Page 58 of Spectacular Things

On Track

Still catching her breath and dripping sweat from her sprint workout, Cricket would bet good money that never in the history of her high school’s football field has someone laid topless at its center in the middle of the day, wearing only the bottoms of her yellow string bikini.

But Yaz does what she wants, including coming here to surprise Cricket.

She looks like a bronze sculpture installed on the fifty-yard line.

“I feel like I still don’t totally get how the draft works,” Yaz says, sitting up as Cricket approaches.

“Or Victory,” Cricket says, watching the middle-aged walkers and joggers register Yaz’s bare chest from the outside lanes.

After she graduated from UCLA this past spring, Yaz secured a job in the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office.

She then promptly asked for a week off to go to Maine, and her boss had said okay, probably because there was no precedent for such gall.

So now Yaz is here, with Cricket, at the expense of the Mayor’s Office but not her tan lines, to see her exhausted and overworked girlfriend.

Just like she has every summer since her mom died, Cricket has booked herself for back-to-back soccer camps, clinics, and individual goalkeeping tutorials.

Thanks to Oliver and his extensive network, she knows which opportunities are the most lucrative and has lined them up accordingly.

These ten weeks coaching soccer pad Cricket’s slush fund through the school year, and even if her days are long and hot and usually end with a headache from girls screaming about one more round of Power and Finesse, Cricket absolutely loves it.

There’s no better place than Maine in the summer.

Except on a soccer field, in Maine, in the summer.

“The NWSL draft?” Cricket asks, thankful for the endorphins from running, and thus the patience to explain her postgraduate plan for the ten-thousandth time. Somehow, after four years together, Yaz still claims not to understandit.

“The one you’ll be in.”

“The NWSL,” Cricket says, untying her sneakers and peeling off her socks. “It stands for the National Women’s Soccer League.”

“I know that,” Yaz says.

Cricket takes several sips of water, trying to see around the corner of this conversation to what Yaz is really thinking about. “It’s in January.”

“And it’s for another team?”

Cricket smiles so she doesn’t scream. How many NWSL games have they watched together? Denial is a powerful thing. “Yes, the professional team I’ll play for after I graduate.”

“But you already play for the National Team—”

“I’m in the National Team pool, ” Cricket interrupts, correcting her. “Teague, the head coach of the National Team, has invited me to some of the National Team training camps, but I’ve never made a National Team roster, so I’m not technically on the team, just in the pool.”

And there in the pool, Cricket reminds herself, she has been treading water, which isn’t to say she’s been doing nothing.

Because treading water means consistent, whole-body work, and actively deciding not to drown, and staying calm about not drowning, and continuing to push in one place even as fatigue settles in and threatens to pull her under or push her out.

Cricket mentally pivots. She needs to be positive and she just crushed her sprint workout.

She’s putting in her days, and keeping her head down, and she will make the team soon enough.

Never mind that Sloane has already made the roster and even played in three games for the United States, earning her first three international caps.

“Okay, fine,” Yaz says, plucking one blade of grass at a time as she thinks. “But why don’t you just pick a team?”

“Hopefully someday I’ll get to,” Cricket says.

“Players are working on a collective bargaining deal to replace the draft with free agency, but for now I’ll play for whichever team picks me in January.

” She almost says that NWSL preseason begins at the end of January, that her career will become her priority six months ahead of her college graduation.

“L.A. has a team,” Yaz points out, looking over at Cricket as if this is groundbreaking news and not a known fact, as if Cricket isn’t already praying that Angel City FC will draft her so she doesn’t have to uproot her life.

“Yeah, but I don’t get to choose.”

Yaz turns to swat a mosquito on her back and inadvertently flashes an older man in black knee socks. “But what if a team on the East Coast picks you?”

“Then I go east and we figure it out.” Cricket tries to sound nonchalant as she squirts Yaz’s expensive sunscreen on her hand and rubs it into Yaz’s shoulders.

For a moment, birdsong fills the silence, and then a ride-on lawnmower huffs along the adjacent soccer fields, where the records Cricket once set still stand.

“Can we not worry about this right now?” she asks.

“I still have my entire senior season to play, and you’re here, and now we have the rest of the day to just chill. ”

“What’s your end goal?” Yaz asks. “With soccer, I mean.”

Cricket homes in on a knot under Yaz’s right wing bone and applies deep pressure with her thumb.

“Cricket?”

“Hm?”

“You can’t play soccer forever.”

Cricket releases the knot. She isn’t in the mood to fight—not here, not now, not when they have such limited time together and she has so many secret beaches she wants to show off to Yaz, and so many different places where she wants to show off her girlfriend.

“Answer me,” Yaz says, reaching for her bikini top and tying the strings behind her neck. “How long?”

“As long as I can,” Cricket says, stating the obvious.

“And then what?”

“And then we’ll see.” Cricket wipes her hands on the grass. Life after her professional soccer career is inevitable but also seems impossible. It’s too terrifying to fathom. The clear track of her life as she knows it ends in a chasm she’s not yet prepared to face.

Yaz’s crocheted top is tugged to the left, but Cricket dares not fix it. “You missed my graduation because you were with the National Team,” Yaz says. “And now you’re telling me you’re not even on that team, you’re just in the pool.”

“Okay?”

“And you can’t come to my cousin’s wedding in September because UCLA is playing against Santa Cruz.”

“Right.”

“You’re just missing a lot,” Yaz says, standing up suddenly. Cricket watches an elderly woman in a pink visor nearly faint at the sight of Yaz’s minuscule bikini bottom. The woman then takes out her cellphone and Cricket knows it’s entirely possible she’s calling the police.

“I’m missing the same stuff I’ve always had to miss,” Cricket says, indulging in a sudden surge of defensiveness.

“I didn’t go to my homecoming or senior prom because of soccer, and if I get drafted, I’ll probably miss my graduation.

” Cricket plucks a blade of grass and twists it between her thumb and pointer.

“The only thing that’s different about my schedule this year is that you’re working a real job. ”

“So this is my fault? For graduating?”

Cricket reaches for Yaz’s hand. “Come here,” she says.

Yaz reluctantly accepts and falls to her knees, wriggling closer to Cricket until their foreheads touch.

The world disappears. “My punk rock skunk,” Cricket whispers, even though Yaz got rid of her pink streak six months ago when she began applying for civil service jobs.

“We’re going to be okay,” Cricket whispers.

Yaz pulls back. “What if I have the mayor write a letter to Angel City demanding they draft you?”

“Do it!” Cricket laughs. “I love that you’ve been there a month, already taken vacation days, and now you’re going to muddy the waters between sports and state.”

“Too much?” Yaz grins, her teeth a dazzling white against her golden skin, the green grass, the infinite blue sky.

“You’re always too much,” Cricket says, taking Yaz’s left hand and kissing each fingertip. “It’s what makes you just right.”