Page 75 of Spectacular Things

Sooner or Later

In the locker room before warm-ups, each player mentally prepares in her own way.

Music blasts from a tiny but powerful speaker and some women dance.

Others meditate with the help of noise-canceling headphones.

A few pray. One player reads her horoscope while holding butterfly pose, because it’s what she’s done since ninth grade and look where it’s taken her.

Cricket sits on the bench in front of her locker, reciting the lyrics to “Get Low, Fly High,” just as she always does at this point in her process.

She shoves a piece of her mom’s lucky red ribbon into her sock.

Near the showers, Gogo and Speedy execute choreography they’ve been working on for months.

It seems like they’re just messing around, but everyone here knows this is how they get ready to ball out.

Cricket watches them while visualizing her own saves.

“What’s up, party people?” Sloane says, making a characteristically dramatic entrance that instantly changes the molecules in the room.

The team greets her with shrieks and oh my God s because they haven’t seen her in person since she looked like roadkill Gumby, writhing on the ground and screaming to the sky in the eighty-third minute of the Gold Medal match.

“How’s your leg?” Gogo asks, and Cricket tries not to take the polite inquiry as a slight, as an implication that Gogo wishes Sloane were tending goal today.

“Which one?” Sloane answers, improvising a series of Rockette-inspired high kicks. Everyone laughs and someone tells Sloane the team isn’t the same without her, which begs the obvious question several people call out at the same time: When are you coming back?

“Sooner than Cricket wants me to, that’s for sure,” Sloane says, walking over to Cricket and jostling loose her topknot.

“Bring it,” Cricket responds, tucking her gloves into her waistband.

“You want to get in on this huddle?” Gogo asks Sloane.

Through the stack of fingers, Cricket swears she can feel an electric current pulsing.

It tick, tick, ticks like the clock on the wall behind her teammates’ heads.

It’s the tick, tick, tick of Cricket realizing she’s running out of time.

Sloane is coming back, and anything could happen, and sooner or later, her last game will be behind her.

It might be in ten years, or two weeks, or today.

And when that happens, who will be waiting for her? Who will she be without soccer?

Only forever is long enough to be a part of this team, Cricket realizes in the huddle.

Only forever is long enough to feel the way she does right now.

She needs to exist here, surrounded by promise, on the verge of something great and so much larger than herself.

Nothing less could ever be enough, impossible as that may sound.

To keep things the same, she’ll need to change her dream.

Sloane is right: It’s time to step off her line.

Gogo counts them in, and Cricket cries out with all her heart:

“Oosa-Oosa-Oosa-Ah!”