The next day, at eleven, Cricket was at home when he saw a boxy compact car, painted a burnt orange, pull into the driveway. His mother was out front getting the newspaper when Olympia swept out of her car and strode fearlessly toward her, hand extended. Olympia was wearing a loose sunflower-yellow blouse and a flowing white skirt. Cricket stepped outside to intervene but wasn’t quick enough.
“I’m Olympia,” she said, and shook his mother’s hand firmly. “We’ve met. At the Romanians’. I took piano.”
No friend of his had ever introduced themselves this way, so directly, so professionally.
“That was you!” his mother said. “Now look at you. You’re a woman!”
Olympia smiled, clearly accustomed to comments like this.
“We’re heading to the track,” Olympia said. “Want to come?”
There were a hundred responses possible, most of them shocked or displeased, but his mother laughed. She was disarmed, rendered mute. “The track? Like the racetrack?”
“Don’t worry, I never gamble,” Olympia said. “It’s just to watch the colors in motion. You should come! It’s such a nice day.”
His mother was struck dumb again. She looked to the front porch, where she found Cricket; he had no idea what to do or say. “Well,” she finally said. “That is a tempting invitation, Olympia. You guys go. Have fun.”
Olympia tapped the roof of her car and Cricket got in.
“When will you be home?” his mother asked. She was frozen in the driveway.
“Last race is at three forty-five,” Olympia said from the driver’s-side window, while backing away, “so an hour after that? But we might have dinner. Do you need him at a certain hour?”
Cricket’s mom shook her head and waved her hand listlessly.
“You enjoy the day now!” Olympia said. She left the driveway and was soon on the highway. The car smelled of spicy deodorant and watermelon gum and something old and stale— a stain somewhere that hadn’t come out. Her car was a stick shift, and Olympia shoved the wood-topped shifter around with authority, occasionally brushing Cricket’s knee when she did.
“It’s so hot today, right?” Olympia said, and took the hem of her skirt and flapped it like a sparrow’s wing. He caught a flash of her pink, freckled calf.
“Are we really going to the track?” he asked.
“You’ve never been?” Olympia asked. “I like your mom. She seems sweet. You got your braces off. Didn’t you have braces? Have you been doing this?” She ran her tongue over the bright surface of her teeth.
He told her about Dr. Talmadge as the landscape flew by.
“What a dick,” she said. “You want me to kill him for you?”
The day was bright and warm and he stole glances at her when she spoke, trying to find any part of her that resembled the girl he’d known before.
“You look different,” she said. “Your hair was longer before. And you were this tiny little kid. You’re almost grown up. Will you keep growing?” He felt obligated to say yes.
“I can’t believe I’m back in Indiana,” she said, looking at the fallow fields and strip malls. “It’s so fucking flat. Sorry we stopped writing letters. I have all yours in a box back in Connecticut. Do you have mine?”
“I do,” he said.
“You’re a romantic,” she said. “I guess I knew that.”
“You look different but the same,” she said. “A lot like your mom. You have an innocent face. Have you heard of the ‘innocent eye’?”
“No.”
“Well you need that!” she said, and laughed a thundering laugh. “That’s the whole thing, right? To be able to see everything, like, anew?”
They arrived at a vast white structure, ornate like a wedding cake.
“This is it.” Olympia put the car in neutral and coasted into the lot without slowing, sending a couple scurrying. She threw her bag, crocheted and enormous, over her shoulder and locked the doors.
“Sorry!” she sang to the couple. “Ready?” she asked Cricket.
“Do I need an ID?”
“Not to get in,” she said. “You don’t need a ticket or anything. It’s free.”
They entered the gates and found a trio of horses in a round pen dense with flowers and garlands. A jockey in pink and black sat atop the shimmering burgundy hide of an enormous horse wearing a white headdress.
“The colors!” Olympia said. “Can you believe it? Look at that one!”
A silky black horse was led into the pen, a jockey in polka dots standing in his stirrups. “This is so the bettors can inspect them before the races. See how that coat shimmers? What would be the evolutionary point of a shimmer like that? I’m thirsty. Are you thirsty?”
She led him through the turnstiles and into a dim corridor smelling of urine, bleach and cigarettes. She stopped when she saw a concession counter.
“You wait here,” she said. “Actually, over there,” she said, and pointed to a dim corner. “Do you have a ten?”
Cricket gave her a ten. He’d brought fifteen.
“I’ll be back,” she said.
He watched her disappear into the corridor under the grandstand, men stepping aside as she approached. One elderly man took off his baseball hat in a most formal way and closed his eyes as she passed.
She returned with two clear plastic cups full of yellow beer. He reached for one. “Not yet,” she said. “Follow me.” She led him through the cool concrete corridors until she turned quickly and they walked into the bright light of the fairgrounds, a sea of green grass, bursts of rosebushes, red and white and yellow, and carnations, and in the center of it all, a silver fountain spraying white water. He’d never seen anything more beautiful.
They sat down and she handed him one of the cups.
“You’re fine now,” she said. “Just don’t walk around with it,” and she drank half of hers in one take. She placed her cup between her legs and wiped her mouth with the base of her hand. “It’s Pabst, so it’s good.”
They were sitting in the grandstand’s sunny lower seats, and the sun multiplied the effect of the beer on Cricket; he was drunk in minutes.
“Wait till you see them run,” she said. “Tell me if you think it looks like slow-motion. I can’t figure it out.”
The bell rang, the chutes opened, and a distant clacking began. Cricket had expected to witness violent speed, noise and chaos, but it was not that.
“See how they seem to go in slow motion from here?” she asked.
“I do,” he said.
“Thank you! I was starting to think I was crazy. They’re moving so fast, I realize that objectively, but from here it’s so incredibly slow. Do you see it that way? I know your way of seeing is unusual. You must like Degas,” she said. “The way you draw.”
“I think so,” he said, and took a long sip of the yellow beer. It was already warm and he didn’t know the name she had just said. Every minute, she uttered a name he didn’t know, a place he’d never heard of.
“You think so! When you see horses don’t you think of Degas? He could draw two things especially well—horses and ballerinas. And floors!” She laughed again. “But seriously, he and Manet used to argue about who painted horses first.” She took a long sip, almost finishing her beer. “It was Manet, actually, but Degas would never admit it. Now you know who I’m talking about? Ballerinas onstage, floors and bassoons in the foreground? Degas?”
Now he knew. “I know it,” he said, and he closed his eyes, feeling he was evaporating, becoming one with the sun and grass and flowers.
“How are you with hands?” she asked, and he pictured his hands around her waist, slow dancing like he’d done with Inés Herrera in middle school, feeling her chest expand against his. “I don’t like my hands. Stuart says they’re stubby. What do you think?” She presented them to him, placing one squarely on his knee. Then it was gone, hidden under the folds of her skirt. “Actually, don’t answer that. But Degas made all hands look dainty. He was good at that.”
All Cricket wanted in the world was to have her hand again on his knee. How could he ask? He couldn’t ask.
“And women getting into bathtubs,” she said, and laughed till she coughed. “I think he did about fifty of those. Can’t you just picture him getting excited about his next painting? ‘Hm, what to do? What. To. Do? I know! How about another chick in a tub?’ And always from behind. But does the world need another picture of a woman stepping into a tub? On the one hand, no. On the other hand, he gets to paint a naked lady in a bathtub. Then there’s Tolstoy.”
She finished her beer and got up. “Another?”
Cricket downed the rest of his first cup and closed his eyes again. Red rings pulsed against his eyelids. Another race began and he fell briefly asleep. Soon Olympia appeared with two more cups of yellow beer. She leaned across his lap to place it in the cup holder to his right. The cup holder to his left was empty but she’d chosen this lap-crossing and he was deeply grateful for this choice. She conveyed her ownership fluently and he loved her madly.
“I’m not saying Degas was some perv,” she said, picking up where she’d left off. “Even though a lot of people assume that now. This old man drawing pubescent ballerinas and all. Wasn’t I talking about Tolstoy? Did you read his
What Is Art? He starts out so strong, talking about how unfun and self-serious artists have become, how art needs to be joyous. I liked that. Made sense. Then he spends another hundred pages writing the most boring, academic crap, like with footnotes and all. Very strange. You know that phrase, ‘Writing about art is like dancing about architecture’? I mean, even Tolstoy couldn’t get it right. Maybe it can’t be done.”
A third race began. The horses seemed to be going even slower now. He’d lost all track of how fast anything should go.
“Sometimes I almost hope for an accident,” she said. “Is that sick? Have you read
Anna Karenina? That scene where they shoot the horse after Vronsky wipes out—wasn’t that shattering?”
“It looks so slow,” Cricket said. He couldn’t get over the way the horses ran. The sound was thunderous and swift, but their movement across his plane of vision was glacial. They seemed to swim before him as if against a roaring tide. They barely moved.
“The horses?” she asked, and laughed a thunderclap laugh. Her laugh had its own echo. Half a dozen people turned to see the source of the sound. Normally Cricket would have shrunk from the attention but he was overwhelmed by Olympia’s life force and her willingness to sit next to him, to lavish him with attention. She was fully a woman, and walked through the world as if everything she’d said and done to date had been met with rapturous approval.
“It’s unexpectedly pretty here, right?” she said.
The scene in front of them was a feast of color. It didn’t make sense that this would be considered a seedy or dishonorable place. The people around them, scattered through the stands, were haggard and alone, but the scene before them was abundant and lush. It looked like Eden.
“So I think we should start a movement,” she said. “You’re not antisocial, I hope. Artists need each other. Are you more Impressionist or Dada?”
Cricket had heard of the Impressionists, and wanted to choose them, but there was something in Olympia’s eyes, the briefest wrinkle of her nose, that indicated some distaste for their lot.
“Hard to choose,” he said, and she nodded while draining a third of her beer.
“Anyway,” she said, “part of what I want to do in our movement is to eliminate these simple dichotomies. I want like a big tent where all these genres can mix and bounce off each other and make better things. I still can’t draw the way I’d like, and will probably end up being a curator or ringleader, but anyway. We can begin, right?”
“Right,” he said, and believed everything she said.
“And look at that one! That shade of purple! And with that white plume! Is it ‘plume’? ‘Plumage’?” She pointed to a horse being trotted along the track in front of them, and she mimed the feathers extending from the jockey’s helmet.
“I think ‘plumage,’ ” Cricket said.
“ ‘Plumage’! You’re right!” she said. “You know most of the Impressionists met in art school. They were like nineteen. Not so much older than us. Pissarro was more like thirty, which I think was kind of cute, kind of sad. He already had this Moses beard and looked sixty. So I don’t think we’re too young to start our movement. Jed can be in it. Do you think he would? We need at least three, I think.”
Cricket thought Jed would be the worst member of any group. He’d hate every minute of it. “Maybe,” he said.
“It’s better this way,” she said, “being so young. You’re fifteen? I’ll be seventeen in four months. We’ll be basically the only teenagers inventing a new movement, so people will pay attention. I don’t know how you feel about that word, ‘teenager,’ but it does have currency.”
Cricket put his cup down, thinking that if he had any more beer he would need to lie down. He wanted to slap himself awake. He had the idea that he’d go to the bathroom to pee and pour cold water on his face.
“Okay, I’ll stay here and guard your beer,” Olympia said. “But don’t leave me too long with all these rapey guys. Look at that one.” She pointed directly at a middle-aged man in a white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the biceps. He was holding a pen and a racing form in his stony gray hand.
He looked directly back to her.
“What a sick fuck,” she said loudly in the man’s direction. “I’m twelve years old!”
The man turned away.
Cricket found that the act of standing was very different than it had been an hour earlier. The aisle’s folding seats shifted like shuffled cards. He found his way to the bathroom, a concrete box with a silver trough along one wall. Next to him, a man moaned in happy release. “That is delightful,” the man said.
When he returned to the stands, the sun had ducked behind a high cloud ceiling and Cricket was relieved. The moment he sat down again, Olympia began.
“Do you like the name ‘PanYouth’? Pan meaning ‘across’ or ‘all’ in Greek. You’re in Latin, right?”
Cricket was taking an honors Latin class taught by an elderly man who wanted only to talk and tell jokes and occasionally pull one of the class’s two girls onto his lap.
“This is something I wanted to talk seriously about,” Olympia said, and turned to him. “You know all the great art movements have friends at their core, right? I’m talking about the movements where the people agree they’re in a movement. A lot of times they’re jammed together by some critic and the artists reject the name and the association. But think about Patti Smith and Sam Shepard. Did you know they dated for a while? This was like ten years ago so don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know that.”
Cricket thought Patti Smith was married to John McEnroe but something within his leaden mind told him not to voice this thought.
“I’ve been thinking about this for like a year now,” she said, and turned to him, her golden eyes open wide. The sun had returned and seemed interested only in Olympia. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were flames, as if a furnace were burning within her.
“Are you looking at my mascara?” she asked, and turned away. “I know I’m terrible at that, or maybe I don’t have the right applicator. The truth is I don’t have a very steady hand. I don’t know why. It makes my drawings suck. Stop looking.”
He wanted to say he couldn’t help looking, at everything, and would always look at her, and at everything— he could not hope to fight the need to see, see, see—but instead he looked over her shoulder, then turned to look at the track.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I mean, don’t look at my fucked-up mascara, but you can look at me, like, in general.” She laughed her thunderclap laugh.
He turned to her and found an innocuous spot on her left cheek where he thought he might rest his eyes.
“I’m really glad you could come today,” she said, and put her hand on his. It was very warm and his childhood ended. Now he was a young man who women touched suggestively at the track. “When Stuart blew me off, I needed distraction.”
Cricket didn’t fully register the words in the moment, but later, alone and sober, he played the sentence back. He was a distraction. He knew he should have been wounded by this, but discovered he did not care. About being a stand-in, he did not care. He had filled in when Stuart stood her up, and this was not ideal but it was not at all bad. The day had been glorious, and its origin, its motivation, didn’t matter.
“I’m usually around,” he said, and she smiled.
Much later, after everyone else had left the track, when the horses were in their stables and the light was lavender streaked with silver, they drove home.
“Maybe when you get back from Europe we can start,” she said, and he remembered that he was going to Europe. A wave of nostalgia passed through him. He would miss her.
“How long will you be there?” she asked, and he realized he did not know.
Copyright © 2026 by Dave Eggers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
