspires on her chin.
But amid the buzz, Cricket feels that gravitational pull once again, the air humming with an electric current, and there she is, Yaz, scrolling through her phone as she pulls open the glass door and joins the back of the snaking line.
She is a goddess among mortals, and no one else has even noticed.
“Hi,” Cricket says to Yaz before realizing she can’t hear her. Yaz’s dark hair is down this time, the hot pink streaks framing either side of her face and hiding the fact that she has AirPods in and music blasting. But she must feel something, too, because she looksup.
“Interloper!” she beams, warmth exuding from her dark brown eyes like trapped sunlight. “I was wondering if I’d see you again.”
Cricket forces words through a dry mouth. “Can you drink the coffee here? With me? Together?” In their exaggerated retellings of this interaction, Yaz admits to wondering whether the baby blond Amazon had learned English only recently.
“Now?”
Cricket nods, distrustful of her love-drunk brain to deploy proper syntax.
Yaz shrugs. “Who can say no to the star soccer goalie?”
“Keeper,” Cricket musters. Ever since Coach differentiated goalie from goalkeeper when she was nine years old, Cricket has, too. “I’m a keeper,” she tries to clarify. “Not a goalie.”
Yaz laughs and it sounds like sleigh bells, like a snow-driven Christmas in the middle of the desert. “Don’t I get to decide that?” Her smile lingers in a flirtatious tease, and Cricket stares at her, trying to pretend that she’s not stroking out.
“Cricket!” the barista announces. “Medium hot chocolate!” But Cricket stays right there in line with Yaz, afraid that the girl she’s been looking for will disappear again, or that Cricket will wake up from yet another dream of her, or that there will be a fire drill and they will have to evacuate the building before exchanging information.
As Yaz orders her matcha, Cricket pulls out her card to pay.
“Slow down, puppy,” Yaz says, giving the cashier a twenty-dollar bill with one hand while nudging Cricket’s card back with the other. Their fingers touch, and by the time they find vacant seats by the windows, they both understand this is the first of many coffees together.
What the admissions website could not tell Cricket during her online investigation is that as impressive as Yasmine comes across on paper, her résumé does not come close to capturing the power of her presence.
Instead, what Cricket learns for herself in the days and weeks ahead is that when Yaz focuses her attention on her, which is often and yet never enough, Cricket is overcome with a euphoric peace she has never experienced.
Like she would give up soccer tomorrow if it meant she could spend every second with this woman whose lightest touch sends Cricket into a blissful blackout.
Also not included on Yaz’s tour guide profile: She has a sardonic, inexhaustible sense of humor she attributes to her dad, and an equally relentless empathy she credits to her mom.
Yaz was eleven, swimming in a pool in Bora Bora, when she realized her family was not upper middle class but “legit rich,” and she was in the middle of her own Bat Mitzvah, singing in Hebrew, when she decided she was “zealously agnostic.” She is lying next to Cricket in her off-campus apartment when Yaz notices for the first time how much she loves Cricket’s pronounced deltoid muscles, and it’s in this same romantic moment that Cricket accidentally, but with quintessential Cricket impulse, tells Yaz she loves her. They have been together for nine days.
Yaz replies without hesitation: “I love you, too, my gigantic puppy superstar.”
Their catalog of differences is a source of endless intrigue: While Cricket feels most comfortable wearing whatever she can play soccer in—or actively recover from playing soccer in—Yaz selects clothes she refers to as pieces that speak to her soul in sustainably made fabrics she calls textiles .
In giving Cricket a tour of her studio space, Yaz explains she prefers working with oils over watercolor and stoneware to porcelain, which she accuses of being fussy, and she’ll take sturdy over fussy any day.
“You’re example A,” she says, grinning at Cricket. “Sturdy and no fuss.”
Cricket laughs and decides to go along with it.
Sure, she doesn’t care too much about what she’s wearing, or which sushi place they pick to celebrate their two-week anniversary, but she’s undeniably particular—Mia calls her obsessive-compulsive—when it comes to soccer.
Beginning with her morning routine, and going through her pregame rituals, mid-match resets, her postgame grounding walk, Cricket is fussy straight through her nighttime stretches, right up until the moment she falls asleep, only to wake up and begin all over again.
Every single game day, Cricket makes the same protein shake, eats the same healthy meals, and consumes the same snacks.
Hydration is a top priority at all times, so Cricket tracks her intake on the same app Sloane introduced her to back in the day.
Before warm-ups, Cricket consumes three pumpkin seeds like she’s taking holy communion.
Each ritual is grounded in what’s worked in the past, which is why Sloane herself has become another fixture: She and Cricket speak within twenty-four hours of every match, debriefing about who played well, who shanked an easy goal, who lost their head but somehow didn’t get carded.
It doesn’t matter that Cricket is playing collegiate in the Pac-12 and that Sloane is competing professionally in the NWSL—their dogged quest for excellence is identical.
“Yeah, I guess I’m not fussy,” Cricket agrees tentatively in Yaz’s studio. “But I’ve got my quirks.” Yaz leans over and pulls out Cricket’s hair tie, freeing the shiny knot of blond pouf. Her fingers massage Cricket’s scalp and it would be relaxing if it weren’t so sensual.
“Everybody has their quirks,” Yaz says just before kissing her.
Under the sheets and upon closer inspection, Cricket finds Yaz to be a committed truth-teller with secrets mapped across her skin.
She has an inked sun hovering above her pubic bone, an iguana holding a balloon at the top of her left thigh.
A cluster of white circles on the back of her neck, just below her hairline, linger still from her grandfather’s lit cigarettes.
“You’re the first to notice those,” Yaz says quietly, the two of them hiding from daylight.
Cricket holds her, listening closely as Yaz tells her everything, and at some point, the conversation turns to Liz and the car accident.
“She was driving home from dropping me off for a tournament,” Cricket confesses.
“The only time I feel absolved is when I’m playing soccer, because that’s what she wanted for me. ”
They do their best to kiss away the pain of each other’s past and plan for a future together. Under Maja’s steady gaze, Cricket and Yaz spend every free moment they don’t have in the sculpture garden or in Yaz’s apartment.
There is no question what this is. Like that first time from across the green, Cricket still senses the molecular pull of Yaz just before she walks into any room.
In every soccer-related injury Cricket has ever incurred, Yaz goes there and heals her but also pushes her.
Because despite all the demands Cricket has put on her body over the years, it’s Yasmine Frankel who teaches her the discipline of surrender.