Spectacular Things

by Beck Dorey-Stein

Sometimes Cricket thinks of her adult life as driving as fast as she can while circling a full parking lot. You can’t force a spot to open up—you just have to put your head down, grind in your highest gear, and hope for fate to break your way.

the most beautiful people tend to be a little bit nuts.

sometimes adults lose their sense of humor. “Life is one big running joke,” he tells her. “Don’t forget that.”

Mia dutifully gulps down the electrolytes and her mother’s soccer dream because from the very first practice, she understands what the sport can provide: escape.

“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift,” Liz reads. “Steve said that—pretty good, right?”

The worst thing Mia ever did in her life was exist, and she’s been trying to make up for it ever since.

She’s here now. Mia tilts the plastic bottle up toward the sky. She drinks with the abandon of someone who has long denied her own thirst.

“When you’re young—and I know I sound old starting out with that—but when you’re young, it’s impossible to understand the permanence of your decisions or their ripple effects. Because at the time, I truly thought I could do anything, and I thought your father was a good man, and I was very, very wrong.”

grief tattooed across her face like winter’s shadow. She is the messenger of death. She is the ruiner of lives. She is familiar but unrecognizable,

the capacity to love strikes her as cruelly beautiful. At birth, each person unwittingly signs a contract to say goodbye to everyone they’re about to meet. Life is merciless in that way, in its promise to end.

What Mia has gained in the loss of her mother is perspective. She understands she is on Earth for such an indefinite amount of time and that the only guarantee is that life is short and unreliable and that it is easy to get waylaid in daily stress that doesn’t ultimately matter. Her gift, if she has one, is simple: She is at her best when she is supporting others.

Sacrifice has felt like love, and love like sacrifice, for as long as Mia can remember.

It isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t require a degree from Yale, but it’s worthwhile. A steady, ordinary life can be extraordinary so long as it’s centered around family and community and filled with love.

Me at petsmart for 5 years

The only way to use your head is to keep your eyes wide open.

The truth is, Mia and Cricket don’t want to move on, but the more they fixate on the clock, the faster it moves away from the moment where they need to stay.

He opens the door and he’s shirtless and the coffee burning Mia’s skin is just confusing because the hot feels like cold, and the cold feels like hot, and who looks that good without a shirt on in real life?

She’s been emotionally nutmegged.

Cricket can’t help but wonder if women are not only destined to become their mothers but also doomed to repeat their mothers’ mistakes.

“I’ll cheer for you always,” Mia whispers. “But I’m staying here, and you can choose whether or not you root for me.”

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.

She is coming to understand that love and loss live on the same coin. It’s never heads or tails but joy and agony, grief and delight, spinning in the air, waiting on time and luck to determine not when this chapter ends but how the next one begins.

Thanks to Yaz, Cricket can appreciate the healing power of love, the freedom that comes with fully trusting another person, bearing witness to the struggles and triumphs of their existence.

just because it’s been a tough year, it doesn’t make you any less extraordinary.

I think all accidents are trying to teach us the same thing, though, which is that we’re human beings, which means we’re still learning, and even if one night doesn’t go our way, we can try again the next time.”

She will grow up knowing she comes from a line of women who ignored the rules to chase their dreams out of bounds. What good fortune to share our fortune.